If businesses are rational agents that seek to maximize profit then yes you would expect agentic AI to eat SaaS. But this is not the world we live in. So much of business could be automated with 1990s technology. A model that predicts societal change should also be able to explain why this time it's different. Historical precedent says we should expect:
- modest incremental gains in productivity
- society will remain mostly the same
- very few people will take advantage of the opportunities unlocked by AI
No DDR4 is affected too. It's a simple question of production and demand, and the biggest memory manufacturers are all winding down their DDR4/DDR5 memory production for consumers (they still make some DDR5 for OEMS and servers).
The big 3 memory manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron) are essentially all moving upmarket. They have limited capacity and want to use it for high margin HBM for GPUs and ddr5 for servers. At the same time CXMT, Winbond and Nanya are stepping in at the lower end of the market.
I don't think there is a conspiracy or price fixing going on here. Demand for high profit margin memory is insatiable (at least until 2027 maybe beyond) and by the time extra capacity comes online and the memory crunch eases the minor memory players will have captured such a large part of the legacy/consumer market that it makes little sense for the big 3 to get involved anymore.
Add to that scars from overbuilding capacity during previous super memory super cycles and you end up with this perfect storm.
Let's see if this demand truly holds.
I'm still unsure.
Currently nobody makes money with AI.
There will be a correction (if I can trust my magic crystal ball ;) )
Flops per watt is relevant for a new data center build-out where you're bottlenecked on electricity, but I'm not sure it matters so much for existing data centers. Electricity is such as small percentage of total cost of ownership. The marginal cost of running a 5 year old GPU for 2 more years is small. The husk of a data center is cheap. It's the cooling, power delivery equipment, networking, GPUs etc that costs money, and when you retrofit data centers for the latest and greatest GPUs you have to throw away a lot of good equipment. Makes more sense to build new data centers as long as inference demand doesn't level off.
For those who don't know, the French (and British) instigated the Suez crisis. It was a highly illegal attempt at regime change in Egypt and the US along with the USSR and United Nations rightfully pressured the French to stop. Bizarre example to illustrate the need for military independence.
Unfortunately your assessment is based on the faulty premise that anyone in international politics does anything to be nice.
The US doesn't give one rats ass about Egypt. The US won and got their way in Suez and the international seas in general. Europe lost.
There is no right in geo politics - only might. It's completely machiavellian. This is because you don't get to elect your neighbors leaders, and so they aren't beholden to you. International politics fundamentally doesn't work like national politics because of this. You can't stop Putin, Trump, or Xi, from taking what is yours unless you have the steel and oil to stop them. You can't sue them or vote them out like in national politics.
The problem with your perspective is that citizens can still tell right from wrong. And the public is much less Machiavellian than those in charge. The people can change how their leaders act, but won't when they believe any attempt to steer towards pro-social geopolitics is pointless.
I should also point out that some countries are much more bellicose than others, in direct contradiction with your nihilist view.
I absolutely do not encourage anything bellicose. I'm saying you are not good for not defending yourself. Everyone needs to defend their access through the Suez.
When AI tools make it easy to cruise through coursework without learning anything then many students will just choose to do that? Intellectual development requires strenuous work and if universities no longer make students strain then most won’t. I don’t understand why you think otherwise.
Google is the favorite to win AI by a mile. Not only do they have some of the best AI people, they have absolute unmatched distribution with youtube, search, gmail, docs, chrome, and android. As impressive as OpenAI is they don't have anything except for their brand. It should be clear by now that nobody has a strong lead in training. Nobody has a strong lead in access to compute. Nobody has a killer app because the interface is just chat or voice. And what happens when you can't compete on product? Distribution wins. And Google's advantage here is almost insurmountable. Google can fumble the next 2 years and still end up on top.
Google has (much) more money in cash on hand than OpenAI has raised.
Of course, there are a few other MegaCorps out there, who make money in other places, while having a serious stake in doing well out of AI, but I'm with you. Google FTW.
Nvidia selling shovels to the miners is great, but the analogy falls down if the gold mines are bottomless, and the cost of the tools to mine them trend to zero.
Who's sitting there talking to Gemini though? Nobody I know's even heard of it. Everyone talks to ChatGPT, everyone. Habits are everything. Google will be swimming against the current and be seen as just another company forcing AI down everyone's throat, while everyone is still talking to ChatGPT. We'll see though, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Google is clever and can do integration well and make something useful out of it though. They have never succeeded in that way before though and in fact seem terrible at it as an organization, so I very much doubt that.
All my google searches do AI then its an easy click to a deeper AI dive.
This greatly disincentives me from visiting chatgpt or other competitors. Google is probably the most popular AI service right now. I don't see how they can be beat in this regard.
Not knowing the name gemini is actually impressive. How many people know Acrobat Adobe is called Acrobat? Its just Adobe. They subsumed the pdf market so much, you dont even realize you have a pdf reader. You just call it by the company name. Same with Xerox'ing copies or whatever. I think the hype cycle is for the big flashy AI companies with eccentric-style CEOs saying carefully crafted "outrage PR" sensationalism, but google is slowly eating everyone's lunch right now. Joe and Jane internet user are already trained and loyal to google and using Gemini probably a dozen or more times a day.
I'm a little surprised at myself because I just have been using google for nearly all AI stuff. For deeper dives into code I may use another tool, but gemini is good enough for most uses. I think this war is google's to lose. If they continue doing this strategy, they will 'win' the AI market, or at least a good part of it. Then AI will become just another boring feature in your search or whatever the same way people used to agonize over PDF readers, but now its just a boring thing built into your browser or, if at work, its "The Adobe."
They aren’t talking about Gemini because Google is the brand name people know. “Oh Google told me this”. “Google planned my day.” Or maybe “Google’s AI said X”
Gemini is less a consumer brand name and a more a brand name for those of us who care about models.
my mom who barely knows how to use her own phone googles stuff and recently showed me tips she got from hitting ai mode after searching something on google.
my dad uses gemini built into email and sheets and chrome.
just 2 anecdotal examples. oh and ai pro subscription i bought applies to my whole family for 20 a month and comes with 2tb storage.
insane value. and again google can do this and is still highly profitable all whilst competing on having the best model.
90% of my LLM use is Gemini, including all the longer chat sessions.
Gemini Pro comes with my Google Workspace subscription, which means that it doesn't train on my data. It also has NotebookLM and it's in Google Sheets.
It's on my Android phone as well. It can summarise Youtube videos without getting throttled. And when I do a regular Google search (which I still do quite a lot) Gemini is there as well and I occasionally ask it followup questions via the search interface.
I'm finding it rather hard to believe nobody else is talking to Gemini.
Which one’s getting integrated into business processes behind the scenes? That’s the thing that’s supposed to replace 12% of the workforce or whatever, not fancier ELIZA.
You describe the "fake email jobs" theory of employment. Given that there are way fewer email jobs in China does this imply that China will benefit more from AI? I think it might.
It could be a side effect of China pursuing more markets, having more industry, and not financializing/profit-optimizing everything. Their economy isn't universally better but in a broad sense they seem more focused on tangible material results, less on rent-seeking.
Not every business loses 95% of their market cap in 3 years. Many companies bleed out slowly as they struggle to retain their market share in the face of new competition. This is normal. It's not normal for a business to just collapse out of nowhere.
Did shareholders and investors collectively make money from the whole ordeal? Looking briefly at the numbers, it looks like they didn't. During the profitable years IRobot made $639 million (sum total) but they lost -$737 in the collapse that followed. No dividends were paid either during the good years. Shareholders were left holding the bag.
Building a business from nothing to IPO is a real accomplishment and I won't diminish that. However, if a business collapses and incinerates more money than it has ever made during the sum of all profitable years calling it a "real success" is a bit of a stretch.
Thanks for elucidating what I failed to do. That was my only point. Someone said he created a number of wild successful companies. iRobot in my eyes was a segment creator which is awesome but it was/is never a wild success. He was also one of 3 founders and is not credited for the first iteration of the roomba.
I think that the database layer is the wrong layer for reconciliation of change sets.
The main problem with any sync system that allows extensive offline use is in communicating how the reconciliation happens so users don't get frustrated or confused. When all reconciliation happens as a black box your app won't be able to do a good job at that.
- modest incremental gains in productivity
- society will remain mostly the same
- very few people will take advantage of the opportunities unlocked by AI