Programming

Okay, this is fun, but it's time for an old programmer to yell at the cloud, a little bit:

The cost per AI request is not trending toward zero.

Current ludicrous costs are subsidized by money from gullible investors.

The cost model whole house of cards desperately depends on the poorly supported belief that the costs will rocket downward due to some future incredible discovery very very soon.

We're watching an edurance test between irrational investors and the stubborn boring nearly completely spent tail end of Moore's law.

My money is in a mattress waiting to buy a ten pack of discount GPU chips.

Hallucinating a new unpredictable result every time will never make any sense for work that even slightly matters.

But, this test still super fucking cool. I can think of half a dozen novel valuable ways to apply this for real world use. Of course, the reason I can think of those is because I'm an actual expert in computers.

Finally - I keep noticing that the biggest AI apologists I meet tend to be people who aren't experts in computers, and are tired of their "million dollar" secret idea being ignored by actual computer experts.

I think it is great that the barrier of entry is going down for building each unique million dollar idea.

For the ideas that turn out to actually be market viable, I look forward to collaborating with some folks in exchange for hard cash, after the AI runs out of lucky guesses.

If we can't make an equitable deal, I look forward to spending a few weeks catching up to their AI start-up proof-of-concept, and then spending 5 years courting their customers to my new solution using hard work and hard earned decades of expert knowledge.

This cool AI stuff does change things, but it changes things far less than the tech bros hope you will believe.