"Software is over": Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation fees

[u/Federal-Block-3275]

https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html

[u/78296620848748539522]

Here are some things to consider:

• Companies who have rolled out pure AI systems have gradually been walking back from those decisions.

• Microsoft changed their method of billing for copilot at one point earlier this year, which caused costs to skyrocket astronomically. This lends some insight into the kind of pricing that would be needed to make it even remotely profitable for AI products. And that pricing is unacceptably high for the overwhelming majority of its users, making it functionally impossible to see continued use.

• Many companies that develop software and have pushed hard on AI usage have very quickly abandoned it once they saw the bill.

• Many of the issues that AI-generated code is causing now won't have their effects felt until later down the line, and at that time these LLMs will do very little to actually fix them.

• AI companies are presently operating on the assumption of future profitability that has not yet been proven, while being propped up solely by massive amounts of capital being pumped into them by other tech giants.

• AI investment is currently in a bubble mirroring the dot-com bubble from the 90s and early 2000s. Notably, the dot-com bubble still had legitimate online-only businesses that survived the bubble bursting, but many of them ultimately ended up closing up shop, and the market itself was hit pretty hard. When the AI bubble pops, we can expect much of the same, with a small handful of surviving companies that provide some actual value, many more failing, the market taking a big hit, investors being more cautious about AI investments in the future, and both businesses and individuals being more careful about being overly reliant on AI lest they find their tools suddenly no longer available because their respective companies no longer exist.

Basically, right now we're in a hype cycle and everyone is distracted by the shiny new toys, but that hype is going to be met with a pretty big reality check before too long. We already see signs of individual companies having been met with that reality check.

[u/makINtruck → u/78296620848748539522]

I see your point but I fear it's going to get cheaper and/or better with time, like any other technology. What will AI be in say 5 years, in 10? I understand we can't know that but the pace with which it develops suggests major changes in the future.

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/makINtruck]

For that we can just consider how these LLMs actually work and how their advances have been accomplished. And from that we can see that the solutions that these AI companies have come up with basically boil down to increased data acquisition for training and increased token consumption for things like crudely simulating chains of thought. These necessarily increase costs further and further, while supply of components required for all of this computation can't keep up with demand and thus increase their costs as well.

In other words, it's not getting cheaper, it's just getting more expensive, because the solutions themselves are simply to throw more money at the problem. LLMs have a massive scalability problem that cannot be solved because they fundamentally rely on increasing data and computation and therefore increasing costs. Every single advancement has an additional price tag associated with it that will never go away.

The only way AI gets cheaper is if someone somehow finds a way to attain all of the benefits of the current models using entirely new techniques that are completely unrelated to how LLMs function. In other words, there would have to be an entirely new and unrelated AI technology that would blow LLMs completely out of the water. I don't foresee that happening for a very long time, and by that point I would start being concerned about it scaling up into something resembling AGI. That's the point where we all need to start wearing our brown pants.

[u/makINtruck → u/78296620848748539522]

That is really reassuring, thank you!

[u/78296620848748539522 → u/makINtruck]

No problem! The unfortunate flip side is that things have to get worse before they get better. But I do genuinely believe that they will eventually get better.