Yeah, after scrutinizing the graph more closely, I'm actually surprised that people are even taking this headline seriously. There's been far larger "plateaus" in the past. And the growth in usage just this year, just in the last couple months, is just astronomical.
I'm actually gonna go against the grain here and say that token maxxing is not dead. In fact, it's just getting started. Maybe not in the short term. I mean, who knows how things are gonna shake out financially speaking. In the long term though, I think people are really just getting started figuring out creative ways to leverage these agents. And especially when they keep getting smarter over time, the surface of use cases is just going to grow and grow and grow. I think the present plateau is simply just a function of costs being a little too high for comfort at the moment combined with the technology just moving so fast that I think it's kind of outpaced us a little bit.
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine" - REM, 1987
The world has always been in overlapping crises, the only difference now is that it's constantly blared into your face by your pocket screen. Ignorance is bliss. Delete the news, buy index funds, and relax.
I think Google, mainly Demis, just made a bad bet that multimodal world models would be the key to unlocking massive progress. Anthropic made the bet that it would be coding, and they were right. OpenAI was originally betting on like hardware and trying to compete in the browser space (?) but was able to quickly pivot to coding due to their size. Google, on the other hand, is like an aircraft carrier, it takes a lot of time to course-correct.
Why they decided to include standalone functionality is beyond me. It's a $1000 dollar VR headset. 99.9% of people buying this will already have a beefy gaming setup and will much prefer to stream from that instead of play standalone. You're not traveling with this thing, you're not using it on the go, it's not heavily subsidized like Quest headsets...
Including standalone and an SSD and ram and stuff does nothing but jack up the prices drastically, for functionality that nobody's gonna use. Rest assured, I will not be buying one.
Does anyone really believe that Bill Gates would propose any kind of truly altruistic plan, that is to say, would he ever support any AI regulation plan that actually hurts his bottom line at the end of the day? I don't think that AI-adjacent CEOs are really the most trustworthy people on this topic.
The truth for me at least is that these models became "good enough" around Opus 4.6. I feel like further capability improvements, "step changes" like we saw with agentic coding, aren't necessarily going to come from the model. I think the next crown goes to whoever can figure out the right scaffolding so that these models can be inserted into your organization.
Search revenue miss, apparently. Not sure whether this has happened before. But I wonder if this could be the long-predicted beginning of the downfall of search as a "money printer".
I actually tend to agree with Sweeney here. At the same time, I think this is kind of doomed for the near future, as people turn more and more against AI. Especially gamers, who now are paying double or triple for the hardware they need.
Firing everyone is lunacy. I think this revolution is here to stay though, and SWE workflows are going to crystallize around "building the agent systems that build the product" rather than "building the product".
I tend to agree with you here. This is the equivalent of that scene in Better Call Saul where Jimmy makes a commercial without getting sign-off from the partners. It doesn't matter whether the thing worked - this is essentially a mutiny from the product roadmap.
Who is in charge of naming things at Google? Like a five syllable word followed by "AI", I couldn't think of a worse name for a product competing for mind share.
Hmm, so for $30 a month you basically get 10% cash back. There's some break even point here if you use Waymo enough. I think in SF, this would make a lot of sense, especially since there are so many Waymos up there to begin with. In South Bay though, if you don't have a car you're pretty much cooked.
OK, well the "circumstances and context" here are that most people commenting on HN live in the United States, so obviously they will be better off if the United States does well. I don't think your "um actually, you can't ALWAYS support something in all cases, sweaty" critique really adds anything to the discussion here.
Windmills? They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes. Yet, the environmentalists love the windmills. I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills. I had them way down. The windmills are the most expensive energy you can have, and they don’t work. They last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place nobody ever takes them down. They just go onto the next piece of prairie or land and destroy that. It’s incredible.
So? Just because some competitor could have possibly formed in an alternate universe doesn't make the company or Page / Brin's contribution any less valuable.
> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry.
I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you think Google is gonna be any better in terms of the "random censoring" for content that their SJW overlords deem "harmful", I have a bridge to sell you.
The behavior described in the article (licking the utensils, putting saliva on the sushi, etc) is seriously antisocial and psychopathic. Especially in our era of heightened public health awareness. People have been charged with terrorism for coughing on each other, I think it's only fair that this person gets charged with terrorism as well.
It's not like we DON'T have a catalog though. Amazon exists. The problem is that there is such a deluge of products that it becomes difficult to choose. That's where advertising can help.
As for the environmental situation, it is unfortunate. But I do believe that the only realistic way out of the climate crisis without a collapse-level drop in standard of living (read: starvation) is technological innovation, a process that seems to be aided a lot by a healthy economy (which results in stable livelihoods, etc). So I'd say if anything there's a moral imperative to keep the economy as healthy and productive as possible.
How is online advertising not useful? It's directly greasing the gears of the economy, matching up potential customers with businesses in a reasonably intelligent way. Yeah, sure, it's not saving the world from climate change or something, but it's clearly facilitating economic activity, and also helps keep a number of very useful products free. Seems pretty useful to our society to me.