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Another indicator that AI is a bubble. Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.7, and users are reporting significantly higher token burn rates (and therefore costs) for what appears to be a minor improvement over Opus 4.6. Discussion on Orange Reddit is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816960 and a tracker of the increased token burn rate is here: https://tokens.billchambers.me/leaderboard
The token tracker is based on user reporting, but has been fluctuating between 37% and 45%.
Even if AGI is actually possible with LLMs (or at all, but I'm not trying to start a discussion on metaphysics here), it looks like the capital needed to achieve it is drying up before it can be reached. Anthropic's move here (combined with them handicapping Opus 4.6 a few weeks ago) seems to clearly be an attempt to achieve profitability. The free/subsidized rate train for end users has pulled into the station, and now you have to pay more for the same (or worse) capabilities you were enjoying before.
I normally don't care much for the median Hacker News commenter (if me calling it Orange Reddit didn't already give that away), but I do find them to be a useful barometer for general sentiment in the tech industry. And a few months ago I would have said roughly 60% of HN users were AI believers/enthusiasts, 20% neutral or unsure, and 20% anti/negative. Anthropic's antics over the last few months (and Sam Altman's antics for his entire life) seem to have soured their views significantly, and I see this as a big sign of a sea change in sentiment about AI in the tech industry.
At least for me personally, I just hope this leads to less retarded mandates from my higher-ups about using AI X times a month etc. (we're literally tracked on usage and it can affect our raises/bonuses).
For everyone here, nut perhaps especially the AGI believers, have your feelings changed at all over the last few months?
You seem very eager to jump on any negative AI news out of some desire to prove the “AI bros” wrong. What’s your motivation? Annoyance at AI mandates from above? At insufferable people shoving AI slop in your face at every opportunity? Just disliking the concept in general?
I don’t know if I’m an “AI believer” (what do you mean exactly by that?), I dislike OpenAI and Anthropic for the shenanigans they keep pulling, and I’ll jump ship to whichever AI service provided the best value for money. The tech industry hype cycle goes on and on, at some point people went crazy over Java of all things, now it’s just a boring programming language and you don’t have to be a “Java believer” to use it.
All of the above, honestly? But the biggest would be annoyance at mandates from above, combined with a completely reversal in what people consider quality engineering in software that magically coincides with the rise in popularity of AI tools. See Lines of Code suddenly becoming a positive metric for a lot of people, versus the old Bill Gates quote "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
Sure, but despite Java's warts it's still used to this day to make a lot of the important software that keeps the modern world running. The AI hype bubble is much more reminiscent of the crypto bubble. No matter how many times you tried to make it clear that crypto is only useful where you need a distributed, immutable, trustless ledger (and even then it's questionable), crypto bros kept proposing uses in situations where trust was still required and other existing tools already did an infinitely better job for far less computing power. Similarly, I see retarded things like "I had AI generate a thing, and then I had another AI review it and tell me it looked great! What, review it myself? No, of course not, why would I do that?"
I just had this epiphany the other day. In my mind it’s barely a step up from the mania of every Bitcoin sycophant. The value is marginal (but if bosses are convinced they can use it to axe employees the hype train will keep running), it’s massively damaging to the environment, the financing doesn’t work and the news cycle perpetuates the myth that this will get us to the techno-messiah that is AGI.
All of the links in this chain are so contentious and fanciful, it’s difficult to come to the conclusion that this isn’t a fraud on several levels. Add to that the aura and personality of someone like Altman as one of the people leading the train (who’s always given me the vibe of a con artist), I don’t see any other way this ends apart from it all coming down crashing; hard.
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