This is not consistent with multiple doctors over the years recommending eating less meat (specially beef), less cheese. The only part that is consistent with most doctors is the base thesis of eating more whole foods.
So what then do you believe is a healthy diet? Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals? Animal protein also has the upside of offering a tremendous amount of, well, protein, alongside the necessary vitamins.
Dairy (in certain forms) offers the same benefits.
> Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals?
By "variety" you mean B12 & omega 3? Or is there something else you think vegans need to supplement that omnivores don't? My kids have varying dietary preferences and personally I haven't found it any more difficult to get high-quality supplements than it is to get high-quality animal proteins.
But what "variety of unregulated supplements" most reminds me of is my chore prepping the cow mineral-vitamin mixes on the farm I worked on as a kid. Most farm animals are given a variety of supplements (by my recollection the cows got A, D, E, iodine, selenium, zinc, various minerals...) that have even less regulation than human supplements. And roughly two thirds of beef cattle in the US receive growth-promoting hormones, though we didn't use those on our farm. And much of the dairy consumed in the US is directly supplemented with vitamin A and D. If you consume animal products in the US you're probably already taking poorly-regulated supplements, they've just been laundered through the body of an animal.
(To be clear I don't agree with the grandparent comment that animal products like dairy, meat, and fish are inherently unhealthy, at least for most people. But neither do I agree that they're inherently superior.)
Makes total sense to me. Detecting and measuring photons seems much simpler than accurately detecting whole molecules. When we need to detect if a sample contains a certain kind of molecule, it usually requires expensive chemical processes.
Mass spectrometry is a multi-faceted beast, and has many applications. One that comes to mind is ion mobility spectrometry. I am most familiar with FAIMS which is an extremely selective method and can detect trace amounts of specific molecules.
The challenge is piecing together what you have detected to draw conclusions about the sample - in this instance you might detect a specific molecule, but to definitively conclude that it's caused by a particular fungus requires lots of prior testing.
The problem I've seen described by some is that the industry is resistant to expand capacity right now, because a partial pop of the AI bubble is expected aaany time now for months, but it keeps not happening. But if it does happen and they have too much capacity, the whole GPU and RAM industry would not be able to recoup that investment and would collapse.
Western (+allied) firms should 100% be worried but they are in a difficult spot: risk losing out on market share or risk overcapacity. The Chinese have the full might of Federal/State Governments behind them which may allow them to survive overcapacity, not so for the western firms.
People confuse themselves with the bubble-metaphor. If an AI bubble exists and pops (we need not discuss either) the already existing and on-the-way-demand will not just disappear. Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore.
Instead, an increasing number of people are going to want AI stuff from here on out, forever, because it's proven to be good enough in the eyes of hundreds of millions and that will create continuous hardware demand (at least because of hardware churn, but also because there are a lot of people in the world who currently don't have great access to this technology yet).
I don't know how much optimization will drive down hardware per token, but given that most people would rather wait like 5 seconds instead of 15 minutes for answers to their coding problems, I think it's safe to assume that hardware is going to be in demand for a long time, even if, for whatever wild reason, absolutely nothing happens on top of what has already happened.
The "bubble popping" mostly means that investment will drastically fall, investors will start demanding profit, and costs will soar. This will cause a lot of tools currently built on top of LLMs to become too expensive. Free tools will likely become rare.
There's a significant number of users that will not pay for AI. There's likely also a significant number of users that will not accept higher subscription costs no matter how much they use AI tools today.
When this happens, the market will go back to "normal". Yes, there will still be a higher demand for computer parts than before ChatGPT was released, but the demand will still go down drastically from current levels. So only a moderate increase in production capacity will be needed.
AI is already easily profitable without further optimization. If at any point investors decided that this is the best the models are going to get, because it's not worth further investment then we will run inference on the existing hardware, forever. What will not happen:
- The models going away. There is no future where people will start doing more coding without AI.
- Everyone running all AI on their existing notebook or phone. We have absolutely no indication that the best models are getting smaller and cheaper to run. In fact GPUs are getting bigger.
This might hurt OpenAI, depending on how good the best available open models are at that point, but this will in no way diminish the continued increased demand for hardware.
> When this happens
I think all of this is highly unlikely, and would put a "If". But we will see!
> Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore
Won’t they? For a great number of people, LLM’s are in the “nice to have” basket. Execs and hucksters foam at the mouth over them, other people find utility but the vast majority are not upending their life in service of them.
I suspect if ChatGPT evaporated tomorrow, the chronically dependent would struggle, most people would shrug and go on with their lives, and any actual use cases would probably spin up a local model and go back to whatever they’re doing.
I’m not denying hardware demand will evaporate, it definitely won’t, but interrupt the cycle and “ehh, good enough” will probably go a very long way for a very large percentage of the userbase.
I am not sure I understand. I agree: If AI were to disappear tomorrow, people would adjust (as they did when AI, or the iPhone or the internet appeared). That's what people do.
But now there is user demand. Who or what would take away AI? What is the scenario?
Lots of companies right now have slapped AI features on their products without extra cost. Some are offering it for free (e.g. search engines). If LLM costs significantly increase, I would expect free AI features to disappear or become extra paid features (already started to happen in some SASS), while any free LLMs become simpler and cheaper.
This is making the scenario more complicated, because now we also have to consider products without product market fit, which is an entirely different issue. I don't know how to think about that.
But that's exactly why this "bubble" is so hard to predict, isn't it? The dot com bubble was simple. All companies were jumping the gun to make websites. Most were not useful, but the Internet was useful so it survived. LLMs are useful, but how much of its current use is actually valuable? If 95% is useful while 5% is memes, we're fine. But if 95% is useless, the industry will collapse hard. Who can tell what is useful when LLM companies sell the service to everyone?
Google Play is plagued with these ads and they are just scams most of the times. You search for an app and get ads from similarly names apps, apps with visually similar icons, ebooks to use the app you searched, etc. They prey on the less tech savvy to install this spam. There's zero user value in them.
When you think about it, why should you trust any app that tries to trick you when you’re looking for something else? It’s such awful behaviour, I don’t want any part of it, I don’t want to reward it so in any place where I can’t forcibly remove this trash I go out of my way to never click on the ad results even if in the rare case it’s exactly what I searched for.
You are also not the target of these ads. My parents, on the other hand? My mum doesn't have a lot of experience with this stuff, and my dad's eyesight deteriorated. They could definitely fall for lookalike apps in an app store.
This seems like something in need of some laws and regulation. It fosters a kind of phishing-light ecosystem. Apple and Google are laughing to the bank while pretending they're helpless against fraudulent apps. They're not, they're creating a marketplace that makes them viable in the first place.
Some people think ad blocking is unethical but I think until there’s more sensible regulation or behaviour it’s your moral duty to block ads, especially on less tech savvy family member’s devices. We’re in a war and the tech companies have been playing dirty for decades.
I'm not sure how well know this is, but besides their contract with Google to be the default search option, Firefox does earn money through revenue share with all other default search options. A normal healthy company would just rely on those. Growing the user base would therefore grow the amount of rev-share income. So improving the product by itself, and thus attracting users, does make money - and probably enough to run Firefox and Mozilla. Just not enough to pay their CEO.
It's not an obsession, it's network effects. I say this as someone whole mostly uses Telegram and Signal and has requested friends to text me on those apps instead of Whatsapp. But most people don't want to have several apps and to have to choose which is the correct one to contact each friend. So the status quo seems to be Whatsapp for people they only have the phone number, and Instagram for the rest.
> That's just another way of saying "my opinion is acceptable, and theirs isn't".
No, it's not. There are laws in several countries of what kind of things you can publish in public. Sure, the line is definitely blurry, but there are lots of cases where it's not. Of course, Meta being an American company often means that local laws have less of an effect.
When one side is actively trying to make most people miserable, poor, or dead, while the other side is trying to save people from ruining their lives (e.g. through an unwanted pregnancy), or just be proud of who they are without hurting others, the whole "both sides" argument reaaaly doesn't work. You're comparing the issues of being cringe with committing human rights violations?
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