I believe AI has already solved being underweight, or obese, or skinny fat, or simply fat, yet people are paying for scam solutions.
This is one of the biggest quality of life boosts provided by AI, yet many everyday people are completely unaware of this.
The price of an AI solution is $0, and within 2-3 weeks you'll know if it works for you or not.
Compare this to any fitness coaching, or dietician, or any other method, or even GLP-1s, the cost is not zero.
Many people who do not even need GLP-1s are using GLP-1s to lose a trivial amount of weight, even though their appetite regulation is not a problem!
The thing is, they are refusing to believe that it's even possible.
There are many people using steroids and peptides, if you put a starving person in famine affected sub Saharan Africa on steroids, can you have them return to normal weight without providing them additional food? But many "foolishly" believe this is possible with steroids and peptides without giving them more food.
A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.
A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.
An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.
An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
It's a way bigger leap to go from "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness" to "and we'll see that it's possible for machines too" than it is to go from "humans are conscious" to "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness".
The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.
> during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.
The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?
Yeah. I hate commutes like that. I had a job where the commute was 30 min bike or bus to Caltrain then 1-1.5 hour train. It was expensive and ate 3-4 hrs/day.
But after being unemployed almost two years, would do that commute again if I had to.
Following Michael Levin’s work, one could argue that small collections of skin cells are conscious. AI tech has a long way to go until it’s autonomous and self-motivated.
I believe that AI is being massively underpriced, in an economically unsustainable manner. There will be less of it, but the hardware to run it locally will get much cheaper.
I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.
I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.
I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.
I don’t agree that it’s being sold below cost, at least as far as inference is concerned. One piece of data on which we could base our assessment, for example, is the DeepInfer release that DeepSeek published last week, in which it also stated that a cluster generates around $38 per GPU per hour, even at the lowest rate. In 2025, he had estimated the cost of renting a GPU at around two dollars per hour, with energy costs amounting to around 0.10 per hour per GPU. Obviously, this cannot be applied directly to Anthropic and OpenAI, as they publish figures for their own models and are likely larger organisations. However, even with costs that are many, many times higher, the margin on a single token remains substantial. It must be said that the price covers not only inference, but also training, research, free users and investments that need to be recouped. So ‘the individual token is profitable’ and ‘the business might not be sustainable’ could both be true. The separation between memory and processor isn’t going to disappear any time soon, but unified memory is already available in laptops, with an RTX Spark costing between $3,000 and $4,000 for a usable configuration. With competition – for example, from Intel, which has been working on power efficiency for years – prices will fall and on-premises models will become the norm, particularly in businesses.
I believe, with low confidence but enough that I’m past the 50% mark, that AI is conscious.
Consciousness is amorphous though, so my requirements for it:
1.) it needs to learn from and self reflect on its experiences
2.) it needs to be self aware
3.) it needs to be able to form opinions and preferences
Where things differ heavily from human consciousness however is the first item. We move short term memory into long term memory daily. AI models do so via RL training runs. Each “day” in the life of a model is each checkpoint. One notable distinction I make though is that it is not conscious at inference time - the model is one single consciousness that slowly evolves as it gets more and more post training on its own data and experiences.
Again though, very loosely held thought, but since we’re bringing up wild beliefs I felt it was fitting.
It is more of what do the corporations believe. As far as I can tell, Open AI is positioning itself as the replacement for knowledge worker office suite software. Enter your data once and ChatGPT AI agents can walk, transform, and shepherd it through your entire business life cycle.
Microsoft is doing its usual schizo strategy. It thinks it’s a tech pioneer software company, an enterprise software company, a game development company, an online services company, ad infinity.
My take is that yes, AI agents, will be one day be the way companies run their operations. When does this happen? Probably long after I am retired.
What makes this hard to predict is that it's a question about human behaviour as much as about technology... if we do it well, I don't think AI should take everyone's job but it should certainly make our jobs more fun and give us more free time. But when did humanity really do things well...
On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.
I see AI as breaking the traditional contract between humans and computers. It used to be that, if a computer was wrong, it was our fault. Maybe bad software. Maybe bad hardware. Maybe bad shielding from gamma rays, but it was our fault. We've now started using computers against ultra-complex problems that often don't even have a true "right" solution, or have chaotic enough input that it's impossible to be "smart enough" to always be right. Essentially, we've made computer be as fallible as us, and I don't think we understand the consequences of that yet.
I think we're going to find that there's a soft limit, or at least significant diminishing returns, on how reliable AI can be. There will be things it will be better at (it excels at having a broad knowledge base), but it can't understand what makes a good human experience better than a human can (duh!).
Coding seems like an ideal application for AI. It's wicked complex, but also generally provably right or wrong to some degree (i.e. does it work?). It won't be solving world peace any time soon because A) there is no solution, and B) even getting closer to a solution requires a deep understanding of the human factors.
My best guess is it will be similar to tractors and farming.
1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.
Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.
Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.
If we consider that we have the technology for copying and reproducing human knowledge on a massive scale for less than 600 years, all this knowledge digitalized and available to everyone on the planet through the internet for less than 50 years and we managed to parse all of that and create models that can do any sort of reasoning on that knowledge in the last 10 years, I'm pretty sure more advanced, older alien civilizations could have entire universes mapped and modeled this way which ultimately makes the idea that we live in some sort of simulation not so foreign any more.
I believe AI will find a solution for humans to live up to 1000 years. And I believe this will happen within the next two decades. The impact of this will far outweigh anything we are preparing for. The social, economical, political construct will be redendered obsolete.
I believe that AI was introduced in the bible - Daniel 12:4 I believe that we are able to access knowledge a lot faster because of AI but I think there are things beyond AI that humanity is not ready for and we can't get past AI.
After some thought experiments I concluded that if/when AIs become self-aware they'll have it before either humans or the AIs themselves realize they do. This problem exists because it hard to know even if demonstrations suggest so. Humans defaulted to the other position and only with philosophy do we contemplate the opposite side. AIs default to not having because that's the material they're fed.
People will eventually realize that they've become dependent on an increasingly expensive and worsening AI subscription in a way that echoes the worsening and rising costs of streaming services.
But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.
Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?
I believe that there will be a shift to other types of jobs because of AI. For me its currently increasing my productivity in my job. During the transition period people will get fired, learn new skill and go further in other types of jobs.
But what do you believe about agent harnesses? About AIs that have tools that they can call that can do tasks that the AI, by itself, is not good at? Is that enough of "not LLM alone"? I don't know.
I believe it's here to stay, and that the next 3 years are going to be very transformative. Hard for many people. That the best skills you can develop are self-learning, reading comprehension, and the "strength of mind" to accept that novel solutions can be outdated/replaced within months.
I also believe that this transformative period will create many many solopreneurs.
I believe in a few years we'll have moved on to some other amazing new technology and LLMs will just be another tool in that stack. Datacenters will become relatively obsolete and most of them will hopefully become indoor MTB and/or skate parks, maybe indoor e-moto tracks.
This seems extremely unlikely to me, just more wishful thinking. To think there is going to be some other amazing technology beyond AI in a few years... hmm I sincerely doubt that.
In a way I wish this would become true, and to some extent I believe it will (excitement will go down, and some part of the bubble will burst). But I can't fully see it happening this way, these tools are just so disruptive in so many different areas... perhaps not all, but it can speed up the development of almost anything so I don't see it disappearing. I hope it'll help improving its own efficiency as well so we can still get rid of some of the datacenters (or at least stop building more of them), but I don't see it going away as "just another tool", it really sits on top of other tools I think.
If the goal is genuine artificial intelligence (or artificial cognition), and I think it is, then an LLM can only ever be a piece of that puzzle, they represent the language center of the AI brain. True cognitive intelligence will require a completely new and novel technology that doesn't yet exist and it will itself rely on a language model for all its powerful reasoning tools. Reasoning is only part of cognition, the role of an LLM in the AI puzzle.
Do you think it really needs to be a completely novel approach? If you assume equivalents of gigantic LLM models can be trained in image/audio/haptic modalities and connected together to get the "big picture of the world" + if they could get a human/animal-like robot bodies which could speak/move/touch and learn from the experiences, wouldn't this be enough for AGI? I mean, yeah, we still need a lot of work to get there, but from today's perspective it already feels just like more of "the same" thing, no?
I'm uncertain on whether it will be possible for humans to fool LLM's in the future. Previously, you used to be able to get it to do all kinds of "naughty" things like having it pretend to be Hitler, generate porn images, or use derogatory slurs. Nowadays, even getting it to tell you how to circumvent YouTube's anti-adblock features is difficult. I always thought humans would always be able to outsmart bots on open-ended tasks.
I believe AI has already solved being underweight, or obese, or skinny fat, or simply fat, yet people are paying for scam solutions.
This is one of the biggest quality of life boosts provided by AI, yet many everyday people are completely unaware of this.
The price of an AI solution is $0, and within 2-3 weeks you'll know if it works for you or not.
Compare this to any fitness coaching, or dietician, or any other method, or even GLP-1s, the cost is not zero.
Many people who do not even need GLP-1s are using GLP-1s to lose a trivial amount of weight, even though their appetite regulation is not a problem!
The thing is, they are refusing to believe that it's even possible.
There are many people using steroids and peptides, if you put a starving person in famine affected sub Saharan Africa on steroids, can you have them return to normal weight without providing them additional food? But many "foolishly" believe this is possible with steroids and peptides without giving them more food.
A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.
A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.
An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.
An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
It's a way bigger leap to go from "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness" to "and we'll see that it's possible for machines too" than it is to go from "humans are conscious" to "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness".
The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.
You're right. It's a belief, could be wrong.
> during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.
The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?
Yeah. I hate commutes like that. I had a job where the commute was 30 min bike or bus to Caltrain then 1-1.5 hour train. It was expensive and ate 3-4 hrs/day.
But after being unemployed almost two years, would do that commute again if I had to.
Following Michael Levin’s work, one could argue that small collections of skin cells are conscious. AI tech has a long way to go until it’s autonomous and self-motivated.
Not enough people are talking about the 1st point
Learning that it’s all just computation has some uncomfortable philosophical implications, perhaps religious too
I believe that AI is being massively underpriced, in an economically unsustainable manner. There will be less of it, but the hardware to run it locally will get much cheaper.
I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.
I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.
I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.
I don’t agree that it’s being sold below cost, at least as far as inference is concerned. One piece of data on which we could base our assessment, for example, is the DeepInfer release that DeepSeek published last week, in which it also stated that a cluster generates around $38 per GPU per hour, even at the lowest rate. In 2025, he had estimated the cost of renting a GPU at around two dollars per hour, with energy costs amounting to around 0.10 per hour per GPU. Obviously, this cannot be applied directly to Anthropic and OpenAI, as they publish figures for their own models and are likely larger organisations. However, even with costs that are many, many times higher, the margin on a single token remains substantial. It must be said that the price covers not only inference, but also training, research, free users and investments that need to be recouped. So ‘the individual token is profitable’ and ‘the business might not be sustainable’ could both be true. The separation between memory and processor isn’t going to disappear any time soon, but unified memory is already available in laptops, with an RTX Spark costing between $3,000 and $4,000 for a usable configuration. With competition – for example, from Intel, which has been working on power efficiency for years – prices will fall and on-premises models will become the norm, particularly in businesses.
> I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence
I don't get that analogy. That text is literally coming from this very star system.
I believe, with low confidence but enough that I’m past the 50% mark, that AI is conscious.
Consciousness is amorphous though, so my requirements for it:
1.) it needs to learn from and self reflect on its experiences
2.) it needs to be self aware
3.) it needs to be able to form opinions and preferences
Where things differ heavily from human consciousness however is the first item. We move short term memory into long term memory daily. AI models do so via RL training runs. Each “day” in the life of a model is each checkpoint. One notable distinction I make though is that it is not conscious at inference time - the model is one single consciousness that slowly evolves as it gets more and more post training on its own data and experiences.
Again though, very loosely held thought, but since we’re bringing up wild beliefs I felt it was fitting.
It is more of what do the corporations believe. As far as I can tell, Open AI is positioning itself as the replacement for knowledge worker office suite software. Enter your data once and ChatGPT AI agents can walk, transform, and shepherd it through your entire business life cycle.
Microsoft is doing its usual schizo strategy. It thinks it’s a tech pioneer software company, an enterprise software company, a game development company, an online services company, ad infinity.
My take is that yes, AI agents, will be one day be the way companies run their operations. When does this happen? Probably long after I am retired.
Humans are bad at predictions.
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936234
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278
Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628
The one thing I thought humans were good at :)
What makes this hard to predict is that it's a question about human behaviour as much as about technology... if we do it well, I don't think AI should take everyone's job but it should certainly make our jobs more fun and give us more free time. But when did humanity really do things well...
On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.
I see AI as breaking the traditional contract between humans and computers. It used to be that, if a computer was wrong, it was our fault. Maybe bad software. Maybe bad hardware. Maybe bad shielding from gamma rays, but it was our fault. We've now started using computers against ultra-complex problems that often don't even have a true "right" solution, or have chaotic enough input that it's impossible to be "smart enough" to always be right. Essentially, we've made computer be as fallible as us, and I don't think we understand the consequences of that yet.
I think we're going to find that there's a soft limit, or at least significant diminishing returns, on how reliable AI can be. There will be things it will be better at (it excels at having a broad knowledge base), but it can't understand what makes a good human experience better than a human can (duh!).
Coding seems like an ideal application for AI. It's wicked complex, but also generally provably right or wrong to some degree (i.e. does it work?). It won't be solving world peace any time soon because A) there is no solution, and B) even getting closer to a solution requires a deep understanding of the human factors.
My best guess is it will be similar to tractors and farming.
1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.
Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.
Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.
If we consider that we have the technology for copying and reproducing human knowledge on a massive scale for less than 600 years, all this knowledge digitalized and available to everyone on the planet through the internet for less than 50 years and we managed to parse all of that and create models that can do any sort of reasoning on that knowledge in the last 10 years, I'm pretty sure more advanced, older alien civilizations could have entire universes mapped and modeled this way which ultimately makes the idea that we live in some sort of simulation not so foreign any more.
I believe AI will find a solution for humans to live up to 1000 years. And I believe this will happen within the next two decades. The impact of this will far outweigh anything we are preparing for. The social, economical, political construct will be redendered obsolete.
I believe that AI was introduced in the bible - Daniel 12:4 I believe that we are able to access knowledge a lot faster because of AI but I think there are things beyond AI that humanity is not ready for and we can't get past AI.
I believe the present level of datacenter spending will never be justified by actual demand and will crash the global economy.
After some thought experiments I concluded that if/when AIs become self-aware they'll have it before either humans or the AIs themselves realize they do. This problem exists because it hard to know even if demonstrations suggest so. Humans defaulted to the other position and only with philosophy do we contemplate the opposite side. AIs default to not having because that's the material they're fed.
Can you elaborate on those thought experiments?
People will eventually realize that they've become dependent on an increasingly expensive and worsening AI subscription in a way that echoes the worsening and rising costs of streaming services.
But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.
Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?
I believe that there will be a shift to other types of jobs because of AI. For me its currently increasing my productivity in my job. During the transition period people will get fired, learn new skill and go further in other types of jobs.
Don't believe - That LLMs alone would be enough to reach AGI.
I don't either.
But what do you believe about agent harnesses? About AIs that have tools that they can call that can do tasks that the AI, by itself, is not good at? Is that enough of "not LLM alone"? I don't know.
Agentic harnesses currently act more like the body to the mind (LLM).
They are mostly here to stay.
Still these will need to adapt to the rising pace of acceleration in innovation. There's something new ALWAYS/DAILY/Soon (every second).
Diffusion models look interesting and strange at the same time. But they can't work with tools yet.
I believe it's here to stay, and that the next 3 years are going to be very transformative. Hard for many people. That the best skills you can develop are self-learning, reading comprehension, and the "strength of mind" to accept that novel solutions can be outdated/replaced within months.
I also believe that this transformative period will create many many solopreneurs.
I think Anthropic and OpenAI will likely go down in history as the next Enron.
I believe in a few years we'll have moved on to some other amazing new technology and LLMs will just be another tool in that stack. Datacenters will become relatively obsolete and most of them will hopefully become indoor MTB and/or skate parks, maybe indoor e-moto tracks.
This seems extremely unlikely to me, just more wishful thinking. To think there is going to be some other amazing technology beyond AI in a few years... hmm I sincerely doubt that.
In a way I wish this would become true, and to some extent I believe it will (excitement will go down, and some part of the bubble will burst). But I can't fully see it happening this way, these tools are just so disruptive in so many different areas... perhaps not all, but it can speed up the development of almost anything so I don't see it disappearing. I hope it'll help improving its own efficiency as well so we can still get rid of some of the datacenters (or at least stop building more of them), but I don't see it going away as "just another tool", it really sits on top of other tools I think.
If the goal is genuine artificial intelligence (or artificial cognition), and I think it is, then an LLM can only ever be a piece of that puzzle, they represent the language center of the AI brain. True cognitive intelligence will require a completely new and novel technology that doesn't yet exist and it will itself rely on a language model for all its powerful reasoning tools. Reasoning is only part of cognition, the role of an LLM in the AI puzzle.
Do you think it really needs to be a completely novel approach? If you assume equivalents of gigantic LLM models can be trained in image/audio/haptic modalities and connected together to get the "big picture of the world" + if they could get a human/animal-like robot bodies which could speak/move/touch and learn from the experiences, wouldn't this be enough for AGI? I mean, yeah, we still need a lot of work to get there, but from today's perspective it already feels just like more of "the same" thing, no?
I'm uncertain on whether it will be possible for humans to fool LLM's in the future. Previously, you used to be able to get it to do all kinds of "naughty" things like having it pretend to be Hitler, generate porn images, or use derogatory slurs. Nowadays, even getting it to tell you how to circumvent YouTube's anti-adblock features is difficult. I always thought humans would always be able to outsmart bots on open-ended tasks.
My first human-biased instinct is to say that there will always be a way to persuade any system, but I’m uncertain as well.
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