YHK - yet another hacker news clone

US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears

93 points mindracer 1 hour ago 45 comments

elpakal 1 hour ago | parent

Google's AI search is abysmal and is almost always, at least, 30% wrong (outdated, wrong info) ime. I find that I just use the chat interface to save tokens on basic things so I don't want to waste my real AI subscription tokens on basics.

In theory I understand their change to make search -> AI search instead, but I have a hard time believing that this was benchmarked in any way and not rushed to desperately remain relevant in the AI race.

eigenspace 1 hour ago | parent

People say this a lot, and part of me wants it to be true and hates this AI search stuff being shoved in my face, but this really hasn't been my experience.

Unless I'm searching for something very niche, I'm often quite surprised by how 'directionally right' Google's AI overview is, even if I retain a lot of the skepticism I had towards it.

cush 50 minutes ago | parent

Other AI search products are so good. I’m not sure why Google is still so far behind. You can feel Gemini struggle in in the new Siri too, it’s awful

downrightmike 47 minutes ago | parent

They don't have anyone who fights for the consumer. They just make things and rename it all the time. No one knows what their thing is called today

foldr 50 minutes ago | parent

Like the sibling, I can't really agree with this. Google is now quite good at answering general queries and doing simple calculations, which is a big step up from its capabilities a few years ago. For example, you can ask

> What is the equivalent focal length on APS-C of 80mm on full frame?

and get the correct answer. It's not good compared to frontier AI models, but that's to be expected, given that you don't pay for it.

esafak 47 minutes ago | parent

It's also multi-modal, right?

Dennip 40 minutes ago | parent

Disagree. In my experience particularly over the last few weeks, Gemini has gotten very good at understanding what i'm asking for and giving a relevant response that 9 times out of 10 just answers my question without me having to go further into the relevant wiki link etc.

taeric 30 minutes ago | parent

Agreed. I have no doubt I could throw curveballs at it, but it has been getting things mostly correct for a while. And the fact that I can follow up with a direct challenge is kind of nice.

method_capital 16 minutes ago | parent

Try asking it about a sporting event or score. It literally just makes shit up. I asked it Tuesday if there was a world series game; it told me with complete confidence there wasn't and that Milwaukee was leading the series 2-1 after losing the night before.

feverzsj 39 minutes ago | parent

It's mostly wrong, if you dig a little bit into the supplied references.

nonethewiser 7 minutes ago | parent

Or will confidently assert something that 1 person speculated about on Reddit

Hikikomori 31 minutes ago | parent

Dont use search but Gemini flash is excellent when I don't use kagi.

georgemcbay 31 minutes ago | parent

> Google's AI search is abysmal and is almost always, at least, 30% wrong

Different experience for me, IMO AI mode saved Google search. The classic search became pretty much worthless due to decades of SEO winning over good results. But AI mode made Google search far more useful for me and gives me what I'm looking for 99.9% of the time.

I do understand some people (website operators who used to rely on SEO or google stockholders after the recent earnings report) being upset about AI mode, but as a search user I find it much more effective than where search was just prior to AI mode.

WarOnPrivacy 36 minutes ago | parent

    Intel's finance chief David Zinsner said the firm did not expect to
    bring in more cash than it spent this year, and forecast 
    lower-than-expected revenue for its fourth quarter.
You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand. Going forward, you could manufacture solutions to bring local LLM options closer to affordability.

If you're into manufacturing stuff people really want, that is.

seemaze 28 minutes ago | parent

According to industry leaders, that would be a terrible allocation of resources[0]. Those wafers belong in a datacenter!

/s

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/open...

edmundsauto 22 minutes ago | parent

Isn’t this just capitalism in practice?

TuxedoBuddy 15 minutes ago | parent

I think in theory yes, but heavy government investment can change how this works in practice.

SecretDreams 5 minutes ago | parent

This guy is seriously evil. He has just absolutely speedran becoming a POS. No surprise him and Musk fight.. they're fighting to see who can hurt humanity the quickest.

bigyabai 19 minutes ago | parent

> You could have manufactured enough ARC video cards to meet demand.

I don't know if anyone told you, but GDDR is included in the current RAM shortage.

zeusk 7 minutes ago | parent

The upcoming cards for local inference use LPDDR (which is also not immune to the shortage) - but maybe it's time Intel gets back to its roots and produce some memory chips. CXL Optane would also shine as a KV cache store.

darquomiahw 16 minutes ago | parent

ARC GPUs are manufactured using TSMC and not Intel foundry. And they require memory which Intel doesn't manufacture.

SecretDreams 7 minutes ago | parent

> which Intel doesn't manufacture.

Doesn't manufacture anymore*.

This company has been run so far into the ground over the last 15 years. Such a fall from grace, with so many decisions that just seem to never be correct.

philipkglass 4 minutes ago | parent

15 years? Intel hasn't manufactured RAM since 1985: https://timeline.intel.com/1985/farewell-to-dram

kube-system 3 minutes ago | parent

Intel stopped making DRAM in 1985.

lukeschlather 9 minutes ago | parent

If Intel were capable of building more chips they would. I don't think their lagging TSMC is a diabolical attempt to inflate their profit margins. Although I only really know what I read on the news.

slowin 7 minutes ago | parent

Thank you. We've already seen what the future looks like, and it's models on a chip. It's several orders of magnitude faster at inference than anything else:

https://chatjimmy.ai

AMD acquired this company, and I hope they start releasing consumer hardware based on their tech.

Your move Intel and NVIDIA, give us what we want and stop hording GPUs in data centers.

kube-system 1 minute ago | parent

Intel and NVIDIA aren't hoarding GPUs in data centers. You can buy them if you have money, but billionaires are hoarding money.

elorant 5 minutes ago | parent

Their 24GB GPU took a year to reach Europe and the 48GB one is nowhere to be found. I mean even if you want to give Intel a second chance in the GPU market they’re so fucking incompetent.

echohack5 1 minute ago | parent

Isn't the current economic scenario unsolvable from the supply side in a 20 year time span? Like is ASML going to magically start mass manufacturing EUL machines, the universities magically gonna spit out 10K more PhD grade level people to work new foundries, and some country magically going to make all the infrastructure investments to build entire cities of compute manufacturing?

Maybe I am wrong but the supply side of this equation seems completely hosed from a fundamental perspective.

taeric 28 minutes ago | parent

How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US? With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.

And the oddest fear is precisely what will happen if we start trying to ramp up a bit of what used to be normal accountability?

cableshaft 23 minutes ago | parent

Yeah this has to be some of it. No coincidence certain industries in the market always shifts up or down significantly just before and after each election, as people try to read the tea leaves of how a shift in political power will affect them.

taeric 19 minutes ago | parent

Some of it is also just political fighting making it inconvenient to sign contracts and do work specifically right now. Even places that have favorable build out plans for data centers have strong fears on moving forward with them with how much political ads are using them as a focus.

Good news on that front is that political fighting typically evaporates with the campaigns. Bad news, of course, is that it typically comes back with them. So contracts have to be executed stupid quick.

Which flat out makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration to give a good faith attempt at executing and honoring what came before.

petcat 9 minutes ago | parent

> makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration

Bidens CHIPS Act is still largely intact though isn't it? The next admin changed some things, renegotiated some implementation details, and even expanded parts of the subsidies. But I believe it is still moving forward at basically the same scale as was originally envisioned.

xienze 17 minutes ago | parent

> How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US?

Uncertainty that just developed overnight?

> With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.

What does that have to do with Intel, Amazon, and Google's financial results?

And where did you get the impression that no one can "discuss" any of this? A minute doesn't go by that someone isn't talking about Trump. Including you, regarding a completely unrelated topic.

nonethewiser 17 minutes ago | parent

>How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US?

Would you like to posit a theory? The article says nothing about this, and states entirely different causes. This concern seems rather tangential to recent market activity

bix6 12 minutes ago | parent

Let’s not forget the fed raised rates but kept them unchanged this time even though they clearly need to raise them further.

In general it’s an earnings story though I agree.

pc86 6 minutes ago | parent

What is it you're being prevented from discussing?

SoftTalker 5 minutes ago | parent

A lot. Stocks are always unstable right before an election. Expect a rebound next week.

vanuatu 4 minutes ago | parent

How much of these falls are due to the AI buildout as a whole vs. AI disrupting certain business models?

More agents browsing the web and people relying on AI summaries -> less revenue for Google Search and Reddit

AI drastically reducing the barrier to game dev -> less users on Roblox

itanalot 3 minutes ago | parent

Windows will soon lose the normie consumer market, and all that's left for them will be gamers (of which they will make zero dollars from) and enterprise (of which their successes will broadly match laptop job employment figures)