2/23/2026 at 10:20:50 AM
I assume this is a symptom of the wider ai hardware issue.This is starting to feel a bit like universal paperclips to me, and we are on the verge of the next stage of industrialisation multiplication.
I guess its either quantum computing or the hypnodrones which will get us out of this mess one way or another...
by alt227
2/23/2026 at 10:48:17 AM
More like China-factor to get us out of the mess. We wait for Huawei photonics gpus (end of this year), CXMT and YMTC ramping up production to flood the market or as Janet coined it overcapacity. You know China will undercut the price significantly.by Haven880
2/23/2026 at 10:56:07 AM
China doesn't have enough to supply itself.by re-thc
2/23/2026 at 10:58:11 AM
Neither does anyone else. Key difference being they planned for this 5 years ago instead of last quarterby monster_truck
2/23/2026 at 11:32:20 AM
Planned doesn’t mean achievable. The yields are still low.by re-thc
2/23/2026 at 11:43:32 AM
Low is better than nothing.by alt227
2/23/2026 at 12:39:35 PM
Low yields means their production can cost more than they sell it for, which is not sustainable. They have to have yields good enough that they can make money, otherwise the government is just subsidizing a give away, which is fine if they don’t export them but wouldn’t make sense if they do.by seanmcdirmid
2/23/2026 at 1:49:37 PM
Chinese planning revolves around mastering a technology no matter the cost, then monopolozing the global market no matter the cost, then bankrupting existing foreigner competitors or entirely preventing them from arising in the first place no matter the cost, to only then caring about costs and to start profiting from it all.by alexgieg
2/23/2026 at 7:53:39 PM
Chinese strategy of monopolizing markets via low prices is strange, it has no moat, they win simply because they provide the best value. I mean, its great for us, I’m all for it, but it doesn’t have an end game where they can actually ever set prices.by seanmcdirmid
2/23/2026 at 2:11:25 PM
Sounds like SV VC culture.by mentalgear
2/23/2026 at 1:08:57 PM
China has plenty of money to subside low yields while they improve their technology.by Incipient
2/23/2026 at 1:09:26 PM
That's where capitalism-with-Chinese-characteristics comes into play, since the CCP knows it's a capacity they want to get some independence from the government creates incentives to develop it until it becomes self-sustainable.They have a strategic goal which the government will support while at the same time letting competition do its thing, it's a step above from what other governments used to do with government-backed R&D that would eventually be developed by the private sector into products.
Not sure why other countries aren't adopting this model adapted to their own needs, seems very effective so far. Well, I'm not sure but have a big hunch it's the usual big business blocking it since it'd create more competition in a more level playing field.
by piva00
2/23/2026 at 1:43:26 PM
Why would the CPC (the correct acronym) subsidize cheap GPUs to America? You won’t see huawei GPUs here until their yields are decent enough to make it profitable.by seanmcdirmid
2/23/2026 at 2:36:12 PM
CCP is the common one even though not the official, either use is fine and understandable (as you've understood it clearly).What do you mean? I'm talking about the CCP funding projects to increase yield for their fabs, not buying GPUs from NVidia...
by piva00
2/23/2026 at 6:00:46 PM
It’s CPC because the official name of the party is Communist Party, China, a hold over to when China was more aligned with the soviets before Stalin died. As long as they subsidize GPUs for domestic use, it makes sense. But we won’t see them for export until their yields are good enough to make them profitable. They will also have a hard time scaling with bad yields, leading to a continued need for GPU imports to meet demand.by seanmcdirmid
2/23/2026 at 8:09:28 PM
> It’s CPC because the official name of the party is Communist PartyI'm very aware of that but it's commonly referred to as CCP which is understandable for any reader, I don't need to change it to CPC to be understood at all. Not sure why you insist on nitpicking this point, rather pointless, it's just a common way to refer to it.
by piva00
2/23/2026 at 3:12:25 PM
> CPC (the correct acronym)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party
Read the very first sentence.
by alt227
2/23/2026 at 6:01:52 PM
Yes, the western world has basically told the Chinese what the proper acronym should be even if the Chinese disagree.by seanmcdirmid
2/23/2026 at 10:46:54 AM
All these macro technology predictions feel very WW2 Wunderwaffe to meby alansaber
2/23/2026 at 12:25:20 PM
Slinging doom and gloom on the internet seems like engagement-bait to me at this point. If the suppliers aren't increasing production, they clearly see something all these armchair doomers do not, I'm sure the prices will normalize back to "normal" levels sooner than people think.by embedding-shape
2/23/2026 at 1:40:44 PM
My compliments for the hypnodrones referenceby skrebbel
2/23/2026 at 3:08:40 PM
Thankyou, I have played many games of Universal Paperclips as I imagine you have as well.Releasing the Hypnodrones is always a very satisfying milestone.
by alt227
2/23/2026 at 10:42:56 AM
Room temp superconductors for chips and robots!by koolala
2/23/2026 at 10:24:26 AM
AI bubble won't last forever when a lot of compute is burned at a loss just so people can generate AI videos of sharks driving cars for social media shorts. It will burst at some point, at which HW manufacturing will have to lower prices if they still want to have enough sales to stay in business, since most of their current sales boom comes from HW they haven't even made yet.OpenAI can't keep losing investor money forever with nothing to show for, at some point the first domino will fall, then the rest of the industry will go too from investor panic.
by joe_mamba
2/23/2026 at 11:06:21 AM
Nothing has ever burst when production can't meet demandby arisAlexis
2/23/2026 at 11:07:50 AM
It always bursts when demand stops. Current demand is artificially pumped up and financially unsustainable aka a bubble,by joe_mamba
2/23/2026 at 11:26:10 AM
demand is increasing exponentially, and barely anyone uses AIby hiuioejfjkf
2/23/2026 at 1:23:38 PM
All exponential growth curves are actually S curves, before the inflection point.by mikkupikku
2/23/2026 at 11:33:50 AM
The free demand is increasing. With price increases hitting the cloud, will there still be demand?by re-thc
2/23/2026 at 11:35:28 AM
programmers paying $200/month will be forced to pay $2000/month or $5000/month or be without a jobby hiuioejfjkf
2/23/2026 at 11:50:32 AM
At this point all the programmers will stop using ai, hence bubble bursting.What is the point of paying $5000/month to keep a job which pays $10000/month?
by alt227
2/23/2026 at 12:27:52 PM
I mean it will be the employers of those programmers and at $5000/dev/month I expect a businesses will start demanding very tangible returns from this spend. And as much as I love the tools I don't think it's generating that much direct business value. It's very obviously not turning $140k devs into $200k devs.by Spivak
2/23/2026 at 11:11:38 AM
The demand being: "trust me bro we will pay you when we're profitable"All it'll take is one company to go bust, oracle for example, for the whole thing to deflate
Plus you're factually wrong, it happened for fiber optics and railroads
by lm28469
2/23/2026 at 11:12:48 AM
>All it'll take is one company to go bust, oracle for example, for the whole thing to deflateProvided that of course, the US administration will be incorruptible enough to not bail out these tech companies with taxpayer money when they do eventually fail.
But when you see the connection between Larry Ellison and Trump, you realize the whole "free market competition" is a scam for suckers. Always has been, just that now they don't even bother to hide it via some complex facades and shell games to garner a veneer of legitimacy, it's straight up banana republic style of corruption.
by joe_mamba
2/23/2026 at 11:20:39 AM
> Provided that of course, the US administration will be incorruptible enough to not bail out these tech companies with taxpayer money when they do eventually fail.I'd love them to try that because virtually no one on any part of the political spectrum would get behind that besides the most corrupted and soulless ghouls masquerading as politicians
by lm28469
2/23/2026 at 11:27:11 AM
I dunno between following the party king and "we must bail them out to avoid total economic collapse" (real or imagined), I wouldn't be betting against bailouts.by GCUMstlyHarmls
2/23/2026 at 12:16:51 PM
I'd love them to try getting caught on audio asking a governor to find votes, and campaign on pardoning people convicted of treason because virtually no one on any part of the political spectrum would get behind that besides the most corrupted and soulless ghouls masquerading as politicians.I could have substituted many other things up there. I was very naive when I thought getting caught on audio talking about grabbing women by the pussy and being able to do whatever you want to them because you’re a celebrity was one of those things too.
by lotsofpulp
2/23/2026 at 10:35:46 AM
I really don't think so. I feel like we're at a takeoff.Senior engineers using AI coding are 10x more productive. My output has jumped dramatically. I'm a senior engineer and built six nines, active-active systems that moved billions of dollars a day. I am absolutely a beast with these models. I can replace an entire team just by myself. I'm literally shipping an entire week of features in half a day. I'm reviewing the code and planning the architecture - I am not dialing this in.
Video editors using video models can replace entire studio production departments. Writer-directors who know how to direct are essentially now Hollywood studios in their own right. I know a lot about this in particular because I've been making films as a hobby for 15+ years and work with a lot of industry professionals.
You'll see a lot of slop, but that's the same thing we got when we gave the masses cell phones with cameras attached to them. We still have plenty of amazing photographers in the world, and the means of creation are only getting cheaper/easier and the scope of creation for any individual is growing and growing and growing.
This is the next industrial revolution.
by echelon
2/23/2026 at 10:41:19 AM
So prices will need to increase -- if it makes a senior engineer 10x more productive then coding assistants could easily cost 20x-100x more then what they cost today. Same for video generation.by sz4kerto
2/23/2026 at 10:49:59 AM
Given that 10x engineers cost in the millions and that movies cost in the hundreds of millions - this is okay!Edit: HN rate limit won't let me reply, so here -
I'm saying that hiring ten senior engineer costs millions. (Not a single 10xer - that's such a debated thing anyway, Fabrice Bellard or not.)
AI companies will make bank when they've hooked us all on the tools and raise prices.
Companies would likely rather pay $500k/yr to Anthropic and $750k/yr to engineers than $2M/yr to an uneven team of humans with HR, taxes, and other expenses, attrition, etc.
Anthropic is going to make bank.
by echelon
2/23/2026 at 12:34:53 PM
The price of tools isn't determined by how much money they make or save the user. That's just the price cap. The price floor (in the long run) is the cost of making the tool. The actual price will be somewhere in between depending on competition.by fauigerzigerk
2/23/2026 at 10:53:05 AM
How many 10x engineers paid millions are out there? How can you stay in business as an AI company by only charging those 10x engineers 200/month?Edit: Fabrice Bellard is a 10x engineers because he invents cool and innovative tools that didn't exist, not because he can bang out code 10x faster. AI can't replace fabrice Ballard.
by joe_mamba
2/23/2026 at 3:05:09 PM
> Edit: HN rate limit won't let me reply, so here -There is a reason for that...
by alt227
2/23/2026 at 11:23:00 AM
Yap, that's what people don't want to hear.Right now we are in the cheap phase.
Price can easily triple
by Bombthecat
2/23/2026 at 12:37:33 PM
> Price can easily tripleThey can just as easily plummet to a fraction. Really depends on wether there's value for the entities that are paying
by s1mplicissimus
2/23/2026 at 10:56:11 AM
If you are able now to create 10 products instead of 1 in the same time frame you will have to plan, review and maintain 10 things instead of 1. How can this work? I mean to double your productivity is a huge jump but 10x sounds unsustainable.by ndr42
2/23/2026 at 11:01:28 AM
Well, AI fanatics aren't about longevity or maintaining things. The fact that the LLM spit out a bunch of code is good enough for them. Drive-by PRs and vaporware are their bread & butter.by hypeatei
2/23/2026 at 11:13:00 AM
Do you get paid 10x? Does your company make 10x?Nope, because the only companies making money on this bs are companies selling pickaxes and shovels
by lm28469
2/23/2026 at 10:37:48 AM
Yea but are you paying a profitable amount of money to your service provider for you to do it? I find it hard to believe that Anthropic is profiting off of my $100/mo subscription based on how active I keep my machines running.by iamtheworstdev
2/23/2026 at 10:58:42 AM
The numbers mentioned by Ed Zitron in his podcast Better Offline recently suggested that a $200/mo Claude subscription allows you to spend $2300 - $2700 worth of Anthropic tokens. That's pretty bad, but better than I expected.I don't see it being unreasonable that models and infrastructure could improve enough to bridge the cost gap within five to ten years. It's just that the AI companies already spend so much money that it might not matter.
by mrweasel
2/23/2026 at 11:02:17 AM
The video models aren’t that good yet but for coding the utility is clear, yes. To be fair Darren Aronofsky also overestimates their quality.Correct me if I’m wrong, but generating video is also much more resource intensive than equivalently productive text-only model use. It seems the industry could save itself a lot of hassle and infamy by simply avoiding artistic fields.
by silver_silver
2/23/2026 at 10:37:51 AM
>Senior engineers using AI coding are 10x more productive.Are the subscriptions of those engineers enough to make their use-case profitable and on top to also be subsidizing the cost of AI video slop generation and keep the company profitable?
>Video editors using video models can replace entire studio production departments.
Then why is OpenAI losing more an more money?
>This is the next industrial revolution.
I'm not saying it isn't, but we did have the .com bubble burst even though that was also revolution. Something can be a bubble and a revolution simultaneously. The internet didn't go away after the .com bubble burst, just the crazy speculations did, which is what I was saying will happen with the AI bauble. The bubble will burst and only the profit generating parts of AI will remain.
by joe_mamba
2/23/2026 at 10:41:33 AM
This is yet to be seen. Certainly feels like I'm more productive but I'm not seeing any faster results. It would be nice for this to be studied more.by mirsadm
2/23/2026 at 12:41:12 PM
What people mostly see is the illusion of productivity. But the measure should be outcomes, not the amount of stuff made. If a factory produces 10x the product but it is only 1/3rd the quality of what it was before that is long term unsustainable and leaves the door open for a competitor to attack them on quality.This is the key driver behind all those 'enshittification' problems that we see. Quantity over quality is almost always a balance and not a binary, if you start treating it as if one should always trump at the expense of the other then sooner or later it will catch up with you.
by jacquesm
2/23/2026 at 10:48:56 AM
> I can replace an entire team just by myself. I'm literally shipping an entire week of features in half a day. I'm reviewing the code and planning the architecture - I am not dialing this in.So you can review so much code so fast? Are you sure?
In many companies code reviews (properly) are the bottleneck. This was the case without AI. Now you're saying AI is giving you 10x more code reviews and you're even faster.
What am I missing?
p.s. I agree AI can make you and things faster just not suddenly god mode.
by re-thc
2/23/2026 at 10:58:38 AM
10x AI speed up only happens when you stop reading the code (or start skimming it, etc). This is pretty obvious to anyone that uses the tools and many vibe coding proponents have said as much.Sacrificing quality for quantity makes these tools much less impressive. I say this as I tab over to my bug ridden memory hog CC tmux tab.
by oohbkkb
2/23/2026 at 10:46:14 AM
Video editors using video models can replace entire studio production departments. Writer-directors who know how to direct are essentially now Hollywood studios in their own right. I know a lot about this in particular because I've been making films as a hobby for 15+ years and work with a lot of industry professionals.This is soul destroying. Literally made my day worse thinking about this.
by GlacierFox
2/23/2026 at 11:06:29 AM
>This is soul destroying.Why?
by joe_mamba
2/23/2026 at 11:37:56 AM
10,000 students go to film school every year. A handful of them will have the autonomy and scope they want. The rest of their dreams die on the vine.This is my friends' lives.
That should make your day worse.
by echelon
2/23/2026 at 10:44:02 AM
the dotcom bubble bursting didn't mean the internet wasn't an extremely valuable technology - still a bubbleby throawayonthe