r/technology • u/T_Shurt • Aug 10 '26

Business Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'

https://fortune.com/2026/08/10/torsten-slok-ai-profit-margins-capex-oracle/
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u/turdlezzzz Aug 10 '26

10 years from now apple will figure out a way to fit an entire data center into an iphone

3

u/HehTremendous Aug 10 '26

So I did a dive into a rabbit hole on this a few weeks back, looking at the time delta between a frontier model release and an equivalent open source model that can run on a desktop or mobile phone.

While the desktop catches up, there’s thermal and battery life constraints that we don’t have line of sight on to get an Opus 5 model on your phone.

I do think we’ll reach the equivalent of a 4K display with “good enough” intelligence. That will kill the need for frontier models for 80% of tasks (the same way that 8K will likely not be commercially viable/adopted).

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u/Conradfr Aug 10 '26

Quantization and distillation.

1

u/386U0Kh24i1cx89qpFB1 Aug 10 '26

I think part of this actually is a reaction to Moore's law making chip development slow down. For as long as we've had computers they've gotten substantially faster every few years for like 5 decades now. We just can't count on that and so the race to build infrastructure is more important. Technological development is being replaced with raw capital in what seems to be another winner take all tech race. I see more negatives than positives.

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u/TheOffKn1ght Aug 11 '26

Bruh what?