The current “AI” arms race reminds me a little of the Space Race of the 1950s-1970s. As a kid, many folks still talked excitedly about “Moon cities” and “space hotels”, with a genuine belief they were mere years away, and not the generations it turned out to be.
Sending people to the Moon and building space stations is very expensive, and at some point the money people looked at the balance sheet and said “Nah. Not worth it.”
Generative “A.I.” has, I’m guessing, a short window left to deliver the goods for the money people, who are growing *very* impatient. And as we watch LLMs become *less* reliable, and “AGI” – the Moon city of A.I. – appears to drift further and further away (generations, not years – if it’s even possible at all), at some point – perhaps quite soon – they’re going to pull the plug.
Gen AI is a massively subsidised technology – orders of magnitude more reliant on investor cash and government largesse than ride-sharing apps and takeaway delivery services – and without that constant injection of capital, ain’t nobody training or operating models on the scale we’ve seen.
Frontier models like o1 are the Moon landings of today, it could be argued – in terms of their scale and their cost.
I was 2 when the last astronaut walked on the Moon. I’ll probably be 60 when the next one does. The only difference is that we *know* there’s stuff of value on the Moon. LLMs have yet to find a use case that comes even close to justifying their cost. If we’re being totally honest, they may never.
Some folks say “Well, even if they stop training models, we’ll still have the ones we have now.”
Okay. So…
1. You gonna host it?
2. Enjoy working in Python 3.10 *forever*!
Codemanship's Blog 
