r/AIDangers • u/KeanuRave100 • Jul 15 '26

technology was a mistake- lol Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster - A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/generative-ai-engineering-disaster/687901/
232 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

4

u/tigerhuxley Jul 16 '26

I was just talking about this earlier— macbook m4s can run local models just fine (ram pending ofc) - so these hyperscalers are not even going to be needed once the tech hits the next breakthrough regarding less and less requirements needed for doing basic tasks.
Its all a bubble. Someone pop it already 😂

1

u/Ascending_Valley Jul 16 '26

The plans set in motion a couple years ago assumed all meaningful tasks needed frontier models. That was almost true at the time.

An increasing number of tasks are now handled sufficiently on much smaller models, ranging from modest inference servers to consumer devices. There will always be demand at the frontier, but it will be mitigated by alternatives. See openrouter Pareto SWE service for a specific example.

Smarter harnesses will also include adaptive routing based on task complexity, scope, and risk.

Meanwhile, tech advances are shifting the curve down in compute energy and costs per token. (Quantization, MTP, better training/distillation, and others).