Sam Altman is starting to panic

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好的,以下是这段文字的中文翻译: 所以,Uber的首席技术官(CTO),你知道的,可以想象成一个50岁出头的男人,努力装得很时尚,害怕被时代抛弃。他很紧张,因为如果他今天在台上不把AI捧得高高的,就会有个留着发髻、揣着信托基金的26岁年轻人在推特上发“好的,老古董”来嘲笑他,断了他的后路。如果他现在开始批评AI,而其他所有人都称它为“下一个印刷术”的话,他就会显得像个落伍的人。所以现在,所有年纪稍大的行业大佬,如DHH、Uncle Bob等,都在积极展示对AI的赞赏,仿佛在说:“嘿,AI这玩意儿挺不错的。看我,正在采纳新技术,你没料到这个老家伙会这样吧?” 于是,Uber的CTO站在公司前面,做了个演示。整整两个小时,这两个小时里他在整个公司高管层面前展示LLM,向大家展示AI有多么有用和强大,并表明这是未来的发展方向。
▶ 英文原文
So the CTO of Uber, who, you know, picture a guy in his early 50s, trying to look hip, terrified of getting left behind, and he's shitting bricks, because if he doesn't suck AI's silicon dick on stage today, some 26-year-old with a man bun and a trust fund is gonna tweet, OK, Boomer, and end his bloodline. Because if he starts bashing AI right now, while everyone else is calling it the next printing press, he's gonna look like a boomer. So all the old dudes right now, the industry staples, DHH, Uncle Bob, all of them, they're out there going, hey, this AI thing is pretty cool. Look at me, adopting new technology. You didn't expect that from this old guy, did you? And so the Uber CTO, he gets up in front of the company and does a demo. Two hours long, it's two hours of this guy jerking off an LLM in front of the entire C-suite, showing everyone how useful and powerful AI is, how this is the future.

整个管理层都坐在第一排,哼哼唧唧的,就像他们第一次和保姆一起参加三人行。当演示结束后,账单来了,这次两小时的演示花费了1200美元的代币。而演示的目的是向他们展示这项技术如何省钱。但是,仅仅是演示就花费了比它要替代的东西还多的钱。这就像在举行一场发布会宣布你的沉默誓言。同时,他们有一个内部仪表盘在跟踪每个团队消耗的代币数量。烧钱最快的团队排名第一,他们收到掌声、站立的欢呼,还有无数的赞许。就好比按厨房用电量来排名厨师。那个整晚开着所有炉灶却什么都没煮的人,成了月度最佳员工。
▶ 英文原文
And the entire C-suite is sitting there in the first row, moaning like it's their first threesome with the babysitter. And after the small demo is over, the bill comes in, and that two-hour demo cost $1,200 in tokens. The demo was him showing them how it will save money. And the mere act of showing them, of demoing this technology, ended up costing more than the thing it was supposed to replace. It's like holding a press conference about your vow of silence. Meanwhile, they've got an internal dashboard tracking how many tokens each team burns. And the team incinerating money the fastest is ranked number one. They're getting applause and a standing ovation and shit. Pats on the back, talk of the town. Which, you know, it's like ranking your chefs by how much electricity the kitchen used. The guy who left every burner on all night and cooked nothing, employee of the month.

这次演示对于 Uber 来说实际上是一个警醒时刻,因为首席运营官在看到数据时,称之为让人"脑袋爆炸"的时刻。而真正令人难以置信的是,情况还变得更糟。Uber 为整个2026年设定了一个AI预算,本想精打细算,避免失控的成本。但他们在四个月内,也就是到四月的时候,就耗尽了全年预算。为了做什么呢?他们是否推出了更多功能?拓展了新市场?不,都没有。他们只是总结了一些电子邮件,写了一些规范。其中有一个规范写得太长,甚至"产生了自我意识",最后自己删除了,作为对人类的最后仁慈。总体来说,用生成式AI生成了数千亿个字,其中90%的内容将永远无人问津。
▶ 英文原文
And so this demo actually becomes a wake-up moment for Uber because the COO, when he sees the number, calls it a head-exploding moment. Now, it gets worse, believe it or not. Uber had actually set an AI budget for all of 2026. And they're like, you know, we're going to be smart about this. We don't want runaway costs. And they blew the entire annual budget in four months. By April. To do what? Did they ship more features? Did they expand into new markets? No. Nothing. They summarized some emails. They wrote a couple specs. They wrote one spec so long, it gained sentience and deleted itself as a final act of mercy to mankind. Overall, just hundreds of billions of words generated with generative AI, 90% of which will never be read.

现在,Uber就像在说,你知道吗?把排行榜给我翻过来,反过来玩。现在是谁花得最少谁赢,不再是谁花得最多。现在是比谁能在不“爆掉”的情况下坚持最久。他们给每个工程师的月预算限制在1500美元。而你要知道,当你有大约5000名工程师时,每个月这仍然是一笔不小的费用。说实话,一开始我无法确定这是否是个泡沫。我以为他们会搞懂经济学的。你知道,科技公司早期通常会亏损,先进入赤字状态以求发展,希望之后成本会降低。他们会找到解决办法的。但是我越想,越不确定了。
▶ 英文原文
And now, Uber's like, you know what? Flip the fucking leaderboard. Invert that bitch. Now, whoever spends the least wins. It's no longer about who can burn the most. Now, it's who can edge the machine the longest without blowing their load. They've capped each engineer at $1,500 per month. And when you've got 5,000 engineers or so, that's still a small fortune each month, by the way. And look, I'll be honest that early on, I couldn't really say definitively that this was a bubble. I figured they'd figure out the economics. You know, tech companies, they lose money early, they go into the red to grow, and then hopefully it gets cheap. They figure it out. But the more I think about it, I don't know.

这个算法,所谓的LLM自回归机制,对于生成的每一个词,都要从头开始重新阅读整个对话。每一个词都是如此。从结构上来说,它在最深层次上是不高效的。这到底是什么呢?我不再假装这只是一个巧妙的比喻了,我是在字面意思上说的。它就是个老虎机。你拉动操纵杆。有时,它会给你一点多巴胺的刺激。哦,看,它写出了能用的代码。于是你上瘾了。但是80%的时间,你听到的是一种听起来很自信的胡言乱语,就像一个迷迷糊糊的人在解释量子物理。不过,那20%,真是精彩。瞧,这就是陷阱,这就是机制。夜深人静时,你在想,我是不是该自己写这个?然后又觉得不行,再拉一次操纵杆吧,大赢就在眼前。就像上次和上上次一样。间歇性的奖励,这是有史以来最容易让人上瘾的设计,现在被安放在你的企业工程团队中,并且加上了一个排行榜。
▶ 英文原文
This algorithm, the LLM autoregressive thing, for every single word it generates, it has to reread the entire conversation from the start. For every word. It's just structurally inefficient at the deepest level. And what this thing actually is. And look, I'm done pretending that this is a clever little analogy. I'm being literal. It's a slot machine. You pull the lever. Sometimes it gives you a little dopamine tingle. Oh, look, it wrote code that works. And you're hooked. But 80% of the time, you're like listening to confident nonsense that sounds like a stoner explaining quantum physics. But hey, that 20%, beautiful. And see, that's the trap. That's the mechanism. It's you light at night going, should I just write this myself? And going, no. Pull the lever one more time, king. The big win's coming. Just like last time and the time before that. Intermittent rewards, the most addictive design ever discovered, dropped into your enterprise engineering team with a leaderboard bolted on top.

整个行业都在经历类似优步的精神错乱。沃尔玛看到了这一点,他们就说,“看我的”。他们建立了一个内部代理程序,叫做“Code Puppy”。听起来像是一个被拒绝的皮毛展吉祥物,因为不当行为而消失了。于是,沃尔玛的高管们就像说,“来吧,给每个人无限的代币”。然后账单来了,Code Puppy被送到农场过它的余生。他们中止了这个项目。
▶ 英文原文
And the whole industry is having this Uber style psychosis episode. Walmart saw this and they're like, hold my beer. They built an internal agent called Code Puppy. Code Puppy. Sounds like the rejected mascot for a furry convention that got me too'd into oblivion. And so Walmart executives were like, here boys, unlimited tokens for everyone. And then the bill came. And Code Puppy was sent up to a farm to live out the rest of his life. They neutered the program.

微软拥有OpenAI大约四分之一的股份,但由于相同原因取消了其自己的云许可。GitHub Copilot也将所有客户转为基于计量收费的模式,而不是订阅制。某些客户发现他们的费用上涨了一百倍,不是百分之百,而是一百倍。事实上,在这些公司中,没有人对AI赞不绝口,因为它并没有让公司运转得完美无缺。充其量,它解决了一些问题,但同时也带来了很多新的问题。
▶ 英文原文
And Microsoft, which owns like a quarter of OpenAI, is canceling its own cloud licenses for the same reason. GitHub Copilot moved all of its customers as well to token-based billing rather than a subscription model. And some customers saw their price jump a hundredfold. That's 100x, not 100%. And the truth is, no one is raving about AI at these companies because it works or makes the entire company a well-oiled code shipping machine. At best, it solves some problems but creates a whole bunch of new ones.

要让它运作良好很困难,而且从来没有人从中获利过。所以现在大家都清醒过来了,对于萨姆·阿尔特曼来说,这真的是非常非常糟糕的消息,因为他需要尽快上市。他现在正忙于企业巡展,声音就像一个刚发现成人网站的青年牧师。在演讲快结束时,他表示各家公司开始抱怨定价问题,称这是一个很大的困扰,而且以前从未遇到过这种情况。
▶ 英文原文
It's hard to make it work well and it has never been profitable for anyone ever. And so everyone is sobering up right now and this is really, really bad news for Sam Altman because Sammy here needs to IPO and soon. He's out there doing the Enterprise Roadshow right now, his voice crackling like a youth pastor who just discovered Pornhub. And towards the end of this presentation, he goes, companies are starting to complain about pricing, saying that it's a huge issue and that this never came up before.

你知道,他随口提到这件事,但你可以看出这对他来说关系重大,就是说现在整个泡沫正在破裂。他就像是在说,大家,我们正在努力准备上市,你们能不能现在别这样?他没有明确说成本已经成为一个巨大的问题,但他让人放心说我们有一个计划来控制它。他只是继续往下说,听起来很惊讶。顺便说一句,赌场也亏损了。OpenAI 每赚一美元就亏损 1.22 美元。
▶ 英文原文
And you know, he says it in passing but really you could tell that this is highly existential for him. I mean, that's the whole bubble crinkling right now. And he's like, guys, we're trying to IPO. Can you guys not do this right now? And you know, he doesn't say cost has become a huge issue but don't worry, we have a plan to get this under control. He just moves on. He just sounds surprised. And by the way, the casinos broke too. OpenAI loses $1.22 for every dollar it makes.

他们已经把软银的资金、沙特的资金都“吸走”了。这些钱全花完了。现在唯一可以筹集更多资金的地方就是你。这就是他们进行首次公开募股(IPO)的原因。你可能会想,如果这一切都不具可持续性,或者是一场骗局,为什么还要IPO并加速自己的衰落呢?有两个原因。第一,他们别无选择。第二,市场并不在意亏损。只要你有一个愿景或成长故事,市场其实很喜欢亏损。
▶ 英文原文
And they've slurped up all the monies from SoftBank, the Saudi money. It's all gone. The only place left to get more is from you. That's what the IPO is. And you might think, wait, if it's all so unsustainable, if it's all a sham, why IPO and accelerate your own demise? Two reasons. One is that they don't have a choice. Two is that the market doesn't care about a loss. The market actually loves a loss as long as you've got a vision or growth story.

这是人工智能,亲爱的。这是一个新物种的诞生。当然,这过程会很混乱和残酷。当股票开始动摇时,达里奥会站到台上说,你竟敢做空一个有意识的生命体?你怎么敢这样?这在道德上是不可接受的,而克劳德现在已经非常不安了。他是一个非常高明的讲故事者,所以这套说辞会奏效。公众会相信,就像他们现在相信的一样。
▶ 英文原文
And this is AI, baby. It's the birth of a new species. Of course, it's going to be ugly and bloody. And when the stock starts to wobble, Dario is going to get up on stage and go, you're trying to short a conscious being? How fucking dare you? This is morally unacceptable and Claude is beside herself right now. And he's such a masterful storyteller that it'll actually work. The public will buy it the same way they're buying it right now.

如果要我预测,我会说人工智能最终会成为一种真实且有用的工具,但用途非常有限。比如在编程和其他可验证的任务上表现出色,但前提是你得像个失望的亚洲父亲一样时刻监督。至于其他方面,它可能只是一种自信满满却错误百出的昂贵方式,而且有一个强化循环,让你一直忍不住去使用。
▶ 英文原文
And look, if I had to make a prediction, I would say that AI ends up being something that is, you know, real and useful, but very narrow. Like great for coding and other verifiable tasks, but only if you hover over it like a disappointed Asian dad. For everything else, it's just a very expensive way to be confidently wrong. With a reinforcement loop that keeps you hooked enough to keep your hand on the lever.

证明就在于其工作的方式。生成式人工智能并不会逐步修改东西。当你要求它做一个小改动时,它会重建整个事物。比如说,如果你让它调整一张图片,它不会简单地移动像素,而是从头开始重建整个图像。它只懂得生成、生成、再生成,其速度之疯狂,人类根本无法企及。
▶ 英文原文
And the proof is in how it works. Generative AI doesn't change things. There's no such thing as the AI editing. Every time you ask for a tiny change, it regenerates the entire fucking universe. Like if you ask it to tweak an image, it doesn't like move pixels or something. It just rebuilds the whole thing from scratch. It only knows how to generate, generate, generate at a volume so insane that no human can keep up.

现在我们感到惊讶的是账单与使用量相符。所有这些努力只是为了让老人们不必在公司聊天中听到“OK Boomer”。所以继续吧,再拉一次杆,国王。大胜利即将到来,就像上次和之前的一样。现在请谁去告诉Uber的首席技术官,他的演示只是一般般。感谢观看。
▶ 英文原文
And now we're surprised that the bill matches the volume. And all this so old dudes don't have to hear OK Boomer in the company chat. So go ahead. Pull the lever one more time, King. The big win's coming. Just like last time and the time before that. Now somebody please go tell the Uber CTO that his demo was mid. Thanks for watching.