The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble
The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble
Shares in AI companies have powered a huge runup in the stock market this year, but users are beginning to question whether the craze will fall flat.
Thank fucking god.
I got sick of the overhyped tech bros pumping AI into everything with no understanding of it....
But then I got way more sick of everyone else thinking they're clowning on AI when in reality they're just demonstrating an equal sized misunderstanding of the technology in a snarky pessimistic format.
I’m more annoyed that Nvidia is looked at like some sort of brilliant strategist. It’s a GPU company that was lucky enough to be around when two new massive industries found an alternative use for graphics hardware.
They happened to be making pick axes in California right before some prospectors found gold.
And they don’t even really make pick axes, TSMC does. They just design them.
Imo we should give credit where credit is due and I agree, not a genius, still my pick is a 4080 for a new gaming computer.
The tech bros had to find an excuse to use all the GPUs they got for crypto after they bled that dry
If that’s the reason, I wouldn’t even be mad, that’s recycling right there.
Shed a tear, if you wish, for Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jenson Huang, whose fortune (on paper) fell by almost $10 billion that day.
Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
I’m sure he won’t mind. Worrying about that doesn’t sound like working.
I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I work seven days a week. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about working, and when I'm working, I'm working. I sit through movies, but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about work.
- Huang on his 14 hour workdays
It is one way to live.
That sounds like mental illness.
ETA: Replace "work" in that quote with practically any other activity/subject, whether outlandish or banal.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about baking cakes.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about traffic patterns.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about cannibalism.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about shitposting.
Obsessed with something? At best, you're "quirky" (depending on what you're obsessed with). Unless it's money. Being obsessed with that is somehow virtuous.
Some would not call that living
Yeah ok sure buddy, but what do you DO actually?
Psychosis doesn't justify extreme privilege.
People like that consider scrolling xitter work
He knows what this hype is, so I don't think he'd be upset. Still filthy rich when the bubble bursts, and that won't be soon.
My only real hope out of this is that that copilot button on keyboards becomes the 486 turbo button of our time.
I've noticed people have been talking less and less about AI lately, particularly online and in the media, and absolutely nobody has been talking about it in real life.
The novelty has well and truly worn off, and most people are sick of hearing about it.
The hype is still percolating, at least among the people I work with and at the companies of people I know. Microsoft pushing Copilot everywhere makes it inescapable to some extent in many environments, there's people out there who have somehow only vaguely heard of ChatGPT and are now encountering LLMs for the first time at work and starting the hype cycle fresh.
Yeah, now we are gonna get the reality of deep fakes; fun times.
Welp, it was 'fun' while it lasted. Time for everyone to adjust their expectations to much more humble levels than what was promised and move on to the next sceme. After Metaverse, NFTs and 'Don't become a programmer, AI will steal your job literally next week!11', I'm eager to see what they come up with next. And with eager I mean I'm tired. I'm really tired and hope the economy just takes a damn break from breaking things.
I just hope I can buy a graphics card without having to sell organs some time in the next two years.
I'd love an upgrade for my 2080 TI, really wish Nvidia didn't piss off EVGA into leaving the GPU business...
My RX 580 has been working just fine since I bought it used. I've not been able to justify buying a new (used) one. If you have one that works, why not just stick with it until the market gets flooded with used ones?
If there is even a GPU being sold. It’s much more profitable for Nvidia to just make compute focused chips than upgrading their gaming lineup. GeForce will just get the compute chips rejects and laptop GPU for the lower end parts. After the AI bubble burst, maybe they’ll get back to their gaming roots.
But if it doesn't disrupt it isn't worth it!
/s
move on to the next [...] eager to see what they come up with next.
That's a point I'm making in a lot of conversations lately : IMHO the bubble didn't pop BECAUSE capital doesn't know where to go next. Despite reports from big banks that there is a LOT of investment for not a lot of actual returns, people are still waiting on where to put that money next. Until there is such a place, they believe it's still more beneficial to keep the bet on-going.
AI doesn't need to steal all programmer jobs next week, but I have much doubt there will still be many available in 2044 when even just LLMs still have so many things that they can improve on in the next 20 years.
I find it insane when "tech bros" and AI researchers at major tech companies try to justify the wasting of resources (like water and electricity) in order to achieve "AGI" or whatever the fuck that means in their wildest fantasies.
These companies have no accountability for the shit that they do and consistently ignore all the consequences their actions will cause for years down the road.
It's research. Most of it never pans out, so a lot of it is "wasteful". But if we didn't experiment, we wouldn't find the things that do work.
I agree, but these researchers/scientists should be more mindful about the resources they use up in order to generate the computational power necessary to carry out their experiments. AI is good when it gets utilized to achieve a specific task, but funneling a lot of money and research towards general purpose AI just seems wasteful.
I don't think I've heard a lot of actual research in the AI area not connected to machine learning (which may be just one component, not really necessary at that).
What’s funny is that we already have general intelligence in billions of brains. What tech bros want is a general intelligence slave.
Well put.
I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to be a personal assistant for searching, summarizing, and compiling information, as long as they were adequately paid for it.
Too much optimism and hype may lead to the premature use of technologies that are not ready for prime time.
— Daron Acemoglu, MIT
Preach!
Personally I can't wait for a few good bankruptcies so I can pick up a couple of high end data centre GPUs for cents on the dollar
Search Nvidia p40 24gb on eBay, 200$ each and surprisingly good for selfhosted llm, if you plan to build array of gpus then search for p100 16gb, same price but unlike p40, p100 supports nvlink, and these 16gb is hbm2 memory with 4096bit bandwidth so it's still competitive in llm field while p40 24gb is gddr5 so it's good point is amount of memory for money it cost but it's rather slow compared to p100 and compared to p100 it doesn't support nvlink
A lot of the AI boom is like the DotCom boom of the Web era. The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.
AI feels a lot like that, it's here to stay, maybe not in th ways investors are touting, but for voice, image, video synthesis/processing it's an amazing tool. It also has lots of applications in biotech, targetting systems, logistics etc.
So I can see the bubble bursting and a lot of money being lost, but that is the point when actually useful applications of the technology will start becoming mainstream.
The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.
The DotCom bubble was built around the idea of online retail outpacing traditional retail far faster than it did, in fact. But it was, at its essence, a system of digital book keeping. Book your orders, manage your inventory, and direct your shipping via a more advanced and interconnected set of digital tools.
The fundamentals of the business - production, shipping, warehousing, distribution, the mathematical process of accounting - didn't change meaningfully from the days of the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. Online was simply a new means of marketing. It worked well, but not nearly as well as was predicted. What Amazon did to achieve hegemony was to run losses for ten years, while making up the balance as a government sponsored series of data centers (re: AWS) and capitalize on discount bulk shipping through the USPS before accruing enough physical capital to supplant even the big box retailers. The digital front-end was always a loss-leader. Nobody is actually turning a profit on Amazon Prime. It's just a hook to get you into the greater Amazon ecosystem.
Pivot to AI, and you've got to ask... what are we actually improving on? It's not a front-end. It's not a data-service that anyone benefits from. It is hemorrhaging billions of dollars just at OpenAI alone (one reason why it was incorporated as a Non-Profit to begin with - THERE WAS NO PROFIT). Maybe you can leverage this clunky behemoth into... low-cost mass media production? But its also extremely low-rent production, in an industry where - once again - marketing and advertisement are what command the revenue you can generate on a finished product. Maybe you can use it to optimize some industrial process? But it seems that every AI needs a bunch of human babysitters to clean up all the shit is leaves. Maybe you can get those robo-taxis at long last? I wouldn't hold my breath, but hey, maybe?!
Maybe you can argue that AI provides some kind of hook to drive retail traffic into a more traditional economic model. But I'm still waiting to see what that is. After that, I'm looking at AI in the same way I'm looking at Crypto or VR. Just a gimmick that's scaring more people off than it drags in.
I don't mean it's like the dotcom bubble in terms of context, I mean in terms of feel. Dotcom had loads of investors scrambling to "get in on it" many not really understanding why or what it was worth but just wanted quick wins.
This has same feel, a bit like crypto as you say but I would say crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.
They are not the ones we are being fed in the mainstream like it replacing coders or artists, it can help in those areas but it's just them trying to keep the hype going. Realistically it can be used very well for some medical research and diagnosis scenarios, as it can correlate patterns very easily showing likelyhood of genetic issues.
The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it's only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn't getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.
Its not going to do much for the end consumer outside of the guff you currently use siri or alexa for etc, but inside the industries AI is very useful.
The funny thing about Amazon, is we are phasing it out of our home now. Because it has become an online 7Eleven. You don’t pay for shipping and it comes fast, but you are often paying 50-100% more for everything. If you use AliExpress, 300-400% more… just to get it a week or two faster. I would rather go to local retailers that are increasing Chinese goods for a 150% profit, than Amazon and pay 300%. It just means I have to leave the house for 30 minutes.
I'm glad someone else is acknowledging that AI can be an amazing tool. Every time I see AI mentioned on lemmy, people say that it's entirely useless and they don't understand why it exists or why anyone talks about it at all. I mention I use ChatGPT daily for my programming job, it's helpful like having an intern do work for me, etc, and I just get people disagreeing with me all day long lol
Google Search is such an important facet for Alphabet that they must invest as many billions as they can to lead the new generative-AI search. IMO for Google it's more than just a growth opportunity, it's a necessity.
FMO is the best explanation of this psychosis and then of course denial by people who became heavily invested in it. Stuff like LLMs or ConvNets (and the likes) can already be used to do some pretty amazing stuff that we could not do a decade ago, there is really no need to shit rainbows and puke glitter all over it. I am also not against exploring and pushing the boundaries, but when you explore a boundary while pretending like you have already crossed it, that is how you get bubbles. And this again all boils down to appeasing some cancerous billionaire shareholders so they funnel down some money to your pockets.
there is really no need shit rainbows and puke glitter all over it
I'm now picturing the unicorn from the Squatty Potty commercial, with violent diarrhea and vomiting.
Stuff like LLMs or ConvNets (and the likes) can already be used to do some pretty amazing stuff that we could not do a decade ago, there is really no need to shit rainbows and puke glitter all over it.
I'm shitting rainbows and puking glitter on a daily basis BUT it's not against AI as a field, it's not against AI research, rather it's against :
- catastrophism and fear, even eschatology, used as a marketing tactic
- open systems and research that become close
- trying to lock a market with legislation
- people who use a model, especially a model they don't even have e.g using a proprietary API, and claim they are an AI startup
- C-levels decision that anything now must include AI
- claims that this or that skill is soon to be replaced by AI with actually no proof of it
- meaningless test results with grand claim like "passing the bar exam" used as marketing tactics
- claims that it scales, it "just needs more data", not for .1% improvement but for radical change, e.g emergent learning
- for-profit (different from public research) scrapping datasets without paying back anything to actual creators
- ignoring or lying about non renewable resource consumption for both training and inference
- relying on "free" or loss leader strategies to dominate a market
- promoting to be doing the work for the good of humanity then signing exclusive partnership with a corporation already fined for monopoly practices
I'm sure I'm forgetting a few but basically none of those criticism are technical. None of those criticism is about the current progress made. Rather, they are about business practices.
Pop pop!
Magnitude!
Argument!
But the trillion dollar valued Nvidia...
I think they're going to be bankrupt within 5 years. They have way too much invested in this bubble.
Fall in share price, yes.
Bankrupt, no. Their debt to Equity Ratio is 0.1455. They can pay off their $11.23 B debt with 2 months of revenue. They can certainly afford the interest payments.
I highly doubt that. If the AI bubble pops, they'll probably be worth a lot less relative to other tech companies, but hardly bankrupt. They still have a very strong GPU business, they probably have an agreement with Nintendo on the next Switch (like they did with the OG Switch), and they could probably repurpose the AI tech in a lot of different ways, not to mention various other projects where they package GPUs into SOCs.
NVIDIA uses of AI technology aren't going to pop, things like DLSS are here to stay. The value of the company and their sales are inflated by the bubble, but the core technology of NVIDIA is applicable way beyond the chat bot hype.
Bubbles don't mean there's no underlying value. The dot com bubble didn't take down the internet.
Maybe we can have normal priced graphics cards again.
I'm tired of people pretending £600 is a reasonable price to pay for a mid range GPU.
I'm not sure, these companies are building data centers with so many gpus that they have to be geo located with respect to the power grid because if it were all done in one place it would take the grid down.
And they are just building more.
But the company doesn't have the money. Stock value means investor valuation, not company funds.
Once a company goes public for the very first time, it's getting money into its account, but from then on forward, that's just investors speculating and hoping on a nice return when they sell again.
Of course there should be some correlation between the company's profitability and the stock price, so ideally they do have quite some money, but in an investment craze like this, the correlation is far from 1:1. So whether they can still afford to build the data centers remains to be seen.
$2.5T currently to be exact
Nvidia is diversified in AI, though. Disregarding LLM, it's likely that other AI methodologies will depend even more on their tech or similar.
Argh, after 25 years in tech I am surprised this keeps surprising you.
We’ve crested for sure. AI isn’t going to solve everything. AI stock will fall. Investor pressure to put AI into everything will subside.
The we will start looking at AI as a cost benefit analysis. We will start applying it where it makes sense. Things will get optimised. Real profit and long term change will happen over 5-10 years. And afterwards, the utter magical will seem mundane while everyone is chasing the next hype cycle.
Truth. I would say the actual time scales will be longer, but this is the harsh, soul-crushing reality that will make all the kids and mentally disturbed cultists on r/singularity scream in pain and throw stones at you. They're literally planning for what they're going to do once ASI changes the world to a star-trek, post-scarcity civilization... in five years. I wish I was kidding.
I'm far far more concerned about all the people who were deemed non essential so quickly after being "essential" for so long because AI will do so much work slaps employees with 2 weeks severance
I’m right there with you. One of my daughters love drawing and designing clothes and I don’t know what to tell her in terms of the future. Will human designs be more valued? Less valued?
I’m trying to remain positive; when I went into software my parents barely understood that anyone could make a living of that “toy computer”.
But I agree; this one feels different. I’m hoping they all feel different to the older folks (me).
A.I., Assumed Intelligence
More like PISS, a Plagiarized Information Synthesis System
Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the "AI services" and what they actually cost?
I'm a writer. I've looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with "Just Another Streaming Service" pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don't care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.
Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don't want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.
I work for an AI company that's dying out. We're trying to charge companies $30k a year and upwards for basically chatgpt plus a few shoddily built integrations. You can build the same things we're doing with Zapier, at around $35 a month. The management are baffled as to why we're not closing any of our deals, and it's SO obvious to me - we're too fucking expensive and there's nothing unique with our service.
As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they're actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don't leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you're not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.
But I noticed right away that I couldn't justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.
I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.
At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM's versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM's start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.
That's a good point about the "AI as a service" model that is emerging.
I was reading that NaNoWriMo has had a significant turnover on their board die to the backlash against their pro-AI stance: https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/nanowrimo-ai-controversty-1.7314090
Well, they also kept telling investors all they need to simulate a human brain was to simulate the amount of neurons in a human brain...
The stupidly rich loved that, because they want computer backups for "immortality". And they'd dump billions of dollars into making that happen
About two months ago tho, we found out that the brain uses microtubules in the brain to put tryptophan into super position, and it can maintain that for like a crazy amount of time, like longer than we can do in a lab.
The only argument against a quantum component for human consciousness, was people thought there was no way to have even just get regular quantum entanglement in a human brain.
We'll be lucky to be able to simulate that stuff in 50 years, but it's probably going to be even longer.
Every billionaire who wanted to "live forever" this way, just got aged out. So they'll throw their money somewhere else now.
I used to follow the Penrose stuff and was pretty excited about QM as an explanation of consciousness. If this is the kind of work they're reaching at though. This is pretty sad. It's not even anything. Sometimes you need to go with your gut, and my gut is telling me that if this is all the QM people have, consciousness is probably best explained by complexity.
https://ask.metafilter.com/380238/Is-this-paper-on-quantum-propeties-of-the-brain-bad-science-or-not
Completely off topic from ai, but got me curious about brain quantum and found this discussion. Either way, AI still sucks shit and is just a shortcut for stealing.
That's a social media comment from some Ask Yahoo knockoff...
Like, this isn't something no one is talking about, you don't have to solely learn about that from unpopular social media sites (including my comment).
I don't usually like linking videos, but I'm feeling like that might work better here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kpkksf3k
But that PBS video gives a really good background and then talks about the recent discovery.
Wall Street has already milked “the pump” now they short it and put out articles like this
Wether we like it or not AI is here to stay, and in 20-30 years, it’ll be as embedded in our lives as computers and smartphones are now.
Right, it did have an AI winter few decades ago. It's indeed here to stay, it doesn't many any of the current company marketing it right now will though.
AI as a research field will stay, everything else maybe not.
It's like the least popular opinion I have here on Lemmy, but I assure you, this is the begining.
Yes, we'll see a dotcom style bust. But it's not like the world today wasn't literally invented in that time. Do you remember where image generation was 3 years ago? It was a complete joke compared to a year ago, and today, fuck no one here would know.
When code generation goes through that same cycle, you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just "does" it.
I have no idea what that means for the future of my humanity.
you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just “does” it
No you can't. Simplifying it grossly:
They can't do the most low-level, dumbest detail, splitting hairs, "there's no spoon", "this is just correct no matter how much you blabber in the opposite direction, this is just wrong no matter how much you blabber to support it" kind of solutions.
And that happens to be main requirement that makes a task worth software developer's time.
We need software developers to write computer programs, because "a general idea" even in a formalized language is not sufficient, you need to address details of actual reality. That is the bottleneck.
That technology widens the passage in the places which were not the bottleneck in the first place.
I think you live in a nonsense world. I literally use it everyday and yes, sometimes it's shit and it's bad at anything that even requires a modicum of creativity. But 90% of shit doesn't require a modicum of creativity. And my point isn't about where we're at, it's about how far the same tech progressed on another domain adjacent task in three years.
Lemmy has a "dismiss AI" fetish and does so at its own peril.
they're pretty good, and the faults they have are improving steadily. I dont think we're hitting a ceiling yet, and I shudder to think where they'll be in 5 years.
I agree with you but not for the reason you think.
I think the golden age of ML is right around the corner, but it won’t be AGI.
It would be image recognition and video upscaling, you know, the boring stuff that is not game changing but possibly useful.
I feel the same about the code generation stuff. What I really want is a tool that suggests better variable names.
I'm just praying people will fucking quit it with the worries that we're about to get SKYNET or HAL when binary computing would inherently be incapable of recreating the fast pattern recognition required to replicate or outpace human intelligence.
Moore's law is about similar computing power, which is a measure of hardware performance, not of the software you can run on it.
Unfortunately it's part of the marketing, thanks OpenAI for that "Oh no... we can't share GPT2, too dangerous" then... here it is. Definitely interesting then but now World shattering. Same for GPT3 ... but through exclusive partnership with Microsoft, all closed, rinse and repeat for GPT4. It's a scare tactic to lock what was initially open, both directly and closing the door behind them through regulation, at least trying to.
Hopefully this means the haters will shut up and we can get on with using it for useful stuff
Shitty useless pictures each costing kilowatt hours.
The pictures aren't very good I'll grant you that, but they definitely don't require even one kWh per image, and besides that basically everything made with a computer costs power. We waste power on nonsense just fine without the help of LLMs or diffusion models.
You're no no longer using the term Luddite on us! Character development!
Oh you're a luddite, you're also a hater and about as intractable and strupid as a trump supporter. You can be many crappy things at once!
That would be absolutely amazing. How can we work out a community effort that is designed to teach, you some crowdsource tests maybe we can bring education to the masses for free...
I don't think AI is ever going to completely disappear, but I think we've hit the barrier of usefulness for now.
I just want computer parts to stop being so expensive. Remember when gaming was cheap? Pepperidge farm remembers. You used to be able to build a relatively high end pc for less than the average dogshit Walmart laptop.
To be honest right now is a relatively good time to build a PC, except for the GPU, which is heavily overpriced. I think if you are content with last gen AMD, this can also be turned to somewhat acceptable levels.
I've spent time with an AI laptop the past couple of weeks and 'overinflated' seems a generous description of where end user AI is today.
The fact that is is from LA Times shows that it's still significant though
What do people mean with "AI bubble"?
The term "AI bubble" refers to the idea that the excitement, investment, and hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) may be growing at an unsustainable rate, much like historical financial or technological bubbles (e.g., the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s). Here are some key aspects of this concept:
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Overvaluation and Speculation: Investors and companies are pouring significant amounts of money into AI technologies, sometimes without fully understanding the technology or its realistic potential. This could lead to overvaluation of AI companies and startups.
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Hype vs. Reality: There is often a mismatch between what people believe AI can achieve in the short term and what it is currently capable of. Some claims about AI may be exaggerated, leading to inflated expectations that cannot be met.
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Risk of Market Crash: Like previous bubbles in history, if AI does not deliver on its overhyped promises, there could be a significant drop in AI investments, stock prices, and general interest. This could result in a burst of the "AI bubble," causing financial losses and slowing down real progress.
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Comparison to Previous Bubbles: The "AI bubble" is compared to the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble, where early optimism led to massive growth and investment, followed by a sudden collapse when the reality didn't meet expectations.
Not everyone believes an AI bubble is forming, but the term is often used as a cautionary reference, urging people to balance enthusiasm with realistic expectations about the technology’s development and adoption.
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As in as soon as companies realise they won't be able to lay off everybody except executives and personal masseuses, nVidia will go back to having a normal stock price.
Rich people will become slightly less grotesquely wealthy, and everything must be done to prevent this.
The more you bAI
So should we be fearing a new crash?
Do you have money and/or personal emotional validation tied up in the promise that AI will develop into a world-changing technology by 2027? With AGI in everyone's pocket giving them financial advice, advising them on their lives, and romancing them like a best friend with Scarlett Johansson's voice whispering reassurances in your ear all day?
If you are banking on any of these things, then yeah, you should probably be afraid.
Why you gotta invent a new hardware just to speed up ai augh these companies