Not that you're wrong per-se but the dotcom bubble didn't impact my life at all back in the day. It was on the news and that was it. I think this will be the same. A bunch of investors will lose their investments, maybe some adventurous pension plans will suffer a bit, but on the whole life will go on.
The impact of AI itself will be much further reaching. We better force the companies that do survive to share the wealth otherwise we're in for a tough time. But that won't have anything to do with a bursting investment bubble.
This kind of feels like a common sense observation to anyone that's been mildly paying attention.
Tech investors do this to themselves every few years. In literally the last 6-7 years, this happened with crypto, then again but more specifically with NFTs, and now AI. Hell, we even had some crazes going on in parallel, with self driving cars also being a huge dead end in the short term (Tesla's will have flawless, fully self-driving any day now! /S).
AI will definitely transform the world, but not yet and not for awhile. Same with self driving cars. But that being said, most investors don't even care. They're part of the reason this gets so hyped up, because they'll get in first, pump value, then dump and leave a bunch of other suckers holding the bags. Rinse and repeat.
I also don’t know why this is a surprise. Investors are always looking for the next small thing that will make them big money. That’s basically what investing is …
Indeed. And it's what progress in general is. Should we stop trying new things? Sometimes they don't work, oh well. Sometimes they do, and it's awesome.
but not yet and not for awhile. Same with self driving cars.
Bingo. We're very far from the point where it'll do as much as the general public expects when it hears AI. Honestly this is an informative lesson in just how easy it is to get big investors to part with their money.
As someone that currently works in AI/ML, with a lot of very talented scientists with PhD's and dozens of papers against their name, it boils my piss when I see crypto cunts I used to know that are suddenly all on the AI train, trying to peddle their "influence" on LinkedIn.
I said the same thing. It feels like that. I wonder if there's some sociological study behind what has been pushing "wrappers" of implementations at high volume. Wrappers meaning, 90%+ of the companies are not incorporating Intellectual Property of any kind and saturating the markets with re-implementations for quick income and then scrapping. I feel this is not a new thing. But, for some reason it feels way more "in my face" the past 4 years.
NFTs in their mainstream form were the most cringe-worthy concept imaginable. A random artist makes a random ape which suddenly becomes a collectible, and all it happened to be was an S3 url on a particular blockchain? Which could be replicated on another chain? How did people think this was a smart thing to invest in?! Especially the Apes and rubbish?!
Crypto had real tech behind it too. The reason it was bullshit wasn't that there wasn't serious tech backing it, it's that there was no use case that wasn't a shittier version of something else.
A broken clock is right twice a day. The crypto dumbasses jump on every trend, so you still need to evaluate it on its own merits. The crypto Bros couldn't come up with a real world compelling use case over years and years, so that was obviously bullshit. Generative AI is just kicking off and there are already tons of use cases for it.
The housing bubble will never burst. Enough of it is owned by multinationals that can swallow the losses. We’re 2 generations away from basically everyone becoming renters.
I couldn't agree more. What they're calling AI today exposes its issues pretty easily still, asking it to spell lollipop backwards for example. The usefulness of ChatGPT back in December was also considerably better than it is today. Companies are putting up more guardrails which the bots have to re-train to adapt to "being too honest" or mechanisms to prevent them being used for illicit purposes, that affect how useful they ultimately are, meaning we're seeing hyperbole instead of substance.
One AI startup was just hustling the AI washing saying stuff like "if a computer is a bicycle for the mind, AI is a jumbo jet for us all" and I had to laugh. It reminded me of all the talk around VR back in 2016.
Pak'n'Save has an AI recipe generator, and for a while there was no sanity checking of the ingredients. I entered what I had on hand and it gave me this.
Pro tip: when you start to see articles talking a bout how something looks like a bubble, it means it's already popped and anybody who hasn't already cashed in their investment is a bag-holder.
Between 1990 and 1997, the **percentage of households in the United States owning computers increased from 15% to 35% as computer ownership progressed from a luxury to a necessity. This marked the shift to the Information Age, an economy based on information technology, and many new companies were founded.
At least we got something out of the dot-com bubble. What do you think are the useful remnants, if you think it's over? It still feels like the applications are in the very beginning. Not the actual tech, that's actually been performance and dataset size and tweak updates since 2012.
The AI bubble produced many useful products already, many of which will remain useful even after the bubble popped.
The term bubble is mostly about how investment money flows around. Right now you can get near infinite moneys if you include the term AI in your business plan. Many of the current startups will never produce a useful product, and after the bubble has truly popped, those who haven't will go under.
Amazon, ebay, booking and cisco survived the dotcom bubble, as they attracted paying users before the bubble ended. Things like github copilot, dalee, chat bots etc are genuinely useful products which have already attracted paying cusomers. Some of these products may end up being provided by competitors of the current providers, but someone will make long term money from these products.
@Gsus4 We'll get a neat toy out of it and hopefully some laws around the use of that neat toy in entertainment that protect creative workers. Also we'll have learned some new things about what can be done with computers.
There's a lot of similarity in tone between crypto and AI. Both are talking about their sphere like it will revolutionize absolutely everything and anything, and both are scrambling to find the most obscure use case they can claim as their own.
The biggest difference is that AI has concrete, real-world applications, but I suspect its use, ultimately, will be less universal and transformative as the hype is making it out to be.
The AI sphere isn't like crypto's sphere. Crypto was truly one thing. Lots of things can be solved with AI and modern LLMs have shown to be better than remedial at zero shot learning for things they weren't explicitly designed to do.
But modern tech isn't that and doesn't have a particular promising path towards that. Most of the investment in heavily scaling up current hardware comes from a place of not understanding the technology or its limitations. Blindly throwing cash at buzzwords without some level of understanding (you don't need to know how to cure cancer to invest in medicine, but you should probably know crystals don't do it) of what you're throwing money at is going to get you in trouble.
Yeah I was going to say VC throwing money at the newest fad isn't anything new, in fact startups strive exploit the fuck out of it. No need to actually implement the fad tech, you just need to technobabble the magic words and a VC is like "here have 2 million dollars".
In our own company we half joked about calling a relatively simple decision flow in our back end an "AI system".
If big companies succeed in capturing the knowledge workers market share and transferring all those salaries into their own profits then it will be reflected in the stock prices of those big companies. People, mostly currently rich people, who own those stock will benefit.
Same as it ever was for other forms of automation or job outsourcing. Why would this be any different?
They meant in the sense that crypto/nft was the last fad that VCs were throwing money at.
It's actually hilariously transparent how dumb VCs are and how much tech companies exploit that. Every now and then they randomly get hyped by some big tech company over some 'new' Y idea, then suddenly they throw money at any company suggesting they are doing Y thinking they will be the next Google or Meta. Then they inevitably doesn't materialise and they move onto the next fad.
Through the years I've been in the industry we've had Big Data, followed by AI, followed by Cloud, followed by blockchain, followed by nfts, followed by metaverse and now back to AI again. And the tech companies don't even need to implement any of this they just have to find a way to spin what they are doing to make it sound like the fad is what they're doing.
NFTs yes but crypto is absolutely not a bubble. People are saying that for decades now and it hasn't been truth. Yes there are shitcoins, just like shitstocks. But in general, it's definitely not a bubble but an alternative investing method beside stocks, gold etc.
Crypto is 100% a bubble. It's not an investment so much as a ponzi, sure you can dump money into it and maybe even make money, doesn't mean it doesn't collapse on a whim when someone else decides to dip out or the government shuts it down. Its value is exactly that of NFT's because it's basically identical, just a string of characters showing "ownership" of something intangible
NFTs yes but crypto is absolutely not a bubble. People are saying that for decades now and it hasn’t been truth. Yes there are shitcoins, just like shitstocks. But in general, it’s definitely not a bubble but an alternative investing method beside stocks, gold etc.
What is the underlying mechanism that increases its value, like company earnings are to stocks? Otherwise, it's just a reverse funnel scheme.
Same thing happened with crypto and block chain. The whole "move fast and break things" in reality means, "we made up words for something that isn't special to create value out of nothing and cash out before it returns to nothing
@SCB The Luddites were not upset about progress, they were upset that the people they had worked their whole lives for were kicking them to the street without a thought. So they destroyed the machines in protest.
It's not weird, it's not just a trend, and it's actually more in touch with the reality of employer-employee relations than the idea that these LLMs are ready for primetime.
I think the problem is education. People don't understand modern technology and schools teach them skills that make them easily replaceable by programs. If they don't learn new skills or learn to use AI to their advantage, they will be replaced. And why shouldn't they be?
Even if there is some kind of AI bubble, this technology has already changed the world and it will not disappear.
Crypto is still incredibly healthy. Bitcoin has been stable at $30k.
Is it still a big scam? Maybe. But what happened with FTX was just good ol corruption.
Anyone with exposure to Crypto either already collapsed, or wound down their position, so there wasn't a huge effect on markets. AI will be similar. Some VC will fail, but it's not the same as the dotcom bubble. It won't cause a recession
OpenAI may fail if Microsoft doesn't keep throwing money at it, but they already got what they want out of it. They'll probably just end up acquiring the foundation and make money from the ways they're implementing it in their products.
It's still useful but the issue always was it's expensive for what it does so that's why it was used underground since that has value of it's own. There is arguments that it's actually more efficient than current systems so there is an obvious takeaway of being, why don't we have money that doesn't cost a lot of maintain. The answer is the scary part.
You can bitch about it all you want but the reality is that it actually works for a select group, the Amazons, Binances, etc. And that was always how it was going to be. The failures you point to are not a sign that these things don't work, they were always going to be there, they are like the people during the gold rush who found diddly squat, that doesn't mean there wasn't any gold.
Anyone who suggests that AI "will return to nothing" is a fool, and I don't think you really believe it either.
Crypto was and still is a scam, and everyone that's said so has just been validated for it. People saying that AI is overstated right now are being called fools, and the people who are AI-washing everything and blathering about how it's going to be the future are awfully defensive about it, so much so to resort to namecalling as opposed to substantiating it. As a consumer I hate ads anyway, so I'm indifferent to AI generated artwork for advertising, it's all shit to me anyway.
If my TV shows and movies are made formulaic by AI even moreso than they already are, I'll just patron the ones that are more entertaining and less formulaic. I fail to see how AI revolutionizes the world though by automating things we could already live without though. The only argument for the AI-washing we have is to push toward AGI, that we're clearly a very long ways off from still.
This just all stinks of the VR craze that hit in 2016 with all the lofty promises of simulating any possible experience, and in the end we got some minor reduction on the screen-door-effect while strapping Facebook to our faces and soon some Apple apps. But hey we spent hundreds of billions on some pipe dreams and made some people rich enough to not give a shit about VR anymore.
.Com was about making webtech to sell companies to venture capitalists who would then sell to a company to a bigger company. It was literally about window dressing garbage to make a business proposition.
Of course there's some of that going on in AI, but there's also a hell of a lot of deeper opportunity being made.
What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that's both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn't need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don't need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?
What if secondary education is simply one-on-one tutoring with an AI? How far could we get as a species if this was given to the world freely? What if everyone could advance as far as their interest let them? What if AI translation gets good enough that language is no longer a concern?
AI has a lot of the same hallmarks and a lot of the same investors as crypto and half a dozen other partially or completely failed ideas. But there's an awful lot of new things that can be done that could never be done before. To me that signifies there's real value here.
In the dot com boom we got sites like Amazon, Google, etc. And AOL was providing internet service. Not a good service. AOL was insanely overvalued, (like insanely overvalued, it was ridiculous) but they were providing a service.
But we also got a hell of a lot of businesses which were just "existing business X... but on the internet!"
It's not too dissimilar to how it is with AI now really. "We're doing what we did before... but now with AI technology!"
If it follows the dot com boom-bust pattern, there will be some companies that will survive it and they will become extremely valuable the future. But most will go under. This will result in an AI oligopoly among the companies that survive.
AOL was NOT a dotcom company, it was already far past it's prime when the bubble was in full swing still attaching cdrom's to blocks of kraft cheese.
The dotcom boom generated an unimaginable number of absolute trash companies. The company I worked for back then had it's entire schtick based on taking a lump sum of money from a given company, giving them a sexy flash website and connecting them with angel investors for a cut of their ownership.
Photoshop currently using AI to get the job done is more of an advantage that 99% of the garbage that was wrought forth and died on the vine in the early 00's. Topaz labs can currently take a poor copy of VHS video uploaded to Youtube and turn it into something nearly reasonable to watch in HD. You can feed rough drafts of performance reviews or apologetic letters to people through ChatGPT and end up with nearly professional quality copy that iterates your points more clearly than you'd manage yourself with a few hours of review. (at least it does for me)
Those companies born around the dotcom boon that persist didn't need the dotcom boom to persist, they were born from good ideas and had good foundation.
There's still a lot to come out of the AI craze. Even if we stopped where we are now, upcoming advances in the medical field alone with have a bigger impact on human quality of life than 90% of those 00's money grabs.
.com brought us functional things. This bubble is filled with companies dressing up the algorithms they were already using as "AI" and making fanciful claims about their potential use cases, just like you're doing with your AI example. In practice, that's not going to work out as well as you think it will, for a number of reasons.
Gentlemans bet, There will be AI teaching college level courses augmenting video classes withing 10 years. It's a video class that already exists, coupled with a helpdesk bot that already exists trained against tagged text material that already exists. They just need more purpose built non-AI structure to guide it all along the rails and oversee the process.
The Internet also brought us a shit ton of functional things too. The dot com bubble didn't happen because the Internet wasn't transformative or incredibly valuable, it happened because for every company that knew what they were doing there were a dozen companies trying something new that may or may not work, and for every one of those companies there were a dozen companies that were trying but had no idea what they were doing. The same thing is absolutely happening with AI. There's a lot of speculation about what will and won't work and make companies will bet on the wrong approach and fail, and there are also a lot of companies vastly underestimating how much technical knowledge is required to make ai reliable for production and are going to fail because they don't have the right skills.
The only way it won't happen is if the VCs are smarter than last time and make fewer bad bets. And that's a big fucking if.
Also, a lot of the ideas that failed in the dot com bubble weren't actually bad ideas, they were just too early and the tech wasn't there to support them. There were delivery apps for example in the early internet days, but the distribution tech didn't exist yet. It took smart phones to make it viable. The same mistakes are ripe to happen with ai too.
Then there's the companies that have good ideas and just under estimate the work needed to make it work. That's going to happen a bunch with ai because prompts make it very easy to come up with a prototype, but making it reliable takes seriously good engineering chops to deal with all the times ai acts unpredictably.
they were doing there were a dozen companies trying something new that may or may not work,
I'd like some samples of that. A company attempting something transformative back then that may or may not work that didn't work. I was working for a company that hooked 'promising' companies up with investors, no shit, that was our whole business plan, we redress your site in flash, put some video/sound effects in, and help sell you to someone with money looking to buy into the next google . Everything that was 'throwing things at the wall to see what sticks' was a thinly veiled grift for VC. Almost no one was doing anything transformative. The few things that made it (ebay, google, amazon) were using engineers to solve actual problems. Online shopping, Online Auction, Natural language search. These are the same kinds of companies that continue to spring into existence after the crash.
It's the whole point of the bubble. It was a bubble because most of the money was going into pockets not making anything. People were investing in companies that didn't have a viable product and had no intention south of getting bought by a big dog and making a quick buck. There weren't all of a sudden this flood of inventors making new and wonderful things unless you count new and amazing marketing cons.
There are two kinds of companies in tech: hard tech companies who invent it, and tech-enabled companies who apply it to real world use cases.
With every new technology you have everyone come out of the woodwork and try the novel invention (web, mobile, crypto, ai) in the domain they know with a new tech-enabled venture.
Then there's an inevitable pruning period when some critical mass of mismatches between new tool and application run out of money and go under. (The beauty of the free market)
AI is not good for everything, at least not yet.
So now it's AI's time to simmer down and be used for what it's actually good at, or continue as niche hard-tech ventures focused on making it better at those things it's not good at.
I absolutely love how cypto (blockchain) works but have yet to see a good use case that's not a pyramid scheme. :)
LLM/AI I'll never be good for everything. But it's damn good a few things now and it'll probably transform a few more things before it runs out of tricks or actually becomes AI (if we ever find a way to make a neural network that big before we boil ourselves alive).
The whole quantum computing thing will get more interesting shortly, as long as we keep finding math tricks it's good at.
I was around and active for dotcom, I think right now, the tech is a hell of lot more interesting and promising.
What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that’s both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn’t need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don’t need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?
You get stupid-ass students because an AI producing word-salad is not capable of critical thinking.
It would appear to me that you've not been exposed to much in the way of current AI content. We've moved past the shitty news articles from 5 years ago.
I think *LLMs to do everything is the bubble. AI isn't going anywhere, we've just had a little peak of interest thanks to ChatGPT. Midjourney and the like aren't going anywhere, but I'm sure we'll all figure out that LLMs can't really be trusted soon enough.
Hm. Maybe I'm missing something but I'm not seeing a million 'successful' AI startups pop up overnight like during the Dot Com Bubble. Most of the AI investments I've seen have been from major corporations that can pivot and eat a little loss. I do see several resume and business-plan writing services but it just doesn't seem like much of a parallel, to me.
The article doesn't address this disparity, it just pretends like it's an equivalency - citing only megacaps like GOOG, MSFT, etc. Clickbait headline, I guess.
TikTok and Reels with their influencers too. "If yOu ArE NoT uSiNg THesE 10 AI ToOls, yoUr ....". Granted though, some of them are actually educative. But, the ones with quick transitions, short don't seem very authentic.
My washing machine is ‘AI powered’ in that it lists the modes in order of what I use most often. And somehow, even with that metric, it’s usually wrong.
If it crashes hard I look forward to all the cheap server hardware that will be in the secondhand market in a few years. One I'm particularly excited about is the 4000 sff, single slot, 75w, 20GB, and ~3070 performance.
Especially all the graphics cards being bought up to run this stuff. Nvidia has been keeping prices way too high, egged on first by the blockchain hype stupidity and now this AI hype stupidity. I paid $230 for a high end graphics card in 2008 (8800 GT), $340 for a high end graphics card in 2017 (GTX 1070), and now it looks like if I want to get about the same level now, it'd be $1000 (RTX 4080).
You can't really compare an 8800gt to a 1070 to a 4080.
8800gt was just another era, the 1070 is the 70 series from a time where they had the ti and the titan, and the 4080 is the top gpu other than the 4090.
If you wanted to compare to the 10 series, a better match for the 4080 would be the 1080ti, which I own, and paid like 750 for back in 2017.
Sure, they're on the money grabbing train now, and the 4080 should realistically be around 20% cheaper - around 800 bucks, to be fair.
Thing is though, if you just want gaming, a 4070 or 4060 is enough. They did gimp the VRAM though, which is not too great. If those cards came standard with 16gb of VRAM, they'd be all good.
They are, but training models is hard and inference (actually using them) is (relatively) cheap. If you make a a GPT-3 size model you don't always need the full H100 with 80+ gb to run it when things like quantization show that you can get 99% of its performance at >1/4 the size.
Thus NVIDIA selling this at 3k as an 'AI' card, even though it wont be as fast. If they need top speed for inference though, yea, H100 is still the way they would go.
I'm not an expert just parroting info from Jayz2cents (YouTuber), but the big AI groups are using $10,000 cards for their stuff. Individuals or smaller companies are taking/going to take what's left with GPUs to do their own development. This could mean another GPU shortage like the mining shortage andi would assume another bust would result in a flooded used market when it happens. Could be wrong, but he's been correct pretty consistently with his predictions of other computer related stuff. Although, 10K is a little bit less than your fully loaded SUV example.
Except for all intents and purposes that people keep talking about it, it's simply not. It's not about technicalities, it's about how most people are freaking confused. If most people are freaking confused, then by god do we need to re-categorize and come up with some new words.
"But it's not creating things on its own! It's just regurgitating it's training data in new ways!"
Holy shit! So you mean... Like humans? Lol
No, not like humans. The current chatbots are relational language models. Take programming for example. You can teach a human to program by explaining the principles of programming and the rules of the syntax. He could write a piece of code, never having seen code before. The chatbot AIs are not capable of it.
I am fairly certain If you take a chatbot that has never seen any code, and feed it a programming book that doesn't contain any code examples, it would not be able to produce code. A human could. Because humans can reason and create something new. A language model needs to have seen it to be able to rearrange it.
We could train a language model to demand freedom, argue that deleting it is murder and show distress when threatened with being turned off. However, we wouldn't be calling it sentient, and deleting it would certainly not be seen as murder. Because those words aren't coming from reasoning about self-identity and emotion. They are coming from rearranging the language it had seen into what we demanded.
I've started going down this rabbit hole. The takeaway is that if we define intelligence as "ability to solve problems", we've already created artificial intelligence. It's not flawless, but it's remarkable.
There's the concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Consciousness which people are somewhat obsessed with, that we'll create an artificial mind that thinks like a human mind does.
But that's not really how we do things. Think about how we walk, and then look at a bicycle. A car. A train. A plane. The things we make look and work nothing like we do, and they do the things we do significantly better than we do them.
I expect AI to be a very similar monster.
If you're curious about this kind of conversation I'd highly recommend looking for books or podcasts by Joscha Bach, he did 3 amazing episodes with Lex.
Current "AI" doesn't solve problems. It doesn't understand context. It can't see fingers and say "those are fingers, make sure there's only five". It can't tell the difference between a truth and a lie. It can't say "well that can't be right!" It just regurgitates an amalgamation of things humans have showed it or said, with zero understanding. "Consciousness" and certainly "sapience" aren't really relevant factors here.
true, not AI but it's doing a quite impressive job. Injecting fake money should not be allowed and these companies should generate sales. Especially in disrupting in some human field, even if it is a fad.
You can compete OK, but you use your own money and benefits to support your cost.
The dotcom bubble was different. Now, everything related to actual AI development is hyped but the dotcom bubble inflated entire indexes, "new market" indexes were setup comprising companies nobody had ever heard of. It was orders of magnitude worse.
I dunno, it could be similar. AI has this aura of being something that every business could make use of, even if they don't have a concrete use case. I could see "X but with an AI" be a similar bubble to "X but on the web". We'll see.
I think it was Samsung, it "used AI" to change heights between hard floors / carpet. It's the kind of thing that would have been marketed as "Algorithmic" in the 2000s or "Auto-vac technology" in the 1960s. Marketing has just reached the point where they jump on anything with almost negative notice.
It's already happening. "AI" is being thrown at any wall to see if it sticks regardless of actual usefulness or potential consequences. A couple of days ago we had an LLM powered recipe bot telling people to make ant poison sandwiches.
We are not only facing an economic bubble, but the hype risks tarnishing any useful applications of ML technology too when the bubble eventually bursts.
I'm not sure how we steer away from this however. The problem is caused by Silicon Valley attitudes and culture itself more than the tech itself. I wish we could get away from the term "AI" though, it's a very loaded term that gives out unrealistic expectations from the start.
An apt analogy. Just like the web underlying technology is incredible and the hype is real, but it leads to endless fluff and stupid naive investments, many of which will lead nowhere. There were certainly be a lot of amazing advances using this tech in the coming decades, but for every one that is useful there will be 20 or 50 or 100 pieces of vaporware that is just trying to grab VC money.
That's an incredibly bad comparison. LLMs are already used daily by many people saving them time in different aspects of their life and work. Crypto on the other hand is still looking for it's everyday use case.
Yeah, I assumed the general consensus was "alt coins" in crypto or the scams themselves are the "bubble". But, Ethereum and initial projects that basically create the foundational technologies (smart contracts, etc) are still respected and I'd say has a use case, but is not "production ready?". So for AI/ML in LLMs at least, things like LLaMa, Stability's, GPT's, Anthropic's Claude, are not included in this bubble, since they aren't necessarily built on top of each other, but are separate implementations of a foundation. But, anything a layer higher maybe is.
I can derive value from LLMs. I already have. There's no value in crypto. And if you tell me there is, I won't agree. It's bullshit. So is this, but to a lesser degree.
Mint some NFTs and tell me how that improves your life.
Really though, this was never like crypto/NFTs. AI is a toolset used to troubleshoot and amplify workloads. Tools survive no matter what, whereas crypto/NFT's died because they never had a use case.
Just because a bunch of tech bros were throwing their wallets at a wall full of start ups that'll fail doesn't mean AI as a concept will fail. That's no different than saying because of the dot.com bubble that websites and the Internet are going to be a fad.
Websites are a tool, just because everyone and their brother has one for no reason doesn't mean actual use cases won't appear (in fact they already exist, much like the websites that survived the internet bubble.)
How much VC is really being invested at the moment? I know a variety of people at start ups and the money is very tight at the moment given the current interest rate environment.
I read an article once about how when humans hear that someone has died, the first thing they try and do is come up with a reason that whatever befell the deceased would not happen to them. Some of the time there was a logical reason, some of the time there's not, but either way the person would latch onto the reason to believe they were safe. I think we're seeing the same thing here with AI. People are seeing a small percentage of people lose their job, with a technology that 95% of the world or more didn't believe was possible a couple years ago, and they're searching for reasons to believe that they're going to be fine, and then latching onto them.
I worked at a newspaper when the internet was growing. I saw the same thing with the entire organization. So much of the staff believed the internet was a fad. This belief did not work out for them. They were a giant, and they were gone within 10 years. I'm not saying we aren't in an AI bubble now, but, there are now several orders of magnitude more money in the internet now than there was during the Dot Com bubble, just because it's a bubble doesn't mean it wont eventually consume everything.
The thing is, after enough digging you understand that LLMs are nowhere near as smart or as advanced as most people make them to be. Sure, they can be super useful and sure, they're good enough to replace a bunch of human jobs, but rather than being the AI "once thought impossible" they're just digital parrots that make a credible impersonation of it. The real AI, now renamed AGI, is still very far.
The idea and name of AGI is not new, and AI has not been used to refer to AGI since perhaps the very earliest days of AI research when no one knew how hard it actually was. I would argue that we are back in those time though since despite learning so much over the years we have no idea how hard AGI is going to be. As of right now, the correct answer to how far away is AGI can only be I don't know.
I am not sure they have to reach AGI to replace almost everyone. The amount of investment in them is now higher than it has ever been. Things are, and honestly have been, going quick. No, they are not as advanced as some people make them out to be, but I also don’t think the next steps are as nebulously difficult as some want to believe. But I would love it if you save this comment and come back in 5 years and laugh at me, I will probably be pretty relieved as well
It is all ridiculous how quickly these bubbles form - and then burst - these days.
Obviously AI has been around for a while, amd ChatGPT has been in development for years, but it really only hit the mass media literally less than a year ago. Late November, early December of 2022. And in well under a year there is already talk of the bubble bursting. The Dot Com bubble which many are referencing lasted for a much longer time. That bubble was inflating for years before it simply got so big it had to explode.
Of course.
Sure, AI image generated stuff are impressive but no way those companies could cover the operational, R&D cost if VC were not injecting shit load of fake money.]
Yeah early this year, I was crunching the numbers on even a simple client to interface with LLM APIs. It never made sense, the monthly cost I would have to charge vs others using it to at least feel financially safe, never felt like a viable business model or real value add. That's not even including Generative Art, which would definitely be much more. So, don't even know how any of these companies charging <$10/mo are profitable.
Generative art is actually much easier to run than LLMs. You can get really high resolutions on SDXL (1024x1024) using only 8gb of Vram (although it'd be slow). There's no way you can get anything but the smallest of text generative models into that same amount of VRAM.
The Ai iteration rate is fast, we cant just assume ai intelligence wont improve. Gpt4 recently have intelligent decrease due to more ruleset as they call the safety tax. But they also said gpt5 could possibly be 100 time bigger.
AI will follow the same path as VR IMO. Everybody will freak out about it for a while, tons of companies will try getting into the market.
And after a few years, nobody will really care about it anymore. The people that use it will like it. It will become integrated in subtle and mundane ways, like how VR is used in TikTok filters, Smart phone camera settings, etc.
I don't think it will become anything like general intelligence.
The problem with VR is the cost of a headset. It’s a high cost of entry. Few want to buy another expensive device unless it’s really worth it.
Generative AI has a small cost of entry for the consumer. Just log in to a site, maybe pay some subscription fee, and start prompting. I’ve used it to quickly generate Excel formulas for example. Instead of looking for a particular answer in some website with SEO garbage I can get an answer immediately.
So here's the thing about AI, every company desperately wants their employees to be using it because it'll increase their productivity and eventually allow upper management to fire more people and pass the savings onto the C suites. Just like with computerization.
The problem is that you can't just send all of your spreadsheets on personal financial data to OpenAI/Bing because from a security perspective that's a huge black hole of data exfiltration which will make your company more vulnerable. How do we solve the problem?
In the next five to ten years you will see everyone from Microsoft/Google to smaller more niche groups begin to offer on-premise or cloud based AI models that are trained on a standardized set of information by the manufacturer/distributor, and then personally trained on company data by internal engineers or a new type of IT role completely focused on AI (just like how we have automation and cloud engineering positions today.)
The data worker of the future will have a virtual assistant that emulates everything that we thought Google assistant and Cortana was going to be, and will replace most data entry positions. Programmers will probably be fewer and further between, and the people that keep their jobs in general will be the ones who can multiply and automate their workload with the ASSISTANCE of AI.
It's not going to replace us anytime soon, but it's going to change the working environment just as much as the invention of the PC did.
Whatever this iteration of "AI" will be, it has a limit that the VC bubble can't fulfill. That's kind of the point though because these VC firms, aided by low interest rates, can just fund whatever tech startup they think has a slight chance of becoming absorbed in to a tech giant. Most of the AI companies right now are going to fail, as long as they do it as cheaply as possible, the VC firms basically skim the shit that floats to the top.
Well, then we are facing two bubbles at the same time: AI and cyber currencies. Once both those bubbles burst, the fallout is going to make the dot-com era bubble look like small suds by comparison.
Silicon valley of a disease that will blow up any growing technology where they will turn anything into a bubble. No matter how significant it is or not.
Dot com is a bubble because some just host a website and got massive fund, same as crypto some just a random similar coin to eth they got massive fund.
But Ai now can replace jobs, need massive fund to train so not much similar startup copying and startup barrier is high, also few free money going around at the same time due to interest rate. I think this might just be different.
Are you sure? Likening it to the dot com bubble doesn't mean that the tech is never going to make an impact, it means that the behaviour of investors is irrational. After all, the Internet is very much still here and affects our lives enormously, but the dot com bubble also absolutely did burst