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No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to
Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.
Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you're right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.
Yes! "AI" defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.
Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.
Honestly kinda miss when the drugs I did were illegal. I used to buy weed from this online seller that was really into designer drugs. The amount of time I used to spend on Erowid just to figure out wtf I was about to take.
I'm glad you didn't say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!
I'm not even understanding what AI is at this point because there's no delineation between moderately sophisticated algorithms and things that are orders of magnitude more complex.
I mean, if something like multisampling came out today we'd all know how it'd be marketed
As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I'd wager it's even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.
What I'm kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts... Who's gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs running on multi-kilowatt servers?
And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.
If bitnet takes off, that’s very good news for everyone.
The problem isn’t AI, it’s AI that’s so intensive to host that only corporations with big datacenters can do it.
I am old enough to remember when the CEO of Nortel Networks got crucified by Wall Street for saying in a press conference that the telecom/internet/carrier boom was a bubble, and the fundamentals weren't there (who is going to pay for long distance anymore when calls are free over the internet? where are the carriers-- Nortel's customers-- going to get their income from?). And 4 years later Nortel ceased to exist. Cisco crashed too, though had enough TCP/IP router biz and enterprise sales to keep them alive even until today.
This all reminds me of the late 1990s internet bubble rather than the more recent crypto bubble. We'll all still be using ML models for all kinds of things more or less forever from now on, but it won't be this idiotic hype cycle and overvaluation anymore after the crash.
Shit, crypto isn't going anywhere either, it's a permanent fixture now, Wall Street bought into it and you can buy crypto ETFs from your stockbroker. We just don't have to listen to hype about it anymore.
Crypto is still just as awful as it ever was IMO. Still plenty of assholes ~~gambling~~ investing in crypto.
Well put.
Soon, it won't be this idiotic hype cycle, but it'll be some other idiotic hype cycle. Short term investors love hype cycles.
Always invest in the spades never the gold mine
I went to a AI conference and you can just sense how bogus it all feels. Like "Our patent pending AI system references billions of crowd-sourced data points to identify what you are craving for breakfast! Never think about breakfast again!"
And as a engineer speaking with other engineers, we all collectively shrug and just keep taking the money. I'll AI your toaster for enough money IDGAF.
No shit.
Like all new technologies, there is a time when bunches of companies jump on the band wagon to get in on the action. You can see it all throughout the history of the industrial revolution.
They mostly know that there will come a great weeding out of those that can't handle the technology or just fail from poor management. But they are betting they will be among the 1% that wins the race and remain to dominate the market.
The rest will just bide their time until the next Big Thing comes along. And the process starts over again.
Yeah, but thanks to the glory of corporateworld, all the people involved in making these decisions will be in a higher position at a different company by the time the consequences come knocking.
You definitely will not regret spending billions of dollars on GPUs and electricity bills.
Maybe it's like the dotcom bubble: there is genuinely useful tech that has recently emerged, but too many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon.
LLMs do seem genuinely useful to me, but of course they have limitations.
10 to 30? Yeah I think it might be a lot longer than that.
Somehow everyone keeps glossing over the fact that you have to have enormous amounts of highly curated data to feed the trainer in order to develop a model.
Curating data for general purposes is incredibly difficult. The big medical research universities have been working on it for at least a decade, and the tools they have developed, while cool, are only useful as tools too a doctor that has learned how to use them. They can speed diagnostics up, they can improve patient outcome. But they cannot replace anything in the medical setting.
The AI we have is like fancy signal processing at best
Not an expert so I might be wrong, but as far as I understand it, those specialised tools you describe are not even AI. It is all machine learning. Maybe to the end user it doesn't matter, but people have this idea of an intelligent machine when its more like brute force information feeding into a model system.
Don't say AI when you mean AGI.
By definition AI (artificial intelligence) is any algorithm by which a computer system automatically adapts to and learns from its input. That definition also covers conventional algorithms that aren't even based on neural nets. Machine learning is a subset of that.
AGI (artifical general intelligence) is the thing you see in movies, people project into their LLM responses and what's driving this bubble. It is the final goal, and means a system being able to perform everything a human can on at least human level. Pretty much all the actual experts agree we're a far shot from such a system.
Not shocked. It seems the tech bros like to troll us every few years.
The tech bros are selling, but it's the VCs that are fueling this whole thing. They're grasping for the next big thing. Mostly they don't care if any of it actually works, as long as they can pump share value and then sell before it collapses.
If you're invested in these stocks, make sure you have your stop loss orders in place, 100%.
I imagine the bubble bursting will be quick and deadly.
Yeah, but the 0.1% remaining will take over the world.
Does anyone remember the era when there were a million search engines? Google didn't spawn alone.
Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.
People are trying to vindicate their dislike of AI, pointing to trends like this as if it were supporting evidence. But saying "AI is going to be a big flop because 99% of companies today will end up failing" is as stupid as saying "online shopping will never work because 99% of online stores will close by the year 2010"
Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.
Fun fact: the first online store still exists. It's Pizza Hut. They launched an experiment for online ordering in 1994. The first company to ever sell a product on the web.
Please please please please please please please please
AI companies specializing in spreading bullshit all across the internet have a bright future however
It will probably burst, but that does not man that AI will go away completly.
Same thing happened to the Dot Com bubble. The fundamental technology has valid uses, but we're in the stage where some people are convinced it can be used for literally anything.
It will burst because no one is going to pay subscription fee for every AI gizmo every app puts in your phone. The way they make any money now is just funneling more and more vc money in exchange of AGI promise (coming soon)