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Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

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Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#101
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you put crypto on the same list with ML. (and I guess you meant Web 3.0, not 2.0)

Nah, web 2.0 was a super hype back in the late 90s early 00s. Everyone was all about advertising their adoption and development of web 2.0. Web 3.0 was never really a thing, beyond some crypto enthusiasts nobody cared. As for crypto, I probably should have said blockchain instead. There was one point recently where everything was block chained.

"Everything"—but not from the big tech giants. None of the FAANG companies, to my knowledge, offered a blockchain-based product.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Objectively, no it doesn't. Even if you think it's a bubble, then the bubble is just growing. There are zero signs of anything popping yet. Company valuations are only increasing. > Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? It makes sense when you look at the financials. It's like back in 1800's when railroads were the new thing, and imagine there were only…

The locomotive analogy doesn't quite fit. The customers of the locomotive company would buy the locomotives and then use them to profit. Are Nvidia's customers making a profit from the billions they are spending on GPUs? I don't think so, at least not yet.

Plenty of railroads went bust -- it was a time of extreme speculation.

All that matters is that people think the industry will turn out to be profitable and sustainable overall, once we figure out which products and features work and which don't. There's no reason whatsoever to think AI doesn't fall in that category.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#103
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Objectively, no it doesn't. Even if you think it's a bubble, then the bubble is just growing. There are zero signs of anything popping yet. Company valuations are only increasing. > Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? It makes sense when you look at the financials. It's like back in 1800's when railroads were the new thing, and imagine there were only…

I think it's more like the San Francisco gold rush. The gold prospectors didn't make a lot of money. The people who made bank were the ones selling goods and services to the prospectors. Selling the shovels is more profitable, and has the bonus of not being dependent on whether or not your customers actually find gold.

But if enough prospectors fail to find gold the demand for shovels will eventually go down.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#104
post #56

"AI" (or rather language models) will change the world. But in a very different way. They aren't (and won't become) AGI. They aren't (and won't) replace software engineers (but maybe help them to write better software, or more realistically churn out even more bad software). And they aren't and won't become ultra-wise oracles that can solve any task you throw at them. But they are an interface between the real world…

"Solved"—so long as you don't mind that unclear and difficult-to-measure percentage of nearly-guaranteed errors—errors which the LLM can never detect or acknowledge, because that would require a level of introspection of which they are fundamentally incapable.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#105
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you put crypto on the same list with ML. (and I guess you meant Web 3.0, not 2.0)

Nah, web 2.0 was a super hype back in the late 90s early 00s. Everyone was all about advertising their adoption and development of web 2.0. Web 3.0 was never really a thing, beyond some crypto enthusiasts nobody cared. As for crypto, I probably should have said blockchain instead. There was one point recently where everything was block chained.

"""Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users."""

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

I don't think I need to elaborate this quotation?

But if I do, note the domain I'm quoting from and the website in which you are reading this comment from me.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#106
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have they been wrong?

Cryptocurrency? NFTs? The Metaverse? Google Glass? Betamax?

> Betamax?

Please. My dad voted with his wallet for… Video 2000.

(He also advised me to buy Lloyds shares when they were about x10 their current price).

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#107

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to…

Perhaps improvements might fizzle out, but a lot of smart people seem to think they won't. The AI models we are using today are the worst that models will ever be in the future. We can't base our valuations on our current experiences with AI today. 5 years ago, just getting a computer to form vaguely relevant grammatically correct sentences felt magical.

> 5 years ago, just getting a computer to form vaguely relevant grammatically correct sentences felt magical

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA dates from 1964.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The locomotive analogy doesn't quite fit. The customers of the locomotive company would buy the locomotives and then use them to profit. Are Nvidia's customers making a profit from the billions they are spending on GPUs? I don't think so, at least not yet.

> Are Nvidia's customers making a profit from the billions they are spending on GPUs? I don't think so, at least not yet. Yes. NVIDIA's customers are mostly the cloud providers buying tens of thousands of machines each. The latest 8xH100 pods cost almost $400,000 so no one but Facebook and a few other tech giants can afford to buy tons of them without having customers lined up and ready to rent them. If you look at A…

Sure but those are just middle-men. What about the cloud providers customers? are they making a profit? Seems like a game of hot potato.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#109
post #56

"AI" (or rather language models) will change the world. But in a very different way. They aren't (and won't become) AGI. They aren't (and won't) replace software engineers (but maybe help them to write better software, or more realistically churn out even more bad software). And they aren't and won't become ultra-wise oracles that can solve any task you throw at them. But they are an interface between the real world…

> Here are a few services that might get by without a web browser or app soon:

> 1. online banking

??! You've got a system of unpredictable reliability and you're going to let it handle money?

Online banking has always been extremely conservative, sometimes for good reason.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The locomotive analogy doesn't quite fit. The customers of the locomotive company would buy the locomotives and then use them to profit. Are Nvidia's customers making a profit from the billions they are spending on GPUs? I don't think so, at least not yet.

Plenty of railroads went bust -- it was a time of extreme speculation. All that matters is that people think the industry will turn out to be profitable and sustainable overall, once we figure out which products and features work and which don't. There's no reason whatsoever to think AI doesn't fall in that category.

I'm not a railroad expert but I think AI involves much more speculation. They knew what a locomotive could do and what problem it solved. We can't really say that with AI.
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