31–40 of 457 posts
Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI.
OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search.
All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers.
There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...
The competition for big LLM AI companies is not other big LLM AI companies, but rather small LLM AI companies with good enough models. This is a classic innovator dilemma. For example, I can imagine a team of cardiologists creating a fine tune LLM model.
Safely and effectively, that is. Dangerous and inappropriate is obviously a much wider set of possibilities.
LLMs as coding assistants seem to be great. Let’s say that every working programmer will need an account and will pay $10/month (or their employer will).. what’s a fair comp for valuation? GitHub? That’s about $10Bn. Atlassian? $50Bn
The “everything else” bin is hard to pin down. There are some clear automation opportunities in legal, HR/hiring, customer service, and a few other fields - things that feel like $1-$10Bn opportunities.
Sure, the costs are atrocious, but what’s the revenue story?
I see no reason why AI will be particularly different. It seems difficult to make the case AI is useless, but it’s also not particularly mature with respect to fundamental models, tool chains, business models, even infrastructure.
In both cases speculative capital flowed into the entire industry, which brought us losers like pets.com but winners like Amazon.com, Netflix.com, Google.com, etc. Which of the AI companies today are the next generation of winners and losers? Who knows. And when the music stops will there be a massive reckoning? I hope not, but it’s always possible. It probably depends on how fast we converge to “what works,” how many grifters there are, how sophisticated equity investors are (and they are much more sophisticated now than they were in 1997), etc.
I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm already keeping an eye on what NVidia gets into next... because that will inevitably be the "Next big thing". This is the third(ish) round of this pattern that I can recall, I'm probably wrong about the exact count, but NVidia is really good at figuring out how to be powering the "Next big thing". So alternatively... I should probably invest in the utilities powering whatever Datacenters are using the powerhungry…
There's a saying in the stock market that probably applies here: past performance does not indicate future performance. Getting lucky twice is a row is really really lucky. Getting lucky three times in a row is not more likely because they were lucky two times in a row
Very few other large tech companies have deep technical competence at CEO level leadership
Larger user base = increased feedback = improved quality of answers = moat
I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...
logic programming is not directly linked to SQL, and has its own AI term now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI.
I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...