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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#111

Post by empath75 »

highfrequency wrote: post #89

Enjoyed the article and thought many of the points were good. Here's a counterargument. > In other words, the billions that AWS spent on building data centers is a lasting defense. The billions that OpenAI spent on building prior versions of GPT is not, because better versions of it are already available for free on Github. The money that OpenAI spends on renting GPUs to build the next model is not what builds the mo…

Inference costs many many times less than training. I think we may end up with one more round of training a larger foundational model, and then it's going to have to wait for new, cheaper, more efficient hardware. It's quite possible that all of these first mover companies go bankrupt, but the models will still exist generating value.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#112

Post by Leherenn »

Terr_ wrote: post #32
streetcat1 wrote: post #11

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.

What on earth would cardiologists use a Large Language Model for, except drafting fluff for journals? Safely and effectively, that is. Dangerous and inappropriate is obviously a much wider set of possibilities.

Like some kind of linter?

The cardiologist checks the ECG, compare with the LLM results and checks the difference. If it can reduce error rate by like 10%, that's already really good.

My current stance on LLM is that it's good for stuff which is painful to generate, but easy to check (for you). It's easier/faster to read an email than to write it. If you're a domain expert, you can check the output, and so on. The danger is in using it for stuff you cannot easily check, or trusting it implicitly because it is usually working.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#113

Post by empath75 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26
AI_beffr wrote: post #6

the hype will never die. all the smartest people in industry and government believe that there is a very high probability that this technology is near the edge of starting the AGI landslide. you dont need AGI to start the AGI landslide, you just need AI tools that are smart enough to automate the process of discovering and building the first AGI models. every conceivable heuristic indicates that we are near the edge.…

AGI is PR. The money is in automating low-level customer service, coding and data science.

That's just the low hanging fruit. People are going to be moving further up the "intelligence" stack as systems integrating AI get more sophisticated.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#114

Post by bradhilton »

Kind of feels like the ride-sharing early days. Lots of capital being plowed into a handful of companies to grab market share. Economics don't really make sense in the short term because the vast majority of cash flows are still far in the future (Zero to One).

In the end the best funded company, Uber, is now the most valuable (~$150B). Lyft, the second best funded, is 30x smaller. Are there any other serious ride sharing companies left? None I know of, at least in the US (international scene could be different).

I don't know how the AI rush will work out, but I'd bet there will be some winners and that the best capitalized will have a strong advantage. Big difference this time is that established tech giants are in the race, so I don't know if there will be a startup or Google at the top of the heap.

I also think that there could be more opportunities for differentiation in this market. Internet models will only get you so far and proprietary data will become more important potentially leading to knowledge/capability specialization by provider. We already see some differentiation based on coding, math, creativity, context length, tool use, etc.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#115

Post by martin_drapeau »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #107
martin_drapeau wrote: post #101

The fundamental question is how to monetize AI? I see 2 paths: - Consumers - the Google way: search and advertise to consumers - Businesses - the AWS way: attrack businesses to use your API and lock them in The first is fickle. Will OpenAI become the door to the Internet? You'll need people to stop using Google Search and rely on ChatGPT for that to happen. Will become a commodity. Short term you can charge a subscri…

But OpenAI doesn’t lead the pack. How do you determine when to switch or when to just keep going with (potentially marginally) inferior product?

Sure it does. Ask any common mortal about AI and they'll mention ChatGPT - not Claude, Gemini or whatever else. They might not even know OpenAI. But they do know ChatGPT.

Has it become a verb yet? Waiting to peole to replace "I googled how to..." with "I chatgpted how to...".

Re: Do AI companies work?

#116

Post by martin_drapeau »

jfoster wrote: post #110
martin_drapeau wrote: post #101

The fundamental question is how to monetize AI? I see 2 paths: - Consumers - the Google way: search and advertise to consumers - Businesses - the AWS way: attrack businesses to use your API and lock them in The first is fickle. Will OpenAI become the door to the Internet? You'll need people to stop using Google Search and rely on ChatGPT for that to happen. Will become a commodity. Short term you can charge a subscri…

That's like saying "how do you monetize the internet?" There are so many ways, it makes the question seem nonsensical. Ways to monetize AI so far: Metered APIs (OpenAI and others) Subscription products built on it (Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.) Using it as a feature to give products a competitive edge (Apple Intelligence, Tesla FSD) Selling the hardware (Nvidia)

20 years ago people asked that exact question. E-Commerce emerged. People knew the physical process of buying things would move online. Took some time. Sure, more things emerged but monetizing the Internet still remains about selling you something.

What similar parallel can we think of for AI?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#117

Post by vrosas »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #115
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But OpenAI doesn’t lead the pack. How do you determine when to switch or when to just keep going with (potentially marginally) inferior product?

Sure it does. Ask any common mortal about AI and they'll mention ChatGPT - not Claude, Gemini or whatever else. They might not even know OpenAI. But they do know ChatGPT. Has it become a verb yet? Waiting to peole to replace "I googled how to..." with "I chatgpted how to...".

I see that a lot already. “I asked ChatGPT for a list of places to visit in Vermont and we planned our road trip around that!”

Re: Do AI companies work?

#118

Post by alexashka »

bhouston wrote: post #90

I think we are in the middle of a steep S-curve of technology innovation. It is far from plateauing and there are still a bunch of major innovations that are likely to shift things even further. Interesting time and these companies are riding a wild wave. It is likely some will actually win big, but most will die - similar to previous technology revolutions. The ones that win will win not just on technology, but on t…

> I think we are in the middle of a steep S-curve of technology innovation

We are? What innovation?

What do we need innovation for? What present societal problems can tech innovation possibly address? Surely none of the big ones, right? So then is it fit to call technological change - 'innovation'?

I'd agree that LLMs improve upon having to read Wikipedia for topics I'm interested in but would investing billions in Wikipedia and organizing human knowledge have produced a better outcome than relying on a magic LLM? Almost certainly, in my mind.

You see, people are pouring billions into LLMs and not Wikipedia not because it is a better product - but because they foresee a possibility of an abusive monopoly and that really excites them.

That's not innovation - that's more of the same anti-social behaviour that makes any meaningful innovation extremely difficult.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#119

Post by mandevil »

leeter wrote: post #7
flappyeagle wrote: post #2

This is like when VCs were funding all kinds of ride share, bike share, food delivery, cannabis delivery, and burning money so everyone gets subsidized stuff while the market figures out wtf is going on. I love it. More goodies for us

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…

One thing I'm not clear on is how much of this is cause and how much effect: that is, does NVidia cheerleading for something make it more popular with the tech press and then everyone else too? There are definitely large parts of the tech press that serve more as stenographers than as skeptical reporters, and so I'm not sure how much is NVidia picking the right next big thing and how much is NVidia announcing the next big thing to the rest of us?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#120

Post by beryilma »

fsndz wrote: post #82
llm_trw wrote: post #31

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...

Exactly what I wrote recently: "The "AI effect" is behind some of the current confusion. As John McCarthy, AI pioneer who coined the term "artificial intelligence," once said: "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore." This is why we often hear that AI is "far from existing." This led to the formulation of the Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."" https://www.lycee.ai/blog/there-are-indeed…

> As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.

So, what are good examples of some things that we used to call AI, which we don't call AI anymore because they work? All the examples that come to my mind (recommendation engines, etc.) do not have any real societal benefits.

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