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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#131

Post by SoftTalker »

marcosdumay wrote: post #126
bradhilton wrote: post #114

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 sh…

Is Uber profitable already or are they waiting for another order of magnitude increase in scale before they bother with that? Amazon is the poster-child of that mentality. It spent more than it earned into growth for more than 20 years, got a monopoly on retail, and still isn't the most profitable retail company around.

Uber the company was profitable last year, for the first time[1].

But I am doubtful that the larger enterprise that is Uber (including all the drivers and their expenses and vehicle depreciation, etc) was profitable. I haven't seen that analysis.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro...

Re: Do AI companies work?

#132

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

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...".

You’re moving the goalposts a little here. In your other post you implied you were using OpenAI for its technical properties. “But getting better and cheaper and faster over time.”

Whether something has more name recognition isn’t completely related here. But if that’s what you really mean, as you state, “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,” then I mostly agree, but as an outsider it doesn’t seem like this is a robust reason to build on top of.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#133

Post by sushid »

foobiekr wrote: post #104
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…

In particular: "There is, however, one enormous difference that I didn’t think about: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months." This isn't true at all. There are like 8 of these companies stood up in the last three or four years fueled by massive investment of sovereign funds - mostly the saudi,…

> And RAG has many, many issues with document permissions

Why can't these providers access all documents and when answers are prompted, self-censor if the reply has references to documents that the end users do not have access permissions? In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how existing RAGaaS providers are handling document/file permissions.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#134

Post by lostphilosopher »

xenospn wrote: post #125
benrutter wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in case anyone's curious, this is from Bertrand Russell's "the history of philosophy". > As soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. I'm not actually sure I agree with it, especially in light of less provable schools of science like string theory or some branches of economics, but it's a great idea.

Is this why almost all CompSci PhDs are actually “doctor of philosophy”?

PhD itself is an abbreviation for "Doctor of Philosophy." The title is more about the original Greek "lover of wisdom" than about the modern academic discipline of philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy

Doctor is similar - in the US, when someone says "Doctor" they usually mean "Medical Doctor" but "Doctor" just comes from the Greek "teacher" / "scholar" which is more broad and the title can still be used officially and correctly for PhDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)

Re: Do AI companies work?

#135

Post by thfuran »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #97
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…

Likely we are because the actualized end result already exists: the human brain. The fact that human intelligence exists means that the idea of human level intelligence is not a pipe dream. The question is whether or not the basic underlying technology of the LLM can achieve that level of intelligence.

And brains do it on about 20 watts.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#136

Post by portaouflop »

sushid wrote: post #133
foobiekr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular: "There is, however, one enormous difference that I didn’t think about: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months." This isn't true at all. There are like 8 of these companies stood up in the last three or four years fueled by massive investment of sovereign funds - mostly the saudi,…

> And RAG has many, many issues with document permissions Why can't these providers access all documents and when answers are prompted, self-censor if the reply has references to documents that the end users do not have access permissions? In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how existing RAGaaS providers are handling document/file permissions.

RAGaas, didn’t know I needed that in my life

Re: Do AI companies work?

#137

Post by delecti »

beryilma wrote: post #120
fsndz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some examples are navigation algorithms, machine learning, neural networks, fuzzy logic, or computer vision. I personally learned several of those in a "Artificial Intelligence" CS course ~15 years ago, but most people would never think to call Google Maps, a smart thermostat learning their habits, or their doorbell camera recognizing faces "AI".

It's only recently with generative AI that you see any examples of the opposite, people outside the field calling LLMs or image generation "AI".

Re: Do AI companies work?

#138

Post by martin_drapeau »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #132
martin_drapeau wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...".

You’re moving the goalposts a little here. In your other post you implied you were using OpenAI for its technical properties. “But getting better and cheaper and faster over time.” Whether something has more name recognition isn’t completely related here. But if that’s what you really mean, as you state, “any common mortal about AI and they'll mention ChatGPT - not Claude, Gemini or whatever else. They might not even…

OpenAI's sole focus is serving AI to consumers and businesses. I trust them more to remain backwards compatible over time.

Google changed their AI name multiple times. I've built on them before and they end of lifed the product I was using. Zero confidence Gemini will be there tomorrow.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#139

Post by mellosouls »

alexashka wrote: post #118
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…

I'm not sure the Wikipedia example is a strong one as that site has it's own serious problems with "abusive monopolies" in its moderator cliques and biases (as with any social platform).

At least with the current big AI players there is the potential for differentiation through competition.

Unless there is some similar initiative with the Wikipedias, the problem of single supplier dominance is a difficult one to see as the way forward.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#140

Post by pavlov »

ActionHank wrote: post #122
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…

The car wasn't a horse that was better, but a car has not changed drastically since they went mainstream. They've gotten better, more efficient, loaded with tech, but are still roughly 4 seats, 4 doors, 4 wheels, driven by petroleum. I know that this is a massive oversimplification, but I think we have seen the "shape" of LLMs\Gen AI\AI products already and it's all incremental improvements from here on out with more…

Feels like someone might have said this in 1981 about personal computers.

"We've pretty much seen their shape. The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out."

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