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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#161

Post by bhouston »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #144
ActionHank wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The big missing thing between both the metaphor in the OP's link and yours is that I just can't fathom any of these companies being able to raise a paying subscriber base that can actually cover the outrageous costs of this tech. It feels like a pipe dream. Putting aside that I fundamentally don't think AGI is in the tech tree of LLM, if you will, that there's no route from the latter to the former: even if there is,…

> The big missing thing between both the metaphor in the OP's link and yours is that I just can't fathom any of these companies being able to raise a paying subscriber base that can actually cover the outrageous costs of this tech. It feels like a pipe dream.

I suspect these companies will introduce ads at some point similar to Google and Facebook for similar reasons, and it will be highly profitable.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#162

Post by culebron21 »

I think the article contradicts itself, missing some simple math. Contradicting points:

1. it takes huge and increasing costs to build newer models, models approached asymptote 2. a startup can take an open-source model and get you out of business in 18 months (with CocaCola example)

The size of LLM is what protects them from being attacked by startups. Microsoft's operating profit in 2022 was $72B, which is 10x bigger than the running cost of OpenAI. And if 2022 was too successful, profits of $44B still dwarf OpenAI.

If OpenAI manages to ramp up investment like Uber, it may stay alive, otherwise it's tech giants that can afford running some LLM. ...if people will be willing to pay for this level of quality (well, if you integrate it into MS Word, they actually may want it).

Re: Do AI companies work?

#163

Post by Alex-Programs »

datavirtue wrote: post #151
LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

"In my mind, already with GPT-4, we're not generating ideas fast enough on how best to leverage it." This is the main bottle neck, in my kind. A lot of people are missing from the conversation because they don't understand AI fully. I keep getting glimpses of ideas and possibilities and chatting through a browser ain't one of them. On e we have more young people trained on this and comfortable with the tech and under…

Just the fact that I can have something proficient in language trivially accessible to me is really useful. I'm working on something that uses LLMs (language translation), but besides that I think it's brilliant that I can just ask an LLM to summarise my prompt in a way that gets the point across in far fewer tokens. When I forget a word, I can give it a vague description and it'll find it. I'm terrible at writing emails, and I can just ask it to point out all the little formalisms I need to add to make it "proper".

I can benchmark the quality of one LLM's translation by asking another to critique it. It's not infallible, but the ability to chat with a multilingual agent is brilliant.

It's a new tool in the toolbox, one that we haven't had in our seventy years of working on computers, and we have seventy years of catchup to do working out where we can apply them.

It's also just such a radical departure from what computers are "meant" to be good at. They're bad at mathematics, forgetful, imprecise, and yet they're incredible at poetry and soft tasks.

Oh - and they are genuinely useful for studying, too. My A Level Physics contained a lot of multiple choice questions, which were specifically designed to catch people out on incorrect intuitions and had no mark scheme beyond which answer was correct. I could just give gpt-4o a photo of the practice paper and it'd tell me not just the correct answer (which I already knew), but why it was correct, and precisely where my mental model was incorrect.

Sure, I could've asked my teacher, and sometimes I did. But she's busy with twenty other students. If everyone asked for help with every little problem she'd be unable to do anything else. But LLMs have infinite patience, and no guilt for asking stupid questions!

Re: Do AI companies work?

#164

Post by ToucanLoucan »

bhouston wrote: post #161
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big missing thing between both the metaphor in the OP's link and yours is that I just can't fathom any of these companies being able to raise a paying subscriber base that can actually cover the outrageous costs of this tech. It feels like a pipe dream. Putting aside that I fundamentally don't think AGI is in the tech tree of LLM, if you will, that there's no route from the latter to the former: even if there is,…

> The big missing thing between both the metaphor in the OP's link and yours is that I just can't fathom any of these companies being able to raise a paying subscriber base that can actually cover the outrageous costs of this tech. It feels like a pipe dream. I suspect these companies will introduce ads at some point similar to Google and Facebook for similar reasons, and it will be highly profitable.

I mean that's quite an assertion given how the value of existing digital ad space is already cratering and users are more than ever in open rebellion against ad supported services. And besides which, isn't the whole selling point of AI to be an agent that accesses the internet and filters out the bullshit? So what, you're going to do that, then add your own bullshit to the output?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#165

Post by akomtu »

mdavidn wrote: post #87
akomtu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People innately believe that intelligence isn't an algorithm. When a complex problem presents itself for the first time, people think "oh, this must be so complex that no algorithm can solve it, only AI," and when an algorithmic solution is found, people realise that the problem isn't that complex. Indeed, if AI was an algorithm, imagine what would it feel like to be like one: at every step of your thinking process y…

Is that not the human experience? I have no “agency” over the next thought to pop into my head. I “feel” like I can choose where to focus attention, but that too is a predictable outcome arising from the integration of my embryology, memories, and recently reinforced behaviors. “I” am merely an observer of my own mental state. But that is an uncomfortable idea for most people.

If this was true, you could lay back relaxed and watch where your brain takes you. But we experience life as a never ending stream of choices, usually between what's easy and what's right, and pursuing the right choice takes a constant effort. We are presented with problems and have to figure out solutions on our own, with no guarantees of success.

This "I'm just an observer" idea may be true at some higher level, if you're a monk on the threshold of nirvana, but for common folk this mindset leads nowhere.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#166

Post by HillRat »

bhouston wrote: post #160
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,…

> The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. Companies in user acquisition/growth mode tend to have low internal ROI, but remember both Facebook and Google has the same issue -- then they introduced ads and all was well with their finances. Similar things will happen here.

LLMs are a utility, not a platform, and utility markets exert a downward pressure on pricing. Moreover, it's not obvious that -- once trained models hit the wild -- any one actor has or can develop significant competitive moats that would allow them to escape that price pressure. Beyond that, the digital marginal cost of services needs to be significantly reduced to keep these companies in business, but more efficient models leads to pushing inference out to end-user compute, which hollows out their business model (I assume that Apple dropping out of the OpenAI investment round was partially due to the wildly optimistic valuations involved, partially because they're betting on being able to optimize runtime costs down to iPhone levels).

Basically, I'd argue that LLMs look less like a Web 2.0 social media opportunity and more like Hashicorp or Docker, except with operational expenses running many orders of magnitude higher with costs scaling linearly to revenue.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#167

Post by sapphicsnail »

alexashka wrote: post #150
mellosouls wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can solve Wikipedia's woes quite easily - Wikipedia should limit itself to math, science, engineering, medicine, physics, chemistry, geography and other disciplines that are not at all in dispute. Politics, history, religion and other topics of conversation that are matters of opinion, taste and state sponsored propaganda need to be off limits. Its mission ought to be to provide a PhD level education in all technic…

A lot of things that seem like simple facts are actually abstractions based on abstractions based on abstractions. The further up the chain, the more theoretical it gets. This is true of the humanities and science.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#168

Post by rty32 »

chillfox wrote: post #56
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

Where I live the ridesharing/delivering startups didn't bring goodies, they just made everything worse. They destroyed the Taxi industry, I used to be able to just walk out to the taxi rank and get in the first taxi, but not anymore. Now I have to organize it on an app or with a phone call to a robot, then wait for the car to arrive, and finally I have to find the car among all the others that other people called. Fo…

"walk out to the taxi rank"

I assume you are talking about airports. Guess what, they still exist in many places. And on the other hand, for US, other than a few big cities, the "normal" taxi experience is that you call a number and maybe a taxi shows up in half an hour. With Uber, that becomes 10 minutes or less, with live map updates. Give me that and I'll be happy to forget about Uber.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#169

Post by nineteen999 »

bhouston wrote: post #160
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,…

> The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. Companies in user acquisition/growth mode tend to have low internal ROI, but remember both Facebook and Google has the same issue -- then they introduced ads and all was well with their finances. Similar things will happen here.

So I go to ask an LLM to answer to a question and it starts trying to sell me products I don't want or need? I'll need to filter it's output through a locally run adblock LLM which detects/flags/strips out advertising text before delivering the output. Hmmm.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#170

Post by namaria »

asterix_pano wrote: post #152
thfuran wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And brains do it on about 20 watts.

Training takes many years though.

Training took hundreds of thousands of years. Everyone just gets a foundation model to fine tune for another couple of decades before it can start flipping burgers.
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