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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#171

Post by Nemi »

culebron21 wrote: post #162

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 bigg…

So riddle me this - Netflix’s revenue is around $9.5B. So a little more than the running costs of OpenAI.

Do you think it is plausible that they will be able to get enough people to pay for OpenAI that Netflix? They would need much more revenue than Netflix to make it viable. Considering that there are other options available, like Google’s, MSFT’s, Anthropic’s, etc.

As a business model, this is all very suspect. GPT5 has had multiple delays and challenges. What if “marginally better” is all we are going to get?

Just food for thought.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#172

Post by idunnoman1222 »

pavlov wrote: post #140
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…

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."

That is basically true about computers minus the networking which the Internet brought, but that’s a separate beast

Re: Do AI companies work?

#173

Post by thfuran »

namaria wrote: post #170
asterix_pano wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been something like half a billion years since the first brain.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#174

Post by crote »

pavlov wrote: post #140
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…

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."

> The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out.

Honestly? I'm not sure I even disagree with that!

Amazon is just an incremental improvement over mail order catalogs. Netflix is just an incremental improvement over Blockbusters. UberEats is just an incremental improvement over calling a pizzeria. Google Sheets is just an incremental improvement over Lotus 1-2-3.

Most of the stuff we're doing these days could have been done with 1980s technology - if a bit less polished. Even the Cloud is just renting a time slice on a centralized mainframe.

With the IBM PC it was already reasonably clear what the computer was going to be. Most of the innovation since then is "X, but on a computer", "Y, but over the internet", or just plain market saturation. I can only think of two truly world-changing innovations: 1) smartphones, and 2) social media.

The current AI wave is definitely producing interesting results, but there is still a massive gap between what it can do and what we have been promised. Considering current models have essentially been trained on the entire internet and they have now poisoned the well and made mass gathering of more training data impossible, I doubt we're going to see another two-orders-of-magnitude improvement any time soon. If anything, for a lot of applications it's probably going to get worse as the training set becomes out of date.

And if people aren't willing to pay for the current models, they aren't going to pay for a model which hallucinates 50% less often. They're going to need that two-orders-of-magnitude improvement to actually become world-changing. Taking into account how much money those companies are losing, are they going to survive the 5-10 years or more until they reach that point?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#175

Post by namaria »

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...

I've said it before, AI is the default way to hype technology.

A hundred years ago computers were 'electronic brains'.

It goes dormant after loosing its edge and then re-emerges when some research project gains traction again.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#176

Post by [deleted] »

christianqchung wrote: post #157
alexashka wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is this satire? All of those industries listed significant disputes. If this is serious it's a concerning view of how science actually works.

[deleted]

Re: Do AI companies work?

#177

Post by sapphicsnail »

lostphilosopher wrote: post #134
xenospn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Just a little correction. Doctor is Latin and roughly means "someone who has learned a lot."

Science also originally referred to knowledge. What we think of as "science" used to be called the natural sciences. Sometimes people get confused because I have a B.S. in Classics because science has lost that broader meaning.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#178

Post by elialbert »

nineteen999 wrote: post #169
bhouston wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

i think you hit the nail on the head

Re: Do AI companies work?

#179

Post by adamc »

felideon wrote: post #159
adamc wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think hasn't been? I think the big game changer in the PC space was graphics cards, but since their introduction, it has all been incremental improvement -- at first, pretty fast, then... slower. Much like CPU improvements, although those started earlier. I can't think of a point where the next generation of PCs was astoundingly different from the prior one... just better. It used to be that they were rel…

Arguably form factor, i.e. smartphones and tablets. Whether you think that's incremental or not is subjective, I guess. I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.

I would say smartphones and tablets are new devices, not, per se, PCs.

Smartphones did bring something huge to the table, and exploded accordingly. But here we are, less than 2 decades from their introduction and... the pace of improvement has gone back to being incremental at best.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#180

Post by FactKnower69 »

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.

it won't be as easy to enshittify a product no one actually wants to use in the first place
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