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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#181

Post by torginus »

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…

Uber is not really a tech company though - its moat is not technology but market domination. If it, along with all of its competitors were to disappear tomorrow, the power vacuum would be filled in very short order, as the core technology is not very hard to master.

It's a fundamentally different beast from AI companies.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#182

Post by Pamar »

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…

Geography I suppose includes borders. So you have now history and politics back in.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#183

Post by Ekaros »

HillRat wrote: post #166
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.

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 efficien…

And on other side, how many more paying users will there be? And of users that known about AI or have tried it are happy to use whatever is free at the moment. Or just whatever is on Google or Bing with add next to it?

Social media is free, subscription services are for stuff you can't get for free easily. But will there actually be similar need for AI? Be it any generation.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#184

Post by jfengel »

snapcaster wrote: post #155
jfengel wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never gave much thought to the Turing test one way or the other. It never struck me as especially informative. I've always been more interested in the non-verbal aspects of human intelligence. I believe that "true AGI", whatever that is, is likely to be able to mimic sentient but non-verbal species. I'd like to see an AGI do what a dog or cat does. LLMs are quite astonishing at mimicking something humans specifical…

What do you think a dog or cat does that can't be replicated by LLMs?

I don't know. I know that any particular thing I say could be met with an LLM that did that thing. But at the moment an LLM doesn't seem to be capable of coding itself up that way. Yet.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#185

Post by namaria »

thfuran wrote: post #173
namaria wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was a much smaller model, couldn't do much more than crawl around and run away.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#186

Post by Ekaros »

crote wrote: post #174
pavlov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

And even smartphone is just combination of with computer, but smaller and over internet. It just got pretty good eventually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX arguably is "smartphone" supporting modem or network connectivity, albeit not wireless...

Re: Do AI companies work?

#187

Post by snapcaster »

jfengel wrote: post #184
snapcaster wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think a dog or cat does that can't be replicated by LLMs?

I don't know. I know that any particular thing I say could be met with an LLM that did that thing. But at the moment an LLM doesn't seem to be capable of coding itself up that way. Yet.

I guess that was kind of my question when I thought about what you said. I could think of any things that a cat or dog do that _current_ LLMs can't do but nothing that seems fundamentally out of reach

Re: Do AI companies work?

#188

Post by kridsdale1 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #131
marcosdumay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Because they put ads on their UI.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#189

Post by bhouston »

HillRat wrote: post #166
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.

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 efficien…

> LLMs are a utility, not a platform, and utility markets exert a downward pressure on pricing.

I think competition exerts a downward pressure on pricing, not being a utility personally. But I guess I agree with the utility analogy in that there are massively initial upfront costs and then the marginal costs are low.

> more efficient models leads to pushing inference out to end-user compute, which hollows out their business model

Faster CPUs have been coming forever but we keep coming up with ways of keeping them busy. I suspect the same pattern with AI. Thus server-based AI will always be better than local. In the future, I expect to be served by many dozens of persistent agents acting on my behalf (more agents as you go further into the future) and they won't be hosted on my smartphone.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#190

Post by skydhash »

snapcaster wrote: post #155
jfengel wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never gave much thought to the Turing test one way or the other. It never struck me as especially informative. I've always been more interested in the non-verbal aspects of human intelligence. I believe that "true AGI", whatever that is, is likely to be able to mimic sentient but non-verbal species. I'd like to see an AGI do what a dog or cat does. LLMs are quite astonishing at mimicking something humans specifical…

What do you think a dog or cat does that can't be replicated by LLMs?

Act on its own?
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