Live data from Hacker News

Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

theregister.com

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#12

But YC just funded hundreds of AI companies. This would mean the world’s smartest investors are wrong. This is, frankly, impossible.

Even if these younger vintage batches fail completely, the existing portfolio will benefit from AI being hyped.

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#13

My bet is on unverified AI going the way of the dodo. I’m sorta sick of hallucinated nonsense. I also don’t see a business use case for a lot of “cool” ai products.

I don't know, remember the controversy over the wildly inaccurate historical AI images? That could serve some satirical products.

Weren't the majority of those induced by manipulated politics rather than it being a base characteristic of the technology?

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#14
I'm wondering if we are now in the Low Background Steel transition, as far as Internet content goes. I already see material on the open Internet that has very obviously been generated by AI. As the next round of Common Crawl or whatever is slurped in for training, AI ends up eating its own output. Does the quality of the material degrade at that point? Maybe we'll end up searching for an Internet that existed before AI started rewriting it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel?wprov=sfl...

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#15

My bet is on unverified AI going the way of the dodo. I’m sorta sick of hallucinated nonsense. I also don’t see a business use case for a lot of “cool” ai products.

I don't know if you're familiar with how LLMs work, but after diving a bit into that space, I'm a "realistic enthusiast" after a lifetime as a deep skeptic. For me it's like the beginning of the internet (yes...old). It's clear there's something profoundly different and potentially enormously useful going on. Exactly how it will end up being used and who will make money from it is unclear. We know from experience that those questions ended up having answers different than we anticipated with the internet and I'd expect the same to happen with AI.

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#16

I'm wondering if we are now in the Low Background Steel transition, as far as Internet content goes. I already see material on the open Internet that has very obviously been generated by AI. As the next round of Common Crawl or whatever is slurped in for training, AI ends up eating its own output. Does the quality of the material degrade at that point? Maybe we'll end up searching for an Internet that existed before…

Yes - this insight has been repeatedly discovered by many, but remains a great analogy.

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#17
post #11

It takes so much money to be a player in this space; the ante went from ~$100k (GOOG, FB) to like $4B or 100k H100s. That's how I arrive at the statement as 99% don't have the cash.

There's a lot of people making AI companies outside LLM model development

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#19

My bet is on unverified AI going the way of the dodo. I’m sorta sick of hallucinated nonsense. I also don’t see a business use case for a lot of “cool” ai products.

I don't know if you're familiar with how LLMs work, but after diving a bit into that space, I'm a "realistic enthusiast" after a lifetime as a deep skeptic. For me it's like the beginning of the internet (yes...old). It's clear there's something profoundly different and potentially enormously useful going on. Exactly how it will end up being used and who will make money from it is unclear. We know from experience tha…

The parent post is very orthogonal to yours. That isn't saying that LLMs won't be useful -- it's saying that unverified LLMs are of limited value.

This rings true. There's a low economic value for performing activities when it doesn't matter if the output is true or accurate.

Unverified LLMs can generated unlimited output that cannot be trusted; this is output that can approximate truth at times.

I suppose the long term question is whether the approximation is sufficient for value-generating purposes. It clearly is sufficient in cases where it outperforms the status quo (example: summarizing customer feedback).

Re: Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

#20

But YC just funded hundreds of AI companies. This would mean the world’s smartest investors are wrong. This is, frankly, impossible.

I'll have to assume you don't understand how tech investing works. Give a dollar to 100 companies and you've spent $100. 99% fail, but one ends up returning $1,000 and you've 10x'ed.

Why would it be 10x in this example? Isn't it 1000x? Or 900x if you remove the initial investment?

Do 1/100 companies really experience that kind of windfall?

Post reply on HN