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

theregister.com

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

#41

Post by n_ary »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #26

Getting beyond the title, which I definitely agree with ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41896346 ), there was this nugget about hallucinations: > I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved – meaning when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer Can't decide if he actually believes this, or he's just spewing his own hype. While I de…

In your case, you ask but then verify. Most people(i.e. IRL people outside tech circle) just want to get things done and believe anything, which is why the “Best top 5/10/20 Y in 20xx” articles work or the top advert gets many hits on google, or social media misinformation spreads and works.

Before AI, people used to “google” things and vehemently believe and support the whatever content that were first and second on their search result, which is why google probably replaced all above the fold results with ad/sponsored and businesses throw plenty money and SEO to be the top.

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

#42

Post by n_ary »

sfmz wrote: 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.

The barrier to entry has always been the winning factor for lot of rapid growth businesses. In previous era, it was ability to afford massive cloud infra and army of expensive SWE to build global scale distributed systems. AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Paypal, Google, Netflix and all the “internet” tech had many competitors but only these could afford the cloud scale growth and overtake the market.

In LLM era, it is the compute cost of the hardware that is differentiating the barrier to entry for winners and anything that do not have massive budget for both training and marketing are never heard of unless they are in self-hype narrow field(Cursor).

It is also sad that, AI is hyped to progress environmental and medical research and there were some impressive feats, but all the hype and money is literally going to chatbot shops, hence marketing budget is also another barrier to entry.

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

#43

Post by n_ary »

kjellsbells wrote: post #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…

With the AI progress, we will probably finally see a slowing down of the “js framework of the month” and other rapidly changing things.

To a bunch of very junior devs using LLMs to generate code and build something, speed is now main factor, it is irrelevant whether the new Airbnb prototype or even prod version was being generated in Svelte 3 as long as it works.

The fine tuning and fixing up happens later on “if needed” basis.

Similar apply for similar knowledge where AI is also being utilized in similar manner. A slightly outdated info is sufficient for the task.

Also, internet will continue ti have decent content as there will always be passionate people who want to build and share knowledge, then there is the need to advertise your knowledge(consultant/freelancer) who still need to generate content in decent quality to be discovered.

The maximum slop will be in sales/marketing/social media sphere where content quality is irrelevant and more clicks/engagement brings profit.

Anything else will be continuously get locked behind paywall, so either exclusive contracts with AI companies to supply training data and sell on open market with strong copyright or drm to general consumers.

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

#44

Post by Ekaros »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29
dmix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are, but then the question really becomes "what is the moat"? I.e. lots of these companies are essentially just providing wrappers around the best models coupled with some type of RAG approach. FWIW, I believe there is a defendable moat for the players that have really good UI and are really focused on end-user solutions. E.g. I pay for Cursor.sh because I believe it is an easy net win for my productivity. But…

I am not sure if there is too many moats.

But I am starting to wonder do you always need one. You won't win startup lottery to trillion. But you can still have solid business that generates profit and sells real working reasonable solutions to real customers.

Then again this is obviously wrong site for that...

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

#45

Post by Gigachad »

lostmsu wrote: post #37
anonzzzies wrote: post #36

He thinks you can trust the answers of chatbots? That is disturbing. Sure I use them all the time, but only for coding ; code I can review and verify after ; many other things are either a lot harder or impossible and I know it really does make up stuff with Confidence, so I do not even try. This guy must know that is how it is as CEO of this massive company?

Ironically, you can't trust code of junior developers in exactly the same way.

At least the junior devs run the code before submitting it for review.

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

#46

Post by anonzzzies »

lostmsu wrote: post #37
anonzzzies wrote: post #36

He thinks you can trust the answers of chatbots? That is disturbing. Sure I use them all the time, but only for coding ; code I can review and verify after ; many other things are either a lot harder or impossible and I know it really does make up stuff with Confidence, so I do not even try. This guy must know that is how it is as CEO of this massive company?

Ironically, you can't trust code of junior developers in exactly the same way.

Not of many 'seniors' either; most people are just terrible and lazy. Also, see the article yesterday about the deflation of developer titles. Everyone here basically agreed the titles are nonsenses, so how does junior mean anything suddenly? Junior vs what?

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

#47

Post by red-iron-pine »

Ekaros wrote: post #44
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are, but then the question really becomes "what is the moat"? I.e. lots of these companies are essentially just providing wrappers around the best models coupled with some type of RAG approach. FWIW, I believe there is a defendable moat for the players that have really good UI and are really focused on end-user solutions. E.g. I pay for Cursor.sh because I believe it is an easy net win for my productivity. But…

I am not sure if there is too many moats. But I am starting to wonder do you always need one. You won't win startup lottery to trillion. But you can still have solid business that generates profit and sells real working reasonable solutions to real customers. Then again this is obviously wrong site for that...

"if it can't be a unicorn why even live?"

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

#48

Post by red-iron-pine »

lostmsu wrote: post #37
anonzzzies wrote: post #36

He thinks you can trust the answers of chatbots? That is disturbing. Sure I use them all the time, but only for coding ; code I can review and verify after ; many other things are either a lot harder or impossible and I know it really does make up stuff with Confidence, so I do not even try. This guy must know that is how it is as CEO of this massive company?

Ironically, you can't trust code of junior developers in exactly the same way.

jr devs will tell you when they're not sure, or can ask for help.

GPT will dead-ass spew wrong answers right at you and sound 100% confident about it. when you correct it, it will do the exact same thing the next day when you try with a different account.

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

#49

Post by red-iron-pine »

jrflowers wrote: post #22
monero-xmr wrote: post #4

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

What if they aren’t the world’s smartest investors

what if they're just rich guys who got lucky, and at the right time, and now have more money than they know what to do with?

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

#50

Post by red-iron-pine »

evilfred wrote: post #40
monero-xmr wrote: post #4

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

very amused at this obvious sarcasm getting grey-texted

you're assuming people don't get that it's sarcasm, and are downvoting it because lazy sarcasm doesn't add anything to the discussion.
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