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GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

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41–50 of 155 posts

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#41

Well, at least AI is going to be better than the blockchain hype. No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for. I had a very hard time explaining once you put something in the chain, you can’t easily pull it back out. If you wanted to verify documents, all you have to do is put a hash in a database table. Which we already had. It has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from c…

> has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from controlling the contents.

I'd like to propose a different characterization: "Blockchain" is when you want unrestricted membership and participation.

Allowing anybody to spin up any number of new nodes they desire us the fundamental requirement which causes a cascade of other design decisions and feedback systems. (Mining, proof-of-X, etc.)

In contrast, deterring one entity from taking over can also be done with a regular distributed database, where the nodes--and which entities operate them--are determined in advance.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#42
post #20

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around. I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literal…

> I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful. Yes, but https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence... Nine years ago, scientist Geoffrey Hinton famously said, “People should stop training radiologists now,” believing it was “completely obvious” AI would outperform human rads within five years.

[deleted]

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#43
post #3

It's 1999 again.

1999 was triggered by fraud, there was far more demand on paper for high bandwidth applications than was justified for all the fiber layout and over-investment in Internet technologies.

The difference today is that every piece of capitalism immediately 100% utilized once it is plugged in.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#44
post #3

It's 1999 again.

1999 was triggered by fraud, there was far more demand on paper for high bandwidth applications than was justified for all the fiber layout and over-investment in Internet technologies. The difference today is that every piece of capitalism immediately 100% utilized once it is plugged in.

Announcing to the world "AGI has been achieved internally" when that's not true seems like fraud to me.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already? Just imagine how many predictions we'll have in six months, or even a year from now!

We don’t need to imagine, we can ask ChatGPT

Yeah, everyone knows LLMs excel at providing mathematically-sound answers to novel questions. :p

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#46

There is no real source for this data other than "executives" that only think in numbers and of course those are the types that collude with their CFOs to come up with great ways to get giant tax write-offs. I would imagine they are not "burning billions" they are coming up with new ways to describe how they ALREADY burned billions.

I can just speak for myself, but my F500 has been setting money on fire chasing AI. Truly terrible ideas are being pursued just for the sake of movement. Were “AI” not part of the pitch, it would have been immediately tossed in the bin as a waste of time.

Ideas which are not terrible, instead have awful ROIs. Nobody has a use case beyond generating text, so lots of ideas about automating some text generation in certain niches. Not appreciating that those bits represent 0.1% of the business ventures. Yet they are technically feasible, so full steam ahead.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#47
post #20

I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around. I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literal…

> I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful. Yes, but https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence... Nine years ago, scientist Geoffrey Hinton famously said, “People should stop training radiologists now,” believing it was “completely obvious” AI would outperform human rads within five years.

If you want to go back in history you will find people confidently claiming things in either direction of what eventually happened.

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#48

Well, at least AI is going to be better than the blockchain hype. No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for. I had a very hard time explaining once you put something in the chain, you can’t easily pull it back out. If you wanted to verify documents, all you have to do is put a hash in a database table. Which we already had. It has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from c…

let's use the term xype for anything being hyped without a good reason .. :-)

Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire

#49

What arrogant and cynical way of looking at business operations. You don't know how anything interesting turns out in the future. You make educated guesses and those cost money. When you run a business, everything costs money. But that is not "lighting money on fire", that is how all learning happens. If anyone thinks they have figured it all out, stop blabbering around. Short the market.

The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent.
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