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

theregister.com

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

#91

Post by HDThoreaun »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #27
JCM9 wrote: post #2

There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.

The VCs are the small players in this bubble now. Big traditional finance is helping Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon build out their datacenters, and the infrastructure to power them. VCs have a lot of money compared to your startup, but they can’t finance a trillion dollars in construction projects. They’re all so highly levered up that they can’t afford for the bubble to pop. If this goes on for another couple…

msft and google both made $100 billion in profit last year. Theyre nowhere near a bailout

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

#92

Post by HDThoreaun »

kgwgk wrote: post #20
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #7

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.

AI does outperform radiologists right now. The issues are liability and the radiologist lobby(which you linked too) throwing a fit.

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

#93

Post by johnecheck »

Terr_ wrote: post #41
kayodelycaon wrote: post #16

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, deterri…

Sure, blockchain development has always been deeply tied to ideas of open membership and participation. I like those ideas too.

But that's a poor definition of a blockchain. A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography.

If you spin up a private bitcoin network, it's a blockchain even if nobody else knows or cares about it. Now, are non-open blockchains at all useful? I suspect so, but I don't know of any great examples.

The wide space between 'membership is determined in advance' and 'literally anyone can make a million identities at a whim' is worth exploring, IMO.

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

#94

Post by kstrauser »

inkyoto wrote: post #86
kstrauser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all that stuff, I like the blockchain implementation known as "git".

I have heard an argument for git before, and it is a viable fit for some use cases. The problem, however, stems from the fact that the git commit history can be modified, which automatically disqualifies git in many other use cases, e.g. official government-issued documents, financial records, recognition of prior learning, and similar – anywhere where the entire, unabridged history of records is required.

It can't without destroying every subsequent commits' digest, unless you find a way to generate commits with identical SHA digests.

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

#95

Post by epistasis »

Nevermark wrote: post #80

Well run large companies often waste a lot, in order to (1) hedge risks of being left behind, (2) ensure they have options in the future in possible growth or new efficiency areas, and (3) to start on long learning curves for skills and capabilities that appear likely to be a baseline necessity in the long run. Bonfires of money. Predictably. Because all three of those concerns require highly speculative action to pr…

Similarly, VC sets barrels of money on fire.

And depending on how you look at it, science itself is experimentation, but at least it mostly results in publications in the end, that may or may not be read, but at least serve as records of areas explored.

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

#96

Post by etrautmann »

jimmaswell wrote: post #89
Nevermark wrote: post #80

Well run large companies often waste a lot, in order to (1) hedge risks of being left behind, (2) ensure they have options in the future in possible growth or new efficiency areas, and (3) to start on long learning curves for skills and capabilities that appear likely to be a baseline necessity in the long run. Bonfires of money. Predictably. Because all three of those concerns require highly speculative action to pr…

Agreed. Smug dismissal of new ideas is such a lazy shortcut to trying to look smart. I'd much rather talk to someone enthusiastic about something than someone who does nothing but sit there and say "this thing sucks" every time something happens even if person #2 is incidentally right a lot of the time.

While I agree in principle, someone has to make decisions about resource allocation and decide that some ideas are better than others. This takes a finely tuned sense of BS detector and technical feasibility estimation, which I would argue is a real skill. It thus becomes subtly different to be an accurate predictor of success vs default cynic if 95% of ideas aren’t going to work.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

kurthr wrote: post #66
fancyfredbot wrote: post #18

Article doesn't understand that cutting "between five and 20 percent of support and admin processing" is really valuable, instead it seems to want to dismiss that as a dull failure. Business process outsourcing companies are valued at $300bn according to the BPO Wikipedia page. So 5%-20% of that is 15-60bn. So even if we're valuing all the other GenAI impact at zero the impact on admin and support alone could plausib…

What is missing even in this article is the install and expected failure rate of the dominant GB300 servers. Numbers I heard were, "~15% annual failure and it's not worth trying to swap/repair". That means in 5 years these entire installs are down more than half. Of course they can install the NEW GX500turbo servers which are 4x the compute, but 2x more power hungry. How much will that cost? What is the hyperscaler w…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by inkyoto »

kstrauser wrote: post #94
inkyoto wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard an argument for git before, and it is a viable fit for some use cases. The problem, however, stems from the fact that the git commit history can be modified, which automatically disqualifies git in many other use cases, e.g. official government-issued documents, financial records, recognition of prior learning, and similar – anywhere where the entire, unabridged history of records is required.

It can't without destroying every subsequent commits' digest, unless you find a way to generate commits with identical SHA digests.

There is no such a thing as «subsequent commits» in git.

Commits in git are non-linear and form a tree[0][1]. A commit can be easily deleted without affecting the rest of the tree. If the git commit represent a subtree with branches dangling off it, deleting such a commit will delete the entire subtree. Commits can also be moved around, detached and re-attached to other commits.

[0] https://www.baeldung.com/ops/git-objects-empty-directory#2-g...

[1] https://www.baeldung.com/ops/git-trees-commit-tree-navigatio...

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

#99

Post by strange_quark »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #7

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…

Agree with this, the "find this thing in my spaghetti codebase" is far and away the best use of LLMs I've seen. Fill in the rest of this switch statement, populate this struct from this database call, etc. also work pretty well. I would love if I could get a small model that ran locally that was able to pull off those 2 tricks. Explaining code works sometimes, but even the biggest models are still prone to getting confused and/or making stuff up that isn't there. I don't like the agentic features at all and expect these to mostly die because they're expensive and, IMO, only provide the illusion of productivity.

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

#100

Post by bradgessler »

gerdesj wrote: post #28
Analemma_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My monkey jpegs are surely going back up! Just have to keep hodling.

I've lost track of my memes. Should I be locking up the green crayons or my daughters?

You should be driving your Lambo on the moon.
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