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

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

#121

Post by impossiblefork »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #116
impossiblefork wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Microsoft has a lot of corporate debt relative to its profits etc., and Google has even less. I'm sure there will be losers, but I'm not quite sure who.

Their recent filings show that they’re planning $100bn/yr in AI expenditures as early as 2027. They’re raising debt, rather than spending from revenues, because they get a better multiplier there. They’re also acting as a guarantor to lots of infrastructure project - meaning the debt is their responsibility, but not on their books. If the creditworthiness of any of the hyperscalers slip, even a tiny amount, the tech…

Ah, I see.

But 100 billion is still on the order of the current profit of each. I suppose with interest, if it's sustained over time it could be a problem though.

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

#122

Post by bigtunacan »

fzzzy wrote: post #65
ModernMech wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who did that?

Sam Altman made a post on Reddit in 2023 implying OpenAI had achieved AGI internally. Later he “clarified” it was a joke, however there was some speculation that he didn’t understand what AGI actually meant at the time.

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

#123

Post by oinfoalgo »

pixl97 wrote: post #13
j45 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly, except now everyone's online and spending time online and spending cash online.

And, the .com bomb killed some companies and slowed down spending for a bit. It did not kill the internet, and now companies like Amazon(.com) are absolutely enormous. Some people think the GenAI bomb is going to kill GenAI, I think it's just going to weed out those with too high of expenses and no way to evolve the compute to be cheaper over time.

The forward P/E of the Nasdaq 100 is pretty exemplary of how this is not the same situation at all.

https://en.macromicro.me/series/23955/nasdaq-100-pe

It is easy to spot the dot com bubble on this chart.

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

#124

Post by marenkay »

The wonderful thing about money is: its roots are only in belief, not in fact. If you get a sufficient amount of money users to believe pink colored dog poop has more value than a diamond, than it has.

The entire shtick is made up. People just tend to forget this too quick.

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

#125

Post by Ekaros »

inkyoto wrote: post #76
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…

> No one knew what “blockchain” was, how it worked, or what could be used for. Not the blockchain itself, but the concept of an immutable, append only, tamper-proof ledger underpinning it is a very useful one in many contexts where the question of authenticity of datasets arises – the blockchain has given us a ledger database. The ledger database is more than just a hash as it also provides a cryptographic proof that…

I often feel that immutability is very much over-rated and goes against real word. Lot of legal system is build on reverting things. Thus things being harder to revert is not actually desirable property.

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

#126

Post by jqpabc123 »

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.

Smug acceptance of new ideas is such a lazy shortcut to trying to look smart. I'd much rather talk to someone who has objectively analyzed the concept rather than someone who does nothing but sit there and say "this thing is great" for no real reason other than "everyone is using it".

Incidentally, "everyone" is wrong a lot of the time.

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

#127

Post by johnecheck »

Terr_ wrote: post #102
johnecheck wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography. If we charitably assume "blockchain" has some engineering meaning (and it isn't purely a word for marketing/scamming) then there's some new aspect which sets it apart from the distributed-databases we've been able to make just fine for decades. Uncontrolled participation is that key aspect. Without that linchpin, almost all the o…

You misunderstand. The analogy wouldn't be Napster with networking code disabled. The analogy is Napster on a LAN. Only those on the LAN can access it so it's not open to the world, but nonetheless you've still got a p2p file-sharing client.

And yes. I'm using the engineering definition. I don't believe in letting a gaggle of marketers and scammers define my terms. A blockchain is a specific technology. It doesn't mean 'whatever scam is happening this week', even if said scam involves a blockchain.

I don't blame you for associating blockchains with scams and fully open projects, that's undeniably what we've seen it used for. But that's not what defines a blockchain.

"A scalpel can only be used for surgery"

"If you use a scalpel to cut a steak, it's still a scalpel."

"There must be some new aspect to scalpels! We've been able to make steak knives for decades!"

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

#128

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

marenkay wrote: post #124

The wonderful thing about money is: its roots are only in belief, not in fact. If you get a sufficient amount of money users to believe pink colored dog poop has more value than a diamond, than it has. The entire shtick is made up. People just tend to forget this too quick.

Moreover, money is not destroyed by spending, but rather circulates. Right now it's flowing around faster -- a manic phase for a portion of the economy.

In other eras, everyone got excited and went to tent revivals.

Granted there could be an opportunity cost -- the real effort and electricity could be used elsewhere -- but only if it were possible to create a similar amount of excitement about something useful, like putting solar panels everywhere. But that takes different people and different skills, so maybe this costs nothing?

(Money can be created and destroyed -- it doesn't just circulate -- but that destruction happens when loans are repaid within a fractional reserve system. Which is kind of a scam, but money itself is, so, whatever.)

Once you internalize that this is all sort of a scam, does that change your behavior? Maybe you start making NFTs or minting shitcoins.

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

#129

Post by npilk »

borroka wrote: post #69
kgwgk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One problem is considering a solution effective only if it, at launch, completely solves the problem, for example, in the case of AI and LLMs, by coding an entire application without any human intervention, retiring radiologists, or driving autonomously in the five boroughs of New York City. If we expect a technology to completely solve a problem as soon as it is launched, only a few in history could be considered a…

Agree. And then people anchor on what the technology was like when it launched, and don't notice or account for the additional improvements and iterations that happen over time.

E.g. - I was considering a 3D printer but I had heard they were expensive, messy, complicated, it was hard to get prints to come out right, etc. But it turned out I was anchored on ~2016 era technology. I got a simple modern printer for a few hundred dollars and it (mostly) just works.

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

#130

Post by jandrese »

sebastiennight wrote: post #81
jandrese wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs are just salivating at the prospect of firing most of their staff and replacing them with AIs. And then you have hype men at these AI companies blowing a burning coal mine of smoke up their asses. And every month the products become even more expensive for even more incremental gains. The hype is unsustainable. How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already?

> How many "we will have AGI by X/X/201X" predictions have we blown past already? This seems wildly inaccurate. Can you find any single such claim from any credible source? Anybody hyping up an AGI timeframe within the 2010s?

Ok, this one is for the end of 2025 so we could still achieve it, and this is from a guy with an AI company (xAI):

https://www.reuters.com/technology/teslas-musk-predicts-ai-w...

Another AI company CEO prediction:

https://time.com/7205596/sam-altman-superintelligence-agi/

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