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AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

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Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#61
post #15

How big is $344B? Apparently the total market capitalisation of the US stock market is $62.8 trillion. Shiller's CAPE ratio for the S & P index is currently about 38 -- CAPE is defined as current price / (earnings, averaged over the trailing 10 years) That suggests that over the last 10 years, the average earnings of the US stock market is about $1.7 trillion annually. So $344B of spending is about 1/5 of the average…

These days am looking at managing my own portfolio. I go off expected returns(using gdp as a component) plus dividend and adjust it for risk to compute which country/region has good expected returns. This i adjust a couple of times a year.

If one would assume it's nearly all a bubble, How would you correct earnings for the US? I am interested in applying it to any investment that tracks AI heavy companies in the US.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#62
post #29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the plan AGI, not ROI on offering services based on current gen AI models. AGI was the winner takes all holy grail, so all this money was just buying lottery tickets in hopes of striking AGI first. At least that how I remember it, but AGI dreams may have been hampered by lack of exponential improvement in last year.

I’m sure somebody believed that? But I never met them.

As sibling commentor mentions, Zuckerberg is dropping billions on AGI currently (or "super human intelligence", whatever the difference is). And, I don't have time to find it, but maybe Sam Altman might've said AGI is the ultimate goal at somepoint - idk, I don't pay too much attention to this stuff tbh, you'll have to look it up if you're interested.

Oh and John Carmack, of Doom fame, went off to do AGI research and raised a modest 20(?) million last I heard.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#63
post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

On the one hand I see posts here by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

On the other I get 5 hours of work done in 5 minutes every other day.

Worst I can see happening is a doc-com crash. pets.com will go out of business, but amazon won't.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#64
post #25
post #12

What's the path to recouping that money? Even if every major company in the US spends $100,000 a year on subscriptions and every household spends $20/month, it still doesn't seem like enough return on investment when you factor in inference costs and all the other overhead. New medical discoveries, maybe? I saw OpenAI's announcement about gpt-bio and iPSCs which was pretty amazing, but there's a very long gap between…

$100k/year is literally nothing. Think of it as maybe $10k/employee, figuring a conservative 10% boost in productivity against a lowball $100k/year fully burdened salary+benefits. For a company with 10,000 employees that’s $100m/year.

That's literally not how the word "literally" works.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#65
post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

>It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. Your comparison to smart phones is interesting. Smart phones are definitely transformative. There was a lot of hype, but still transformative. Do you believe that LLMs and AI is also going to be transformative?

I don't think it was about smart phones.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#66
post #7
post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

>> in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in When your boss is hyping it up and demanding all hands on deck full steam ahead on the Good Ship AI, lots of people join in out of fear, particularly in the currently awful job market which is partly being ruined by AI itself. Some of us just stay quiet, keep our hea…

Absolutely, and you see this in non-Mag7/non-tech industries where CEOs are all announcing a parade of "head of AI" hires. Will it end up being a permanent role like CISO, or is this just faddish follow-along? I know some of the guys being hired into these roles and, lol.. let's just say they are not experts.

My spouse works at a large (50k-100k) org in a program management role where she is getting a lot of pressure to organize various AI evangelism efforts aimed at developers. Workshops, bake offs, demo days, etc.

I mean sounds neat, but is this being done because it's useful or because someone up high needs to justify their AI budget spend with AI usage metrics?

Do we believe that ICs are actually so stupid/stubborn they need to be mandated, coaxed, coached, bullied and bribed to use something that makes their jobs easier?

Doesn't most of the best tech end up being bottoms-up?

Most of us who were around 15+ years ago recall a lot of BigCorp had to be dragged unwillingly into mobile by internal useres/devs who got their first iPhone and saw the light. A lot of stuff starts as small team internal skunk works / unofficial projects working around productivity drains. I am highly suspicious that the C-suite knows what people 10 levels down actually need for productivity enhancement.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#67
post #49
post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

I've been following progress on self-driving cars since the 2004 and 2005 Darpa Challenges. Things were very exciting in the 2011-2015 timeframe. Demos were mindblowing. Engineers were giddy. The auto industry went from laughing to shaking in their boots, and then scrambling to make it appear as though they had a horse in the self-driving car race. Hundreds of billions in investment were flying around. Now here we ar…

But I can actually use an LLM to do useful work for me and no one gets hurt.

I think there’s too much hype and money, but LLMs are useful right now.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#68
post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

I think it's easy to forget how much low-hanging-fruit there still is, in terms of taking full advantage of this technology. People are still figuring out very basic integrations, and even now, at this early stage, the things I can do with LLMs are pretty incredible. For example, I was able to set Cursor up on finally dragging an old codebase out of the dark ages. It then built new features that I've long wanted. It…

"I think it's easy to forget how much low-hanging-fruit there still "

Such as?

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#69
post #48

Most of us believed that crypto currencies were trash. Look how valuable its now . LLMs are a million times better than Crypto currencies.

There is a distinction between "vehicle for a large volume of speculation" and "valuable". Cryptocurrency has not created any "value".

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#70
post #28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in When your boss is hyping it up and demanding all hands on deck full steam ahead on the Good Ship AI, lots of people join in out of fear, particularly in the currently awful job market which is partly being ruined by AI itself. Some of us just stay quiet, keep our hea…

No developer job has yet been lost to AI. We are in a huge recession, and companies like to have an excuse to fire people that can be spun as a positive.

> No developer job has yet been lost to AI.

https://content.techgig.com/technology/developer-fires-entir...

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