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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#41

Post by Etheryte »

aurareturn wrote: post #11
hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of progr…

The recent MIT report on the state of AI in business feels relevant here [0]:

> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return.

There's no doubt that you'll find anecdotal evidence both for and against in all variations, what's much more interesting than anecdotes is the aggregate.

[0] https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#42

Post by patapong »

admissionsguy wrote: post #23
aurareturn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of progr…

When your work consists of writing stuff disconnected from reality it surely helps to have it written automatically.

On the other hand, it's a hundreds-of-billions of dollars market...

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#43

Post by _heimdall »

rwmj wrote: post #40

Also no one is talking about how exposed we are to Taiwan. Nvidia, AMD, Apple, any company building out GPUs (so Google, Microsoft, Meta etc), even Intel a bit, are all manufacturing everything with one company, and it's largely happening in Taiwan. If China invades Taiwan, why wouldn't TSMC, Nvidia and AMD stock prices go to zero?

We must run in different circles as it were, I hear this raised frequently on a number of podcasts I listen to.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#44

Post by philippta »

kumarm wrote: post #12
hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.

> they definitely improves average programmer efficiency

Do we really need more efficient average programmers? Are we in a shortage of average software?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#45

Post by piva00 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #31
admissionsguy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just the “it’s different this time” mentality shared by all bubbles. Some things never change.

The final AI push that doesn't lead to a winter will look like a bubble until it hits. We're realistically ~3 years away from fully autonomous software engineering (let's say 99.9% for a concrete target) if we can shift some research and engineering resources towards control, systems and processes. The economic value of that is hard to overstate.

You are basically saying "it's different this time" with a lot of words.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#46

Post by therealmarv »

It reminds me what I said to somebody recently:

All my friends and family are using the free version of ChatGPT or something similar. They will never pay (although they have enough money to do so).

Even in my very narrow subjective circles it does not add up.

Who pays for AI and how? And when in the future?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#47

Post by einrealist »

So much in this AI bubble is just fueled by a mixture of wishful thinking (by people who know better), Science Fiction (by people who don't know enough) and nihilism (by people who don't care about anything other than making money and gaining influence).

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#48

Post by aiisnotjustah »

hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

I don't know what you mean by this at all tbh.

I don't think the researchers at the top think LLM is AGI.

DeepMind and co are already working on world models.

The biggest bottleneck right now is compute compute and compute. If an experiement takes MONTH to train, you want a lot more compute. You need compute to optimize what you already have like LLMs and then again a lot of compute to try out new things.

All of the compute/Datacenters and GPUs are not LLM GPUs. They are ML capable GPUs.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#49

Post by lopis »

tbrownaw wrote: post #33
rimeice wrote: post #2

> Some people think artificial intelligence will be the most important technology of the 21st century. I don’t, I think a workable fusion reactor will be the most important technology of the 21st century.

We'll finally have electricity that's too cheap to meter.

And we'll use it all to run more crypto/AI/next thing

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#50

Post by pessimizer »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #10

I don't think it'll contract. The people dumping their money into AI think we are at end of days, new order for humanity type point, and they're willing to risk a large part of their fortune to ensure that they remain part of the empowered elite in this new era. It's an all hands on deck thing and only hard diminishing returns that make the AI takeoff story look implausible are going to cause a retrenchment.

You don't think it will contract just because rich people have bet so much on it that they'll be forced to throw good money after bad? That's the only reason?
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