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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

71–80 of 531 posts

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#71
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.

name the podcasts

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#72

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…

> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming Odd way to describe ChatGPT which has >1B users. AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users, Gemini has ~200M users, etc. Adoption is far from low.

> AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users

Does that really count as adoption, when it has been introduced as a default feature?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#73
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.

I mean, we already have a giant working fusion reactor (the sun) and we can even harvest it's energy (solar, wind, etc)! That's pretty awesome.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#74
post #12

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.

AI can be quite impressive if the conditions are right for it. But it still fails at so many common things for me that I'm not sure if it's actually saving me time overall.

I just tried earlier today to get Copilot to make a simple refactor across ~30-40 files. Essentially changing one constructor parameter in all derived classes from a common base class and adding an import statement. In the end it managed ~80% of the job, but only after messing it up entirely first (waiting a few minutes), then asking again after 5 minutes of waiting if it really should do the thing and then missing a bunch of classes and randomly removing about 5 parenthesis from the files it edited.

Just one anecdote, but my experiences so far have been that the results vary dramatically and that AI is mostly useless in many of the situations I've tried to use it.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#75

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…

[dead]

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#76

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…

It's silly to say that the only objective that will vindicate AI investments is AGI. Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU…

The problem is that it’s already commodified; there’s no moat. The general tech practice has been capture the market by burning vc money, then jack up prices to profit. All these companies are burning billions to generate a new model and users have already proven there is no brand loyalty. They just hop to the new one when it comes out. So no one can corner the market and when the VC money runs out they’ll have to jack up prices so much that they’ll kill their market

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#77

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…

It's silly to say that the only objective that will vindicate AI investments is AGI. Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU…

You seem to be making an implicit claim that LLMs can create an effective cancer drug "10% of the time".

Smells like complete and total bullshit to me.

Edit: @eucyclos: I don't assume that Chat GPT and LLM tools have saved cancer researchers any time at all.

On the contrary, I assume that these tools have only made these critical researchers less productive, and made their internal communications more verbose and less effective.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#78
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.

Why would it be too cheap to meter? You're still heating up water and putting it through a turbine. We've been doing that for ages (just different sources of energy for the heating up part) and we still meter energy because these things cost money and need lots of maintenance.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#79

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…

> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming Odd way to describe ChatGPT which has >1B users. AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users, Gemini has ~200M users, etc. Adoption is far from low.

Mostly agreed, but AI overviews are a very bad example. Google can just force feed its massive search user base whatever bullshit it damn pleases. Even if it has negative value to the users.

I don't actually think that AI overviews have "negative value" - they have their utility. There are cases where I stop my search right after reading the "AI overview". But "organic" adoption of ChatGPT or Claude or even Gemini and "forced" adoption of AI overviews are two different beasts.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#80
When there was a speculative mania in railways, afterward there were railroads everywhere that could still be used. A bubble in housing has a bunch of houses everywhere, or at the very least the skeleton of a house that could be finished later.

These tech bubbles are leaving nothing, absolutely nothing but destruction of the commons.

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