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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

241–250 of 531 posts

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what you’re saying. You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right? Can you provide more information?

Well there was that example a while back of some store's product recommendation algo inferring that someone was pregnant before any of the involved humans knew.

That's...not hard. Pregnancy produces a whole slew of relatively predictable behavior changes. The whole point of recommendation systems is to aggregate data points across services.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#242

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?

[deleted]

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#243
post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

In my eyes, it'd be cheaper for a company to simply purchase laptops with decent hardware specs, and run the LLMs locally. I've had decent results from various models I've run via LMStudio, and bonus points: It costs nothing and doesn't even use all that much CPU/GPU power. Just my opinion as a FORMER senior software dev (disabled now).

Same here. I already have the computer for work, so marginally, it costs nothing and it meets 90 percent of my LLM needs. Here comes the down vote!

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#244
I'm trying to pinpoint the canary in the financial coal mine here. There will be a time to pull out of the market and I really want to have an idea of when. I know, timing the market, but this isn't some small market correction we're talking about here.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We're realistically ~3 years away from fully autonomous software engineering We had Waymo cars about 18 years ago, and only recently they started to roll out commercially. Just saying.

This isn't a comment on timelines, but a Waymo going wild is going to run over and kill people, so it makes sense to be overly conservative with moving forwards. Meanwhile, if someone hacks into a vibecoded website and deletes everything and steals my user data, no one's getting run over by a car.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#246

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?

People said the same thing about Facebook. The answer: advertisers.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#247
post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

> It's like letting a small child drive a car. Bad example, because FSD cars are here.

Bad counter-example, because FSD has nothing in common with LLMs.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#248
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think we’ll have the choice.

> I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it. > But fusion as a power source is never going to happen. Not because it can’t, because it won’t. Because no matter how hard you try, it’s always going to cost more than the solutions we already have. https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-wi...

Yeh current tech is expensive and would likely be uncompetitive. At the very very end of that article is the key to this though:

> I fully support a pure research program for radically different approaches to fusion.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#249
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Years ago I found this book on the topic really eye-opening: - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Technological-Revolutions-Financial... The process of _actually_ benefitting from technological improvements is not a straight line, and often requires some external intervention. e.g. it’s interesting to note that the rising power of specific groups of workers as a result of industrialisation + unionisation then argua…

My understanding is that the 40 hour work week (and similar) was talked about for centuries by workers groups but only became a thing once governments during WWI found that longer days didn't necessarily increase output proportionally. For a 4 day week to really happen st scale, I'd expect we similarly need the government to decide to roll it out rather than workers groups pushing it from the bottom up.

> My understanding is that the 40 hour work week (and similar) was talked about for […]

See perhaps:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement

Generally it only really started being talked about when "workers" became a thing, specifically with the Industrial Revolution. Before that a good portion of work was either agricultural or domestic, so talk of 'shifts' didn't really make much sense.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#250
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just you switching away from Google is already justifying 1T infrastructure spend. How? OpenAI are LOSING money on every query. Beating Google by losing money isn't really beating Google.

How do we know this?

Many of the companies (including OpenAI) have even claimed the opposite. Inference is profitable; it's R&D and training that's not.
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