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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#321

Post by AlecSchueler »

tbrownaw wrote: post #195
mettamage wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just think about how much more effective advertisements are going to be when LLMs start to tell you what to buy based on which advertiser gave the most money to the company. Optimistic view: maybe product quality becomes an actually good metric again as the LLM will care about giving good products. Yea, I know, I said it's an optimistic view.

What does it mean for the language model to "care" about something? How would that matter against the operator selling advertisers the right to instruct it about what the relevant facts are?

I think it might be like when Grok was programmed to talk about white genocide and to support Musk's views. It always shoehorned that stuff in but when you asked about it it readily explained that it seemed like disinformation and openly admitted that Musk had a history of using his business to exert political sway.

It's maybe not really "caring" but they are harder to cajole than just "advertise this for us."

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#322

Post by sakesun »

billy99k wrote: post #27
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? " Have you ever used an LLM? I use it every day to help me with research and completing technical reports (which used to be a lot more of my time). Of course you can't just use it blindly, but it definitely adds value.

Have you read the article ? The cost is currently not justified for the benefit.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#323

Post by benterix »

> ...$2 billion in funding at a $10 billion valuation. The company has not released a product and has refused to tell investors what they’re even trying to build. “It was the most absurd pitch meeting,” one investor who met with Murati said. “She was like, ‘So we’re doing an AI company with the best AI people, but we can’t answer any questions.”

I observed how he played the sama drama and I realized she will outplay them all.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#324

Post by dns_snek »

dist-epoch wrote: post #290
the_snooze wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're cheaper right now because they're operating at a loss. At some point, the bill will come due. Netflix used to be $8/month for as many streams and password-shares as you wanted for a catalog that met your media consumption needs. It was a great deal back then. But then the bill came due. Online LLM companies are positioning themselves to do the same bait-and-switch techbro BS we've seen over the last 15+ years…

Fundamentally it will always be cheaper to run LLMs in the cloud, because of batching. Unless somehow magically you'll have the need to run 1000 different prompts at the exact same time to also benefit from it locally. This is even without considering cloud GPUs which are much more efficient than local ones, especially from old hardware.

Yes they'll be cheaper to run, but will they be cheaper buy as a service?

Because sooner or later these companies will be expected to produce eye-watering ROI to justify the risk of these moonshot investments and they won't be doing that by selling at cost.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#325

Post by fragmede »

zparky wrote: post #294
_heimdall wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an odd anecdote to ask "show your work." I don't catalog shows and episodes where any particular topic comes up, and I follow over 100 podcasts so I don't have a specific list you can fact check me on. Personally I could care less if that means you choose not to believe that I hear the Taiwan risk come up often enough.

Charitably, perhaps they're simply asking for podcasts that they would be interested in listening to that cover these topics. Personally, I would like to listen to a podcast that talks about semiconductor development, but I've done approximately zero research to find them so I'm not pressed for an answer :)

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKtxx9TnH76SRC7ZbOu2Nsg5m...

Asianometry playlist on TSMC

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#326

Post by throaway1988 »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #233
xiphias2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just you switching away from Google is already justifying 1T infrastructure spend. Just think about how much more effective advertisements are going to be when LLMs start to tell you what to buy based on which advertiser gave the most money to the company.

1 Trillion US dollars? 1 trillion dollars is justified because people use chatGPT instead of google sometimes?

Google search won’t exist in the medium term. Why use a list of static links you have to look through manually if you can just ask AI what the answer is? Ai tools like chatgpt are what Google wanted search to be in the first place.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#327

Post by Workaccount2 »

Diti wrote: post #190
ivape wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI figured out something on my mind that I didn’t tell it about yesterday (latest Sonnet). My best advice to you is to spend time and allow the AI to blow your mind. Then you’ll get it. Sometimes I sit in wonder at how the fuck it’s able to figure out that much intent without specific instructions. There’s no way anyone programmed it to understand that much. If you’re not blown away by this then I have to assume you…

LLMs cannot think on their own, they’re glorified autocomplete automatons writing things based on past training. If the “AI figured out something on your mind”, it is extremely likely the “thing on your mind” was present in the training corpus, and survivorship bias made you notice.

C. Opus et al. released a paper pretty much confirming this earlier this year[1]

[1]https://ai.vixra.org/pdf/2506.0065v1.pdf

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#328

Post by throaway1988 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #159
emp17344 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed… I feel increasingly alienated because I don’t understand how AI is providing enough value to justify the truly insane level of investment.

The same way that NFTs of ugly cartoons apes were a multi-billion dollar industry for about 28 months. Edit: People are downvoting this because they think "Hey, that's not right, LLMs are way better than non-fungible apes!" (which is true) but the money is pouring in for exactly the same reason: get the apes now and later you'll be rich!

true but AI replacing search has a much better chance of profitability than whatever value Nft’s were supposed to provide.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#329

Post by Workaccount2 »

Etheryte wrote: post #41
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…

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/quart…

Ah yes, the study that everyone posts but nobody reads

>Behind the disappointing enterprise deployment numbers lies a surprising reality: AI is already transforming work, just not through official channels. Our research uncovered a thriving "shadow AI economy" where employees use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude subscriptions, and other consumer tools to automate significant portions of their jobs, often without IT knowledge or approval.

>The scale is remarkable. While only 40% of companies say they purchased an official LLM subscription, workers from over 90% of the companies we surveyed reported regular use of personal AI tools for work tasks. In fact, almost every single person used an LLM in some form for their work.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#330

Post by throaway1988 »

weregiraffe wrote: post #296
donatj wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find me an FSD that can drive in non-Californian real world situations. A foot of snow, black ice, a sand drift.

>A foot of snow, black ice, a sand drift. What else, a meter of lava flow? Forest fire? Tsunami? Tornado? How about pick conditions where humans actually can drive.

he’s describing conditions that exist for every area in the world that actually experiences winter!
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