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The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

theregister.com

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Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#131

Post by inigyou »

spwa4 wrote: post #130
DanTheManPR wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather be market-corrected out of a job for a few weeks or months than have this inflate into an economy-wrecking bubble that derails my career and life for years. I'm worried that we're at that state already...

The thing about the past is that it's the past. Things change, big changes do not bring back the past. They change things. If you are market-corrected out of a job that situation most software engineers will be out of a job for years and wages will not recover for decades, or just never.

The trajectory of feudalism has always bent towards low wages and high rent extraction. There is no possible future where we stay with feudalism but increase wages.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#133

Post by DiBop »

antibarbarus wrote: post #87

Just before coming to read this article and thread, I read how Hyatt got rid of something like 30% of their call centre staff, and how the industry is gearing for replacing human work with AI. There is sadly ample fiscal headroom in mundane drone-like work that was being outsourced (still cheaply, I might add) that AI can replace and even do a marginally better job of. I suspect AI prices can even increase and it wil…

The thing is that companies that are investing in AI crap to replace mundane drone-like workers is that the AI will get better but more importantly we will get more used to the way behaves towards us. Right now we some janky-as-fuck implementations but we're currently being trained on how to react to AI just as much it is trained on us responding to it.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#134

Post by exographicskip »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #51
Hoasi wrote: post #40

Of course we know it. It’s been obvious since at least 2023. Everyone in AI oversells, except a few companies that built an actual business with revenue, like Midjourney. There is no AGI coming anytime soon no matter how much hype is being thrown around. We are not in the singularity. However, peak bullshit is NEAR.

The trick the frontier labs have done is define AGI as "better than humans at the vast majority of valuable knowledge work" which is definitely not what most people think it means.

> define AGI as "better than humans at the vast majority of valuable knowledge work"

Isn't that superintelligence?

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#135

Post by xnx »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #132
xnx wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High switching cost.

Now do Google

Advantages: Lowest inference cost due to scale, experience, advanced datacenters and custom chips. Huge customer base. AI automation will make it much easier to switch from AWS to GCP. Serious organization that doesn't let it's product unknowingly hack companies.

Disadvantages: Top model is slightly behind the frontier for now. Bias against using their products because it's not cool/trendy.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#136

Post by InsideOutSanta »

simianwords wrote: post #125
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're arguing with the wrong person. Please note what I actually said: > This is poorly stated in the podcast, but the underlying point is correct: while cost-per-token is going down, overall token use is way up. This is causing the cost of using LLMs in corporations to skyrocket.

> If the model consumes four times as many tokens to deliver a result, it’s not cheaper This is literally what the guy says in podcast. So the underlying point is not correct. He’s specifically talking about per task cost. There’s no “but actually they meant something else”. I don’t discount your point about overall cost increasing but that’s not relevant here. Let’s agree that the podcast is fundamentally wrong in t…

Here's the actual quote from the podcast you're presumably referring to. I guess everybody can make up their own mind about what they're saying and whether they are "fundamentally wrong."

You gotta watch something, because harnesses have changed how you can look at the cost structure of these things. If you look at cost per million tokens, it might look lower, but if the model consumes four times as many tokens in order to deliver a meaningful result, it's not cheaper. And so, Tom Claburn, one of our senior software reporters, had an excellent piece looking at how Anthropic's latest models use a tremendous number of tokens in order to deliver the result. So, sure, OpenAI's latest models might look less expensive from an API standpoint, which is great for marketing, but if it's using twice as many tokens, that's not the same thing. And that's somewhat dependent on the harness, but it's also dependent on how much reasoning effort is put into it, how they're routing the models.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#137

Post by horsawlarway »

rwz wrote: post #119
horsawlarway wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we agree with this take (and I do think it's a likely take that you're right on the long term), it doesn't change that it seems likely we're in a bubble, and it probably will pop. We see a similar paradigm with lots of revolutionary technology. The initial promise is high, people get very excited, lots of money pours in, and.... 15-30 years go by before we start seeing real impact across the economy at large.…

> So take robots: I can promise you that you won't see robotics in every household in the next decade (especially so if we exclude the current market of robot vacuums). People in 2016 were adamant that the current frontier LLM capabilities would not be achievable in the next decade. Modern home robots prototypes look awkward and mostly useless the same way GPT-2 was looking like a curious but mostly useless thing in…

Worth buying? Maybe.

Actually bought and distributed? No.

Again, hardware just doesn't roll out that fast, and you're talking about trying to distribute expensive hardware to a population with a 47k median yearly wage.

I've built robots. Even if the software expense is ~$0... you're not going to escape the fact that a robot that can do anything remotely similar to household work is just going to be expensive. Like, several thousand dollars in actuators and sensors alone, not counting any compute.

LLMs are a SaaS - Robots are delivered hardware. The graveyard is littered with software folks who thought they could deliver hardware like it was software.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#138

Post by nobody9999 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #128
nobody9999 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sci-fi is Lt. Cmdr. Data, HAL, Skynet, Culture Minds... The current state of things is closer (not close to by a long shot) to Fred Pohl's "AI" programs from his novel Gateway [0] than it is to the above examples. But even those are decades (at least) beyond what we have now. What we have now is the foreseeable (from at least 30 or 40 years ago) evolution of what was once called "expert systems."[1] [0] https://en.w…

How was it foreseeable? Expert systems worked on quite different principles. Knowledge representation, expert interviews, ontologies etc.

>How was it foreseeable?

I guess you had to be there. I certainly saw it coming.

>Expert systems worked on quite different principles.

Actually, not so much. The inference engine has changed, but otherwise it's same shit, different day.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#139

Post by bonoboTP »

nobody9999 wrote: post #138
bonoboTP wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was it foreseeable? Expert systems worked on quite different principles. Knowledge representation, expert interviews, ontologies etc.

>How was it foreseeable? I guess you had to be there. I certainly saw it coming. >Expert systems worked on quite different principles. Actually, not so much. The inference engine has changed, but otherwise it's same shit, different day.

Expert systems didn't use neural nets or in fact any machine learning.

They did interviews with experts and tried to do domain modeling, mapping the expertise to a formal symbolic logical description, ontologies, relations etc.

Both the knowledge base and the inference engine changed. They both changed to a unified machine learning paradigm. It's like you throw away your axe's handle, then the head, and then you grab a chainsaw. It's "the same thing" to that same degree.

Re: The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

#140

Post by blanched »

dwaltrip wrote: post #107
blanched wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you can mad-lib something that makes sense at the surface doesn’t make it insightful. How are plungers comparable to LLMs?

They are both products with multiple sellers competing on price. If one seller raises their price, people can switch to the other seller. You can't only look at how much "value" the buyer gets from the product. That's the mistake made by the original comment. You might ask "why don't all of the LLM providers just raise their prices?". That's called price fixing or collusion, and is generally illegal.

That makes sense to me. Thanks for explaining.

And I'm sorry to you and the parent poster for being needlessly snarky, I wasn't in a great mood when I wrote my original comment. I'll avoid bothered-posting in the future ;).

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