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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#101

Post by trhway »

automatic6131 wrote: post #87
danroblew wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about how the economics of the LLM market is making all tech look bad. They need trillions of dollars in returns. VC's won't finance tech startups for decades. I use Cursor sometimes, and VSCode + Continue with llama.cpp, and it's great. That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions.

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

>it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that.

The BigTech companies have been flush with liquidity and poured those hundreds of billions into the promising tech, and as result we got a wonderful new technology. There is not much need for those trillions in return - just look at liquidity positions of those companies, they are just fine. If those trillions come in eventually - even better.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#102

Post by klibertp »

Ancapistani wrote: post #43
bccdee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh they'd have been right. Cars are expensive to buy and to maintain. They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow: Traffic is an unsolvable problem in urban centres. Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.

And yet, they’re better than what they replaced. Horses weren’t cheap when they were a primary mode of transportation. Lots of people have died riding, driving, and breaking horses. They definitely smell bad, and their “particulate matter” was so bad that houses had to be set back and elevated from the street. Cities designed around cars are far superior to cities designed around horses.

> They definitely smell bad

??? No, they don't. They only smell bad when they're kept standing in their urine, which is still not worse than a hairdresser. Compared to dogs (or ICE cars) horses smell way less. They do sweat to regulate temperature, which has a distinct smell, but it's way less irritating to a human's nose than the sweat of the rider.

There's a set of distinct smells associated with the horses, but other than the piss, none of them are particularly "bad". In my experience, humans tend to smell way worse overall (from food to body odor to the excrement) than horses.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#103

Post by pwdisswordfishz »

mylastattempt wrote: post #73

On LLM/ML itself: it seems a lot of cynical people start with some unreasonable idea that "AI" should be able to do what it will perhaps be able to in 10 or 100 years, and are subsequently upset that it is not capable of that yet. It may get there, it may not. But that's on you for starting with a wrong assumption. Is the AI "business" or "market" overvalued for it's current capabilities? Yeah, I do believe so. Welco…

> it seems a lot of cynical people start with some unreasonable idea that "AI" should be able to do what it will perhaps be able to in 10 or 100 years, and are subsequently upset that it is not capable of that yet

Because that's what AI wa supposed to be in the first place. But the industry performed the swindle of renaming "AI" to "AGI", so that they can pretend the thing that exists now is "AI".

Re: The Generative AI Con

#104

Post by n2d4 »

levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003.

It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensable.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#105

Post by pavlov »

levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

If Google search disappeared, I would still remember the names of several sites like Stack Overflow that are always at the top of the results, and I’d just go directly there.

Maybe the original Yahoo! style curated list of categorized links would actually be more useful for me at this point than Google with all the SEO spam.

That kind of high-quality directory combined with ChatGPT would probably replace Google for me.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#106

Post by automatic6131 »

trhway wrote: post #101
automatic6131 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

>it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. The BigTech companies have been flush with liquidity and poured those hundreds of billions into the promising tech, and as result we got a wonderful new technology. There is not much need for those trillions in return - just look at liquidity positions of those companies, they are just fine. If t…

>There is not much need for those trillions in return

Whilst you are correct that big tech cos do not need the return to survive, that's not how public markets work at all, and thus not how the incentives for those in charge of the companies work, and so making you actually wrong.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#107

Post by roenxi »

lukevp wrote: post #12

I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…

> I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers.

While the timeline is unclear; it seems likely that LLMs will obsolete precisely the skills that developers use to earn their income. I imagine a lot of them feel rather threatened by the rapid rate of progress.

Pointing out that it is already operating at junior dev quality and rapidly improving is unlikely to quiet the discontent.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#108

Post by krainboltgreene »

n2d4 wrote: post #104
levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003. It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensab…

I remember when people commented here that the blockchain was the same as early google search or early aws or early iPhone.

Everyone thinks their new thing is the T-1.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#109

Post by krainboltgreene »

trhway wrote: post #101
automatic6131 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

>it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. The BigTech companies have been flush with liquidity and poured those hundreds of billions into the promising tech, and as result we got a wonderful new technology. There is not much need for those trillions in return - just look at liquidity positions of those companies, they are just fine. If t…

Funny, I had been told we had to lay off all those workers because they weren’t flush with cash.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#110

Post by athrowaway3z »

danroblew wrote: post #84
simonw wrote: post #5

> When you put aside the hype and anecdotes, generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years. The one "big thing" that they've been able to do is to use "reasoning" to make the Large Language Models "think" [...] This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months: - Multi-modal: LLMs can consume…

Cost as in, cost to you? Or cost to serve? If the cost-to-serve is subsidized by VC money, they aren't getting cheaper, they're just leading you on.

As a society we choose to let the excess wealth pile up into the hands of people that are investing to bring about their own utopia.

If we're stretching, we can talk about opportunity cost. But the people spending and creating the "bubble" don't have better opportunities. They're not nations that see a ROI on things like transportation infrastructure or literacy.

So unless the discussion is taken more broadly and higher taxes are on the table, there really isn't a cost or subsidy imo.

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