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Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

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Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#101

Post by forgetfulness »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #63
forgetfulness wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring tril…

Ok, ignoring any AGI or massive advances, let's just say an LLM can help the average office worker be 15% more productive... what do you think the economic value of that is?

100 billion a year, with math that’s downright delusional.

So, back of the envelope math, the US GDP is 27.72T USD, 80% (22.18) corresponds to the tertiary sector.

Let’s say that this is a 15% increase over a 10 years period, because YoY a boom like the computer revolution itself looks like 2% increases a year.[1]. This amounts to about 1.5% increases each year.

Let’s just make the huge leap that you can just scale the productivity up of all this just by making typing out reports and emails a faster activity, and summarizing information for which you’re not facing liability if the bot gets it wrong.

Yes, including the nurses, cleaners, truckers, teamsters, all of it.

1.5% of it is a cool 330 billion.

How much of a cut of that productivity increase could AI companies take? 30%? That’s 100 billion in one year there.

So with pie-in-the-sky math, they could break even if their obligations throughout the decade don’t amount to 1 trillion (since those 1.5T in bonds issued this year mature in longer periods)

1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivit...

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#102

Post by alwa »

ben_w wrote: post #79
thousand_nights wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can capture that market for next 20 years, it's worth $200 billion. that's like 5% of NVIDIA's current market cap. sounds like peanuts when you lay it out like that

Perhaps. But that's just the USA's software developers in just their first year after graduating. Software devs are 1% of the US job market, the first year after graduation is (66-21=45 years, 1/45 ~= 2%) of a working life, the US is just 4% of the world's population/25% GDP. For the 1% to matter, there have to be other jobs that LLMs can do as well as a fresh graduate. I don't know, are LLMs like someone the first y…

> For the 1% to matter, there have to be other jobs that LLMs can do as well as a fresh graduate. I don't know, are LLMs like someone the first year out of law school or medical school, or are those schools better than software?

Before looking to medical and law schools, I might look to middle-manager school or salesperson school or bookkeeper school.

I don’t know enough to speculate even beyond those crude guesses, but as I thought about this question, I found it interesting to skim the US’ employment-by-detailed-occupation chart:

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#103

Post by georgemcbay »

kittikitti wrote: post #80

This is another doomer article about AI. The author openly admits to using AI for the article and the irony isn't lost on me. How long will we be hearing about the AI bubble?

People continued to use the internet during and after the very real ".com" bubble burst.

LLMs can be useful tools in the right situations and the valuations for companies involved with them can be wildly and irrationally inflated at the same time.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#104

Post by softwaredoug »

hnburnsy wrote: post #83

Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…

On the RHS, post hype, the second movers could work on the boring, unsexy problems in those domains nobody wanted to solve. And solve them extremely well. Then build a moat around that.

There is also a customer adoption curve of technology that lags far behind the technologist adoption curve. For example video on the Web failed a long time, until it didn't, when Youtube began to succeed. The problem became "boring" to technologists in some ways, but consumers gradually caught up.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#105

Post by [deleted] »

hnburnsy wrote: post #83

Pets.com→Chewy Webvan → Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Fresh Kozmo.com → Postmates, Uber Eats, Gopuff Boo.com (fashion) → Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, ASOS Broadcast.com → YouTube, Netflix, Twitch The dot-com bubble didn’t prove the internet was a fad — it proved the internet was inevitable, but the valuations assumed adoption would happen in 2 years instead of 15–20. To me it feels like the AI inevitability will be much qui…

[deleted]

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#106

Post by asdff »

toephu2 wrote: post #84

The fact that I'm getting rate-limited every day even though my company has enterprise-level subscriptions to gemini, chatgpt, etc. tells me this bubble is far from popping. I predict within a year 80%+ of devs will be using LLMs to write most of their code for them.

If it is so certain that will happen this year, why didn't it happen already last year, or the year before that? By most peoples measures the codegen hasn't improved. Some believe the newly released models are even a regression on the old in favor of saving costs.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#107

Post by munk-a »

carlosjobim wrote: post #75
munk-a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is of immense social value - but manual translation services for commercial projects (like application localization) is already dirt cheap to do and automatic casual translation services for consumers would be incredibly difficult to monetize.

I think your perspective might be severely limited. There exists millions of businesses outside of big IT enterprises.

I will freely admit this - but I have led a localization effort on a mobile game and worked on localization for a desktop application. I am also lucky enough to travel abroad quite a bit and am quite familiar with consumer offerings.

So I would fairly limit my experience to consumer and medium-sized business uses - I have no experience with large corporate translation efforts (the largest would probably be Ubisoft or the Mouse-Ears company's gaming divisions if you consider them large) and even the small mobile game company I worked at had a budget in the millions range. It certainly hasn't been a focus of my career but I feel comfortable standing by my statement above.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#108

Post by munk-a »

chickensong wrote: post #61
ares623 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s copium, as the kids say nowadays. The massive planetary investment is a 100% for AI chats. All those other things are taking the crumbs where they can.

Big business and government aren't buying supercomputer clusters and licensing models to run chats.

The really weird thing is that Big Business actually is buying supercomputer clusters to do just that. I can't really talk to the government side but a lot of businesses' early forays into AI was just slapping a chatbot on their product and hoping it'd attract a lot more business. I also think you'd be surprised how integrated really dumb chatbots are into business communication these days.

I think most smart people are looking seriously at different models to try and improve the accuracy of any existing ML uses they had in their business but the new features built post-ChatGPT tend to often just be fancied up chats.

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#109

Post by ghm2180 »

I have a noob question. How can developed economies where populations levels have plateaued continue to be expected to post positive GDPs (and therefore add net new goods and services) yoy?

Homes as assets should pass on, higher cost services of today would be replaced by lower cost which only temporarily would increase units sold(but should eventually plateau because #units/person is not going to change). No component of the GDP will move.

If the fertility rate of developed economies is less than 2.1 then there should be wealth and asset accumulation among the younger people over time. The demand for newer goods and services from the people who get richer is inelastic: most goods and service's prices dont matter to the rich they buy them any ways, and it continues to keep becoming more inelastic.

So within like a several years the demand should just collapse as wealth accumulates a lot and people work less and become more price insensitive. Immigration is set to remain low to developed nations for the next 3-5 years.

This seems to be quite evident in Japan and EU already(though in the EU if you adjust the productivity for work hours the GDP becomes same as America's).

So why do people assume developed countries would even buy this much more new stuff. 1.5 trillion$ worth of new things over the next 5 years?

Re: Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?

#110

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

asdff wrote: post #106
toephu2 wrote: post #84

The fact that I'm getting rate-limited every day even though my company has enterprise-level subscriptions to gemini, chatgpt, etc. tells me this bubble is far from popping. I predict within a year 80%+ of devs will be using LLMs to write most of their code for them.

If it is so certain that will happen this year, why didn't it happen already last year, or the year before that? By most peoples measures the codegen hasn't improved. Some believe the newly released models are even a regression on the old in favor of saving costs.

The tooling for autonomous programming agents are still improving and being iterated upon. Developing integrations with various systems and learning how to most effectively make use of agents is an ongoing and open problem. Adoption has actually been reasonably fast.
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