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Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

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111–120 of 234 posts

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#111
post #92
post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

That's true for driverless cars but there's many areas where you don't need 100% to be useful. Stable diffusion and LLMs are 90% there but still very useful and cool.

Most of those areas don't normally have a lot of value or you're marginally improving on existing recommendation systems. It's a coin toss on how much of an improvement this wave of LLM powered ML systems will have over the previous wave of "enterprise knowledge collation" systems and if that will be enough for people to buy them.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#112
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? > The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. It's also available at zero cost, thanks to the ecosystem around Stable Diffusion. You probably know the meme that gets parroted randomly about OpenAI needing a moat; well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists?

> well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists? Although this is debatable, lets accept it for the sake of argument that adobe has no moat. If this is the case, this may be bad for adobe, but it is amazing for the design world. Producing more art for cheaper is real value. And we may not know who specifically will capture that value, but it is undeniably value none the less that will go somewhere . That still bene…

> Producing more art for cheaper is real value.

Except that if art production becomes too easy, the prices go down, and the only party benefiting is the consumer/customer.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#113
post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

> The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. > Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco [...] From the outside, it sure does look like driverless is still firmly at "sort of works": "After California regulators approved the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco earlier this month, it took only a little more than 24 hours for a series of events t…

That's Cruise. Waymo has driven 1 million miles as of last January with only two incidents that have met the government's reporting criteria and no injuries. Those stats are impressive.

https://waymo.com/blog/2023/02/first-million-rider-only-mile...

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#114
post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Self-driving is never going to happen, and its also sitting in some sort of informational blind spot for the people working on it - I have no idea why. There is no such thing as "driving" there is no physical force, or particle. There is no force preventing you from driving in the opposite direction of traffic, or through glass panes. "Driving" is entirely a social phenomnon, the confluence of societal self impositio…

Indeed, it would probably require the invention of a true Artificial Intelligence, and of high quality as well. Not the glorified autocomplete the scammers are trying to pass as AI now, but the real thing that can sense and understand the world around it.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#115
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. Same like how the computers enabled billions to do the most complex calculations within a second, while before you needed to learn that skill over years or practise.

> Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? > The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. It's also available at zero cost, thanks to the ecosystem around Stable Diffusion. You probably know the meme that gets parroted randomly about OpenAI needing a moat; well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists?

The design world runs on Creative Suite, and the Figma acquisition improved that position. There's a network effect to the software, the file format, and creative team collaboration tools.

Given this, competitors need to be meaningfully better, not just equivalent or somewhat better. Adobe is still in the position to be the go to product suite for creative professionals.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#116
post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

How do you define "poor"? Net worth of less than $10M? Income less than $1M? Unless you set very strict limits for "poor" like that, the people that the ultra rich hire tend to be rather well off, or at least comfortable, themselves ( by that I mean net worth of >$1M OR income of >$100k. Actual poor people don't built state of the art tech. At best, they work as cleaning staff or in the cafeteria of those companies.…

>income of >$100k

This is barely "middle class" now, unless you live in the middle of nowhere or like a college student.

$100k/yr stopped being impressive long ago. Even the FAANG rich boys are closer to the janitor than to the CEO.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#117
post #27

Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped. Whether you believe AI is going to be massively tr…

We use the tech the blockchain sector was based on every day. The program is called git.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#119
post #27

Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped. Whether you believe AI is going to be massively tr…

Isn't a lot of the cash coming from funds? Funds that diversify but still can pump billions into this sector without breaking a sweat. Individual investors don't have a lot of opportunity to buy in anyway, and they usually know the risks. But funds can blindly pump memes alongside modest strategies and still return on investment overall; and they aren't left standing when the music stops.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#120
Regardless of wether it's the right idea right now, I am convinced that AI is at least not he complete vapourware that blockchain was. That really was some useless hype. There's something to show for and real applications, from self driving cars to other smart systems. Classifiers are everywhere.

I interact with chatgpt regularly. It's in my smartphone classifying my photos. I don't know when I have ever interacted with a blockchain.

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