171–180 of 668 posts
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How is AI hard to understand when you enter a cafe and everyone is chatting with their LLM?
Chat rooms webs were sold by millions in the dotcom era. And everybody used them. Nowdays everybody see them as useless.
He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.
Video game crash followed by video games taking off and eclipsing most other forms of digital entertainment. Dot com crash followed by the web getting pretty popular and a bit central to business. To all those betting big on AI before the crash: Careful, Icarus.
The leap of faith necessary in LLMs to achieve the same feat is so large its very difficult to imagine it happening. Particularly due to the well known constraints on what the technology is capable of.
The whole investment thesis of LLMs is that it will be able to a) be intelligent b) produce new knowledge. If those two things that dont happen, what has been delivered is not commensurate to the risk in regards to the money invested.
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It was founded 1998, very much dotcom era, and had no significant web 2.0 products for years after that.
Gmail and Google Maps were prototypical 2.0.
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HN said the same thing about Uber forever.
Uber didn't invent anything, they drove taxis out of business then jacked up the prices, squeezed the workers, and now everybody is riding around in regular people's crappy cars for more than a cab cost. And now I need a phone and to maintain my relationship with these two crappy companies rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.) That was literally what everybody said would happen…
If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too late.
Do I have this right that there have been no or at least very few pure AI IPO's during this cycle (I can't actually think of a single one)? So it's dissimilar to dotcom in that regard because during that time countless dotcoms went public with sky-high valuations and then failed. A bunch of reputable companies also went or were already public during that time and those saw huge valuation drops so that's more analogou…
This time is always different, until it isn't. However, it is different from the internet bubble partially for the reason you describe. There have been a few IPOs, but they perhaps happened earlier in the cycle, or companies are pivoting into AI. I'm thinking companies like Palantir, which was always AI, or Salesforce which is making a big AI pivot. Most of the funding is not coming from public sectors. There is so m…
The big advantage of staying private is controlling the narrative.
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And we're not talking a 51-49 disproportion, we're talking about a 99.9999 percent of the benefit will go to the richest people
How so?
This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.
The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?
Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
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Is the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem. The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc. Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erod…
Undeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see them nonstop is incredible.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...
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Is the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem. The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc. Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erod…
Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past? Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever. I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume. If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and mo…
Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality.
The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from.
Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.