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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?

#191

Post by tim333 »

ghm2180 wrote: post #109

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 compone…

Even if the populations and quantities of stuff sold by weight peak, people can still by fancier stuff - Ferraris rather than Fiestas etc. GDP just measures the amount spent basically.

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

#192

Post by tim333 »

kergonath wrote: post #57
mmooss wrote: post #2

To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is a…

> To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. Not really. I mean, not only. The value of the web is immense. And yet, the dot-com bubble was indeed a bubble. What matters is the value in the short term compared to the value of the companies in the current context . Even if AI is huge 20 years from now, it can still crash dramatically tomorrow.

I was going to say that. Also the bubble can be in some areas but not in others. I think the proposed data center build out is a bubble as in not economically justified presently, but I think money spent on AI research is reasonable.

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

#193

Post by tim333 »

shigawire wrote: post #53

I think I'm asking for the impossible here... But is anyone trying to hedge risk in their personal finances? I'm not a real "investor" (index funds only) but I am feeling more willing to forgo gains to be more risk averse just based on my own neuroses. Maybe I cash out and buy T-bills? Gold? Bullets? What's the non-crazy person equivalent?

I'm not sure it's sensible but I have a lot of cash at the moment. I think there'll be a bit of a crash and then it'll be good to invest in stocks bitcoin or whatever. Non crazy might be income generating boring companies like utilities.

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

#194

Post by tim333 »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #69
shigawire wrote: post #53

I think I'm asking for the impossible here... But is anyone trying to hedge risk in their personal finances? I'm not a real "investor" (index funds only) but I am feeling more willing to forgo gains to be more risk averse just based on my own neuroses. Maybe I cash out and buy T-bills? Gold? Bullets? What's the non-crazy person equivalent?

If you look at most stock markets over a very long timeline, on average it goes up because the economy is growing. So a very broad portfolio of stocks or ETFs. Gold is only for very rich people if you want to have something in the case the whole economy goes to the bin. Bullets if you are paranoid.

A friend of mine who is decidedly not rich put her money in gold (via an ETF) two or three years ago and has done very well. She wasn't even trying to do well, just have something that wouldn't get eaten by inflation or crash in a hurry.

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

#195

Post by tim333 »

pedalpete wrote: post #74

I wonder if we need a new term rather than bubble for these types of short-term over-invested sectors. The Tulip mania (if it existed) was a bubble. It popped, it's never coming back. BeanieBabies was a bubble for the same reason. NFT art remains to be seen, but I think it was likely a bubble. The internet was over-invested and decreased significantly when looking on a timeline of 5-7 years. But outside of that, if y…

>... Tulip mania ... never coming back.

Poor old much maligned tulips. The mania isn't coming back but the tulip industry had endured for nearly four hundred years and Holland produces billions of tulip bulbs each year. Some of the more conservative tulip buyers in mania days probably even did ok out of it.

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

#196

Post by gizmo686 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #184
tim333 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no new algorithm ideas on the horizon The LLM algorithms seem pretty clunky to me, like a hack designed for text translation that surprised everyone by getting quite smart. The reason the human brain is so much more energy efficient is quite likely better design/algorithms. I was watching some video comparing brain and LLM function and almost tempted to try building something myself ( https://youtu.be/3SUqBUGlyh8 ).…

Everyone says "those autoregressive transformer LLMs are obviously flawed", and then fails to come up with anything that outperforms them. I'm not too bullish on architectural gains. There are efficiencies to be had, but far closer to "+5% a year" than "+5000% in a single breakthrough". You can try to build a novel AI architecture, at a small scale. Just be ready. This field will kick your teeth in. ML doesn't like g…

Most people are not ML researchers. Most of the AI industry is not AI researchers. Most of the AI spending is not going to AI researchers.

AI researchers came up with an architectural improvement that made a lot of previously impossible stuff barely possible. Then, industry ran with it. Scaling that particular trick to the limits by throwing as much raw compute and data at it as humanly possible.

You don't need to be an AI expert to know that there are probably more advances to be had and that funding foundational research is the way to get them.

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

#197

Post by ACCount37 »

gizmo686 wrote: post #196
ACCount37 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone says "those autoregressive transformer LLMs are obviously flawed", and then fails to come up with anything that outperforms them. I'm not too bullish on architectural gains. There are efficiencies to be had, but far closer to "+5% a year" than "+5000% in a single breakthrough". You can try to build a novel AI architecture, at a small scale. Just be ready. This field will kick your teeth in. ML doesn't like g…

Most people are not ML researchers. Most of the AI industry is not AI researchers. Most of the AI spending is not going to AI researchers. AI researchers came up with an architectural improvement that made a lot of previously impossible stuff barely possible. Then, industry ran with it. Scaling that particular trick to the limits by throwing as much raw compute and data at it as humanly possible. You don't need to be…

The results from "funding foundational research" are, too, middling at best.

It's not certain if something like JEPA would ever reach production grade AI models.

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

#198

Post by tim333 »

fsmv wrote: post #185
ACCount37 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone says "those autoregressive transformer LLMs are obviously flawed", and then fails to come up with anything that outperforms them. I'm not too bullish on architectural gains. There are efficiencies to be had, but far closer to "+5% a year" than "+5000% in a single breakthrough". You can try to build a novel AI architecture, at a small scale. Just be ready. This field will kick your teeth in. ML doesn't like g…

Physics is obviously incomplete and yet nobody can solve quantum gravity. Being obviously flawed doesn't mean the solution is obvious. That's the whole problem.

Not obvious but the brain manages to think in ways LLMs don't really and the design is presumably of fairly finite complexity to be encoded in DNA.

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

#199

Post by worik »

mmooss wrote: post #134
worik wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The value of modern AI seems very hig Very useful, clearly. But valuable? In aggregate it seems clear that it is. But where does that value acrue? It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. It does not seem possible that any conceivable business can pay for all the announced plans for developing data centres, nor energy available to power them. If AI systems can be developed to…

> It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. Won't the value will be concentrated in the few with the scale to build competitive AIs? In a sense, costs are spread thinly across the content creators whose work has been stolen. (But of course, it is indeed incredibly concentrated in building datacenters.)

> content creators whose work has been stolen.

The law is an ass.

Current IP laws are too restrictive, but scraping public facing websites is not theft even under those crazy laws

I have no moral objection to the use of Anna's Archive to train models. A good use, if illegal. But I do recogise and condemn the hypocrisy of Meta doing it. Not surprising, just disgusting

The wasting of bandwidth is annoying, so silly. We should be better organized

Calling it theft is buying into the mad bad and sad IP legal thinking that has become the dominant paradigm in the West

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

#200

Post by worik »

mmooss wrote: post #134
worik wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The value of modern AI seems very hig Very useful, clearly. But valuable? In aggregate it seems clear that it is. But where does that value acrue? It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. It does not seem possible that any conceivable business can pay for all the announced plans for developing data centres, nor energy available to power them. If AI systems can be developed to…

> It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. Won't the value will be concentrated in the few with the scale to build competitive AIs? In a sense, costs are spread thinly across the content creators whose work has been stolen. (But of course, it is indeed incredibly concentrated in building datacenters.)

> Won't the value will be concentrated in the few with the scale to build competitive AIs?

No.

Open AI and their ilk can sell tokens, but how much business is there in that? Trillions? If not, they're bankrupt.

Dead man walking. Zombie

The open and free models are very capable and getting better.

If there is a breakthrough beyond transformers and neural nets that means trustworthy AI that can be agentic (does not exist, the "trustworthy" part) then it will be exponentially more valuable. But that was as likely in 2020 as in 2030.

Meanwhile something like 10% of the USA electricity supply is being "committed" to datacenters and no practical plans to supply it

Meanwhile the Chinese are leaping ahead and in a more community orientated open way. The cognitive dissonance is quite loud for that one!

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