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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?

#201

Post by cousinbryce »

refactor_master wrote: post #144
mancerayder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot - cheating on job interviews, writing resumes to be repetitive, and adding an annoying flowery tone to non-native English speakers who think AI wrote something for them that isn't AI-obvious.

I wonder how many market inefficiencies this creates. People with worse education, people who cheated their way to a job opening compared to a better candidate, etc. Basically counteracting the productivity gains AI was supposed to bring.

There’s a corollary here. People with worse educations may be able to do much higher quality work.

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

#202

Post by thefz »

laterium wrote: post #161
thefz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inevitability of what, chatbots that mark poisonous mushrooms as edible in every product?

How does this add to the discussion? Is the goal to make HN as toxic as everywhere else online? If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise this performative negativity and cynicism is boring honestly.

What I have to say is in the comment above: chatbots are mediocre at best

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

#203

Post by R_D_Olivaw »

arximboldi wrote: post #173
didibus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP does not require that the goods or services were sold for money. GDP measures the market value adjusted to constant quality of all final goods and services produced. GDP can grow even with fewer workers, fewer hours, fewer buyers, and fewer units sold. So the way I understood it, productivity, efficiency and quality gains can increase GDP year over year. Say we are a country of 1 person. If that person can make a…

I have a theory (actually I wanted at some point to write more seriously about it) about how GDP also expands by consuming life itself. If you're burnt out, or don't have time to see friends and are depressed have to pay for therapy, GDP grows. If you don't have time to care for your children so you have to keep them busy with million classes, or paid for caretaking, GDP expands. If you don't have time or confidence…

Monkeys invented numbers. And then created a world where numbers are all that matters.

A human life, it's worth what? 1 millions usd? 10million usd? 20 million usd? Is it worth saving lives of GDP goes down?

We're due for a reckoning.

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

#204

Post by mmooss »

acdha wrote: post #189
mmooss wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded. All I can say is, that was the opposite of what I've heard. Did you participate? Also, Google was many years after Netscape's IPO, seen as the…

There's a lot of variety in the quality of writing from that period. At the time, a lot of “analysts” were doing lazy number-go-up stories rather than the harder work of actually looking at business fundamentals—I remember so many stories which were basically trying to rationalize the greater fool theory—and there was also a tendency to lump all of the internet companies together. Amazon.com was an interesting exampl…

Thanks for all the detail from someone who was there.

> completely missing the distinction between the dotcoms which were losing money on every sale with no way to close the gap and Amazon, which was expanding rapidly but was profitable in each business segment within a couple years (e.g. books were cash-positive circa 1995) and could go from reporting losses to profits any time they wanted simply by slowing their expansion plans.

Great insight. And of course Amazon would raise any funds possible to expand into this new frontier.

> Win95 was the first version of Windows to ship with built-in TCP/IP and a web browser, not to mention being a lot closer to the competition on usability.

Per Wikipedia:

"Windows 95 originally shipped without Internet Explorer, and the default network installation did not include TCP/IP .... At the release date of Windows 95, Internet Explorer 1.0 was available,[48] but only in the Plus! add-on pack for Windows 95, which was a separate product. ...

Windows 95 OEM Service Release 1 was the first release of Windows to include Internet Explorer (version 2.0) with the OS."

My point is not to nitpick, but that the Internet's value wasn't obvious to Microsoft at that point.

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

#205

Post by mmooss »

worik wrote: post #199
mmooss wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In a way, I agree with your last sentence. But there is a difference, and that is power.

As a simplistic hypothesis: The already-powerful and super-wealthy taking all that IP from the small content creators is theft, IMHO. The small content creators who can't afford JSTOR finding some free source for a paper, etc. is democratic, empowering, and enriches our society.

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

#206

Post by ghm2180 »

didibus wrote: post #126
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…

GDP does not require that the goods or services were sold for money. GDP measures the market value adjusted to constant quality of all final goods and services produced. GDP can grow even with fewer workers, fewer hours, fewer buyers, and fewer units sold. So the way I understood it, productivity, efficiency and quality gains can increase GDP year over year. Say we are a country of 1 person. If that person can make a…

But this only addresses the supply side. The demand side has to be buying those two cars. The 1 person country car that one or two car would need to be bought by someone else there is no GDP consumption recorded

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

#207

Post by fakedang »

rafaelero wrote: post #24

Idk, we seem to be the at the cusp of autonomous driving. Transportation is like ~8% of world's GDP. Payroll is, what, 30% of that? It seems like we can already have the return on all AI investment by just conquering this one application.

Transportation AI does not remotely require any of the heavy investments obligated to run LLMs.

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

#208

Post by soorya3 »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #182
nitwit005 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those early .com companies could have been profitable. They chose to go for rapid growth instead. Some people here probably remember discussion of users mattering more than revenue. You see that same pattern with AI now. Products are being provided for free or nearly free, and plenty is being spent on marketing.

Thats because both then and now there’s a perception that it’s a land grab. That the key to success is developing a brand and user base faster than the next person can. And that’s where AI makes things so hard. Creating a protective moat.

also people forget that user base can change, yahoo -> gmail, altavista -> google search etc

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

#210

Post by maximus-decimus »

AstroBen wrote: post #120
more_corn wrote: post #14

Ok, so if that prediction is true what actions did you take? Identify the therefore part of the prediction and enumerate the three highest priority steps. Have you determined that the stock market will crash and bought positions accordingly? Have you sold all your nvidia stock? What are the implications in the broader economy and what steps have you taken?

Recognizing a bubble and timing what will happen are two really different things. Will it pop tomorrow or 4 years from now? Will the market go up another 70% before the eventual pop?

You even have to time the market twice : when it'll go down so you sell just before and when it'll go up so you don't lose on the gains.
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