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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#221

Post by KoolKat23 »

bakugo wrote: post #128
aurareturn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No she’s less productive. She just use it because she wants to do less work, be less likely to get promoted, and have to stay in the office longer to finish her work. /s What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder? Like ChatGPT is some…

You're working under the assumption that punching a prompt into ChatGPT and getting up to grab some coffee while it spits out thousands of tokens of meaningless slop to be used as a substitute for something that you previously would've written yourself is a net upgrade for everyone involved. It's not. I can use ChatGPT to write 20 paragraph email replies that would've previously been a single manually written paragra…

That's a very broad assumption.

It's no different to a manager that delegates, are they less of a manager because they entrust the work to someone else? No. So long as they do quality checks and take responsibility for the results, wheres the issue?

Work hard versus work smart. Busywork cuts both ways.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#222

Post by paulsutter »

> The AI infrastructure boom is the most important economic story in the world.

Energy spending is about $10T per year, even telecom is $2T a year

The AI infrastructure boom at $400B a year is big but far from the most important economic story in the world.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#223

Post by automatic6131 »

pruetj wrote: post #200
eek2121 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my eyes, it'd be cheaper for a company to simply purchase laptops with decent hardware specs, and run the LLMs locally. I've had decent results from various models I've run via LMStudio, and bonus points: It costs nothing and doesn't even use all that much CPU/GPU power. Just my opinion as a FORMER senior software dev (disabled now).

> purchase laptops with decent hardware specs > It costs nothing Seems like it does cost something?

Quite, the typical 5 year depreciation on personal computing means a top-of-the-line $5k laptop works out to a ~$80/month spend... but it's on something you'd already spend for an employee

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#225

Post by coldpie »

jstummbillig wrote: post #176
lm28469 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the important people at FAANG, all the people at OpenAI/Anthropic, all the investors. It's like asking big pharma if medicine should be less regulated, "all the experts agree", well yeah, their paycheck depends on it. Same reason no one at meta tells Zuck that his metaverse is dogshit and no one wants it, they still spent billions on it. You can't assume everyone is that dumb, but you certainly can assume that…

Again, this is not an argument. I am asking: Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong? This is not rhetorical question, I am not looking for a rhetorical answer. What is every important decision maker at all these companies missing? The point is not that they could not all be wrong, they absolutely could. The point is: Make a good argument. Being a general…

> Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong?

Because of historical precedent. Bitcoin was the future until it wasn't. NFTs and blockchain were the future until they weren't. The Metaverse was the future until it wasn't. Theranos was the future until it wasn't. I don't think LLMs are quite on the same level as those scams, but they smell pretty similar: they're being pushed primarily by sales- and con-men eager to get in on the scam before it collapses. The amount being spent on LLMs right now is way out of line with the usefulness we are getting out of them. Once the bubble pops and the tools have a profitability requirement introduced, I think they'll just be quietly integrated into a few places that make sense and otherwise abandoned. This isn't the world-changing tech it's being made out to be.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#226

Post by rkomorn »

jstummbillig wrote: post #176
lm28469 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the important people at FAANG, all the people at OpenAI/Anthropic, all the investors. It's like asking big pharma if medicine should be less regulated, "all the experts agree", well yeah, their paycheck depends on it. Same reason no one at meta tells Zuck that his metaverse is dogshit and no one wants it, they still spent billions on it. You can't assume everyone is that dumb, but you certainly can assume that…

Again, this is not an argument. I am asking: Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong? This is not rhetorical question, I am not looking for a rhetorical answer. What is every important decision maker at all these companies missing? The point is not that they could not all be wrong, they absolutely could. The point is: Make a good argument. Being a general…

I think you have a point and I'm not sure I entirely disagree with you, so take this as lighthearted banter, but:

Coming from the opposite angle, what makes you think these folks have a habit of being right?

VCs are notoriously making lots of parallel bets hoping one pays off.

Companies fail all the time, either completely (eg Yahoo! getting bought for peanuts down from their peak valuation), or at initiatives small and large (Google+, arguably Meta and the metaverse). Industry trends sometimes flop in the short term (3D TVs or just about all crypto).

C-levels, boards, and VCs being wrong is hardly unusual.

I'd say failure is more of a norm than success, so what should convince us it's different this time with the AI frenzy? They wouldn't be investing this much if they were wrong?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#227

Post by mrweasel »

bko wrote: post #217
donatj wrote: post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

I think text is the ultimate interface. A company can just build and maintain very strong internal APIs and punt on the UX component. For instance, suppose I'm using figma, I want to just screenshot what I want it to look like and it can get me started. Or if I'm using Notion, I want a better search. Nothing necessarily generative, but something like "what was our corporate address". It also replaces help if well int…

For AI I'm of the opinion that the best interface is no interface. AI is something to be baked into the functionality of software, quietly working in the back. It's not something the user actually interacts with.

The chat interfaces are, in my opinion infuriating. It feels like talking to the co-worker who knows absolutely everything about the topic at hand, but if you use the wrong terms and phrases he'll pretend that he has no idea what you're talking about.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#228

Post by skybrian »

boxed wrote: post #207
skybrian wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know this?

Statistically this is obvious. Most people use the free tier. Their total losses are enormous and their revenue is not great.

No, it’s not obvious. You can’t do this calculation without having numbers, and they need to come from somewhere.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#229

Post by ACCount37 »

driverdan wrote: post #188

I keep seeing articles like this but does anyone actually think we're not in a bubble? From what I've seen these companies acknowledge it's a bubble and that they're overspending without a way to make the money back. They're doing it because they have the money and feel it's worth the risk in case it pays off. If they don't spend, another company does, and it hits big they will be left behind. This is at least insura…

I don't think it's a bubble.

There's a very real possibility that all the AI research investment of today unlocks AGI, on a timescale between a couple of years and a couple of decades, and that would upend the economy altogether. And falling short of that aspiration could still get you pretty far.

A lot of "AI" startups would crash and burn long before they deliver any real value. But that's true of any startup boom.

Right now, the bulk of the market value isn't in those vulnerable startups, but in major industry players like OpenAI and Nvidia. For the "bubble" to "pop", you need those companies to lose big. I don't think that it's likely to happen.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#230

Post by squidbeak »

emp17344 wrote: post #150
donatj wrote: post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

Agreed… I feel increasingly alienated because I don’t understand how AI is providing enough value to justify the truly insane level of investment.

Remember, investment is for the future. It would seem riskier if progress was flat, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
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