Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

blog.robbowley.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 489 posts

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#241

Post by alganet »

pixl97 wrote: post #203
alganet wrote: post #93

One key difference in all of this is that people were not predicting the dotcom bubble, so there was a surplus left after it popped. It was a surprise. This AI bubble already has lots of people with their forks and knifes waiting to capitalize on a myriad of possible surpluses after the burst. There's speculation on top of _the next bubble_ and how it will form, even before this one pops. That is absolutely disgustin…

> of _the next bubble_ and how it will form This is how humans have worked with pretty much every area of expansion in at least the last 500 years and probably longer. It's especially noticeable now because the amount of excess capital in the world from technological expansion makes it very noticeable and a lot of the limitations we know of in physics have been ran into, so further work gets very expensive. If you wa…

No, that's not how capitalism works. Debt is not the same thing as a speculation bubble.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#242

Post by crote »

pixl97 wrote: post #180
dgacmu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982. It sounded pretty robotic and the decisions were 1982-level AI: Lots of if statements. I'm not really trying to be snarky; I'm trying to point out to you that you're being really vague. And that when you actually get really, really concrete about what we have it ... starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think". Computers…

>I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982. And it became and industry that as completely and totally changed the world. The world was just so analog back then. >starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think" Computer thinking will never become magical. As soon as we figure something out it becomes "oh that is just X". It is human thinking that will become less magi…

The "talking and making decisions" part didn't change the world, though. It was the digital spreadsheets and letters that did.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#243

Post by hiq »

ACCount37 wrote: post #171
notepad0x90 wrote: post #133

The AI "bubble" won't burst just like the "internet bubble" didn't burst. the dotcom bubble was a result of investors jumping on the hype train all at once and then getting off of it all at once. Yes, investors will eventually find another hype train to jump on, but unlike 2000, we have tons of more retail investors and AI is also not a brand new tech sector, it's built upon the existing well established and "too big…

People don't have the grasp of just how insane that "800M MAU and still growing" figure is. CEOs would kill people with their own bare hands to get this kind of userbase. OpenAI has ~4B of revenue already, and they aren't even monetizing aggressively. Facebook has an infinite money glitch, and can afford to put billions in the ground in pursuit of moonshots and Zuck's own vanity projects. Google is Google, and xAI is…

> they aren't even monetizing aggressively

That's one of the issues with the current valuation: it's unclear to me how many of the 800M MAU will stick to ChatGPT once it monetizes more aggressively, especially if its competitors don't. How many use ChatGPT instead of Claude because the free version offers more? How many will just switch once it doesn't anymore?

OpenAI is already at a 500B valuation; the numbers I could find indicate that this number grew 3x in a year. One can reasonably ask if there's some ceiling or if it can keep on growing indefinitely. Do we expect it to become more valuable than Meta or MSFT? Can they keep raising money at higher valuations? What happens if they can't anymore, given that they seem to rely on this even for their running costs, not even speaking about their investments to remain competitive? Would current investors be fine if the valuation is still 500B in a year, or would they try to exit in a panic sell? Would they panic even if the valuation keeps growing but at a more modest pace?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#245

Post by vharuck »

lxgr wrote: post #211
dotnet00 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the example of egyptian archeology, if you're reading the work of someone who is well regarded as an expert in the field, you can trust their word a lot more than you can trust the word of an AI, even if the AI is provided the text you're reading. This is a pretty massive difference between the two, and your narrative is part of why AI is proving to be so harmful for education in general. Delusional dreamers a…

The vast majority of people trying to do any given thing simply don’t have access to experts in the field, though. I’ll take a potential solution I can validate over no idea whatsoever of my own any day.

>I'll take a potential solution I can validate over no idea whatsoever of my own any day.

If you have to validate what the LLM says, I assume you'd do that by researching primary sources and works by other experts. At that point, the LLM did nothing except charge you for a few tokens before you went down the usual research path. I could see LLMs being good for providing an outline of what you'd need to research, which is definitely helpful but not in a singularity way.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#246

Post by tim333 »

KPGv2 wrote: post #137
mikert89 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they didnt have the compute or the data to make use of NNs. but theoretically NNs made sense even back then, and many people thought they could give rise to intelligent machines. they were probably right, and its a shame they didnt live to see whats happening right now

> they didnt have the compute or the data to make use of NNs The compute and data are both limitations of NNs. We've already gotten really close to the data limit (we aren't generating enough useful content as a species and the existing stuff has all been slurped up). Standard laws of physics restrict the compute side, just like how we know we will hit it with CPUs. Eventually, you just cannot put things closer toget…

We have evidence that general intelligence can be produced but a bunch of biological neurons in the brain and modern computers can process similar amounts of data to those so it's a matter of figuring how to wire it up as it were.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#247

Post by fragmede »

AstroBen wrote: post #44
mikert89 wrote: post #4

I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.

..except they can't It's blatantly obvious to see if you work with something you personally have a lot of expertise in. They're effectively advanced search engines. Useful sure.. but they're not anywhere close to "making decisions"

In what sense? It seems entirely possible to have a computer program that calls ChatGPT with questions on what stocks to buy, and for that computer program to then trade stock based on the results, entirely autonomously. No matter your opinion of the idea itself, why wouldn't that count as "making decisions"?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#248

Post by what »

lxgr wrote: post #211
dotnet00 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the example of egyptian archeology, if you're reading the work of someone who is well regarded as an expert in the field, you can trust their word a lot more than you can trust the word of an AI, even if the AI is provided the text you're reading. This is a pretty massive difference between the two, and your narrative is part of why AI is proving to be so harmful for education in general. Delusional dreamers a…

The vast majority of people trying to do any given thing simply don’t have access to experts in the field, though. I’ll take a potential solution I can validate over no idea whatsoever of my own any day.

All of the information available from an LLM (and probably more) is available in books or published on the internet. They can go to a library and a read a book. They can be fairly certain books written by subject matter experts aren’t just made up.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#249

Post by fragmede »

jayd16 wrote: post #202
logicchains wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not running at a loss. Training runs at a loss, but the models are profitable to serve if you don't need to continuously train new models.

But you do or you're missing current events, right?

There are a number of techniques to modify a model post-training. Some of those techniques allow adding current events to the model's "knowledge" without having to do an entire from-scratch training run, saving money.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#250

Post by [deleted] »

hiq wrote: post #219
tyleo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an M4 MBP and I also think Apple is set up quite nicely to take real advantage of local models. They already work on the most expensive Apple hardware. I expect that price to come down in the next few years. It’s really just the UX that’s bad but that’s solvable. Apple isn’t having to pay for each users power and use either. They sell hardware once and folks pay with their own electricity to run it.

Your comment made me realize that there's also the benefit of not having to handle the hardware depreciation, it's pushed to the customer. And now Apple has renewed arguments to sell better machines more often ("you had ChatGPT 3-like performance locally last year, now you can get ChatGPT 4-like performance if you buy the new model"). I know folks who still use some old Apple laptops, maybe 5+ years old, since they d…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN