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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

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Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#281

Post by chairmansteve »

chii wrote: post #85
nostrademons wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this as well. It's a huge boon for startups, because it means that a lot of functions that you would previously need to hire specialists for (logo design! graphic design! programming! copywriting!) can now be brought in-house, where the founder just does a "good enough" job using AI. And for those that can't (legal, for example, or various SaaS vendors) the AI usually has a good idea of what services you…

> ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity that's not destroying economic activity - it's removing a less efficient activity and replace it with a more efficient version. This produces economic surplus. Imagine saying this for someone digging a hole, that if they use a mechanical digger instead of a hand shovel, they'd destroy economic activity since it now cost less to dig that hole!

You are right. The next question is, who gets the surplus?

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#282

Post by iamacyborg »

ragequittah wrote: post #261
iamacyborg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. What we’re really talking about here is the consolidated of power under a few tech elites. Saying it’s a luddite argument is a red herring.

A whole lot of what I use every day especially for images and audio is open source. The open source AI video is getting pretty good these days as well. Better than the sora that I pay for anyways. Granted not nearly as good as veo3 yet. So long as Nvidia doesn't nerf their consumer cards and we keep getting more and more vram I can see open source competing.

I’m yet to see these models produce anything actually good yet, paid or otherwise. On the bright side the movie industry seems to have actually been smart and still makes extensive use of unions which should help protect actual artists.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#283

Post by estimator7292 »

The problem with viewing AI through the lens of capitalism is the fact that you can't make it artificially scarce.

AI is largely capable of running on-device. In a few years, it's likely that most tasks that most people want AI for will be possible from a tiny model living in their phone. Open source models are plentiful, functional, and only becoming moreso.

But you can't monetize that. We're currently dumping billions of dollars into datacenter moats that are just gonna evaporate inside the decade.

For the average user doing their daily "who was that actor in that movie" query, no, you absolutely cannot monetize AI because all of your local devices can run the model for free with enough quality that no one will know or care that there's a difference.

For enterprise scale building a trillion dollar datacenter and 15 nuclear reactors to replace a hundred developers... also no. LLMs are not capable of that, and likely won't be in the foreseeable future. It's also extremely unclear that one could ever get an ROI on in-house AI like this. It might be more plausible if it were a commodity technology you can just buy, but then you can't make a moat.

The only hypothetical fortune to be found is by whoever is selling AI to people who think they need to buy AI. Just like bitcoin or NFTs.

The good news is that this has two possible outcomes: capitalist AI vendors will want to remove AI from individual access so they can sell it to you: everyone gets less AI. Capitalists realize they can never monetize AI when it's free and open source, and give up: everyone gets less AI. Win-win-win, in my book.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#284

Post by psolidgold »

KPGv2 wrote: post #57
benoau wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.

> With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art Imagery AI does not produce art. Not that it matters to anyone but artists and art enjoyers.

Stop trying to impose your narrow-minded definition of art onto other people. If you disagree, that's fine, but you've lost my respect the moment you tell someone else that their definition of art is wrong.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#285

Post by grues-dinner »

iamacyborg wrote: post #262
grues-dinner wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of the hole digging analogy, it seems like a lot of holes didn't need to be carefully hand-dug by experts with dead straight sides. Using an excavator to sloppily scoop out a few buckets in 5 minutes before driving off is good enough for dumping a tree into. For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. Most actual humans ignore most ads at a consci…

> For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. You think wrong. This stuff is easy to measure and businesses spend billions in aggregate a month on this stuff. It’s provably effective and the details matter.

Do they though? Saturation bombing the Superbowl with Coinbase ads might be effective, but will it significantly change the conversion if a person in the background of the shot has a fuzzy leg that merges with a fire hydrant?

Businesses presumably spend billions on things like office carpet too and very few of them care exactly what neutral-ish colour it is.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#286

Post by akomtu »

jschveibinz wrote: post #271

We have a limited time on earth. AI may present an opportunity for us to improve the quality of life or the amount of time spent doing things we really want to do while we are here. Those who spend time figuring out how to use AI for these purposes will be heroes, and only then will AI have been a positive development for humanity. Get to work, heroes!

Creating a machine lifeform that competes with humans for resources is hardly a heroic act.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#287

Post by grues-dinner »

thwarted wrote: post #268
ben_w wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the AI art in an advert is weird enough to make the advert itself memorable. For example, in one of the underground stations here in Berlin there was a massive billboard advert clearly made by an AI, and you could tell noone had bothered to check what the image was before they printed it: a smiling man was standing up as they left an airport scanner x-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and a robot standing n…

> Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no idea what it was selling. A friend of mine liked to point out that if you couldn't remember what the brand was or what was being sold, then it wasn't effective advertising. It failed at the one thing it needed to do/be. And there's a lot of ineffective advertising. Either people don't notice it or they don't remember it. Massive amounts of m…

I think a lot of advertising is extremely effective in that it implants the brand in your subconscious through repetition and familiarity. I would much rather go to a local sandwich shop that a Subway, and I've been to a Subway maybe 10 times in my entire life, not once in over 15 years, and am not especially impressed by what I got for the money, and yet every time I go past a Subway my brain immediately goes "ooh look a Subway" and I have to almost deliberately go "no, walk on" to myself.

Which lines up with the rest of what you say that if it's just about hammering the recognition into your grey matter, it's not especially important if the hammer is gold plated.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#288

Post by ac29 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #245
pydry wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be larger if wealth inequality werent so staggeringly high. The first automated-server restaurants (Horn and hardart) appeared in the 1930s during the depression. They were popular because they were cheap. Far from being the wave of the future, they went out of business in the 1950s when people started having disposable income. Part of the reason we accept slop, impersonal service and mass produced crud is not b…

I have doubts on the quality and how automated a 1930s restaurant could have been.

They are talking about automating the serving process, not the cooking process.

Specifically, you can read about Automats, which were basically early vending machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#289

Post by Retric »

autoexec wrote: post #93
Retric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren’t getting rich with AI products, they are getting rich selling AI companies.

nvidia is getting rich selling AI products.

They sell products to AI companies not AI products.

Electric utilities are also making bank, but it’s boring old electricity not some new AI electricity product.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#290

Post by silenced_trope »

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

I'm also a hobbyist gamedev that struggles with the art side. Can I ask what AI tools you've been using most?
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