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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?

#371

Post by mattmanser »

kasey_junk wrote: post #367
mattmanser wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snark only works when you've got a valid point. One person can write sqllite. You can iterate up to bigger opensource DBs like postgre. One person cannot create a modern LLM model unless they have 10s of millions of dollars to burn on compute. LLMs are a fundamental shift from what was achievable in software and OSS, and we're basically living off scraps from the big players releasing their old models. They're alread…

Oracle is far and away better than any of the open source databases. For a long time it wasn’t particularly close. Db didn’t get parity with Oracle, they got good enough that you have to justify spending for Oracle and incurring the down sides of its company’s model. Similarly, no db that competes with Oracle was written by one person, they were and are funded mostly by private companies and foundations. There is a f…

You mean the history where MS captured the OS, Applle/Google the phone, Google capture the entire search market for 20 years, Facebook the social web, Amazon shopping, NVidia/AMD, Netflix, Spotify, I could go on and on and on.

Most things in tech settle into monopolies or duopolies.

LLMs are more akin to the search market than the database market. They need to be updated constantly.

Selectively picking out the one technology that's basically no-one's primary business is an odd way to try and convince me. It must be over 20 years now since any large company consider a DB to be a significant product.

Open source winners like Linux and MySql/Postgre are the oddity, not the norm.

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

#372

Post by kasey_junk »

mattmanser wrote: post #371
kasey_junk wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle is far and away better than any of the open source databases. For a long time it wasn’t particularly close. Db didn’t get parity with Oracle, they got good enough that you have to justify spending for Oracle and incurring the down sides of its company’s model. Similarly, no db that competes with Oracle was written by one person, they were and are funded mostly by private companies and foundations. There is a f…

You mean the history where MS captured the OS, Applle/Google the phone, Google capture the entire search market for 20 years, Facebook the social web, Amazon shopping, NVidia/AMD, Netflix, Spotify, I could go on and on and on. Most things in tech settle into monopolies or duopolies. LLMs are more akin to the search market than the database market. They need to be updated constantly. Selectively picking out the one te…

You made a more specific claim than it being captured by a monopoly or duopoly. You claimed that the leaders definitively will cause dramatic price increases implying that the current pricing are just for capturing market share (ala uber/lyft).

Yet for every example you just delivered that _did not happen_. OSes have wide choice including a free option that is widely used, phones got cheaper, Amazon does not have a monopoly for online shopping, Netflix and Spotify compete in extremely cut throat markets with very low margin. Then there are the other players that tried that exact model and are failing (eg doordash and Grubhub).

The “bait and switch” approach requires there to be no viable alternative. Where we’ve seen that is in products with very strong network effects. To date the ai market doesn’t display that, if you don’t like cursor go to vs code, if Claude is better than Gemini it is trivial to switch, etc.

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

#373

Post by yardie »

Eisenstein wrote: post #224
yardie wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the courts don’t think they are. Early rap beats used lots of samples. Some of the most popular hip hop songs made $0 for the artists as they had to pay royalties on those samples.

Most synthesizers use sampled instruments.

And those sampled instruments were copyrighted by the manufacturers: YamahaGS, RolandXM, Alesis, Korg, etc. Early hip-hop were sampling disco and R&B records and got roundly slapped once they become popular for money to be involved.

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

#374

Post by Eisenstein »

yardie wrote: post #373
Eisenstein wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most synthesizers use sampled instruments.

And those sampled instruments were copyrighted by the manufacturers: YamahaGS, RolandXM, Alesis, Korg, etc. Early hip-hop were sampling disco and R&B records and got roundly slapped once they become popular for money to be involved.

That doesn't answer the question if music composed of samples is considered original, though. It is merely a legal ruling about some music from a certain time period that a lot of people would consider original.

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

#375

Post by awesome_dude »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #363
awesome_dude wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m genuinely sorry you feel that way. It wasn’t my intention. I really don't think you fully grasp anything at this point in the conversation > Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. That aged well. /s

>> Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Is that what you meant by making it personal? > That aged well. /s It aged perfectly fine.

You demonstrated absolutely no understanding of the current state of the art, and then made a subjective claim on someone elses' grasp of the subject.

Yes you were making it personal, and yes it was you that was demonstrating the complete and utter lack of grasp of the subject.

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

#376

Post by catlifeonmars »

awesome_dude wrote: post #375
catlifeonmars wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Is that what you meant by making it personal? > That aged well. /s It aged perfectly fine.

You demonstrated absolutely no understanding of the current state of the art, and then made a subjective claim on someone elses' grasp of the subject. Yes you were making it personal, and yes it was you that was demonstrating the complete and utter lack of grasp of the subject.

I don’t see how disagreeing with you constitutes “a complete and utter lack of grasp of the subject”. That’s hyperbole.

So your claim is that the state of the art weather models are accurate at somewhere between 24h and 2 weeks (unclear based on the other sub threads) and continually improving. Based on this you extrapolate that given enough compute and sensors it would be possible to predict the weather with the same accuracy a month or more out. I think that’s a reasonable claim assuming that (1) the behavior of the system is deterministic and (2) the system behaves the same at both time scales.

Setting (1) aside, I claim that (2) is a wrong assumption. That weather exhibits chaotic behavior and that this likely puts an upper bound on prediction accuracy and the upper bound is less than 1 month.

The state of the art appears to be GraphCast [1] and FengWu [2]. These show promise out past 2 weeks when run against historical data. However, neither model is making actual weather predictions, and both are still in preprint (e.g. methodology has not been peer reviewed). This is super interesting and it’s possible my claim is incorrect, and that the upper bound is further out than the conventional 2 week limit.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/html/2504.20238 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02948

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

#377

Post by awesome_dude »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #376
awesome_dude wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You demonstrated absolutely no understanding of the current state of the art, and then made a subjective claim on someone elses' grasp of the subject. Yes you were making it personal, and yes it was you that was demonstrating the complete and utter lack of grasp of the subject.

I don’t see how disagreeing with you constitutes “a complete and utter lack of grasp of the subject”. That’s hyperbole. So your claim is that the state of the art weather models are accurate at somewhere between 24h and 2 weeks (unclear based on the other sub threads) and continually improving. Based on this you extrapolate that given enough compute and sensors it would be possible to predict the weather with the sam…

> I don’t see how disagreeing with you constitutes “a complete and utter lack of grasp of the subject”. That’s hyperbole.

Your complaint is that I am applying your measure with the same effort that you did to me.

The current upper bounds are constantly being reviewed, just as with other active areas of research. With that in mind, we don't really know what the final upper bound might be, we can only say with any semblance of surety that the upper bound at any given point in time is limited by our imagination (read: our ability to create new and possible novel ways to model the future)

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