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Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

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Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#41

Post by robertlagrant »

kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

This isn't exactly untrue, although the numbers are off, I think, but no one seems to invented a better alternative. If you have money because you stole it from your citizens, or because you sent your serfs to die in a war, that's infinitely worse than because you did something someone else thought was valuable and they paid you for it.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#42

Post by throwawaylinux »

kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

[flagged]

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#43

Post by jokethrowaway »

kortilla wrote: post #17
kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

> What could be better? Reality. Most of tech is not funded by existing billionaires.

This. If life were as op (beautifully) put it, the world would be much better. At least the rich guy would try to innovate.

Most billionaires get rich in ways that are worthless, when they're not damaging to society. We allow governments to send people to die in wars just so their friends producing weapons will make a profit.

Most of the money around gets stolen from the little guys and given to the big guys. Think about your taxes funding banks' bailouts or inflation.

Tech is not perfect, every large organisation eventually resemble the politics and stupid games of powers you see in every government or other criminal organisation. The waste, the inefficiency, the idiotic rules.

Stay in small companies, create value for real people, maybe even start one (with no VC) if you want your chance at making some cash without going insane.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#45

Post by eastbound »

martindbp wrote: post #37
harry8 wrote: post #27

Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped. Whether you believe AI is going to be massively tr…

You can always find some earlier example of a tech that lost. But if you invested in the first company to mass produce a car (Ford) you'd have done well. If you invested in the first of its kind smartphone (Apple) even better. Likewise there's been a lot of early failed AI startups in the past 20 years that you could point to, and now OpenAI is hitting it out of the park, expecting a billion in revenue next year on a…

But each revolution is a multiplicator. A company making a billion a year is dime a dozen today. If they really were onto AI, then they’d be projected to make a trillion a year.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#46

Post by darkwater »

doctor_eval wrote: post #28
JimDabell wrote: post #21

Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trend…

Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. AI solves real problems, and has been doing so for many years. Generative AI is just the latest and most accessible instantiating of it. My first company was a dialup ISP in the 90s. I look at GPT4 and I see the 56K modem of AI. There is so much upside to be discovered, we have barely started.

> Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem.

True

> AI solves real problems

AI research and real products, most probably. All those new companies/startups that are wrappers around ChatGPT? Not that much. Maybe someone will do something that really brings value but most of them sound and act like the Blockchain startups we had til 12 months ago.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#47

Post by apexalpha »

harry8 wrote: post #27

Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped. Whether you believe AI is going to be massively tr…

This seems wrong, though?

For cars the inventor is (Mercedes) Benz, the people who first mass produced it was Ford. Both seem like good investments.

PC: Who is this early mover you talk about? I guess not Apple in your mind, since that would've been a fantastic investment. Hard to think of any better.

Plus, there are hundreds if not thousands of companies along the way you could've invested in that were swallowed up by the bigger fish. That's still a good investment since you either get a good exit or shares in the bigger fish.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#48

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #42
kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

[flagged]

> What could be better is to be happy with what you have.

This statement requires further qualification; for example, you certainly wouldn’t say that to someone in an abusive relationship - or someone living in poverty.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#49

Post by apexalpha »

darkwater wrote: post #46
doctor_eval wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. AI solves real problems, and has been doing so for many years. Generative AI is just the latest and most accessible instantiating of it. My first company was a dialup ISP in the 90s. I look at GPT4 and I see the 56K modem of AI. There is so much upside to be discovered, we have barely started.

> Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. True > AI solves real problems AI research and real products, most probably. All those new companies/startups that are wrappers around ChatGPT? Not that much. Maybe someone will do something that really brings value but most of them sound and act like the Blockchain startups we had til 12 months ago.

Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works?

The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI.

Same like how the computers enabled billions to do the most complex calculations within a second, while before you needed to learn that skill over years or practise.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#50

Post by tromp »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #42
kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

[flagged]

The rich man is not he who has a lot, but he who needs little...
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