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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#451

Post by tim333 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #355
jacknews wrote: post #83

I think these articles slightly miss the point. Sure, AI as a tool, as it currently is, will take a very long time to earn back the $B being invested. But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push? Everything changes. So I think there's a massive, massive upside risk being priced into these investments.

> But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push? What if Jesus turns up again? Seems a little optimistic, especially with several leading AI voices suggesting that AGI is at least a lot further away than just parameter expansion.

Probably the most reliable person I can think of to estimate that would be Hassabis at Deepmind and he's saying like 5 years give or take a factor of two. (for AGI, not Jesus)

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#452

Post by johnnyanmac »

aurareturn wrote: post #11
hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of progr…

>Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of programming come from?

Well this article cites 400b of spending for 12b of revenue. That's not zero value, but it definitely showing overvalue. We're not paying that level of money back with consumer level goods.

Now is B2B valuable? Maybe. But it's really tough valuating that with how businesses are operating c. 2025.

> ChatGPT released data showing that programming is just a tiny fraction of queries people do.

yes, but it's not 2010 anymore. Companies are already on ChatGPT's neck trying to get RoI's. They can't run insolvent for a decade at this level of spending like all the FAANG's did in yestr-decade.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#453

Post by johnnyanmac »

sotix wrote: post #414
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. Is she more productive though? People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

> Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Au contraire. Acute nicotine improves cognitive deficits in young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00913... > Non-smoking young adults with ADHD-C showed improvements in cognitive performance following nicotine administration in several domains that are central to ADHD. The results from t…

So the best interpretation is that it's like Adderal. Something to be carefully prescribed to with doctor-sanctioned doses. Not something you buy off the counter and smoke a pack a day of.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#454

Post by johnnyanmac »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #209
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. Is she more productive though? People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

Productive how and for who? My own use case (financial analysis and data capture by the models). It takes away the grunt work, I can focus on the more pleasant aspects of the job, it also means I can produce better quality reports as I have additional time to look more closely. It also points out things I could have potentially missed. Free time and boredom spurs creativity, some folks forget this. I also have more f…

>Productive how and for who?

For me, quality is the biggest metric, not money. But time does play into the metric of quality.

The sad reality is that many use it as a shortcut to output slop. Which may be "productive" in a job where that busywork isn't critical for anyone but your paycheck. But those kinds of corners being cut seems anathema to proper engineering or any other mission critical duties.

>their jobs don't actually change the world and thinking of the shareholders only gets you so far.

I'm worried of seeing more cases like a lawyer submitting cases to a judge that never existed. There's ethical concerns about the casual chat apps, but I can leave that to others.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#455

Post by johnnyanmac »

aurareturn wrote: post #102
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. Is she more productive though? People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

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…

>Is it so hard to believe that ChatGPT is actually productive?

Given what I've seen in the educational sector: yes. Very hard. We already had this massive split in extremes between the highly educated and the ones who struggle. The last thing we need is to outsource the aspect of thinking to a billionaire tech company.

The slop you see in the workplace isn't encouraging either.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#456

Post by johnnyanmac »

1123581321 wrote: post #135
freehorse wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the kind of question that takes into account that people thinking that they are more productive does not imply that they actually are. This happens in a wide range of contexts, from AI to drugs.

It isn’t a question asked by people generally suspicious of productivity claims. It’s only asked by LLM skeptics, about LLMs.

>It isn’t a question asked by people generally suspicious of productivity claims.

Why not? If you ever got an AI generated email or had to code-review anything vibecoded, you're going to be suspicious on who's "more productive". I've read reports and studies and it feels like the "more productive" people tend to be pushing more work onto people below or beside them to fix the generated mess.

I do believe there are productive ways to use this tech, but it does not seem like many people these days has the discipline to establish a proper workflow.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#457

Post by johnnyanmac »

echelon wrote: post #107
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…

Serious thought. What if people are using LLMs to achieve the same productivity with more cost to the business and less time spent working? This, to me, feels incredibly plausible. Get an email? ChatGPT the response. Relax and browse socials for an hour. Repeat. "My boss thinks I'm using AI to be more productive. In reality, I'm using our ChatGPT subscription to slack off." That three day report still takes three day…

Yeah, I think this is why it's more important to shift the question to "is the team/business more productive". If a 0.5xer manager is pushing 0.1x work and a 1xer teammate needs to become a 1.5xer to fix the slop, then we have this phenomenon where the manager can feel way more productive, while the team under him is spending more time just to fix or throw out his slop.

Both their perspectives are technically right. But we'll either have burned out workers or a lagging schedule as a result in the long term. I miss when we thought more long term about projects.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#458

Post by johnnyanmac »

isamuel wrote: post #160
bakugo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result. Come on, you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way. I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?” Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much…

> you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way.

Why not?

>I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?”

It's very possible. I know people love bescmirching the "you won't always have a calculator" mentality. But if you're using a calculator for 2nd grade mental math, you may have degregaded too far. It varies on the task, of course.

>Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.

Depends on how it's making it easier. Phones are an excellent example. They make communication much easier and long distance communication possible. But if it gets to the point where you're texting someone in the next room instead of opening your door, you might be losing a piece of you somewhere.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#459

Post by johnnyanmac »

sigbottle wrote: post #97
Etheryte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent MIT report on the state of AI in business feels relevant here [0]: > Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. There's no doubt that you'll find anecdotal evidence both for and against in all variations, what's much more interesting than anecdotes is the aggregate. [0] https://mlq.ai/media/quart…

I think it's true that AI does deliver real value. It's helped me understand domains quickly, be a better google search, given me code snippets and found obscure bugs, etc. In that regard, it's a positive on the world. I also think it's true that AI is nowhere near AGI level. It's definitely not currently capable of doing my job, not by a long shot. I also think that, throwing trillions of dollars at AI for a "a bett…

I have my criticisms of LLM's, but anyone in 2025 trying to sell you AGI is selling you a bridge made of snake oil. The aspect of the job market won't even be the biggest question the day we truly achieve AGI.

>At the same time, don't know if it's worth trillions of dollars, at least right now.

The revenue numbers sure don't think so. And I don't think this economy can support "trillions" of spending even if it wanted to. That's why the bubble will pop, IMO.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#460

Post by aurareturn »

dsr_ wrote: post #448
aurareturn wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of logic is this? ChatGPT automates much of my friend's work at PwC making her more productive --> not a sign that ChatGPT has any value Farming machines automated much of what a farmer used to have to do by himself making him more productive --> not a sign that farming machines have any value

The output of a farm is food or commodities to be turned into food. The output of PwC -- whoops, here goes any chance of me working there -- is presentations and reports. “We’re entering a bold new chapter driven by sharper thinking, deeper expertise and an unwavering focus on what’s next. We’re not here just to help clients keep pace, we’re here to bring them to the leading edge.” That's on the front page of their w…

The output of her work isn’t presentations and reports. The actual output is raising money and making successful deals. This requires convincing investors mostly which is very hard to do.

Look up what M&A is.

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