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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’

#51

Post by bombolo »

borissk wrote: post #29
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…

Actually compared to the economies of past societies, the modern economy in the West is amazing. If you work hard, have a little bit above the average intelligence and potentially a bit of luck you can make a lot of money. If not I guess you can make excuses. The simplest way to organize a group of people, animals, organisms is to make one of them leader and have the rest follow him. This is the way our ancestors beh…

I'm sure you're completely unaware of the fact that your world view comes from protestant religion, which equates richness with god's favour, thus ending up considering poor people as worse sinners who don't deserve a better life due to their moral failings.

People of other religions and cultures don't necessarily share your same faith (I realise you think you're being completely rational, but to an external observer you are not).

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

#52

Post by mihaic »

robertlagrant wrote: post #41
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.

Only very few people are asking for a completely different system, they usually demand fine-tuning the system so that it improves median life quality.

It used to be that the philosophy before was to have the least amount of intervention on the free market, and it's now that there should be no interventions whatsoever. Isn't that an extreme position?

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

#53

Post by Almondsetat »

WaxProlix wrote: post #24
Almondsetat wrote: post #7

Routinely articles like these are written. I find them superfluous and a symptom of the human tendency to never sit down and reflect about stuff. Grifts prey on the ignorant, duping them through an informational gap. As such, grifts flourish in new and uncertain environments. Environments where expert opinion is still forming and is badly communicated, and scammers can sound knowledgeable to the average person withou…

Was this written by GPT? It feels very Trained On Hacker News.

Yes, this was in fact generated by a GPT model I specifically tuned for HN and that I managed to run inside my brain with minimal latency and power requirements.

[EDIT]

In conclusion

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

#54

Post by bombolo »

boxed wrote: post #36
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is not wealth. Once you have more of it than is necessary for basic needs, you have to figure out a way to get rid of it and exchange it for real wealth. Investing it in "tech" is an easy and dumb solution to the problem.

The problem is that the 0.1% don't seem to really understand this. If they did we would se massive investments in basic science and medicine from them. But we don't. Instead most of them seem to treat their wealth as internet points to compare to other super rich.

They want investments with short term returns… and basic science isn't that.

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

#55

Post by bombolo »

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]

[flagged]

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

#56

Post by hnhg »

robertlagrant wrote: post #41
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.

Even if you did invent a better alternative, do you think you would get a fair hearing, given how mainstream/corporate media is organised and operated?

Actually, do you think there is anyone with any substance and influence out there trying to even invent a better alternative? All I see is culture wars/left vs right nonsense, but maybe I am out of touch.

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

#57

Post by bombolo »

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.

I think the problem was "buy drugs online"

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

#59

Post by skybrian »

apexalpha wrote: post #47
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…

This is hindsight bias. You know the names of the ones history remembers.

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

#60

Post by IshKebab »

codelord wrote: post #39

IMO AI is more underrated than overhyped. The scale of value that AI can bring maybe larger than what internet brought. But, product design and engineering havn't caught up with the science yet. I think we are too narrowly looking at AI. LLMs are cool, but investors should look beyond that. ChatGPT wrappers aren't the next big thing. The fact that LLMs and image generation models work as good as they do now, should g…

I agree. LLMs have a ton of unrealised applications in business. Imagine training one on your company wiki and chat history.

Barely any companies have done that yet because of legal and security concerns and because it isn't easy to do yet, but that will change.

It's not going to be long before someone makes and end-to-end speech to speech model. A single model that incorporates speech recognition, LLM and speech synthesis. In fact I'm really surprised it hasn't happened already because it's such an obvious thing to try. That's going to blow people's minds.

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