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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#51

Post by alvah »

ksynwa wrote: post #35
anothermathbozo wrote: post #3

This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…

He hasn't said anything about when the bubble will burst. Just says that it is a bubble and it will inevitably burst.

Spotting bubbles and predicting they will burst at some point is not a particularly useful skill. Housing in Amsterdam was in a bubble for 37 years in the 1700s; identifying the bubble early on would have been completely pointless.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#52

Post by andsoitis »

bccdee wrote: post #13
lukevp wrote: post #7

Why in the world would you want a car?? They are horrible to maintain, difficult to operate, expensive, smell bad, and are slower than horses! -somebody salty about automobiles, circa 1900.

Tbh they'd have been right. Cars are expensive to buy and to maintain. They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow: Traffic is an unsolvable problem in urban centres. Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.

> They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow

Sarcastically, one might say that horses are even harder to operate (they have minds of their own), they smell worse that automobiles (esp EVs), and the particulate matter they excrete would be unhealthy to consume. They are also very slow.

More seriously, the trajectory that our imagination pushes towards seems to be “overcoming” biological limitations. Perhaps a symbiosis of machine and biology and consciousness will take us to the next level by opening up vast new universe state.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#53

Post by cmdtab »

Ancapistani wrote: post #41
locusofself wrote: post #4

As a 40yo software engineer (at Microsoft) with no specific domain expertise other than using genAI for fun and some code completion, this essay/blog post articulates my gut feelings about where we are at, very well.

41 here, working in healthtech… and Devin has committed more code and closed more tickets on my behalf in the past week at my behest than I’ve done on my own in a month. It’s basically functioning as a team of entry-level junior engineers at this point. Previously I was having to spend a fair amount of time writing tickets and providing context, but lately I’ve fed all my meeting transcripts and such into an LLM and…

What kind of tickets are these? Even at non-complex tasks, I find agents struggle a lot.

Can you give some examples?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#54

Post by xnx »

advael wrote: post #34
xnx wrote: post #27

Plenty of AI companies that are cons or extremely overvalued, but the technology is the real deal and delivering huge improvements over previous techniques in all kinds of domains: language translation, weather prediction, code completion, self driving, etc.

I swear no matter how many times people say it people will still conflate all ML with LLMs. No, chatGPT is not driving advances in self-driving or weather prediction

For better or worse, "LLM" or "generative ai" has become roughly synonymous with the current wave of ML.

I know very little about ChatGPT, but Waymo is using an LLM: "Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data." (https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/introducing-emma)

Re: The Generative AI Con

#55

Post by JimDabell »

anothermathbozo wrote: post #3

This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…

> This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read.

He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person.

> I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence.

> I am so very bored of having this conversation

> I don't care about this number!

> Shut the fuck up!

> This isn't the early days of shit.

> Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine.

> $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic.

> This isn’t real business! Sorry!

> He said in one of his stupid and boring blogs that

> This man is full of shit! Hey, tech media people reading this — your readers hate this shit! Stop printing it! Stop it!

> It's here where I'm going to choose to scream.

> Dario Amodei — much like Sam Altman — is a liar, a crook, a carnival barker and a charlatan, and the things he promises are equal parts ridiculous and offensive.

> Why are we humoring these oafs?

> Despite Newton's fawning praise

> Nobody talks like this! This isn’t how human beings sound! I don’t like reading it!

> Ewww.

> I'm sorry, I know I sound like a hater, and perhaps I am, but this shit doesn't impress me even a little.

> I know, I know, I'm a hater, I'm a pessimist, a cynic, but I need you to fucking listen to me: everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous

> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product

> I know this has been a rant-filled newsletter, but I'm so tired of being told to be excited about this warmed-up dogshit.

> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.

> I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously.

When I read this kind of thing, it’s very apparent that this is being driven entirely by spite not insight. He’s just so angry about everything. There are 57 exclamation marks in this article!

Re: The Generative AI Con

#56

Post by famouswaffles »

>So...yeah, of course ChatGPT has that many users. When you have hundreds of different reporters constantly spitting out stories

Oh sure, because you can just have hundreds of reporters constantly write about your product. It's so simple. Why aren't more people thinking of that ?

>The weekly users number is really weird. Did it really go from 200 million to 300 million users in the space of three months?

According to similarweb, monthly visits grew over 1B in that timeframe so yeah sure it sounds possible.

>300 million monthly active users would mean a conversion rate of less than 4%, which is pretty piss-poor

A B2C Saas whose lowest price point is $20 will be lucky to get anywhere near 4% conversation.

>And even then, we still don't have a killer app!

The 6th (and climbing) most visited site in January is not a killer app ? Okay

Re: The Generative AI Con

#57

Post by ksynwa »

alvah wrote: post #51
ksynwa wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hasn't said anything about when the bubble will burst. Just says that it is a bubble and it will inevitably burst.

Spotting bubbles and predicting they will burst at some point is not a particularly useful skill. Housing in Amsterdam was in a bubble for 37 years in the 1700s; identifying the bubble early on would have been completely pointless.

So what should one do when one notices a bubble?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#58

Post by x0x0 »

bccdee wrote: post #10
anothermathbozo wrote: post #3

This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…

> The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress There hasn't been much R&D progress, though. Sure, as another commenter pointed out, context lengths have gotten longer and chat models can interpret images now, but the industry figureheads have been pushing agents, and we're not much closer to those than we were two years ago when GPT-4 came out. Current models simply are not consistent enough to do th…

I think you can simultaneously think that there is some real value being made with LLMs and also look at OpenAI losing $5B a year or thereabouts and really wonder how they're not going to run out of money.

That said, I'm learning a new sdk and I've moved 500-1k searches a month from kagi and google to llms.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#59

Post by tiborsaas »

> And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry.

I shocked he really believes it in his closing thought.

Maybe his rant would be bit more digestible if it contained sections with: "here's what I tried and it did not work". But that would make it not a rant but actual research with value.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#60

Post by CamperBob2 »

tiborsaas wrote: post #59

> And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry. I shocked he really believes it in his closing thought. Maybe his rant would be bit more digestible if it contained sections with: "here's what I tried and it did not work". But that would make it not a rant but actual research with value.

I'll save him the trouble of writing it: "I asked ChatGPT 3.5 to write a large, underspecified chunk of code a couple of years ago, and it didn't work the first time, unlike the code that I write. This whole 'AI' business is an elaborate scam."
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