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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#501

Post by Quarrelsome »

tim333 wrote: post #451
Quarrelsome wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

head guy at Meta stated in a talk that current techniques ain't gonna be enough and they at least need to start to be more creative.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#502

Post by Quarrelsome »

_heimdall wrote: post #445
Quarrelsome wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITER apparently fires up in 2039.

That date means nothing though. We have yet to figure out how to run a fusion reactor for any meaningful period of time and we haven't figured out how to do it profitably. Setting a date for when one opens is just a pipe dream, they don't know how to get there yet.

isn't the ROI on current AI investment kinda similar though? Both are built on elements of hope.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#503

Post by player1234 »

billy99k wrote: post #27
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? " Have you ever used an LLM? I use it every day to help me with research and completing technical reports (which used to be a lot more of my time). Of course you can't just use it blindly, but it definitely adds value.

How did you measure this "a lot more of my time", please share your results and methodology!

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#504

Post by player1234 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #88
therealmarv wrote: post #46

It reminds me what I said to somebody recently: All my friends and family are using the free version of ChatGPT or something similar. They will never pay (although they have enough money to do so). Even in my very narrow subjective circles it does not add up. Who pays for AI and how? And when in the future?

People are always so fidegty about this stuff — for super understandable reason, to be clear. People not much smarter than anyone else try to reason about numbers that are hard to reason about. But unless you have the actual numbers, I always find it a bit strange to assume that all people involved, who deal with large amounts of money all the time, lost all ability to reason about this thing. Because right now that…

Fallacy: Appeal to authority.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#505

Post by player1234 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #427
rkomorn wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have a point and I'm not sure I entirely disagree with you, so take this as lighthearted banter, but: Coming from the opposite angle, what makes you think these folks have a habit of being right? VCs are notoriously making lots of parallel bets hoping one pays off. Companies fail all the time, either completely (eg Yahoo! getting bought for peanuts down from their peak valuation), or at initiatives small…

The universe is not configured in such a way that trillion dollar companies come into existence without a lot of things going well over long periods of time, so if we accept money as the standard for being right, they are necessarily right, a lot. Everything ends and companies are no exception. But thinking about the biggest threats is what people in managerial positions in companies do all day, every day. Let's also…

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#506

Post by player1234 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #473
fred_is_fred wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was promised with self-driving and what we have are orders of magnitude off. We were promised fleets of autonomous taxis - no need to even own a car anymore. We were told truck drivers would be replaced en-masse and cargo would drive 24x7 by drivers who never needed breaks. We were told downtown parking lots would disappear since the car would drop you off and drive to an offsite lot and wait for you. In short a…

I don't ride ubers anymore. It changed society in SF. You guys don't know what's coming.

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#507

Post by player1234 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #472
hx8 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo showed it's not a bubble. Waymo is showing it might not be a bubble. They are selling rides in five cities. Let's see how they do in 100 cities.

You aren't living it. I live in SF, I ride waymos every freaking day. SF has some of the tightest roads and hardest driving. Just living in SF I already know they can scale to the entire country.

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#508

Post by evilduck »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #283
steveklabnik wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the companies (including OpenAI) have even claimed the opposite. Inference is profitable; it's R&D and training that's not.

It's not reasonable to claim inference is profitable when they've also never released those numbers. Also the price they charge for inference is not indicative of the price they're paying to provide inference. Also, at least in openAI's case, they are getting a fantastic deal on compute from Microsoft, so even if the price they charge is reflective of the price they pay, it's still not reflective of a market rate.

OpenAI hasn't released their training cost numbers but DeepSeek has, and there's dozens of companies offering inference hosting of open weight models for the very large models that keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic, so we can see what market rates are shaking out to be for companies that have even less economies of scale. You can also make some extrapolations from AWS Bedrock pricing and can also investigate inference costs yourself on local hardware. Then look at quality measures of quantizations that hosting providers do and you get a feel for what hosting providers are doing to manage costs.

We can't pinpoint the exact dollar amount OpenAI categorically spends but we can make a lot of reasonable and safe guesses, and all signs points to inference hosting being a profitable venture by itself, with training profitability being less certain or being a pursuit of a winner-takes-all strategy.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#509

Post by rkomorn »

player1234 wrote: post #505
jstummbillig wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The universe is not configured in such a way that trillion dollar companies come into existence without a lot of things going well over long periods of time, so if we accept money as the standard for being right, they are necessarily right, a lot. Everything ends and companies are no exception. But thinking about the biggest threats is what people in managerial positions in companies do all day, every day. Let's also…

[flagged]

They were responding to me and I have no issue with their answer (although I don't particularly agree with it).

Take your attitude somewhere else. It sucks.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#510

Post by tim333 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #501
tim333 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

head guy at Meta stated in a talk that current techniques ain't gonna be enough and they at least need to start to be more creative.

Yeah that seems the consensus. There are lots of people working on the stuff though.
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