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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#511

Post by johnnyanmac »

aurareturn wrote: post #485
johnnyanmac wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Look how what M&A is. Mergers and Aquisitions? If that's the right acronym I hate it even more, thank you. But yes, I can see how automating the BS of corporate culture then using it to impress people (who also don't care anyway) by saying "I made this with AI" can be "productive". Not really a job I can do, though.

Classic software developer mindset. Thinks nothing is valuable except writing code.

If you saw my rant on monopolistic mergers and thought "he only cares about writing code", then it's clear who's really in the software mindset.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#512

Post by gizajob »

geerlingguy wrote: post #13
gizajob wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ll probably need to innovate one of those to power the immense requirements of AI chatbots.

I think we'll need a few hundred, if spending continues like it has this year.

My vision of fusion power comes from Sim City 2000 where one plant just powers absolutely everything forever.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#513

Post by throaway1988 »

schrectacular wrote: post #401
tromp wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you cannot trust the answers AI gives. It presents hallucinated answers with the same confidence as true answers (e.g. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322413 )

Aren't blogspam/link farms the equivalent in traditional search? It's not like Google gives 100% accurate links today.

exactly. AI is inherently more useful in its form.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#514

Post by senordevnyc »

9rx wrote: post #475
senordevnyc wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely false. In rare cases Waymo needs human intervention, but they do NOT have humans in the loop for the vast majority of their operations.

Cruise control also doesn't need human intervention for the vast marjory of its operation. Yet, the human remains the operator. But it seems we're just playing a silly game of semantics at this point, so let's return to the actual topic at hand. There was a time where people believed that everyone would buy a new car with self-driving technology, which would be an enormous cash cow for anyone responsible for deliveri…

Ah, it’s the old “teleport the goalposts and then change the subject!” strategy.

Just like Waymo, LLMs are already wildly useful to me others, both technical and non-technical, and there’s no reason to think the progress is about to suddenly stop, so I don’t know what you’re even on about at this point.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#515

Post by 9rx »

senordevnyc wrote: post #514
9rx wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise control also doesn't need human intervention for the vast marjory of its operation. Yet, the human remains the operator. But it seems we're just playing a silly game of semantics at this point, so let's return to the actual topic at hand. There was a time where people believed that everyone would buy a new car with self-driving technology, which would be an enormous cash cow for anyone responsible for deliveri…

Ah, it’s the old “teleport the goalposts and then change the subject!” strategy. Just like Waymo, LLMs are already wildly useful to me others, both technical and non-technical, and there’s no reason to think the progress is about to suddenly stop, so I don’t know what you’re even on about at this point.

> and there’s no reason to think the progress is about to suddenly stop

You seem a bit confused. Bubbles, and subsequent crashes, aren't dependent on progress, they're dependent on people's retained interest in investing. The AI bubble could crash even if everything was perfect executed, just because the people decided they'd rather invest in, as you suggest, teleportation — or something boring like housing — instead.

Progress alone isn't enough to retain interest. Just like the case before, the internet progressed fantastically through the last 90s — we almost couldn't have done it any better — but at the same time people were doing all kinds of stupid things like Pets.com with it. While the internet itself remained solid and one of the greatest inventions of all time, all the extra investment into the stupid things pulled out, and thus the big bubble pop.

You're going to be hard-pressed to convince anyone that we aren't equally doing stupid things with AI right now. Not everything needs a chatbot, and eventually investors are going to realize that too.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#516

Post by majewsky »

edanm wrote: post #443
layer8 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I assess results in a familiar programming language is by reviewing and reasoning through the code. Testing is necessary, but not sufficient by any means.

Out of curiosity, how do you assess software that you didn't write and just use, and that is closed source? Don't you just... use it? And see if it works? Why this is inherently different?

You are correct that this is indeed a mostly unsolved problem. In chapter 15 of "The Mythical Man-Month", Fred Brooks called for all program documentation to not only for how to use a program, but also for how to modify a program [1] and, relevant to this discussion, for how to believe a program. This was before automated tests and CI/CD were a thing, so he advocated for shipping testcases with the program that the user could review and execute at any time. It's now 50 years later, and this is one of the many lessons in that book that we've collectively not picked up on enough.

[1] Side-note: This was written at a time when selling software as a standalone product was not really a thing, so everything was open-source and the "how to modify" part was more about how to read and understand the code, e.g. architecture diagrams.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#517

Post by majewsky »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #126
TheCapeGreek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users Does that really count as adoption, when it has been introduced as a default feature?

Yes, if people are interacting with them, which they are. HN seems to think everyone is like in the bubble here, which thinks AI is completely useless and wants nothing to do with it. Half the world is interacting with it on a regular basis already. Are we anywhere near AGI? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. Inference costs are dropping like a rock, and usage is continuing to skyrocket.

I am interacting with AI daily through Google products. YouTube is consistently giving me auto-translated titles that are either hilarious or wrong, and I desparately want to turn this bullshit off, but I can't, because it's not giving me an option.

That's the kind of adoption that should just be put up for adoption instead.

(And of course, the reason that I can tell that the auto-translated video titles are hilarious and/or wrong is because they are translating into a language that I speak from a language that I also speak, but apparently the YouTube app's dev team cannot fathom that a person might speak more than one language.)

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#518

Post by majewsky »

stnmtn wrote: post #393
Gerardo1 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it seem like progress isn't flat?

Largely speaking across technological trends of the past 200 years, progress is nowhere near flat. 4 generations ago, the idea of talking with a person on the other side of the country was science fiction.

You might want to recheck your example. Four generations ago would be my great-grandfathers. They were my current age around 1920. The first transcontinental (not just cross-national!) telephone call took place in 1914.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#520

Post by throwaway-0001 »

danaris wrote: post #336
throwaway-0001 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I disagree completely. I think you have no clue how’s the average person or below. Look at instagram or any social media ads, they are mostly scams, AI can figure out but most people don’t. Just an example.

I don't have to know how smart the average person is, because I know that an LLM doesn't think, isn't conscious, and thus isn't "smart" at all. Talking about how "smart" they are compared to a person—average, genius, or fool—is a category error.

Most people fall for scams. AI won’t fall for 90% of the scams. Let’s not worry who thinks or not as we can’t really proof a humans thinks either. So focus on facts only.
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