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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

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Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#591

Post by crystal_revenge »

mountainriver wrote: post #585
crystal_revenge wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why has my experience with AI started to see such dramatically diminishing returns? 2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic, to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted to be on the front lines. 2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding goes. I started building very promising prototypes for companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that were…

I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries this month. I'm an MLE by trade and it would have taken me ages without AI. This wasn't possible even a year ago. I have no idea how anyone thinks the models haven't improved

> This wasn't possible even a year ago.

My experience has been that it was. I was using AI last year to build ML models about as well as I have been this year.

I'm not saying AI isn't useful, just that the progress certainly looks to be sigmoid not exponential in growth. By far the biggest year for improvement was 2022-2023. Early 2022 I didn't think any of the code assistants were useful, by 2023 I was able to use them more reliably. 2024 was another big improvement, but I honestly haven't felt the change (at least not for the better).

Some of the tooling may be better, but that has little do to with exponential progress in AI itself.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#592

Post by crystal_revenge »

madaxe_again wrote: post #536
shiandow wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this remains possible my main impression now is that progress seems to be slowing down rather than accelerating.

Not even remotely. In LLM land, the progress seems slow the past few years, but a lot has happened under the hood. Elsewhere in AI however progress has been enormous, and many projects are only now reaching the point where they are starting to have valuable outputs. Take video gen for instance - it simply did not exist outside of research labs a few years ago, and now it’s getting to the point where it’s actually use…

> the progress seems slow the past few years, but a lot has happened under the hood.

The claim is "exponential" progress, exponential progress never seems "slow" after it has started to become visible.

I've worked in the research part of this space, there's neat stuff happening, but we are very clearly in the diminishing returns phase of development.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#593

Post by danans »

probablypower wrote: post #422
m000 wrote: post #407

"During bubbles, every experiment or idea gets funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real." Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas? The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the ne…

> Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas? A lot of good ideas only look bad in hindsight. It costs time and money to determine goodness, and that deserves funding.

> A lot of good ideas only look bad in hindsight. It costs time and money to determine goodness, and that deserves funding.

Governments can also do that funding. The most pivotal technologies in recent history have been a result of government investment.

Private capital has a role, but it's mostly at the productization phase, not fundamental research.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#594

Post by rhetocj23 »

mountainriver wrote: post #509
zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

This won’t even come close to maiming the economy, that’s one of the more extreme takes I’ve heard. AI is already making us wildly more productive. I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries over the last month or so. This would have taken me maybe years before when I was manually coding as an MLE. We have clearly hit the stage of exponential improvement, and to not invest basically everything we have in it would be crazy. Any…

Go ahead and post what youve done fella so we can critique.

Why is it all these kinds of posts never come with any attachments? We are all interested to see it m8.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#595

Post by rhetocj23 »

someuser54541 wrote: post #558
dmix wrote: post #64

I'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.

My team is doing the same, and yet all of us still aren't sure that we're actually more productive overall. If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with what is effectively a lot more code review (of whatever the LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term understanding of a block of code that actually comes from writing it yourself (let's not pretend that a reviewer has the same depth…

Yes there is a very real trade off between labour and capital.

In the past the tradeoff has been very straight forward. But this is a unique situation because it involves knowledge and not just the physicality of the human in regards to productivity.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#597

Post by bobthepanda »

immibis wrote: post #378
bobthepanda wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time. The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some thing…

> it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time Do we, though? I recently learned about the controversial scene "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Ignoring the content of the scene for a moment, the quality of the choreography stood out to me as something you would never see in a movie today. Certainly not in one take.

I would say that has more to do with the decline in musicals involving small numbers of people doing choreography, and the current movie system de-prioritizing dance as an important skill. The highest grossing musical movie happened in 2024 with Wicked, and the second half of that movie is probably going to do the same thing next year.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#599

Post by alchemism »

bialpio wrote: post #560
SoftTalker wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data centers built in 1998 don't have nearly enough power or cooling capacity to run today's infrastructure. I'd be surprised if very many of them are even still in use. Cheaper to build new than upgrade.

How come? I'd expect that efficiency gains would lower power and thus cooling demands - are we packing more servers into the same space now or losing those gains elsewhere?

Yes - blades-of-servers replacing what was 2 or 3 rack mount servers. Both air exchange and power requirements are radically different in order to fill that rack as it was before.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#600

Post by fc417fc802 »

bialpio wrote: post #560
SoftTalker wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data centers built in 1998 don't have nearly enough power or cooling capacity to run today's infrastructure. I'd be surprised if very many of them are even still in use. Cheaper to build new than upgrade.

How come? I'd expect that efficiency gains would lower power and thus cooling demands - are we packing more servers into the same space now or losing those gains elsewhere?

It's just an educated guess, but I expect that power density has gone up quite a bit as a form of optimization. Efficiency gains permit both lower power (mobile) and higher compute (server) parts. How tightly you pack those server parts in is an entirely different matter. How many H100s can you fit on average per 1U of space?
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