Well it’s more real than crypto in many ways so not a terrible gamble
Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
61–70 of 234 posts
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#62Money is always pouring into something shiny (looking from a limited perspective) thing.
Probably too much money is with clueless but greedy and lazy (to discover) people?
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#63Modern "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.
> no one seems to invented a better alternative
There has been myriads of alternatives experimented in the 200,000+ years humans have been a thing. Many ancient societies didn't have the concept of property. Others did, but burned everything someone possessed when they died, ensuring a level playing field at each generation. Most ancient societies didn't have any hierarchy at all. The concept of anyone being the boss of anyone else is extremely recent.
We marvel at our modern world but what does it give us? Does it make us happy?
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#64Transformative 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…
Survivor bias is massive here, watch out for it.
Osborne beat apple to personal computing. Facebook did not exist during the dotcom boom. So very many early car companies went broke. "But if you'd only got ford it would have been sweet as." But they weren't first. Panhard et Levassor in 1889, ford in 1901 sayeth wikipedia.[1] So now you're waiting and picking winners in the sector which is very much harder without the time machine to see what worked out in the end.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile#Eras...
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#65Modern "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…
You need to be really blinded by cynism to not see how much better modern life is for average people or how many people benefit from advancements and scale which wouldn't be possible without billions of dollars worth of investments.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#66Modern "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…
Nice summary.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#67Transformative 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…
You can always find some earlier example of a tech that lost. But if you invested in the first company to mass produce a car (Ford) you'd have done well. If you invested in the first of its kind smartphone (Apple) even better. Likewise there's been a lot of early failed AI startups in the past 20 years that you could point to, and now OpenAI is hitting it out of the park, expecting a billion in revenue next year on a…
this is another way of saying "If you invested in the first one to be successful." Well yeah. Obviously. Time machines work great for investment decisions.
edit:
Whether it was first or not the nokia N95 was a smartphone and was definitely before the iphone. Forgotten like every earlier loser I guess.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#68Modern "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…
Things are always changing.
The US and its mindless dynamics definately could use a kick in the teeth to speed up the change. But its happening with interest rates rising, dedollarization etc. Some rich folk who think nothing is changing and their behavior doesnt need to change, their story wont end well.
They dont have as much control over anything as they think. In fact I think rich people are going to take the biggest hit mentally, financially, socially cause its very precarious having wealth without control over what happens tomorrow morning.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#69IMO 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…
Yes that's probably true. The article makes a parallel between the current AI hype and crypto, but there's a huge difference. Crypto didn't bring any benefit to anyone and didn't do anything one couldn't do before (with orders of magnitude better efficiency and security).
The current situation is more like the early dot-com boom of the 2000s; Webvan and pets.com or Altavista were ill-executed but they weren't stupid ideas. It was then that Amazon and Google were founded.
Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> no one seems to invented a better alternative There has been myriads of alternatives experimented in the 200,000+ years humans have been a thing. Many ancient societies didn't have the concept of property. Others did, but burned everything someone possessed when they died, ensuring a level playing field at each generation. Most ancient societies didn't have any hierarchy at all. The concept of anyone being the boss…
> The concept of anyone being the boss of anyone else is extremely recent.
My guts tell me it's as old as humankind. Citation?