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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

#611
post #437

All the smartest people I know in finance are preparing for AI to be a huge bust that wipes out startups. To them, everyone in tech is just a pawn in their money moving finance games. They view Silicon Valley at the moment salivating on what there plays are to make money off the coming hype cycle implosion. The best finance folks make the most money when the tide goes out… and they’re making moves now to be ready. Ta…

> To them, everyone in tech is just a pawn in their money moving finance games.

Don't they think everyone is a pawn in their money moving games?

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

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis. For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But… Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware…

> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis. "Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.

Costs (time/money) are metrics to help analyse your situation/progress. They are not quality of life.

If you had a huge pile of money but still lived in a shack in a slum, you’d still have a terrible quality of life.

If you argument were true, and people are saving time (or money) due to these new systems, why is the wealth gap widening?

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

#613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience they invariably conflate LLMs with AI and can’t/won’t have the difference explained. This is the blind spot that will cause many to lose their shirts, and is also why people are wrong about AI being a bubble. LLMs are a bubble within an overall healthy growth market.

LLMs are a bubble on the back of an AI bubble in a market finally surmounting an enormous single-shot energy surfeit

LLMs are the air in the AI bubble.

Machine learning is a perfectly valid and useful field, traditional ML is super useful and can produce very powerful tools. LLMs are fancy word predictors that have no concept of truth.

But LLMs look and feel like they're almost "real" AI, because they talk in words instead of probabilities, and so people who can't discern the distance between and LLM and AGI assume that AGI is right around the corner.

If you believe AGI is right around the corner and skip over the bit where any mass application of AGI to replace workers for cheaper is just slavery but with extra steps, then of course it makes sense to pour money into any AI business.

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

#614

Seems like society isn't going to benefit much, but the ultrawealthy will benefit enormously.

Adding to that, I love how his analysis is completely detached from the consequences this burst will impose on the working man. As it did in the dotcom bubble.

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

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are a bubble on the back of an AI bubble in a market finally surmounting an enormous single-shot energy surfeit

LLMs are the air in the AI bubble. Machine learning is a perfectly valid and useful field, traditional ML is super useful and can produce very powerful tools. LLMs are fancy word predictors that have no concept of truth. But LLMs look and feel like they're almost "real" AI, because they talk in words instead of probabilities, and so people who can't discern the distance between and LLM and AGI assume that AGI is righ…

And energy is the air in the economy at large. The Eliza effect is not the only bias disposing people to believe AGI is right around the corner. There are deeper assumptions many cling to.

I agree about ML.

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

#616
post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but there's also a continuum of practice between banning outright and letting the students use llm's to just write for them. Use it as a peer review. Use it during brainstorming. Use it to clarify ambiguous thoughts. Use it to challenge your arguments and poke holes in your assumptions.

Are the examples you mentioned actually banned, as opposed to not actively used in classes? I'd think even where LLMs don't belong in the curriculum, self-studies in various forms as complimentary to the curriculum wouldn't be any of the teachers business? BTW if you haven't, I encourage reading this. https://zenodo.org/records/17065099

Correct. The faculty at my institution do not want any use of LLM or 'AI' technology. End of sentence. If they learn that a student used an LLM, regardless of how it was used, they send a formal academic discipline complaint to administration. It's a fucking joke.

I'm not saying throw the doors open and let loose. I'm saying that we need to find places where using these tools makes sense, follows a sense of professional ethics, and encourages (rather than replaces) critical thinking.

And the problem with your cited paper is that people who kick and scream the loudest about this at my institution (again, this is just at mine and is in no way indicative of any other institution) are the ones who have not updated their courses since I was in college. I mean that quite literally. I attended the institution I currently work at. Decades later and I could turn in papers that I wrote for their classes my freshman year and pass their classes.

Three of them sent me that same linked article. But instead of seeing the message "we need to think about how to use these things responsibly" they just read "you can do what you've done for years and nothing needs to change."

That "research" article isn't as impactful as the faculty at my institution thought.

I'm all for the thoughtful integration or rejection of these technologies based on sound pedagogical practices rooted in student learning theory. At my institution, and I want to stress n=1, they literally do not want to take time updating lessons, regardless of the reason. Llm's are just a convenient scapegoat right now.

I would argue that it's more unethical to not update your classroom lessons in over 2 decades than it is to use llm's to supplement learning.

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

#617
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, this is not the case in many european cities. In those places the main benefit seems to be not having to interact with the cab driver.

You don't talk to your drivers? I've had a lot of genuinely good conversations in my rides. I always at least feel it out and see how much the driver wants to talk but it feels wrong to not say anything

I'm talking about the benefit to whoever is using them. Once you learn it's more expensive, there's little logic to keep on using it unless for the reason stated.

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

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow really? The agentic coding work that has come out in the last year are super impressive to me.

And before it didn’t seem to understand the fundamentals of Torch well, not well enough to do novel work. Now with Codex in high it absolutely does, and MLE bench reflects that

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

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because they are private and I can’t make them public. I have no self interest here, I’m an MLE by trade and this technology threatens my job.

I had been mostly opposed to vibe coding for a long time, autocomplete was fine but full agentic coding just made a mess.

That’s changed now, this stuff is genuinely working on really hard problems.

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

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost is in transportation (aside from the cost of developing and producing all those automated systems). Where do you expect extra-terrestrial mining to occur and why do you think what's mined there would be used on Earth? The nearest place to mine would be the moon, and it's on the order of 1 million dollars per kg to bring things back. We could potentially drop that, but that's a hell of a base cost just for ma…

In the next couple of decades? Starship is real, space mining companies are real, NVIDIA Cosmos is real, robotics development is nascent, but real and thrilling. Ordinary market forces will ensure the uptake of robotics. You're calculating the expense of returning mined resources using past metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining com…

>metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing to send gear to asteroids

Nothing in the near future is superceding the tyranny of the rocket equation. It'll still be extremely expensive to send equipment to and retrieve material from space even if the spacecraft and mining equipment were literally free.

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