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Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

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Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#71

Post by willvarfar »

Tenoke wrote: post #65
kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "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.

Is this accidental to the billionaires, or is this their intended outcome?

And could the investment come from alternative sources if the billionaires didn't exist?

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#73

Post by ben_w »

apexalpha wrote: post #49
darkwater wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. True > AI solves real problems AI research and real products, most probably. All those new companies/startups that are wrappers around ChatGPT? Not that much. Maybe someone will do something that really brings value but most of them sound and act like the Blockchain startups we had til 12 months ago.

Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. Same like how the computers enabled billions to do the most complex calculations within a second, while before you needed to learn that skill over years or practise.

> Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works?

> The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI.

It's also available at zero cost, thanks to the ecosystem around Stable Diffusion.

You probably know the meme that gets parroted randomly about OpenAI needing a moat; well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists?

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#74

Post by Tenoke »

willvarfar wrote: post #71
Tenoke wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this accidental to the billionaires, or is this their intended outcome? And could the investment come from alternative sources if the billionaires didn't exist?

>And could the investment come from alternative sources if the billionaires didn't exist?

In theory, sure. In practice, pretending that the current system has been making things worse or that we have a viable realistic and better alternative is flat-out wrong.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#76

Post by martin_a »

apexalpha wrote: post #49
darkwater wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. True > AI solves real problems AI research and real products, most probably. All those new companies/startups that are wrappers around ChatGPT? Not that much. Maybe someone will do something that really brings value but most of them sound and act like the Blockchain startups we had til 12 months ago.

Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. Same like how the computers enabled billions to do the most complex calculations within a second, while before you needed to learn that skill over years or practise.

I'm regularly using the Photoshop function to test its limits and applications to our printing business. It's kind of impressive at first but it lacks quality where it matters, especially with the more complicated jobs.

Also "editing photos" is more than what the AI does. We have solutions for that, on another level though, for the last 15-20 years already.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#77

Post by [deleted] »

kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "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…

[deleted]

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#78

Post by [deleted] »

satvikpendem wrote: post #5

AI investment is actually down recently, looks like the hype is wearing off since most of the companies funded were just wrapping OpenAI APIs. I will copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue. https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512 Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m --- 6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed reviv…

[deleted]

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#79

Post by IanCal »

satvikpendem wrote: post #5

AI investment is actually down recently, looks like the hype is wearing off since most of the companies funded were just wrapping OpenAI APIs. I will copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue. https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512 Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m --- 6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed reviv…

I'd add that actually using llms to add surprisingly powerful or complex features is extremely easy as a dev. It's turned things that would have needed large ML investment and expertise into a few rest API calls. The other vital thing imo is the pay per token pricing with no minimum, and a simple UI for prototyping - you can build out a demo paying personally and then get a company account.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#80

Post by olalonde »

harry8 wrote: post #67
martindbp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that there is no way to tell whether a company will become one of the "early failed companies" vs "the first one to be successful". Your strategy is not actionable.
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