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The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

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Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#71

Post by belter »

drewcoo wrote: post #66
belter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best description of the current state of affairs. But who is going to risk not invest on what could be another possible major breakthrough in 3 to 5 years? Either from a GPT5 or another source? It's not like all the brainpower that left OpenAI recently, suddenly converted to farming... At least load on NVIDIA options....

> But who is going to risk not invest on what could be another possible major breakthrough in 3 to 5 years? 3 to 5 years is an awful lot of quarters . . .

I like to measure my time in PhD's ...3 to 5 years, means the major breakthrough could be just at a distance of 0.5 PhDs

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#72

Post by pavlov »

nabla9 wrote: post #65
pavlov wrote: post #50

I seem to recall reading articles like this in 1997 about the internet. “What’s there to do really?” they asked. Whatever annoyance somebody had with the state of the early web was magnified into a portrait of decline. It was only for nerds. Or maybe too shallow with ugly amateur content. Or too commercialized already. Or maybe it was never going to be a successful platform for business because nobody is crazy enough…

Today we are asking: Why the productivity growth from the internet was so low? As Robert Solow said “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” The productivity gains from the internet have been surprisingly small or negligible so far. There was initial surge in productivity growth from 1996-2000, then productivity growth fell back to pre-internet levels.

IMO, as long as increasing headcount is a primary measure of managerial success and status, there won’t be meaningful productivity gains because managers spend profits on hiring people who are not necessary but make their fiefdoms look more important.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#73

Post by the_snooze »

drewcon wrote: post #47
nabla9 wrote: post #25

Technology revolution means different thing to different people - technological change, consumer benefit - investing opportunity. If you compare to internet revolution consumer benefit increased steadily, but as a general investment category it was total bust. During the internet revolution, Top 5 internet companies were Yahoo.com, AOL.com, Geocities.com, MSN.com, and Lycos.com. It took almost 10 years to Amazon stoc…

This is such an important point. Finance world looks at the consumer benefit as an interesting feature of the investment opportunity, while the technology world looks at the investment opportunity as an interesting feature of the technology change and consumer benefit. The two communities will talk right past each other like they’re speaking different languages.

>Finance world looks at the consumer benefit as an interesting feature of the investment opportunity, while the technology world looks at the investment opportunity as an interesting feature of the technology change and consumer benefit.

Boeing's cultural nosedive in so many words.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#74

Post by Jensson »

pavlov wrote: post #72
nabla9 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today we are asking: Why the productivity growth from the internet was so low? As Robert Solow said “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” The productivity gains from the internet have been surprisingly small or negligible so far. There was initial surge in productivity growth from 1996-2000, then productivity growth fell back to pre-internet levels.

IMO, as long as increasing headcount is a primary measure of managerial success and status, there won’t be meaningful productivity gains because managers spend profits on hiring people who are not necessary but make their fiefdoms look more important.

Managers hires managers so they don't have to work. Then those managers hires managers so they don't have to work. There is no end to how many managers you can have.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#75

Post by somenameforme »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #17

To me it seems that AI is not even priced into the market cap of the big tech companies yet. Since GPT-3 came out in mid 2020: Alphabet's market cap doubled. But their earnings more than doubled. Same for Microsoft. In other words: Their p/e ratio did not increase. The future potential of AI is not yet priced in. The cost of all human labor is something like $70 trillion per year. Automating 1% of that per year would…

Aside from some nitpicky numeric issues, you're considering the benefit without the cost. If we ever achieve real AI, the sort that could realistically start replacing labor pools with high efficiency, then you'd destroy your own economy. The people that work for you (in a broad enough picture) are the exact same people buying your stuff. Kill your labor pool, kill your demand, kill your economy. Then unemployed people get angry, start torching AI systems, and electing what will be called 'luddites.'

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#76

Post by somenameforme »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #21

I don't believe it, even though I'd like to. I don't really care much for the technology because of its societal impact. I am a bit surprised that it hasn't been more weaponized yet for elections and wars. But it will be, no doubt about it.

I'm fairly certain it's being extensively used simply because the opposite seems basically impossible to imagine. You have these bots capable of endlessly writing semi-believable comments that can dynamically adjust to context, to spin whatever you want to your desired narrative.

It's unimaginable that the military and government aren't already extensively using these systems. There's no laws against it (not that that seems to even matter that much anymore), there's no real cost if caught (as e.g. has happened with "influencers" being asked to make political points by politicians while also not disclosing that), and so on. It's basically near zero risk, low cost, high perceived reward, and completely doable. It's happening.

This could easily explain why social media, sites such as YouTube, and others increasingly often seem to follow cues from the political establishment more than general public sentiment as reflected in polls, "real life" actions, etc.. Of course there could also be biases driving such things, but those biases did not seem to exist, certainly not to the same degree, in the times before LLMs.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#77

Post by somenameforme »

_heimdall wrote: post #48
sriram_malhar wrote: post #21

I don't believe it, even though I'd like to. I don't really care much for the technology because of its societal impact. I am a bit surprised that it hasn't been more weaponized yet for elections and wars. But it will be, no doubt about it.

Militaries move really slow when it comes to adopting entirely new tech, at least in open warfare. We likely won't see much from them until we suddenly have fighter jets flown by AI in the battlefield and autonomous systems handling at least a portion of the weapons targeting process.

I'm fairly certain he's referring to war propaganda, not bot driven war systems. A bot that drops a bomb on its own people 1% of the time is pretty useless. A propaganda bot that says viable nonsense 1% of the time is awesome because it just adds even more plausible deniability.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#78

Post by EA-3167 »

dpflan wrote: post #8

It’s the best demo-able software today that lets the customers’ minds go wild with the possibilities. But then the nuances of human abilities in commercial settings, like call center, become realities and obstacles that the software can’t surmount. Costs rise, productivity not so much, and then legal gets involved and it’s even more costly.

Plus there's the reality that all of this mediocre capability requires VAST inputs of energy that are totally unsustainable.

I've said it here before and will again, AI is just the pivot from crypto that props up NVIDIA prices and lets tech bros speculate on a market that simply will never materialize.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#79

Post by iLoveOncall »

magic_hamster wrote: post #55

This article deals with the ginormous models being trained and run in places like meta or openai - but the real AI revolution is a mix of things and we've only barely scraped the surface of what we could do with this technology. I say this not because the next ChatGPT will be incredible (which it might be) but because it's actually the open source community which amazes me with what has already been built, and runs l…

I think you're overestimating what the open source community has done.

The core value of GenAI (the models) that is currently open sourced has ONLY been contributed by large companies.

What the open source *community* has contributed is frontends and implementations of research papers. It is hugely important of course, and not to be ignored, but GenAI simply doesn't exist at all without large companies.

Re: The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam

#80

Post by magic_hamster »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #79
magic_hamster wrote: post #55

This article deals with the ginormous models being trained and run in places like meta or openai - but the real AI revolution is a mix of things and we've only barely scraped the surface of what we could do with this technology. I say this not because the next ChatGPT will be incredible (which it might be) but because it's actually the open source community which amazes me with what has already been built, and runs l…

I think you're overestimating what the open source community has done. The core value of GenAI (the models) that is currently open sourced has ONLY been contributed by large companies. What the open source *community* has contributed is frontends and implementations of research papers. It is hugely important of course, and not to be ignored, but GenAI simply doesn't exist at all without large companies.

Not exactly. The "web uis" are actually products built around these models. There are some truly outstanding examples like comfy, automatic1111 and ollama. But what's been even more impressive to me is how the open source community use these models to create new workflows like texturing in blender. There is just so much to discover yet.
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