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

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71–80 of 668 posts

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

#71
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Claude, make sure to sprinkle at least one typo in here. And no em dashes you hear?"

Faculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from using them. One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing." I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?" Blank stares. I hate it.

The writing is a mandatory part of the learning process. Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or upwork before LLMs.

Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.

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

#72

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…

Personally I think people should stop trying to reason from the past. As tempting as it is, it leads to false outcomes because you are not thinking about how this particular situation is going to impact society and the economy. Its much harder to reason this way, but isnt that the point? personally I dont want to hear or read analogies based on the past - I want to see and read stuff that comes from original thinking…

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

#73
post #35
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And their promises. The "it'll make all your devs 6x as productive by the end of the year" types of promises. But those probably explain the valuations

Yeah, Sam Altman’s recent one saying that his LLMs would “cure cancer” if they built enough data centres was also a winner.

And create a theory of quantum gravity.

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

#74

Every bubble looks obvious in hindsight. The dot-com crash left behind Amazon and Google. The crypto crash left behind Coinbase and a few real revenue generating companies. If this is the AI bubble, then the survivors are going to look very obvious in a decade, we just don’t know which ones yet.

But google and amazon were obvious to those in the know, in terms of what they delivered. S Jobs called it back in 1995-97 - he referred to it as shopping for information and shopping for good and services. Nobody has this crystal clear, tangible vision re. LLMs. Nobody at all. That is a big problem. I found the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSfFcaluHc&t=1700s

Personally I never tougth of Google as a dotcom era company. Most of those were landing pages with news and chat rooms.

It was more of web 2.0 company.

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

#75
post #56

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…

That's true for the GPUs themselves, but the data centers with their electricity infrastructure and cooling and suchlike won't become obsolete nearly as quickly.

This is true. It’s probably 2-3 times as long as a GPU chip. But it’s still probably half or a quarter of the depreciation timeline of a carrier fiber line.

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

#76
post #71
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from using them. One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing." I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?" Blank stares. I hate it.

The writing is a mandatory part of the learning process. Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or upwork before LLMs. Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.

The sad difference that makes a difference is that banning graphing calculators from proctored exams is enforceable in practice.

Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best. Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat on exams simply does not generalize.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/18/51-west-...

edit: good on West Point for actually following up on the cheating. I've witnessed another institution sweeping it under the rug even when properly documented and passed up two or three levels of reporting. As an academic director and thus manager of professors this was infuriating and demoralizing for all concerned.

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

#77
post #69
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, not that many people had modems.

In the late 90s to 2001? Many people were still using modems at that time. Cable or DSL wasn't even an option for a considerable percentage of the population.

In 2000 6% of the population had access to internet.

In 2002 I was woking making webs and setting up linux servers and I did not have internet at home.

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

#78
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.

Those companies are also likely still in the red. They're banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm sure one of them will be.

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

#79
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.

are you paying them enough to have profitable unit economics? How hard would it be for you to switch from one provider to another?

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

#80

My understanding is that the cost of training each next model is very very large, and a half trained model is worthless. Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People will continue using the old models, but they will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not much more than historical artifacts. My poi…

If they stop getting returns in intelligence, they will switch to returns in efficiency and focus on integration, with new models being trained for new data cutoffs if nothing else. Even today there is at least a 5-10 year integration/adoption period if everything halts tomorrow.

There is no reality in which LLMs go away (shy of being replaced).

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