Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

institutionalinvestor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 234 posts

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

#81

Post by mym1990 »

borissk wrote: post #29
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…

Actually compared to the economies of past societies, the modern economy in the West is amazing. If you work hard, have a little bit above the average intelligence and potentially a bit of luck you can make a lot of money. If not I guess you can make excuses. The simplest way to organize a group of people, animals, organisms is to make one of them leader and have the rest follow him. This is the way our ancestors beh…

The fact that you think our ancestors go back hundreds of millions of years…is wild.

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

#82

Post by bombolo »

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'd expect the real implementation to not be nearly as good as the demo shows.

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

#83

Post by bambax »

croo wrote: post #70
bambax wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. (...) the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.

The Dawn of Everything, 2020

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

#84

Post by doctor_eval »

darkwater wrote: post #46
doctor_eval wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. AI solves real problems, and has been doing so for many years. Generative AI is just the latest and most accessible instantiating of it. My first company was a dialup ISP in the 90s. I look at GPT4 and I see the 56K modem of AI. There is so much upside to be discovered, we have barely started.

> 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.

GPT wrapper products are the equivalent of static corporate HTML pages from the 90s. We build them because we are the early adopters of a brand new technology and we’re working out how it works.

I’m working with such a company and yes, the first product is a (very nuanced and very domain specific) wrapper around GPT. But as we gain experience, we expect to develop far more complex and interesting products. But we gotta start somewhere.

2 years ago, nobody even knew about ChatGPT. We are at the very start of this wave and we’re just still plucking the low hanging fruit. The fact that GPT wrappers are useful speaks directly to the potential of the technology.

Contrast this with crypto, which wasn’t even capable of solving the problems it was supposed to solve, and where losses incurred by things like smart contracts were almost inevitable. The products being built with AI are real products that real people are paying for. The difference couldn’t be more stark.

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

#85

Post by trashtester »

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…

How do you define "poor"? Net worth of less than $10M? Income less than $1M?

Unless you set very strict limits for "poor" like that, the people that the ultra rich hire tend to be rather well off, or at least comfortable, themselves ( by that I mean net worth of >$1M OR income of >$100k.

Actual poor people don't built state of the art tech. At best, they work as cleaning staff or in the cafeteria of those companies. Or maybe in the assembly plant in a foreign country. (And even those may feel wealthy when compared to their friends and family.)

Those who resent the ultra rich the most tend to be those who are themselves quite comfortable, often affluent even, but really hate it when other people are even more successful than themselves.

They often pretend to care for "the poor", but really all they want is to pull down anyone more successful than themselves.

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

#86

Post by stale2002 »

ben_w wrote: post #73
apexalpha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists?

Although this is debatable, lets accept it for the sake of argument that adobe has no moat.

If this is the case, this may be bad for adobe, but it is amazing for the design world. Producing more art for cheaper is real value.

And we may not know who specifically will capture that value, but it is undeniably value none the less that will go somewhere. That still benefits the economy as a whole, even if we can't guess which AI startup will win the race.

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

#87

Post by fxtentacle »

ben_w wrote: post #73
apexalpha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Adobe's moat is that GIMP still cannot properly edit 4-channel CMYK images. And none of the competitors can print with ICC profile correction. I kid you not, there is no way around Adobe for any kind of serious image editing.

Adobe's second moat is PDF. And it builds upon their imaging moat because companies want their product boxes to be sharp and with accurate colors, so there is an entire industry built around PDF-based print and cut and glue manufacturing.

So whether or not they throw an AI bone to the kids is probably irrelevant to their bottom line. My guess would be that Adobe added those AI features mainly to make their company look more sexy to potential future hires.

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

#88

Post by Animats »

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite.

Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had off-road driving on empty roads working. Then there were a few experimental self-driving cars that sort of worked on general roads. Many startups, most went bust.

Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco. 64 years since GM's Firebird III. (Which still exists, in driveable condition, in GM's in-house collection.)

It may take a while to get from GPT-3 to Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0. But the path is clear now.

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

#89

Post by mschuster91 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #25
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…

It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke?

> It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke?

Your average millionaire is closer in wealth to the average homeless person than he is to the average billionaire.

A single catastrophic event - be it some kid getting paralyzed on your backyard trampoline, an investment gone wrong, a company going under because it can't compete with Chinese government-backed price dumping, disaster that rips apart one's home that has gotten uninsurable, cancer, or early-onset dementia - can wipe out their wealth in the blink of an eye, whereas the billionaire can afford to sink half a billion into a yacht and still have not made a dent in his wealth.

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

#90

Post by logifail »

Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

> The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. > Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco [...]

From the outside, it sure does look like driverless is still firmly at "sort of works":

"After California regulators approved the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco earlier this month, it took only a little more than 24 hours for a series of events to begin that seemed to justify the taxis’ detractors.

The day after the vote, 10 autonomous vehicles operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, abruptly stopped functioning in the middle of a busy street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Posts to social media showed the cars jammed up, their hazard lights flashing, blocking traffic for 15 minutes.

A few days later, another Cruise vehicle drove into a paving project in the Western Addition and got stuck in freshly poured concrete.

And then last week, a Cruise car collided with a fire truck in the city, injuring a passenger in the car.

So it was that last Friday Cruise agreed to a request from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to cut in half the number of vehicles it operated in San Francisco, even though regulatory approval for more remained in place. The company, which has had 400 driverless vehicles operating in the city, will now have no more than 50 cars running during the day and 150 at night."[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/us/california-autonomous-...

Post reply on HN