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The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

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Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#81

Post by h3lp »

dinkblam wrote: post #34
frithsun wrote: post #31

I believe this is a "good" bubble in the sense that the 19th century railroad bubble and original dot com bubble both ended up invested in infrastructure that created immense value. That said, all of these LLMs are interchangeable, there are no moats, and the profit will almost entirely be in the "last mile," in local subject matter experts applying this technology to their bespoke business processes.

> "good" bubble in the sense how can massively buying hardware that will have to be thrown away in a few years be a "good" bubble in the sense of being a lasting infrastructure investment?

One large but forgotten effect of the dotcom bubble was an excess fiber capacity, that allowed smooth growth of internet in the following 25 years---average internet speed in the US is 200 Mbps, and a significant number of households is on a gigabit uplink. I take your point that GPU hardware amortizes away faster than fiber, but that's true of all computing hardware: the average lifecycle of a server is around five years.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#82

Post by skeezyboy »

usrnm wrote: post #5

Are we in a bubble that's going to pop and take a large part of the economy with it? Almost certainly. Does it mean that the AI is a scam? Not really. After all, the Internet did not disappear after the dotcom burst, and, actually, almost everything we were promised by the dotcoms became reality at some point.

> almost everything we were promised by the dotcoms became reality at some point. remember the blockchain bubble? used much blockchain lately? are blockchains changing anything?

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#83

Post by falcor84 »

mossTechnician wrote: post #60
falcor84 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that hardware "have to be thrown away"? I've seen quite old GPUs still in use; given the current demand, I expect the vast majority of hardware used in these data centers to see a lot more extended use than most other types of electronics around the world (e.g. phones).

GPUs in data centers have short lifespans. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

Oh, interesting - it's about failure rate following degradation after prolonged use. I didn't think of that - but my take is that if companies like Google are actually using those components until they 100% exhaust what the components are capable of, then we can argue about whether this use of resources is better than an alternative use of them, but it's by definition not a waste of resources.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#84

Post by elktown »

falcor84 wrote: post #56
elktown wrote: post #40

What's clear is that the hype has reach such a critical mass that people are comfortable enough to publicly and shamelessly extrapolate extraordinary claims based purely on gut feeling. Both here on HN and by complete laymen elsewhere. AI-optimist or not, that's just shocking to me.

> people are comfortable enough to publicly and shamelessly extrapolate extraordinary claims based purely on gut feeling What's the problem with that? Why shouldn't people feel comfortable sharing their vision of the future, even if it's just a "gut feeling" vision? We're not going to run out of ink.

I guess I expect higher standards than the kind of confident extrapolation you find in pseudo-science. And "vision of the future" is your euphemistic rewrite. If that's clearly stated I obviously have no problem with people's fanciful speculation. But these are claims in the format: "X will be replaced in a couple of years, how should we adapt as a society?" etc etc.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#85

Post by variadix »

wulfstan wrote: post #51
frithsun wrote: post #31

I believe this is a "good" bubble in the sense that the 19th century railroad bubble and original dot com bubble both ended up invested in infrastructure that created immense value. That said, all of these LLMs are interchangeable, there are no moats, and the profit will almost entirely be in the "last mile," in local subject matter experts applying this technology to their bespoke business processes.

I keep saying to people - "if you have a good idea that can make use of large amounts of really really cheap GPUs to do something genuinely useful - get ready for a massive glut of spare capacity". I still haven't thought of anything, unfortunately...

Hopefully they can be repurposed for something like cheap drug discovery rather than shitcoin mining.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#86

Post by K0balt »

I too am deeply skeptical of the current economic allocation, but it’s typical of frontier expansions in general.

Somehow, in AI, people lost sight of the fact that transformer architecture AI is a fundamentally extractive process for identifying and mining the semantic relationships in large data sets.

Because human cultural data contains a huge amount of inferred information not overtly apparent in the data set, many smart people confused the results with a generative rather than an extractive mechanism.

….To such a point that the entire field is known as “generative” AI, when fundamentally it is not in any way generative. It merely extracts often unseen or uncharacterized semantics, and uses them to extrapolate from a seed.

There are, however, many uses for such a mechanism. There are many, many examples of labor where there is no need to generate any new meaning or “story”.

All of this labor can be automated through the application of existing semantic patterns to the data being presented, and to do so we suddenly do not need to fully characterize or elaborate the required algorithm to achieve that goal.

We have a universal algorithm, a sonic screwdriver if you will, with which we can solve any fully solved problem set by merely presenting the problems and enough known solutions so that the hidden algorithms can be teased out into the model parameters.

But it only works on the class of fully solved problems. Insofar as unsolved problems can be characterized as a solved system of generating and testing hypothesis to solve the unsolved, we may potentially also assail unsolved problems with this tool.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#87

Post by wulfstan »

variadix wrote: post #85
wulfstan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep saying to people - "if you have a good idea that can make use of large amounts of really really cheap GPUs to do something genuinely useful - get ready for a massive glut of spare capacity". I still haven't thought of anything, unfortunately...

Hopefully they can be repurposed for something like cheap drug discovery rather than shitcoin mining.

If that ends up being the case then we could all genuinely agree that good has eventually emerged from the compute/inference infrastructure that LLMs paid for. I hope that comes to pass.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#88

Post by whywhywhywhy »

wulfstan wrote: post #57

In July 2023, I wrote this to a friend: "...being entirely blunt, I am an AI skeptic. I think AI and LLM are somewhat interesting but a bit like self-driving cars 5 years ago - at the peak of a VC-driven hype cycle and heading for a spectacular deflation. My main interest in technology is making innovation useful to people and as it stands I just can't conceive of a use of this which is beneficial beyond a marginal i…

> but everything it produces needs careful checking for errors, mistakes and 'hallucinations' by someone with some level of expertise in a subject

Nah you just post it, if people point out the mistakes the comment is treated as a positive engagement by the algorithm anyway, unfortunately for anyone that cares.

Re: The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

#90

Post by topaz0 »

usrnm wrote: post #5

Are we in a bubble that's going to pop and take a large part of the economy with it? Almost certainly. Does it mean that the AI is a scam? Not really. After all, the Internet did not disappear after the dotcom burst, and, actually, almost everything we were promised by the dotcoms became reality at some point.

Worth noting that the essay acknowledges that there are ways that people use this stuff and actually like it. Saying it's a scam is about those uses being orders of magnitude less valuable than the companies involved (and credulous media) claim, and even orders of magnitude less than the amount of money that they are actively investing in this stuff. Saying it's a bubble is not a claim that it will go away entirely and never be seen again, it's a claim that reality will eventually manifest and result in massive upheaval as companies go bankrupt, valuations plummet, and associated downstream effects.
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