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AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

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Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#81

Post by Fricken »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #67
Fricken wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been following progress on self-driving cars since the 2004 and 2005 Darpa Challenges. Things were very exciting in the 2011-2015 timeframe. Demos were mindblowing. Engineers were giddy. The auto industry went from laughing to shaking in their boots, and then scrambling to make it appear as though they had a horse in the self-driving car race. Hundreds of billions in investment were flying around. Now here we ar…

But I can actually use an LLM to do useful work for me and no one gets hurt. I think there’s too much hype and money, but LLMs are useful right now.

SAE Level 2 automated vehicles are useful now, just not so useful that it's safe to take one's eyes off the road and hands off the wheel.

LLMs are in a similar place, and still a long way from doing the whole job reliably by themselves. The current state of AI is one or several unknown unknowns away from real AGI. We're missing something fundamental.

Likewise with autonomous vehicles, the mythical SAE level 5 vehicle that goes anywhere and everywhere there is a road is still very much science fiction.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#82

Post by GloriousMEEPT »

steveBK123 wrote: post #66
wffurr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in When your boss is hyping it up and demanding all hands on deck full steam ahead on the Good Ship AI, lots of people join in out of fear, particularly in the currently awful job market which is partly being ruined by AI itself. Some of us just stay quiet, keep our hea…

Absolutely, and you see this in non-Mag7/non-tech industries where CEOs are all announcing a parade of "head of AI" hires. Will it end up being a permanent role like CISO, or is this just faddish follow-along? I know some of the guys being hired into these roles and, lol.. let's just say they are not experts. My spouse works at a large (50k-100k) org in a program management role where she is getting a lot of pressure…

> Most of us who were around 15+ years ago recall a lot of BigCorp had to be dragged unwillingly into mobile by internal useres/devs who got their first iPhone and saw the light.

Yeah thanks guys. Now I have outlook/teams on my phone and am expected to be reachable 24/7. If not, I'm expected to respond to text, and share my phone number with my colleagues. Those I don't directly share it with will get it from someone who knows me.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#83

Post by johnecheck »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #57
pixelesque wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise with the dot com bubble and the web - it was a bubble and it was overhyped, but it was still transformative if you look back 20 years as to how things are different in terms of media, and commerce.

Both smartphones (and tablets, and smart watches) and the internet went through the hype cycle [0], and the sentiments I've been reading lately indicate AI is in the "trough of disillusionment" right now. That said, I don't believe AI will ever reach the heights (i.e. the measurable ones, how much it penetrates our lives, how much money goes into it) as either smartphones or the internet had. Probably higher than VR…

It will of they can actually make it think better than we do. Whether they ever will is hard to say, but it feels pretty clear that throwing more money at LLMs isn't going to get us there.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#84

Post by lotsofpulp »

ghm2199 wrote: post #61
shoo wrote: post #15

How big is $344B? Apparently the total market capitalisation of the US stock market is $62.8 trillion. Shiller's CAPE ratio for the S & P index is currently about 38 -- CAPE is defined as current price / (earnings, averaged over the trailing 10 years) That suggests that over the last 10 years, the average earnings of the US stock market is about $1.7 trillion annually. So $344B of spending is about 1/5 of the average…

These days am looking at managing my own portfolio. I go off expected returns(using gdp as a component) plus dividend and adjust it for risk to compute which country/region has good expected returns. This i adjust a couple of times a year. If one would assume it's nearly all a bubble, How would you correct earnings for the US? I am interested in applying it to any investment that tracks AI heavy companies in the US.

How do you plan to adjust for government actions that affect purchasing power of the currency?

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#85

Post by darepublic »

wffurr wrote: post #7
redwood wrote: post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

>> in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in When your boss is hyping it up and demanding all hands on deck full steam ahead on the Good Ship AI, lots of people join in out of fear, particularly in the currently awful job market which is partly being ruined by AI itself. Some of us just stay quiet, keep our hea…

I sympathize with this, I would hate having some cargo cult bullshit foisted upon me by disingenuous management. However I'm not sure that it's AI who is "the emperor with no clothes". What I think _is_ such a facade are oftentimes the company itself, its business model, the product it is trying to build and the way its trying to build it. I have sometimes spoken my mind about these things -- petulantly, on my way out the door.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#86

Post by rsynnott »

redwood wrote: post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

One thing I find fascinating; go to any forum/subreddit/whatever for any LLM thing, and it will be full of people complaining that it's not as good as it used to be, and that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/whoever is intentionally degrading it, because they are so evil and want their products to be worse.

Then a new model or tool comes out, all is wonderful for a bit, then repeat (except for GPT-5, oddly; that one seems to have inspired hatred from the start).

It rarely seems to occur to people that familiarity breeds contempt; once the novelty wears off people start noticing the problems. The model isn't getting magically worse, you're just _noticing_ more.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#88

Post by elzbardico »

Mizza wrote: post #12

What's the path to recouping that money? Even if every major company in the US spends $100,000 a year on subscriptions and every household spends $20/month, it still doesn't seem like enough return on investment when you factor in inference costs and all the other overhead. New medical discoveries, maybe? I saw OpenAI's announcement about gpt-bio and iPSCs which was pretty amazing, but there's a very long gap between…

If AI Doesn’t Fire You, It Can’t Pay For Itself https://esborogardius.substack.com/p/if-ai-doesnt-fire-you-i...

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#89

Post by GloriousMEEPT »

wffurr wrote: post #80
qsort wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in Different speeches for different audiences. On HN, for all its faults, people don't need to be told that yes, SOTA LLM can somewhat help you with code, parsing documentation, etc. A lot of people in the "real world" are still grossly underestimating this technolog…

>> A lot of people in the "real world" are still grossly underestimating this technology. Did you mean "overestimating"? "somewhat help" is putting it strongly, IMO.

Most businesses don't need google or netflix level engineering. People on HN are outliers. The corporate world needs simple CRUD apps so tech savvy but non developer employees can stop grinding away at Excel.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#90

Post by thisisit »

redwood wrote: post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

> It's definitely interesting how in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in

I have seen that in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is transformative like say early smartphones.

When it comes to wearing professional hats people fall into two categories.

People who are using it outside their expertise area. Things they had to previously rely on others like back end operations. They gush about it - praising the technology as if they have discovered smartphones. Only when they use it for their expertise area they realize that AI might not be all it is hyped to be and that they need to be cautiously optimistic.

Then there are people who are using it within their expertise area. Like vibe coding. There are people who gush about it. But there are more who are cautiously optimistic. They will tell you it works but in a contained environment.

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