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

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

#91

Post by mihaaly »

JimDabell wrote: post #21

Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trend…

None of those "knowing why others are stupid" and "AI is muchmuchmore useful" matters if the topic is rampaged and distorted by clueless pile of wealth into momentary apparent fame instead of developed sensibly. Crypto and blockchain could have had much better merit if it's reputation was not destoyed by forced through careless mania. The society will f up AI into something of a freak, maybe even quicker due to its powerful hence scary nature, if maniacs push into something where it causes serious damages or cathastrophy, triggering hard regulations and bans. At least for our lifetime, slowing its much needed introduction to life to several generations timespan. AI could, and probably will, be castrated rapidly by the frenzy of huge piles of clueless money.

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

#92

Post by naillo »

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…

That's true for driverless cars but there's many areas where you don't need 100% to be useful. Stable diffusion and LLMs are 90% there but still very useful and cool.

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

#93

Post by rickdeckard »

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 business model is to provide you the benefits of wild-west AI with the legal stability of an Adobe service.

With Firefly they offer a tool an art agency can use daily without having to worry about hidden legal implications of using AI...

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

#94

Post by rvz »

It is a grift regardless of usefulness. "But it is useful" is hardly a justification for destroying the planet [0] [1] [2] without any viable efficient methods available today in training, fine-tuning and running it on every inference on tons of data centers.

All for so-called companies claiming to be 'AI companies' when they cannot even read or implement a technical paper and are just wrapping over someone elses API and immediately they are 'AI companies'. When it goes down they start crying over it 'not working'.

That is a confidence trick which is the definition of a grift and most replying here with excuses of "But it is useful" are likely to be underwater over their investments in inflated ChatGPT wrapper companies.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/08/artificia...

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

#95

Post by c7b »

What I find interesting about this wave of tech is not just how useful, but how accessible it is. Image generators like SD pretty much work out of the box on a lot of consumer-grade hardware, LLMs might be a bit more of a stretch but still doable (haven't tried that yet, though). It's quite unusual, compare that to how inaccessible the first computers were.

Not sure I would love this fact if I was an AI investor, but for the rest of us, it's just a blessing. Let's hope it stays that way by supporting researchers/companies who do share their weights, and being mindful of the CEOs telling lawmakers that only they should be allowed to do matrix multiplications (not saying we don't need any regulation though). Those tools undeniably do create value, maybe not for every investor, but for countless users. And the investors should understand the risks, my guess is that if you'd invested in "cars" around 1900, chances that you'd have lost your money would have been quite high, even though your idea might have been right in principle.

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

#96

Post by trashtester »

mihaic wrote: post #52
robertlagrant wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't exactly untrue, although the numbers are off, I think, but no one seems to invented a better alternative. If you have money because you stole it from your citizens, or because you sent your serfs to die in a war, that's infinitely worse than because you did something someone else thought was valuable and they paid you for it.

Only very few people are asking for a completely different system, they usually demand fine-tuning the system so that it improves median life quality. It used to be that the philosophy before was to have the least amount of intervention on the free market, and it's now that there should be no interventions whatsoever. Isn't that an extreme position?

There is probably no country in the world with no intervention, or even close. In fact, there are massive intervention in pretty much every country.

Actual lassez-faire economies was mostly a thing in the 19th century.

Since then, regulatations have been accumulating constantly, and total government spending increased to GDP increased from about 10% to 35-75% in most if not all western countries.

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

#97

Post by spaceman_2020 »

I was a complete believer in AI when chatGPT first dropped. The tech seemed revolutionary. GPT-4 even helped me write a ton of code for an app.

But if you ask me now, I feel that the AI revolution is a little overstated. The tech, while incredibly good, is not really ready for large scale adoption. Individuals and hobbyists might benefit from it, but for large enterprises and serious applications, it's too inconsistent and unreliable.

All I can see it accomplishing is pushing out the lowest end of the content/code creation totem pole. That's nice, but it's not nearly the "intelligence revolution" the promoters have been promising.

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

#98

Post by nologic01 »

The "AI" bubble has some similarities but also important differences from the "crypto/blockchain" bubble and the brief "metaverse" mania.

The similarities are sort of obvious. The real economy is in a precarious state worldwide. Geopolitical strife, political polarization, exhausted and confused households, still reeling from the pandemic. All in a background of a deteriorating environment that either burns to ashes or is swamped by plastic. This is our real condition and there is no turnaround in sight.

Yet the "optimism" and valuations must keep up or the system will collapse for good. The reliable pony delivering tricks is the tech sector. Being unregulated/oligopolistic with massive rent extraction, operating in an entirely virtual realm and by now controlling all digital communication channels it has massive resources and opportunity to pump up every nugget into a digital gold rush and it does so shamelessly and with predictable regularity.

So what is different between these serial bubbles? crypto and metaverse require massive social and/or behavioral change. If you look at the problems that blockchain was supposed to solve, all of them would be solvable with lower tech if people actually had an interest to solve them. There far easier ways to make the monetary and financial systems more fair and honest than inventing a poor simulacra. The metaverse requires a collective migration into a fake reality. People are increasingly escapists and absurdists but strapping a heavy idiot-signaling device on your head is a virtual bridge too far for most.

"AI" is a better fit to the status quo. Grabbing any and all accessible data and algorithmic manipulation of people is already enshrined as acceptable practice ("people so much enjoy the convenience"). So imho this bubble has some legs. Which means the fall will more painful when it happens. What will burst the bubble? Regulation on data collection and possible applications is one possible balloon prick. The other one is commoditization.

Commoditization is an interesting one. If there is any silver lining in this dismal doom tech era we live through it is the fact that major information processing and communication capabilities are being built. It is conceivable that at some point these will be deployed in very different ways and with much bigger positive impact.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

bambax wrote: post #83
croo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by ak_111 »

JimDabell wrote: post #21

Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trend…

I think you are being harsh on the critics. A technology can have tremendous value while still attracting grifters and being an early investors' graveyard.

Best example is the dot com bubble in 1996 - 2001, the web had truly world-changing potential, but grifting was rife and practically all early investors lost their money unless you were one of the lucky ones who invested in amazon, yahoo, google or ebay out of the 10,000 companies that were shilling back then (and even then you had to be very patient not to sell your stock for decades to make the really big gains - see the history of amazon and apple stock during this era).

There are many such examples in history of technology concerning grifters and the fate of early investors see also automobiles and printing press (even in printing press Guttenberg lost a lot of money and had many grifters/copycats)

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