The Generative AI Con
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The Generative AI Con
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Re: The Generative AI Con
#2[deleted]
Re: The Generative AI Con
#3This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho should be viewed as an R&D race amongst private actors.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#4As a 40yo software engineer (at Microsoft) with no specific domain expertise other than using genAI for fun and some code completion, this essay/blog post articulates my gut feelings about where we are at, very well.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#5> When you put aside the hype and anecdotes, generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years. The one "big thing" that they've been able to do is to use "reasoning" to make the Large Language Models "think" [...]
This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months:
- Multi-modal: LLMs can consume images, audio and (to an extent) video now. This is a huge improvement on the text-only models of 2023 - it opens up so many new applications for this tech. I use both image and audio models (ChatGPT Advanced Voice) on a daily basis.
- Context lengths. GPT-4 could handle 8,000 tokens. Today's leading models are almost all 100,000+ and the largest handle 1 or 2 million tokens. Again, this makes them far more useful.
- Cost. The good models today are 100x cheaper than the GPT-3 era models and massively more capable.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#6Well, he isn't wrong.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#7Why in the world would you want a car?? They are horrible to maintain, difficult to operate, expensive, smell bad, and are slower than horses! -somebody salty about automobiles, circa 1900.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#8> How does this industry actually continue? Do OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise tens of billions of dollars every six months until they work this out?
It's been made fairly clear that the insiders are setting the stage for governments to back them (bail them out).
Re: The Generative AI Con
#9> When you put aside the hype and anecdotes, generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years. The one "big thing" that they've been able to do is to use "reasoning" to make the Large Language Models "think" [...] This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months: - Multi-modal: LLMs can consume…
The "iPhone moment" gets used a lot, but maybe it's more analogous to the early internet: we have the basics, but we're still learning what we can do with this new protocol and building the infrastructure around it to be truly useful. And as you've pointed out, our "bandwidth" is increasing exponentially at the same time.
If nothing else, my workflows as a software developer have changed significantly in these past two years with just what's available today, and there is so much work going into making that workflow far more productive.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#10This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…
> The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress
There hasn't been much R&D progress, though. Sure, as another commenter pointed out, context lengths have gotten longer and chat models can interpret images now, but the industry figureheads have been pushing agents, and we're not much closer to those than we were two years ago when GPT-4 came out. Current models simply are not consistent enough to do the kind of agentic stuff that AI valuations are predicated upon, nor is there any sign that a significantly smarter GPT-5 is just around the corner. Multi-modal chat is cute, but OpenAI is burning money. They're all burning money, and they don't have a product. They imply and imply that there's something big on the horizon, but it's been years, and there just isn't a killer app yet. Their platform isn't good enough, and it's not improving in the ways it would need to in order for Godot to arrive and for agents to be feasible.