As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
Same thing happened with crypto and block chain. The whole “move fast and break things” in reality means, "we made up words for something that isn’t special to create value out of nothing and cash out before it returns to nothing
Going back all the way to the tulip mania of the 17th century.
Except I’m able to replace 2 content creator roles I’d otherwise need to fill with AI right now.
There’s this weird Luddite trend going on with people right now, but it’s so heavily divorced from reality that it’s totally non-impactful.
AI is not a flash in the pan. It’s emerging tech.
@SCB The Luddites were not upset about progress, they were upset that the people they had worked their whole lives for were kicking them to the street without a thought. So they destroyed the machines in protest.
It’s not weird, it’s not just a trend, and it’s actually more in touch with the reality of employer-employee relations than the idea that these LLMs are ready for primetime.
Luddites were wrong and progress happened despite them.
I’m not really concerned about jobs disappearing. Get a different job. I’m on my 4th radically different job of my career so far. The world changes and demanding it should not because you don’t want to change makes you the ideological equal of a conservative arguing about traditional family values.
Meanwhile I’ll be over here using things like Synthesia instead of hiring an entry level ID.
Not everyone can flex into new roles. Have some compassion for those who get left behind. The lack of compassion in your response actually causes you to look conservative.
I have compassion. I think the government should invest heavily into retraining programs and moving subsidies.
I don’t think we should hold all of progress back because somebody doesn’t want to change careers
Edit: retraining, not restraining. That’s an important typo fix lol
What if we were finally able to get insurance companies out of healthcare in the US? Thousands would lose their jobs, but millions would suddenly be able to get care. So much money would be saved, but so many people would suddenly be out of work.
I don’t know about you, but I hate paying several hundred dollars a month (and 100s or 1000s if I actually get care) to prop up a whole ass middleman between me and my care.
Anyway, my point is we can’t keep old systems only for the sake of preserving jobs. The guy you’re replying to is short sighted and relying too heavily on a language imitation program, but he’s essentially right about not keeping jobs just because.
@new_acct_who_dis Yeah, but that wouldn’t hurt as much because all the people out of work would still have healthcare.
AI displaced creatives will lose their healthcare.
The lack of rationale and reason in your response actually causes you to look conservative.
You can bitch about it all you want but the reality is that it actually works for a select group, the Amazons, Binances, etc. And that was always how it was going to be. The failures you point to are not a sign that these things don’t work, they were always going to be there, they are like the people during the gold rush who found diddly squat, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any gold.
Anyone who suggests that AI “will return to nothing” is a fool, and I don’t think you really believe it either.
Crypto was and still is a scam, and everyone that’s said so has just been validated for it. People saying that AI is overstated right now are being called fools, and the people who are AI-washing everything and blathering about how it’s going to be the future are awfully defensive about it, so much so to resort to namecalling as opposed to substantiating it. As a consumer I hate ads anyway, so I’m indifferent to AI generated artwork for advertising, it’s all shit to me anyway.
If my TV shows and movies are made formulaic by AI even moreso than they already are, I’ll just patron the ones that are more entertaining and less formulaic. I fail to see how AI revolutionizes the world though by automating things we could already live without though. The only argument for the AI-washing we have is to push toward AGI, that we’re clearly a very long ways off from still.
This just all stinks of the VR craze that hit in 2016 with all the lofty promises of simulating any possible experience, and in the end we got some minor reduction on the screen-door-effect while strapping Facebook to our faces and soon some Apple apps. But hey we spent hundreds of billions on some pipe dreams and made some people rich enough to not give a shit about VR anymore.
Crypto is still incredibly healthy. Bitcoin has been stable at $30k.
Is it still a big scam? Maybe. But what happened with FTX was just good ol corruption.
Anyone with exposure to Crypto either already collapsed, or wound down their position, so there wasn’t a huge effect on markets. AI will be similar. Some VC will fail, but it’s not the same as the dotcom bubble. It won’t cause a recession
OpenAI may fail if Microsoft doesn’t keep throwing money at it, but they already got what they want out of it. They’ll probably just end up acquiring the foundation and make money from the ways they’re implementing it in their products.
I think *LLMs to do everything is the bubble. AI isn’t going anywhere, we’ve just had a little peak of interest thanks to ChatGPT. Midjourney and the like aren’t going anywhere, but I’m sure we’ll all figure out that LLMs can’t really be trusted soon enough.
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I just want to make the distinction, that AI like this literally are black boxes. We (currently) have no ability to know why it chose the word it did for example. You train it, and under the hood you can’t actually read out the logic tree of why each word was chosen. That’s a major pitfall of AI development, its very hard to know how the AI arrived at a decision. You might know it’s right, or it’s wrong…but how did the AI decide this?
At a very technical level we understand HOW it makes decisions, we do not actively understand every decision it makes (it’s simply beyond our ability currently, from what I know)
You train it, and under the hood you can’t actually read out the logic tree of why each word was chosen.
Of course you can, you can look at every single activation and weight in the network. It’s tremendously hard to predict what the model will do, but once you have an output it’s quite easy to see how it came to be. How could it be bloody otherwise you calculated all that stuff to get the output, the only thing you have to do is to prune off the non-activated pathways. That kind of asymmetry is in the nature of all non-linear systems, a very similar thing applies to double pendulums: Once you observed it moving in a certain way it’s easy to say “oh yes the initial conditions must have looked like this”.
What’s quite a bit harder to do for the likes of ChatGPT compared to double pendulums is to see where they possibly can swing. That’s due to LLMs having a fuckton more degrees of freedom than two.
I don’t disagree with anything you said but wanted to just weigh in on the more degrees of freedom.
One major thing to consider is that unless we have 24/7 sensor recording with AI out in the real world and a continuous monitoring of sensor/equipment health, we’re not going to have the “real” data that the AI triggered on.
Version and model updates will also likely continue to cause drift unless managed through some sort of central distribution service.
Any large Corp will have this organization and review or are in the process of figuring it out. Small NFT/Crypto bros that jump to AI will not.
IMO the space will either head towards larger AI ensembles that tries to understand where an exact rubric is applied vs more AGI human reasoning. Or we’ll have to rethink the nuances of our train test and how humans use language to interact with others vs understand the world (we all speak the same language as someone else but there’s still a ton of inefficiency)
The thing is a lot of people are not using for that. They think it is a living omniscient sci-fi computer who is capable of answering everything, just like they saw in the movies. Noone thought that about keyboard auto-suggestions.
And with regards to people who aren’t very knowledgeable on the subject, it is difficult to blame them for thinking so, because that is how it is presented to them in a lot of news reports as well as adverts.
They think it is a living omniscient sci-fi computer who is capable of answering everything
Oh that’s nothing new:
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- Charles Babbage
@Reva “Hey, should we use this statistical model that imitates language to replace my helpdesk personnel?” is an ethical question because bosses don’t listen when you outright tell them that’s a stupid idea.
Are you familiar with the 1980s program Racter? It wasn’t trained on the entire internet like LLMs are, but it kind of feels like an extension of that. Except Racter’s output was more amusing.
The best way to make money in the gold rush was selling shovels.
Same idea here. Nvidia is making bank.
And that’s before you even point out that they were also making bank from the last gold rush
Good time to be in the GPU business
If nvda selling shovels, what is tsmc?
selling steel
Did you mean the crypto/NFT bubble?
Yeah I was going to say VC throwing money at the newest fad isn’t anything new, in fact startups strive exploit the fuck out of it. No need to actually implement the fad tech, you just need to technobabble the magic words and a VC is like “here have 2 million dollars”.
In our own company we half joked about calling a relatively simple decision flow in our back end an “AI system”.
crypto and nft have nothing to do with AI, though. Investing in AI properly is like investing in Apple in the early 90’s.
ultimately it won’t matter because if we get AGI, which is the whole point of investing in AI, stocks will become worthless.
NFTs yes but crypto is absolutely not a bubble. People are saying that for decades now and it hasn’t been truth. Yes there are shitcoins, just shitstocks. But in general, it’s definitely not a bubble but an alternative investing method beside stocks, gold etc.
NFTs yes but crypto is absolutely not a bubble. People are saying that for decades now and it hasn’t been truth. Yes there are shitcoins, just like shitstocks. But in general, it’s definitely not a bubble but an alternative investing method beside stocks, gold etc.
What is the underlying mechanism that increases its value, like company earnings are to stocks? Otherwise, it’s just a reverse funnel scheme.
What’s the underlying mechanism that gives money a value? We the humans give money and gold a value because we believe they’re valuable. Same with crypto. Bitcoin is literally like gold but digital. Stop saying what everyone without knowledge says and inform yourself. Not only about crypto, also about money etc.
If you don’t understand the fundamentals of money, how can you judge something of being scam. There are lot of people here who didn’t even understand how money and gold works.
Money has value insofar as governments use it to collect tax - so long as there’s a tax obligation, there’s a mandated demand for that currency and it has some value. Between different currencies, the value is determined based upon the demand for that currency, which is essentially tied to how much business is done in that currency (eg if a country sells goods in its own currency, demand for that currency goes up and so does it’s value).
This is not the same for crypto, there are no governments collecting tax with it so it does not have induced demand. The value of crypto is 100% speculative, which is fine for something that is used as currency, but imo a terrible vehicle for investment.
You are right in that it increases people’s belief in money because it is the primary source of revenue for states. But if the majority of people did not believe in the piece of paper, it would be worth nothing. That is the fundamental value of money as we know it.
There have been states where stones were the currency simply because the inhabitants believed in them.
Gold Standard
Linking money to a material with intrinsic value for it’s value
Gold has intrinsic value
US Dollar moved to be a Fiat Currency
US Dollar is backed by a Government
Crypto has zero intrinsic value, not linked to anything with intrinsic value, and not backed by a Government
Crypto is an imaginary “item” some people want to have valve. Value is created because of this want.
US Dollar is legal tinder for all US debts, Crypto is not
Crypto is not a currency but a digital commodity
Money is a physical representation of the concept of value. Saying “what gives money value” is like asking “why does rain make clouds.”
This is why printing money decreases the value of the currency - the value it represents has not changed so the value is diluted across the currency as the amount of currency expands.
The only way for someone to make money in crypto is for someone else to lose it.
Crypto is a scam.
Reminds me of money.
So what’s the difference to money, stocks or every other investing option? There’s has to be someone who loses so someone different can win. We’re living in a capitalistic system, that’s how it works.
Money isn’t an investment, it’s a currency. Of course it’s a bad investment and investing in forex is barely a better investment than crypto (purely because there’s less risk of a sovereign currency devaluing to 0).
Investing in capital, like stocks, property, equipment etc does not require someone to lose money for the capital owner to profit. If I invest in a stock, each year I’m paid a dividend based on the profits of that organisation - no losers required. I could later sell that stock at the exact price I paid for it and come away with profit from those dividends. What determines whether it’s a good or bad investment, is the ratio of profit to the capital owner compared to cost of the asset. Crypto generates 0 profit, so it has 0 value as a capital investment.
Sooooo, the exact same premise with ehmmmm… Stocks.
Crypto is 100% a bubble. It’s not an investment so much as a ponzi, sure you can dump money into it and maybe even make money, doesn’t mean it doesn’t collapse on a whim when someone else decides to dip out or the government shuts it down. Its value is exactly that of NFT’s because it’s basically identical, just a string of characters showing “ownership” of something intangible
Every startup now:
Ah, the sudden realisation of all the VCs that they’ve tipped money into what is essentially a fancy version of predictive text.
Alexa proudly informed me the other day that Ray Parker Jr is Caucasian. We ain’t in any danger of the singularity yet, boys.
I couldn’t agree more. What they’re calling AI today exposes its issues pretty easily still, asking it to spell lollipop backwards for example. The usefulness of ChatGPT back in December was also considerably better than it is today. Companies are putting up more guardrails which the bots have to re-train to adapt to “being too honest” or mechanisms to prevent them being used for illicit purposes, that affect how useful they ultimately are, meaning we’re seeing hyperbole instead of substance.
One AI startup was just hustling the AI washing saying stuff like “if a computer is a bicycle for the mind, AI is a jumbo jet for us all” and I had to laugh. It reminded me of all the talk around VR back in 2016.
Pak’n’Save has an AI recipe generator, and for a while there was no sanity checking of the ingredients. I entered what I had on hand and it gave me this.
Alexa just confused Ray Parker Jr with Huey Lewis. It’s an easy mistake.
It certainly is somewhere around the peak of the hype cycle.
Maybe. Never underestimate how far you can take hype.
No! Really, what a shock!!
How much VC is really being invested at the moment? I know a variety of people at start ups and the money is very tight at the moment given the current interest rate environment.
Like 85% of the most recent YC class are “revolutionize x with AI” crap.
Yeah this author doesn’t understand what a bubble actually is if they are saying there’s an AI bubble without associated capital over-investment
If it crashes hard I look forward to all the cheap server hardware that will be in the secondhand market in a few years. One I’m particularly excited about is the 4000 sff, single slot, 75w, 20GB, and ~3070 performance.
I figured the gear they were using was orders of magnitude heftier than those cards. Stuff like the h100 cards that go for the price of a loaded SUV.
They are, but training models is hard and inference (actually using them) is (relatively) cheap. If you make a a GPT-3 size model you don’t always need the full H100 with 80+ gb to run it when things like quantization show that you can get 99% of its performance at >1/4 the size.
Thus NVIDIA selling this at 3k as an ‘AI’ card, even though it wont be as fast. If they need top speed for inference though, yea, H100 is still the way they would go.
I’m not an expert just parroting info from Jayz2cents (YouTuber), but the big AI groups are using $10,000 cards for their stuff. Individuals or smaller companies are taking/going to take what’s left with GPUs to do their own development. This could mean another GPU shortage like the mining shortage andi would assume another bust would result in a flooded used market when it happens. Could be wrong, but he’s been correct pretty consistently with his predictions of other computer related stuff. Although, 10K is a little bit less than your fully loaded SUV example.
Whatever this iteration of “AI” will be, it has a limit that the VC bubble can’t fulfill. That’s kind of the point though because these VC firms, aided by low interest rates, can just fund whatever tech startup they think has a slight chance of becoming absorbed in to a tech giant. Most of the AI companies right now are going to fail, as long as they do it as cheaply as possible, the VC firms basically skim the shit that floats to the top.
Already!? XD
Of course. Sure, AI image generated stuff are impressive but no way those companies could cover the operational, R&D cost if VC were not injecting shit load of fake money.]
Dot com is a bubble because some just host a website and got massive fund, same as crypto some just a random similar coin to eth they got massive fund. But Ai now can replace jobs, need massive fund to train so not much similar startup copying and startup barrier is high, also few free money going around at the same time due to interest rate. I think this might just be different.
@DarkMatter_contract It’s not that the AI CAN replace jobs, it’s that they’re gonna use it to replace jobs anyway.
The burst will come from those companies succeeding and quickly destroying a lot of their customer’s businesses in the process.
Silicon valley of a disease that will blow up any growing technology where they will turn anything into a bubble. No matter how significant it is or not.
