Oh no!
Anyway…
I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.
This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.
With the right level of Government support, bubbles can seemingly go on for literal decades. Case in point, Australian housing since the late 90s has been on an uninterrupted tear (yes, even in ‘08 and ‘20).
🤷♂️ I only use local generators at this point,so I don’t care.
“The economics are likely to be grim,” Marcus wrote on his Substack. “Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence.”
“As I have always warned,” he added, “that’s just a fantasy.”
Microsoft shit is a mega corp… AI is based on their revenue lol
Even Zuckerberg admits that trying to scale LLMs larger doesn’t work because the energy and compute requirements go up exponentially. There must exist a different architecture that is more efficient, since the meat computers in our skulls are hella efficient in comparison.
Once we figure that architecture out though, it’s very likely we will be able to surpass biological efficiency like we have in many industries.
That’s a bad analogy. We weren’t able to surpass biological efficiency in industry sector because we figured out human anatomy and how to improve it. It’s simply alternative ways to produce force like electricity and motors which had absolutely no relation to how muscles works.
I imagine it would be the same for computers, simply another, better method to achieve something but it’s so uncertain that it’s barely worth discussing about.
Of course! It’s not like animals have jet engines!
Human brains are merely the proof that such energy efficiencies are possible for intelligence. It’s likely we can match or go far beyond that, probably not by emulating biology directly. (Though we certainly may use it as inspiration while we figure out the underlying principles.)
“LLMs such as they are, will become a commodity; price wars will keep revenue low. Given the cost of chips, profits will be elusive,” Marcus predicts. “When everyone realizes this, the financial bubble may burst quickly.”
Please let this happen
Market crash and third world war. What a time to be alive!
Because nobody could have possibly saw that coming. /s
Seems to me the rationale is flawed. Even if it isn’t strong or general AI, LLM based AI has found a lot of uses. I also don’t recognize the claimed ignorance among people working with it, about the limitations of current AI models.
Can you name some of those uses that you see lasting in the long term or even the medium term? Because while it has been used for a lot of things it seems to be pretty bad at the overwhelming majority of them.
AI is already VERY successful in some areas, when you use editing of photos on your phone, the more sophisticated options are powered by AI. Almost all new cars have AI features.
But it’s completely irrelevant if I can see use cases that are sustainable or not. The fact is that major tech companies are investing billions in this.
Of course all the biggest tech companies could all be wrong, but I bet they researched the issue more than me before investing.
Show me by what logic you believe to know better.The claim that it needs to be stron AI to be useful is ridiculous.
The fact is that major tech companies are investing billions in this.
They have literally invested billions in every single hype cycle of the last few decades that turned out to be a pile of crap in hindsight. This is a bad argument.
And which are those? There is no technology all major tech companies have invested in like AI AFAIK.
Maybe the dot com wave way back, but are you arguing the Internet came to nothing?
while you may be right, one would think that the problem lies in the overestimated peception of the abilities of llms leading to misplaced investor confidence – which in turn leads to a bubble ready to burst.
Yup. Investors have convinced themselves that this time AI development is going to grow exponentially. The breathless fantasies they’ve concocted for themselves require it. They’re going to be disappointed.
is this where we get to explain again why its not really ai?
I have to do similar things when it comes to ‘raytracing’. It meant one thing, and then a company comes along and calls something sorta similar the same thing, then everyone has these ideas of what it should be vs. what it actually is doing. Then later, a better version comes out that nearly matches the original term, but there’s already a negative hype because it launched half baked and misnamed. Now they have to name the original thing something new new to market it because they destroyed the original name with a bad label and half baked product.
He is writing about LLM mainly, and that is absolutely AI, it’s just not strong AI or general AI (AGI).
You can’t invent your own meaning for existing established terms.LLMs are AI in the same way that the lane assist on my car is AI. Tech companies, however, very carefully and deliberately play up LLMs as being AGI or close to it. See for example toe convenient fear-mongering over the “risks” of AI, as though ChatGPT will become Skynet.
LLMs are AI as it is defined in Computer Science, not SciFi. And the lane assist on your car might also be, although it may just be a well tuned PID for all I know.
I agree, but the problem is that the media (encouraged by tech companies) use the sci-fi definition, and the layman doesn’t know any better.
The irony is palpable lol
Machine learning is absolutely not artificial intelligence is ng the pre-existing definition of the word.
You can’t invent your own meaning for existing established terms.
You should research the definition of AI then. Even the A* pathfinding algorithm was historically considered AI. It’s a remarkably broad field.
Even a mildly complex state machine is AI.
All that really tells us is that the people who defined the term were remarkably stupid.
Nope, just where you divest your stocks like any other tech run.
The tech priests of Mars were right; death to abominable intelligence.
No shit. This was obvious from day one. This was never AGI, and was never going to be AGI.
Institutional investors saw an opportunity to make a shit ton of money and pumped it up as if it was world changing. They’ll dump it like they always do, it will crash, and they’ll make billions in the process with absolutely no negative repercussions.
Then what is this I’m feeling if it’s not AGI? 🤔
Maybe GERD?
Turns out AI isn’t real and has no fidelity.
Machine learning could be the basis of AI but is anyone even working on that when all the money is in LLMs?
I’m not an expert, but the whole basis of LLM not actually understanding words, just the likelihood of what word comes next basically seems like it’s not going to help progress it to the next level… Like to be an artificial general intelligence shouldn’t it know what words are?
I feel like this path is taking a brick and trying to fit it into a keyhole…
Right, so AIs don’t really know what words are. All they see are tokens. The tokens could be words and letters, but they could also be image/video features, audio waveforms, or anything else.
shouldn’t it know what words are?
Not necessarily, but it should be smart enough to associate symbols with some form of meaning. It doesn’t do that, it juts associates symbols with related symbols, so if there’s nothing similar that already exists, it’s not going to be able to come back with anything sensible.
I think being able to create new content with partial sample data is necessary to really be considered general AI. That’s what humans do, and we don’t necessarily need the words to describe it.
More like taking a billion bricks and throwing it at that keyhole until one has a random shape that just happens to fit into the keyhole after 50 years of throwing bricks. After that point, every other brick you throw will be shaped similar to that, and most of them will work, until you encounter different keyhole.
All while consuming the energy equivalent of small countries.
learning is the basis of all known intelligence. LLMs have learned something very specific, AGI would need to be built by generalising the core functionality of learning not as an outgrowth of fully formed LLMs.
and yes the current approach is very much using a brick to open a lock and that’s why it’s … ahem … hit a brick wall.
Yeah, 20 something years ago when I was trying to learn PHP of all things, I really wanted to make a chat bot that could learn what words are… I barely got anywhere but I was trying to program the understanding of sentence structure and feeding it a dictionary of words… My goal was to have it output something on its own …
I see these things become less resource intensive and hopefully running not on some random server…
I found the files… It was closer to 15 years ago…
Trying to invent artificial intelligence to learn php is quite funny lol
I’m amazed I still have the files… But yeah this was before all this shit was big… If I had a better drive I would have ended up more evil than zuck … my plan was to collect data on everyone who used the thing and be able to build profiles on everyone based on what information you gave the chat … And that’s all I can really remember… But it’s probably for the best…
Also a bit sadistic to be honest. Bringing a new form of life into the world only to subject it to PHP.
I wish just once we could have some kind of tech innovation without a bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects while they get super rich off it.
Of course most don’t actually even believe it, that’s just the pitch to get that VC juice. It’s basically fraud all the way down.
… bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects…
one doesn’t imagine any of them even remotely thinks a technological panacaea is feasible.
… while they get super rich off it.
because they’re only focusing on this.
Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.
Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.
That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.
Yeah my management was all gungho about exploiting AI to do all sorts of stuff.
Like read. Not generative AI crap, but read. They came to us and said quite literally: “how can we use something like ChatGPT and make it read.”
I don’t know who or how they convinced them to use something that wasn’t generative AI, but it did convince me that managers think someone being convincing and confident is correct all the time.
Being convincing and confident without actually knowing is how 9/10s of them make it to the C suite.
That’s probably why they don’t worry about confidently incorrect AI.
Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.
Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.
The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.
No no, I disagree I think that shoving AI into all these apps is a solid plan on their behalf. People are going to stop recall and shut it off. So instead they put AI components into every app, It now has the right to overview everything you’re doing and every app collects data on you sending it home to update their personalized models for you so they can better sell you products.
True, they just sell it to their investors as a panacea
Some are just opportunists, but there are certainly true believers — either in specific technologies, or pedal-to-the-metal growth as the only rational solution to the world’s problems.
Andreessen is pretty open about it: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
I think Andreessen is lying and the “techno optimist manifesto” is a ruse for PR.
a16z has been involved in various crypto pump and dumps. They are smart enough to know that something like “play to earn” is not sustainable and always devolves into a pyramid scheme. Doesn’t stop them from getting in early and dumping worthless tokens on the marks.
The manifesto honestly reads like it was written by a teenager. The style, the tone, the excessive quotes from economists. This is pretty typical stuff for American oligarch polemics, no?
Soooo… Without capitalism?
Pretty much.
It’s gonna crash like a self driving tesla. It’s gonna fall apart like a cybertrukkk.
Even Pied Piper didn’t scale.
It’ll implode but there are much larger elephants in the room - geopolitical dumbassery and the suddenly transient nature of the CHIPS Act are two biggies.
Third, high flying growth, blue sky darlings, they’re flaky. In a downturn growth is worth 0 fucking dollars, throw that shit in a dumpster and rotate into staples. People can push off a phone upgrade or new TV and cut down on subscriptions, but they’ll always need Pampers.
The thing propping up AI and semis is an arms race between those high flying tech companies, so this whole thing is even more prone to imploding than tech itself, since a ton of revenue comes from tech. Sensitive sector supported by an already sensitive sector. House of cards with NVDA sitting right at the tippy top. Apple, Facebook, those kinds of companies, when they start trimming back it’s over.
But, it’s one of those things that is anyone’s guess. When you think it’s not even possible for everything to still have steam one of the big guys like TSMC posts some really delightful earnings and it gets another second wind, for the 29th time.
Definitely a house of cards tho, and suddenly a lot more precarious because suddenly nobody knows how policy will affect the industry or the market as a whole
They say shipping is the bellwhether of the economy and there’s a lot of truth to that. I think semis are now the bellwhether of growth. Sit back and watch the change in the wind
nvidia at least sells shovels, they already made some real profit unlike openai
True, but it’s not a competition. When big tech tightens their belts NVDA starves to death
Death?
They got the IP my man, pipe down.
