this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, but thanks to the glory of corporateworld, all the people involved in making these decisions will be in a higher position at a different company by the time the consequences come knocking.

You definitely will not regret spending billions of dollars on GPUs and electricity bills.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

This hurts so much. Being in the tech industry, I see it everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

AI companies specializing in spreading bullshit all across the internet have a bright future however

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Maybe it's like the dotcom bubble: there is genuinely useful tech that has recently emerged, but too many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon.

LLMs do seem genuinely useful to me, but of course they have limitations.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (28 children)

We need to stop viewing it as artificial intelligence. The parts that are worth money are just more advanced versions of machine learning.

Being able to assimilate a few dozen textbooks and pass a bar exam is a neat parlor trick, but it is still just a parlor trick.

Unfortunately probably the biggest thing to come out of it will be the marketing aspect. If they spend enough money to train small models on our wants and likes it will give them tremendous amounts of return.

The key to using it in a financially successful manner is finding problems that fit the bill. Training costs are fairly high, quality content generation is also rather expensive. There are sticky problems around training it from non-free data. Whatever you're going to use it for either needs to have a significant enough advantage to make the cost of training /data worth it.

I still think we're eventually going to see education rise. The existing tools for small content generation adobe's use of it to fill in small areas is leaps and bounds better than the old content aware patches. We've been using it for ages for speech recognition and speech generation. From there it's relatively good at helper roles. Minor application development, copy editing, maybe some VFX generation eventually. Things where you still need a talented individual to oversee it but it can help lessen the workload.

There are lots of places where it's being used where I think it's a particularly poor fit. AI help desk chatbots, IVR scenarios, It says brain dead as the original phone trees and flow charts that we've been following for decades.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago

Machine learning is AI. I think the term you're looking for is general artificial intelligence, and no one is claiming LLMs fall under that label.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (5 children)

We're hitting logarithmic scaling with the model trainings. GPT-5 is going to cost 10x more than GPT-4 to train, but are people going to pay $200 / month for the gpt-5 subscription?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So, I have clients that are actively using AI on a daily basis and LOVE it. It is however a very narrow subset. Also, I’m pretty sure that a LARGE amount of Dollars are currently being spent on AI generated political articles.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The web didn't die after the dot com bubble burst. The AI bubble will burst, but a smaller niche of companies will continue to exist.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

The dot com crash was because tech companies were massively overvalued and didn't have a proper business plan or profit. I definitely see some similarities with the AI bubble, especially with the large unprofitable companies like OpenAI. OpenAI isn't estimated to become profitable until 2029, and there's a lot of unknowns between now and then (e.g. maybe they'll be forced to license content they use for training).

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (16 children)

I am old enough to remember when the CEO of Nortel Networks got crucified by Wall Street for saying in a press conference that the telecom/internet/carrier boom was a bubble, and the fundamentals weren't there (who is going to pay for long distance anymore when calls are free over the internet? where are the carriers-- Nortel's customers-- going to get their income from?). And 4 years later Nortel ceased to exist. Cisco crashed too, though had enough TCP/IP router biz and enterprise sales to keep them alive even until today.

This all reminds me of the late 1990s internet bubble rather than the more recent crypto bubble. We'll all still be using ML models for all kinds of things more or less forever from now on, but it won't be this idiotic hype cycle and overvaluation anymore after the crash.

Shit, crypto isn't going anywhere either, it's a permanent fixture now, Wall Street bought into it and you can buy crypto ETFs from your stockbroker. We just don't have to listen to hype about it anymore.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Crypto is still just as awful as it ever was IMO. Still plenty of assholes ~~gambling~~ investing in crypto.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago

This message has existed for 10 hours and a cryptobro hasn't commented yet?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

Well put.

Soon, it won't be this idiotic hype cycle, but it'll be some other idiotic hype cycle. Short term investors love hype cycles.

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[–] [email protected] 230 points 1 day ago (9 children)

No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to

[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago

the housing bubble.

ai is probably close second though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

I think all the crypto scams, all the shitcoins, NFTs and other blockchain bullshit were much worse. At least AI companies usually don't require you to give them large sums of money, they're only after your data and absolutely fuck the environment by wasting absurd amounts of power, but they don't try to take away your life savings

[–] [email protected] 175 points 1 day ago (23 children)

Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.

[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you're right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago

Yes! "AI" defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm glad you didn't say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Maybe real estate?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (25 children)

10 to 30? Yeah I think it might be a lot longer than that.

Somehow everyone keeps glossing over the fact that you have to have enormous amounts of highly curated data to feed the trainer in order to develop a model.

Curating data for general purposes is incredibly difficult. The big medical research universities have been working on it for at least a decade, and the tools they have developed, while cool, are only useful as tools too a doctor that has learned how to use them. They can speed diagnostics up, they can improve patient outcome. But they cannot replace anything in the medical setting.

The AI we have is like fancy signal processing at best

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I'd wager it's even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.

What I'm kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts... Who's gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs running on multi-kilowatt servers?

And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.

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