7 ms·

AI Looks Like a Bubble

55 points by allenleee 4y ago

Madmallard 4y ago
The technologies behind stable diffusion and chatGPT have very high potential. I think this author's take is very wrong.
- tlonny 4y ago
  Thats not the point the article is trying to make: > AI will change the world, it will make us question what it means to be alive, and there is a chance it will make us a multi-planetary species. But I’m not convinced that just being a company that sells AI will deliver judicious year-over-year returns.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  Having potential and having your stock rise just because you slapped AI in your product are two different things.
jsemrau 4y ago
I suppose its more on the hype cycle than a bubble. Yet I don't think we have reached Peak-AI yet -- although LinkedIn is currently packed with posts about ChatGPT and SD.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  It's getting there though. One VC that I'm intimately familiar with during their last LP meeting made the point of 'only looking at companies that do AI'.
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    Could you make an intro ;-)
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Lol, line up ;)
- qsort 4y ago
  It's... hype cycle with bubble characteristics. Obvious comparison is crypto. Unlike crypto I'm more willing to view this in a positive light because there's something real behind all the marketing, however we're starting to get sucked into the bubble-like loop of big promises -> practical applications not living up to those promises -> even bigger promises. If it's a tech demo, then writing sonnets is impressive and cool. But when you're promising to disrupt entire industries, "hey, I can write sonnets" is not going to cut it.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Sonnets by themselves, absolutely agree. Sonnets as an unprogrammed free extra? Interesting, at least. I’m not sure how many stops there are between this and the end of intellectual labour. For example, Go AI went from mediocre to superhuman much faster than many expected, while self driving cars have been much slower than (I at least) expected.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      The language models have been around for many years now, if they would go to being superhuman very quickly they would already be there. We are already in the right side of the S curve, many big companies have made similar language models and they all end up at similar performance levels with respect to coding, language, answering questions etc. We will see improvements but they will be very incremental, like GPT-3 to ChatGPT was barely noticeable and took years. Extrapolating that and we will get language models that can be moderately helpful to a human professional, but they wont be good enough to automate much at all. For the AI hype to pay off we would need all this buzz and activity to result in another new revolution similar to transformers. But without it it will go the same way as self driving cars, barely being good enough to do stuff, but with tons of works and checks it might lead to some automation at scale that could threaten jobs in a decade.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        > We will see improvements but they will be very incremental, like GPT-3 to ChatGPT was barely noticeable and took years. This was not my experience having tried GPT-3 before ChatGPT came out; and likewise people who have tried Bing Chat report it seems to be significantly more capable than ChatGPT. Also, while it is clearly limited in competence, for breadth of information and speed and price it is clearly already superhuman. If that's useful or not remains to be seen, as the self driving car analogy is that the reaction times being effectively instant doesn't help when the perception says "what stationary truck?" I kinda hope this won't be taking over for a decade, and you're not the only person who is suggesting we need multiple new breakthroughs on par with transformer models, but as the saying goes, predicting is hard, especially about the future.
lordnacho 4y ago
I wonder if C3's contracts with large enterprise customers are the value? As in, it takes a heck of a lot of work to get an enterprise customer signed up for anything, and these guys have done it, so all you then need to do is buy them so that you can actually pour the tech into the contract? Point being they don't need to have anything special in themselves, in terms of AI product. As for the rest of the AI investment idea, the question is where does the surplus accrue? Does it land at OpenAI? Does it make devs more productive and land in their pockets? Or does it land at their employers? This is the unobvious thing about every innovation that one needs to tackle.
swyx 4y ago
> Some snarky hedge-fund analyst probably thought that the sports-bra-ification of AI would happen im sorry, what? i dont understand the reference to sports bras.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  A bra company mentioned blockchain and its stock price rose. It's in the article.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
warkanlock 4y ago
As always, in all areas, there is noise, but there is also incredible music being played. I don't think there's a bubble, but rather the beginning of a change. Although I agree with the author: potential products with market fit could take a few years to permeate the traditional consumer base. In addition, I disagree with the author in seeing how the market behaves to see if there is a potential "bubble" (in this particular case). I think the technology we are talking about right here, like in any other revolution, might shake a few trees a bit but in the end, we will see a brave new world.
peteforde 4y ago
Here's what I believe the author has missed: much like Amazon for the first (20?) years, they were not interested in making a profit - it would have actually hurt them, and the priority was to reinvest in their tech. This seems to have paid off. OpenAI is run by Sam Altman, former YC pres and official smart dude. OpenAI's actual business plan has nothing to do with charging monthly subscription fees. It's more like Sam decided YC wasn't designed to be profitable enough, and wanted to make sure he got the whole thing right this time around. OpenAI will invest $1M and offer early access to next-gen ML models in exchange for 10% equity. If you buy into the premise that a solution built on a highly customized current-gen model will be clobbered by a barely customized next-gen model, then it would seem as though being chosen by OpenAI to build a business with a headstart that nobody else will have access to is literally a license to print money. In other words, OpenAI gets to select founders for and then automatically own 10% of the next generation of successful startups. If this plays out, I predict that OpenAI will be a FAANG-scale company this decade. Ignore OpenAI at your peril.
- Madmallard 4y ago
  Too bad they want to stifle its potential. It’s already much less useful than it was a couple months ago.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > OpenAI is run by Sam Altman, former YC pres and official smart dude Sam’s chops as an investor are unassailable. As an operator, less so. > OpenAI will invest $1M and offer early access to next-gen ML models in exchange for 10% equity These aren’t super-competitive terms.
  - peteforde 4y ago
    I fear that I might have buried my lede. The "early access to the next versions of the OpenAI models" is the only important detail in this arrangement. The most obvious signal so far is Bing/Sydney chat freaking out Google so much that they rushed a Bard demo that shit the bed. $1M may be enough that a quality founding team can get a first iteration out the door without having to distract themselves with fundraising. Essentially, this makes OpenAI a kingmaker. The $1M is just icing. The cake is being able to launch something that nobody else can.
benjaminwootton 4y ago
I’ve followed AI for 25 years, but it’s only in the last few months the potential has really come alive. Chat GPT and Midjourney are jaw dropping. Every CEO and CIO worth their salary must be looking at how to incorporate this stuff into their business. And we can say that with a straight face unlike some of the other technologies which the tech industry has pushed. So C3 stock price mooning I can understand as they are first to a super hot market (AI in large enterprise) which has grown in size overnight.
- logifail 4y ago
  > Every CEO and CIO worth their salary must be looking at how to incorporate this stuff into their business Those of us old enough to remember recall exactly that phrase said about other stuff, too. > And we can say that with a straight face unlike some of the other technologies which the tech industry has pushed. Those of us old enough to remember think this might be exactly like other technologies which boomed ... and then busted. As John Naughton wrote in The Guardian a month ago[0], "if we know anything from history, it is that we generally overestimate the short-term impact of new communication technologies, while grossly underestimating their long-term implications. So it was with print, movies, broadcast radio and television and the internet." [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgpt-bot-excel-ai-chatbot-tech https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgp...
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    This is how it was with blockchain: a solution in search of a problem. What the advances in AI give us are new capabilities. Ways to solve existing problems much better than before. Smart companies will reassess their old ways to see if they can’t be made better. As an example, Whisper can and should be used in automated phone systems. Understanding what customers are saying will absolutely make the product better.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > As an example, Whisper can and should be used in automated phone systems. Understanding what customers are saying will absolutely make the product better Ever since early voice prompt automated phone systems, we've had data that customers hate automated phone systems. Customers like talking to humans who can actually listen and are empowered to provide assistance and resolve problems. This is why when you earn "elite" status with airlines or hotels one of the most valued perks is typically some kind of special phone number to call which (who'd have thought it?) gets you through rapidly to an actual human being who is (who'd have thought it?) empowered to assist you, without having to go through all the usual voice prompts and endless waiting. I'd bet a beer that a majority of customers will turn out to hate "AI automation" just as much as they already hate other automation.
andrewstuart 4y ago
There were people who said the Internet was a fad.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  And there were people who thought 3D displays would be ubiquitous, or that self driving cars will have replaced at least professional drivers by 2025, or that Google Glass was the next iPhone. It's easy to look back and laugh at those that mispredicted, but you'll find all possible predictions being made for every technology, so you'll always have winners and losers.
college_physics 4y ago
People really have short memories and thats not a good position from which to understand anything that unfolds over more than a day's worth attention span. Remember just a few years ago Jack Ma urging everybody to become artists and philosophers because "AI will eat the world"? AI was pushed relentlessly, we got "ethical AI", and "explainable AI" and androids doing the circles impressing the masses. Needles to say things didnt work out as planned. AI did not bring the next industrial revolution. Fast forward today and every little technical breakthrough is milked to blow some new life in that dead horse. Its most likely a desperate search of early investors to cash out before the next AI winter. Sure, the tech is cool and useful. But it is also limited and risky and fragile. And very fundamentally: an algorithm does not make a business model.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  >next AI winter Oh? And why would that happen?
  - college_physics 4y ago
    If you read my comment rather than have an already entrenched position the message is that is has already happened.
candiodari 4y ago
AI has been a huge bubble ~5 times now at least. Oh, and we prefer the term "AI winter", thank you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter Failure of AI translation in the 60's, abandonment of connectionism (~95% of deep learning) in the early 70s, government deciding AI is useless (mid-seventies), LISP collapse (mid-eighties), expert systems abandonment, AGAIN failure of deep learning (after seeing CNNs massively improve recognition) in the mid-2000s. And let's just not talk about how often specific subfields of AI have been in winter. One subfield that is particularly famous (and I did my thesis on, because ... I'm an idiot) is biologically plausible machine learning, or attempting to get closer to biological machine learning or "liquid" machine learning. People have been restarting this field since before my father was born ... and it keeps dying, again and again and again. And hey, I gave it a shot too in my thesis, and I failed just like everyone else (technically I succeeded, in that I managed to get the network working ~3 times, but it certainly did not "wake up" the field). I guess it's just that people look at biology, and look at combinatorics/statistics ... and feel biology is the easier path forward, both because you don't have to find your own ideas, and it's generally easier (e.g. transformers are 2 big ideas. One, as it turns out, is more or less equivalent to "brainwaves", ie. positional encoding, something nature has used for at least 500000 years. That's not how it was found though. Transformers refuse to train without some serious expected value shenanigans) Meanwhile I'm convinced most of the progress of AI actually happens during the winters. At this point a lot researchers are let go, and make a lot of progress in the private sector that then spreads across everything. AI, and specifically the more-or-less abandoned CNN networks are the algorithm behind most traffic control systems. Right now particular kinds of generative AI are definitely making their way into the economy, as is a whole bunch of autonomous robots. That is actually quite incredible. That will expand, by a lot, winter or not.
mjburgess 4y ago
This is quite a subtle and powerful analysis of the economic role of AI that seems to have been misunderstood in this thread. The claim is: AI is not a profitable space to compete in. Why? 1) Most of the gains are distributed at zero-cost: academic innovation in a model is available to everyone. 2) Zero-cost gains are extremely hard to extract: Business-useful data requires large corps to do massive enterprise change projects to provide it. 3) Profit will lie in between these and incumbents are already the best placed: adding AI to business data systems and apps is best done by the providers which already own/operate those systems. The intuition here seems sound: AI is not the kind of technology which creates competitive advantages. It apparently does so very early in a business' use of it, but it actually lowers the barrier to competition dramatically. Whatever AI company seems "ahead" now, for the above reasons, it is quite trivial to create a competitor.
- Lacerda69 4y ago
  >quite trivial to create a competitor. I dont get it though, if its that easy why is there no meaningful alternative to openai now? or are you arguing that that will happen later on once its (even more) established?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > why is there no meaningful alternative to openai now Is GPT that far ahead of other LLMs?
  - logifail 4y ago
    > why is there no meaningful alternative to openai now Alternative to do what, exactly? Were people asking each other "why is there no meaningful alternative to tulip bulbs?" early in the year 1637...?? Can't help thinking that the people getting rich off gold rushes are often the ones selling shovels...
    - janalsncm 4y ago
      That isn’t quite fair. Tulip mania was a bubble because it was a greater fool scheme. The only purpose of the commodity was to sell it to a “greater fool” at some time in the future. This is analogous to the crypto bubbles that happen every few years. OpenAI has created actual products which have some value. Dall-E is useful to people for what it is. Codex has limitations but some people find it useful. GPT3 and ChatGPT are definitely not general purpose problem solvers but for the people who use them they have value.
Havoc 4y ago
All of those Uber but for X type ventures coming out of it maybe, but as a technology I doubt it is a bubble.
Madmallard 4y ago
If there was no censorship it wouldn’t be a bubble.
- corbulo 4y ago
  Agree. It's becoming a bubble because they're strangling their own product while pretending it saves humanity to do so. Which is why it wont pop. Because it's actually useful to many private orgs. It's just dangerous for the public to use if you're anything but pro-free speech.
MeshFresh 4y ago
[dead]
pearjuice 4y ago
It seems to me that after web3 collapsed, VC is looking for a new balloon to pump and cash out on.

55 points by allenleee 4y ago

The technologies behind stable diffusion and chatGPT have very high potential. I think this author's take is very wrong.

tlonny 4y ago
Thats not the point the article is trying to make: > AI will change the world, it will make us question what it means to be alive, and there is a chance it will make us a multi-planetary species. But I’m not convinced that just being a company that sells AI will deliver judicious year-over-year returns.
mrleinad 4y ago
Having potential and having your stock rise just because you slapped AI in your product are two different things.

jsemrau 4y ago

I suppose its more on the hype cycle than a bubble. Yet I don't think we have reached Peak-AI yet -- although LinkedIn is currently packed with posts about ChatGPT and SD.

jacquesm 4y ago
It's getting there though. One VC that I'm intimately familiar with during their last LP meeting made the point of 'only looking at companies that do AI'.
- jsemrau 4y ago
  Could you make an intro ;-)
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Lol, line up ;)
qsort 4y ago
It's... hype cycle with bubble characteristics. Obvious comparison is crypto. Unlike crypto I'm more willing to view this in a positive light because there's something real behind all the marketing, however we're starting to get sucked into the bubble-like loop of big promises -> practical applications not living up to those promises -> even bigger promises. If it's a tech demo, then writing sonnets is impressive and cool. But when you're promising to disrupt entire industries, "hey, I can write sonnets" is not going to cut it.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Sonnets by themselves, absolutely agree. Sonnets as an unprogrammed free extra? Interesting, at least. I’m not sure how many stops there are between this and the end of intellectual labour. For example, Go AI went from mediocre to superhuman much faster than many expected, while self driving cars have been much slower than (I at least) expected.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    The language models have been around for many years now, if they would go to being superhuman very quickly they would already be there. We are already in the right side of the S curve, many big companies have made similar language models and they all end up at similar performance levels with respect to coding, language, answering questions etc. We will see improvements but they will be very incremental, like GPT-3 to ChatGPT was barely noticeable and took years. Extrapolating that and we will get language models that can be moderately helpful to a human professional, but they wont be good enough to automate much at all. For the AI hype to pay off we would need all this buzz and activity to result in another new revolution similar to transformers. But without it it will go the same way as self driving cars, barely being good enough to do stuff, but with tons of works and checks it might lead to some automation at scale that could threaten jobs in a decade.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      > We will see improvements but they will be very incremental, like GPT-3 to ChatGPT was barely noticeable and took years. This was not my experience having tried GPT-3 before ChatGPT came out; and likewise people who have tried Bing Chat report it seems to be significantly more capable than ChatGPT. Also, while it is clearly limited in competence, for breadth of information and speed and price it is clearly already superhuman. If that's useful or not remains to be seen, as the self driving car analogy is that the reaction times being effectively instant doesn't help when the perception says "what stationary truck?" I kinda hope this won't be taking over for a decade, and you're not the only person who is suggesting we need multiple new breakthroughs on par with transformer models, but as the saying goes, predicting is hard, especially about the future.

lordnacho 4y ago

I wonder if C3's contracts with large enterprise customers are the value? As in, it takes a heck of a lot of work to get an enterprise customer signed up for anything, and these guys have done it, so all you then need to do is buy them so that you can actually pour the tech into the contract? Point being they don't need to have anything special in themselves, in terms of AI product. As for the rest of the AI investment idea, the question is where does the surplus accrue? Does it land at OpenAI? Does it make devs more productive and land in their pockets? Or does it land at their employers? This is the unobvious thing about every innovation that one needs to tackle.

swyx 4y ago

> Some snarky hedge-fund analyst probably thought that the sports-bra-ification of AI would happen im sorry, what? i dont understand the reference to sports bras.

mrleinad 4y ago
A bra company mentioned blockchain and its stock price rose. It's in the article.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

warkanlock 4y ago

As always, in all areas, there is noise, but there is also incredible music being played. I don't think there's a bubble, but rather the beginning of a change. Although I agree with the author: potential products with market fit could take a few years to permeate the traditional consumer base. In addition, I disagree with the author in seeing how the market behaves to see if there is a potential "bubble" (in this particular case). I think the technology we are talking about right here, like in any other revolution, might shake a few trees a bit but in the end, we will see a brave new world.

peteforde 4y ago

Here's what I believe the author has missed: much like Amazon for the first (20?) years, they were not interested in making a profit - it would have actually hurt them, and the priority was to reinvest in their tech. This seems to have paid off. OpenAI is run by Sam Altman, former YC pres and official smart dude. OpenAI's actual business plan has nothing to do with charging monthly subscription fees. It's more like Sam decided YC wasn't designed to be profitable enough, and wanted to make sure he got the whole thing right this time around. OpenAI will invest $1M and offer early access to next-gen ML models in exchange for 10% equity. If you buy into the premise that a solution built on a highly customized current-gen model will be clobbered by a barely customized next-gen model, then it would seem as though being chosen by OpenAI to build a business with a headstart that nobody else will have access to is literally a license to print money. In other words, OpenAI gets to select founders for and then automatically own 10% of the next generation of successful startups. If this plays out, I predict that OpenAI will be a FAANG-scale company this decade. Ignore OpenAI at your peril.

Madmallard 4y ago
Too bad they want to stifle its potential. It’s already much less useful than it was a couple months ago.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> OpenAI is run by Sam Altman, former YC pres and official smart dude Sam’s chops as an investor are unassailable. As an operator, less so. > OpenAI will invest $1M and offer early access to next-gen ML models in exchange for 10% equity These aren’t super-competitive terms.
- peteforde 4y ago
  I fear that I might have buried my lede. The "early access to the next versions of the OpenAI models" is the only important detail in this arrangement. The most obvious signal so far is Bing/Sydney chat freaking out Google so much that they rushed a Bard demo that shit the bed. $1M may be enough that a quality founding team can get a first iteration out the door without having to distract themselves with fundraising. Essentially, this makes OpenAI a kingmaker. The $1M is just icing. The cake is being able to launch something that nobody else can.

benjaminwootton 4y ago

I’ve followed AI for 25 years, but it’s only in the last few months the potential has really come alive. Chat GPT and Midjourney are jaw dropping. Every CEO and CIO worth their salary must be looking at how to incorporate this stuff into their business. And we can say that with a straight face unlike some of the other technologies which the tech industry has pushed. So C3 stock price mooning I can understand as they are first to a super hot market (AI in large enterprise) which has grown in size overnight.

logifail 4y ago
> Every CEO and CIO worth their salary must be looking at how to incorporate this stuff into their business Those of us old enough to remember recall exactly that phrase said about other stuff, too. > And we can say that with a straight face unlike some of the other technologies which the tech industry has pushed. Those of us old enough to remember think this might be exactly like other technologies which boomed ... and then busted. As John Naughton wrote in The Guardian a month ago[0], "if we know anything from history, it is that we generally overestimate the short-term impact of new communication technologies, while grossly underestimating their long-term implications. So it was with print, movies, broadcast radio and television and the internet." [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgpt-bot-excel-ai-chatbot-tech https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/07/chatgp...
- janalsncm 4y ago
  This is how it was with blockchain: a solution in search of a problem. What the advances in AI give us are new capabilities. Ways to solve existing problems much better than before. Smart companies will reassess their old ways to see if they can’t be made better. As an example, Whisper can and should be used in automated phone systems. Understanding what customers are saying will absolutely make the product better.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > As an example, Whisper can and should be used in automated phone systems. Understanding what customers are saying will absolutely make the product better Ever since early voice prompt automated phone systems, we've had data that customers hate automated phone systems. Customers like talking to humans who can actually listen and are empowered to provide assistance and resolve problems. This is why when you earn "elite" status with airlines or hotels one of the most valued perks is typically some kind of special phone number to call which (who'd have thought it?) gets you through rapidly to an actual human being who is (who'd have thought it?) empowered to assist you, without having to go through all the usual voice prompts and endless waiting. I'd bet a beer that a majority of customers will turn out to hate "AI automation" just as much as they already hate other automation.

andrewstuart 4y ago

There were people who said the Internet was a fad.

tsimionescu 4y ago
And there were people who thought 3D displays would be ubiquitous, or that self driving cars will have replaced at least professional drivers by 2025, or that Google Glass was the next iPhone. It's easy to look back and laugh at those that mispredicted, but you'll find all possible predictions being made for every technology, so you'll always have winners and losers.

college_physics 4y ago

People really have short memories and thats not a good position from which to understand anything that unfolds over more than a day's worth attention span. Remember just a few years ago Jack Ma urging everybody to become artists and philosophers because "AI will eat the world"? AI was pushed relentlessly, we got "ethical AI", and "explainable AI" and androids doing the circles impressing the masses. Needles to say things didnt work out as planned. AI did not bring the next industrial revolution. Fast forward today and every little technical breakthrough is milked to blow some new life in that dead horse. Its most likely a desperate search of early investors to cash out before the next AI winter. Sure, the tech is cool and useful. But it is also limited and risky and fragile. And very fundamentally: an algorithm does not make a business model.

cuteboy19 4y ago
>next AI winter Oh? And why would that happen?
- college_physics 4y ago
  If you read my comment rather than have an already entrenched position the message is that is has already happened.

candiodari 4y ago

AI has been a huge bubble ~5 times now at least. Oh, and we prefer the term "AI winter", thank you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter Failure of AI translation in the 60's, abandonment of connectionism (~95% of deep learning) in the early 70s, government deciding AI is useless (mid-seventies), LISP collapse (mid-eighties), expert systems abandonment, AGAIN failure of deep learning (after seeing CNNs massively improve recognition) in the mid-2000s. And let's just not talk about how often specific subfields of AI have been in winter. One subfield that is particularly famous (and I did my thesis on, because ... I'm an idiot) is biologically plausible machine learning, or attempting to get closer to biological machine learning or "liquid" machine learning. People have been restarting this field since before my father was born ... and it keeps dying, again and again and again. And hey, I gave it a shot too in my thesis, and I failed just like everyone else (technically I succeeded, in that I managed to get the network working ~3 times, but it certainly did not "wake up" the field). I guess it's just that people look at biology, and look at combinatorics/statistics ... and feel biology is the easier path forward, both because you don't have to find your own ideas, and it's generally easier (e.g. transformers are 2 big ideas. One, as it turns out, is more or less equivalent to "brainwaves", ie. positional encoding, something nature has used for at least 500000 years. That's not how it was found though. Transformers refuse to train without some serious expected value shenanigans) Meanwhile I'm convinced most of the progress of AI actually happens during the winters. At this point a lot researchers are let go, and make a lot of progress in the private sector that then spreads across everything. AI, and specifically the more-or-less abandoned CNN networks are the algorithm behind most traffic control systems. Right now particular kinds of generative AI are definitely making their way into the economy, as is a whole bunch of autonomous robots. That is actually quite incredible. That will expand, by a lot, winter or not.

mjburgess 4y ago

This is quite a subtle and powerful analysis of the economic role of AI that seems to have been misunderstood in this thread. The claim is: AI is not a profitable space to compete in. Why? 1) Most of the gains are distributed at zero-cost: academic innovation in a model is available to everyone. 2) Zero-cost gains are extremely hard to extract: Business-useful data requires large corps to do massive enterprise change projects to provide it. 3) Profit will lie in between these and incumbents are already the best placed: adding AI to business data systems and apps is best done by the providers which already own/operate those systems. The intuition here seems sound: AI is not the kind of technology which creates competitive advantages. It apparently does so very early in a business' use of it, but it actually lowers the barrier to competition dramatically. Whatever AI company seems "ahead" now, for the above reasons, it is quite trivial to create a competitor.

Lacerda69 4y ago
>quite trivial to create a competitor. I dont get it though, if its that easy why is there no meaningful alternative to openai now? or are you arguing that that will happen later on once its (even more) established?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > why is there no meaningful alternative to openai now Is GPT that far ahead of other LLMs?
- logifail 4y ago
  > why is there no meaningful alternative to openai now Alternative to do what, exactly? Were people asking each other "why is there no meaningful alternative to tulip bulbs?" early in the year 1637...?? Can't help thinking that the people getting rich off gold rushes are often the ones selling shovels...
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    That isn’t quite fair. Tulip mania was a bubble because it was a greater fool scheme. The only purpose of the commodity was to sell it to a “greater fool” at some time in the future. This is analogous to the crypto bubbles that happen every few years. OpenAI has created actual products which have some value. Dall-E is useful to people for what it is. Codex has limitations but some people find it useful. GPT3 and ChatGPT are definitely not general purpose problem solvers but for the people who use them they have value.

Havoc 4y ago

All of those Uber but for X type ventures coming out of it maybe, but as a technology I doubt it is a bubble.

Madmallard 4y ago

If there was no censorship it wouldn’t be a bubble.

corbulo 4y ago
Agree. It's becoming a bubble because they're strangling their own product while pretending it saves humanity to do so. Which is why it wont pop. Because it's actually useful to many private orgs. It's just dangerous for the public to use if you're anything but pro-free speech.

MeshFresh 4y ago

[dead]

pearjuice 4y ago

It seems to me that after web3 collapsed, VC is looking for a new balloon to pump and cash out on.