13 ms·

Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. It's not about whether or not there is value there to be provided. VR and

Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. It's not about whether or not there is value there to be provided. VR and cyrpto provide value too, it's just that the markets for that tech are way more "niche" than companies were hoping for. And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software. The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now? Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for. Right now what I am observing is a phenomenon that is way too common in our industry. Companies are rushing to go to market with some AI "thing." 99.9999% of those "things" will end up being more versions of the Metaverse and crypto. Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people. It's all so novel and abstract and people are seeing dollar signs with very little understanding of how they are going to put it to use. Where it finds its uses, I predict will be limited to the same applications that we're already using ML for. Chat bots, entertainment, generating document outlines etc. Just because we made a big breakthrough with the technology doesn't mean that we've actually created a solution to real world problems that real world people are having here and now in the real world. No one, other than maybe Open AI, is going to get rich on "generative AI." If they get rich and change the industry, it will be finding a use for it that many people want.

warning26 4y ago
> The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now? Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
- gspencley 4y ago
  Cool, so I'm Joe Sixpack next door. Things I care about: how to feed my kids, avoid getting laid off at the manufacturing plant I work for and my oldest daughter is learning to drive and has no idea how she's going to be able to afford a home of her own and, despite how much I love my kids, I really want her to move out before she's 30 so that my wife and I can enjoy retirement. Things I do for fun: play sports, video games and drink. What problems in my life does generative AI immediately and obviously solve for me? Like I said, it is "abstract" which is why you can make such a claim with such a high degree of confidence. Every person who sees POTENTIAL with generative AI has their own ideas as to what sorts of applications it has that they would find useful. The very words "generative AI" and "ChatGPT" create a Barnum Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect). Right now, I would posit that ChatGPT is like pet rocks. It got popular because it is neat and novel. Once that effect wears off, people will stop caring and the hype train will die as fast as crypto. Therefore, until a company releases a product that uses ChatGPT under the hood and solves a real problem that a lot of people need solving right now, there's no tangible value that is inherent in the technology that can be identified. Only ideas and potentials.
  - vikramkr 4y ago
    I mean, off the bat you might use it to replace Google, like bing is already doing. And it doesn't have to solve a problem for you to make an impact on your life- it can make your life worse too. If your daughter is interested in writing, graphic design,or programming, well, finding a job and moving out by 30 might become a lot harder. Bing is already in use. Copilot is already in use. These are not small markets or use cases.
    - gspencley 4y ago
      Bing was already in use before ChatGPT and Copilot is seen by most as an evolution of auto-complete. My last paragraph specifically said that I predict that the applications for generative AI will be in areas where we're already using ML. Search and auto-complete are two examples.
    - 4y ago
noodle 4y ago
FWIW, I've found uses for it already that will improve the company I'm building in the very short term. Maybe you disagree in the magnitude of the value, but I find it to be at least somewhat significant. Enough to pursue. I've never worked for any company where leaning into the Metaverse or crypto would generate any meaningful business value, short or long term. The promises for Metaverse and crypto are always about a nebulous future that could exist if only everyone collectively bought into the vision.
- gspencley 4y ago
  Anything that is limited to the the company you're building at the moment sounds to me like the very definition of "niche application." If you re-read my comment I didn't say that generative AI does not have any potential to solve any problems ever. What I said is that companies are currently racing to go to market with some "ai thing" and most are chasing it because it is the "next big thing" in their mind, not because they know what problems for their end users that it can actually help solve. I know of companies right now who are banking on "selling AI to customers." That is doomed to fail in my opinion. Customers don't care about AI outside of the novelty and entertainment value it may possess. They have actual problems that need solving. My point was that generative AI, as the broad umbrella that it is, will see the hype train die and people will realize that "it" is not the revolutionary and disruptive Internet or printing press like invention that they think it will be. The value will be in individual applications of it, of which there will be a few but not as many I think people think there will be.
  - noodle 4y ago
    > that companies are currently racing to go to market with some "ai thing" and most are chasing it because it is the "next big thing" in their mind, not because they know what problems for their end users that it can actually help solve. And if you re-read my comment, what I am saying is that while I'm not exactly "racing", I do have a very clear problem for my end users that this actually helps to solve. Its possible I could've cobbled together a similar solution with other technologies, but I didn't see a very clear path forward on this user-facing problem until very recent developments. I suspect that the people in this same boat far outnumber people in the Metaverse or crypto equivalents.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
farts_mckensy 4y ago
[flagged]
billconan 4y ago
I never wanted to pay for metaverse and invest in crypto. But I'm paying for genAI (midjourney and openAI api)
- re5i5tor 4y ago
  Exactly, and for me, a third, ChatGPT+.
kenjackson 4y ago
I think crypto, metaverse, and generative AI are all really different -- and I agree with the original poster. Generative AI seems much more likely to be a game changer. Crypto was something I always struggled to make sense of. My son asked, "why didn't I buy bitcoin when it was a few cents?!" -- The simple answer was it didn't seem like it had much use. The value in crypto eventually came in the form of a pyramid scheme. Admittedly, I do use crypto to do transactions with untrustworthy people (don't have to worry about chargebacks and things like that). But it's hype was around it being a speculative commodity. For normal people -- it's just not all that useful. The metaverse is different in that I do see the theoretical value in it. But it seems a LONG way off. I haven't seen anything that really makes me think, "wow -- this is it". It doesn't seem like we're close. And honestly I think generative AI maybe a prerequisite to deliver a truly valuable metaverse. Generative AI is useful now and represents a huge leap over the state of the art, not that long ago. I worked with RNNs and LSTMs to answer questions not that many years ago, and honestly I wouldn't have predicted this level of effectiveness for LLMs for probably 20 plus years -- and I certainly didn't know how we'd do it. But more importantly I'm finding it valuable today. As I noted in another post -- ChatGPT-4 already has shown better differential diagnosis skills than my family's doctor. I use it literally every day already. There are things that I want it to do that would make my life 10x better -- and I could see a clear path to get there (like, if that was my day job I think I could put together a project plan to deliver it). I just don't think these techs are comparable at all.
- thrashh 4y ago
  People seem to see new developments as black boxes that you can't analyze. Like they see something new and ask themselves "will it work?" and then say it will work or not based on whether the last thing worked... with zero nuance. Let's try to analyze crypto on its own as an example: yes, crypto was a new frontier in money supply, but what makes it critically different? And are these critical differences actually desired? Crypto was critically different in that it would decentralize the financial system. Was it desired? Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations? No one could figure it out. So if crypto was trying to sell something that no one really wanted, how the heck could it work? ...then it crashed... because there was no centralized control. It's not like we haven't had this happen in history already.
Bjorkbat 4y ago
You've pretty much nailed what I've been thinking about when comparing generative AI hype to crypto/metaverse hype. I keep hearing this argument that generative AI has more utility, making it more "real". Sure, but they're missing the point, which is that people made some pretty ridiculous claims about the future utility of crypto / metaverse ($100k bitcoin, metaverse real-estate speculation) rather than the present day possibilities, and they're continuing to make ridiculous claims about the future utility of AI (the end of web development, AGI soon, etc). The hype isn't about present day possibilities, but about future speculation, and the future speculation can get off-the-rails crazy.
- int_19h 4y ago
  The hype exists, firstly, because the present day possibilities are already impressive enough to net actual financial gains from improved productivity, and secondly because it's obvious that all this stuff hasn't yet been scaled to the limit - but the scaling and improvement that we've seen so far (GPT 3 -> 3.5 -> 4) showed massive gains on every step in a very short period of time.
  - Bjorkbat 4y ago
    Incidentally I was about to say that even speculation based on present utility can get a little bit out there. Modern AI is already quite good at generating code snippets, and it already increases developer productivity, but just how much is that going to really change things? Just how much more productive is an AI-augmented software developer? Are LLMs really the thing that was missing from no-code website / app builders? I wouldn't say it's obvious that this stuff hasn't been scaled to the limit. I mean, sure, you could make bigger LLMs, but I don't think it's a given that LLM performance will increase in performance in a predictable fashion. If anything I think that performance probably resembles an S curve where performance matches improvements in scale before sharply plateauing. When's the plateau? GPT-4 is a clear improvement over GPT-3, but it's also 6x larger, and so far I haven't quite seen any real evidence to suggest that it's 6x better, other than the fact that it scored better on tests.
    - 4y ago
WWLink 4y ago
> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. I don't disagree, but I think making that claim right now is saying the emperor has no clothes lol.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  I think that was what was meant.
babl-yc 4y ago
I'm a paid DAU of ChatGPT. I'm using it regularly as a tutor to help work through a technical online course I'm taking, and it is extremely good at that. My cousin who is in college says basically every student is using it to help study. There could be an excess of hype, but there is clear significant and immediate value of these tools.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  A great way to learn wrong stuff.
  - snapdeus 4y ago
    It's actually a great way to learn stuff, but go ahead and gatekeep.
    - suzzer99 4y ago
      Here's ChatGPT confidently spewing a ton of very very wrong stuff about the Mesoamerican calendar: > Is the 1-earthquake inscription on monument 3 at San Jose Magote is the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date? > Yes, the 1-earthquake inscription on Monument 3 at San Jose Magote is considered the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date. This monument was discovered in Oaxaca, Mexico, and dates back to the Preclassic period of Mesoamerican civilization, around 1150 BCE. The inscription records a date in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which was a complex system of timekeeping used by various cultures in Mesoamerica. The date is given as 7.16.3.2.13, which corresponds to August 11th, 129 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. This is wrong. It's actually more like 647 BCE. > What does 1-earthquake mean? > "1-earthquake" is a term used in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which was a system of timekeeping used by various cultures in Mesoamerica. The Long Count calendar is based on cycles of time that are counted in base 20, and each cycle has a specific name and duration. The term "1-earthquake" refers to the beginning of a new cycle in the Long Count calendar, specifically the start of the 13th baktun, which is equivalent to 144,000 days or approximately 394 years. The Long Count calendar was used by Mesoamerican societies to track historical events, astronomical observations, and religious ceremonies, and it was an important part of their cultural and social identity. This is completely wrong. 1-Earhquake is a combination of two shorter cycles. It has nothing to do with beginning of a baktun. > What is the previous 1-earthquake to 7.16.3.2.13? > The previous occurrence of 1-earthquake in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar before the date 7.16.3.2.13 (August 11th, 129 BCE) would have been 12.19.19.17.19. This corresponds to August 13th, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar, which is the date that marks the beginning of the current cycle of the Long Count calendar, known as the 13th baktun. It's worth noting that the Long Count calendar was designed to be a continuous and cyclical system, so there is technically no "start" or "end" to the calendar. Instead, each cycle represents a new period of time, and the 1-earthquake date represents the beginning of a new cycle within that larger system. This doesn't even make sense given chatGPT's own internal reasoning. A baktun is 144,000 days or around 394 years. It's clearly just regurgitating training data and getting it all jumbled up.
tempestn 4y ago
I think you're both right. I think generative AI will be like the internet, and we'll experience a 90s-style bubble first, then it will gradually transform everything. Personally though, I've already used it for multiple real-world applications in my business and personal life, whereas crypto was only ever a toy. VR I'm less sure about; so far it's only a toy, and I think it will take longer than AI to make a real difference, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least AR and probably VR are both eventually very commonplace.
tablespoon 4y ago
> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. A common thread tying those three things together is that, in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve. Technologies like that are pretty much always overhyped and oversold.
- dvt 4y ago
  > in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve. I'm no AI fanboy, but let's be fair: machine learning has been solving problems for decades now. From OCR, to translation, to facial recognition, etc. While GPT4 or DALL-e may be "toys," large models (be they language, vision, or otherwise) definitely have a future in business automation, data collation, military applications, etc.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    I feel like this is some of where my own cynicism comes from: the machine learning that has been solving problems for decades now were almost all predicted and prototyped in the 60/70s "AI boom". The generative models were all "toys" then, too and none of the 60/70s "predictions" of when/where/how they might become more than "toys" ever really came to pass and sounded so much like people on HN are saying today. We're certainly doing more of (almost) everything explored/predicted by "the ancients", we're doing it all much, much faster with much more massive data sets of input and output. For me, though, there isn't a sense that we are doing anything substantially new beyond Moore's Law meets mega-scale GIGO. There's something of a pervasive feel to me to this hype cycle like we are just recreating past mistakes of boom and then (inevitable) bust and haven't learned enough from them. But I've become too cynical, perhaps.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      The tech may not be substantially new, but the emergent phenomena definitely are.
      - 4y ago
Hermitian909 4y ago
While it's early days yet AI is proving itself much more readily. If you're in the right networks you've heard that several companies who've rolled out AI features are on track to generate >100MM ARR charging for them. One feature I'm quite confident in: translation services for i18n in websites using GPT-4 + a much smaller number of human translators to check the work of low confidence translations and high value surfaces. I can confirm the end result for French is better than existing human translation services and much cheaper. Certainly businesses will need to walk back some AI features but it really seems like there's business value now, let alone in 2 years when publicly available LLMs are even better.
- cjblomqvist 4y ago
  Honestly curious, what are the companies generating (or close to/on track) these levels of revenue (which they would have otherwise)?
osigurdson 4y ago
The Metaverse is another name for a new kind of interface: glasses. If the interface gets good enough then everything else will follow.
__lbracket__ 4y ago
I mostly agree with this -- the converged value will be ~1% of the initial hype. 1% of hype is still massive. After the noise has calmed, I feel generative AI, at its core, will enhance information search and summarization; lookup and compression. That itself will have massive value. It will differentiate roles that require net new thinking from those that require regurgitation.
imhoguy 4y ago
As with any craze the best suited are the shovel sellers... NVDA.
germinalphrase 4y ago
“ Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people.” Tech should hire more broadly.
mbesto 4y ago
> And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software. VR will go the way of 3D Printing. A surgeon can walk into one of the largest medical device company's in the world, talk about a new idea for a broken bone transplant and within 24 hours can have a 3D prototype printed out. Great for innovation of broken bones, but it isn't the ubiquity we experienced with something like mobile phones, email, or social media. Meta thinks thats what VR is going to be.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  I know it's off-topic, but this simply baffles me about 3D printing. I have a 3D printer and I plan on buying more, but when you look at the most downloaded models on a huge website like printables.com, the number 1 has a bit more than 200K downloads, and the second drops all the way down to only 83K. Only 83,000 people downloaded the 2nd most downloaded model :| Every time I look at the numbers I realize how niche of a hobby it is, despite being easier and easier (and cheaper and cheaper) to get into and has pretty much endless applications.
  - pulvinar 4y ago
    The reason for that is that 3D printing's strength is one-off designs. Any popular design would get mass-produced cheaper and better, and would then lose popularity on those sites.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I do a lot of 3D printing -- but outside of when I first started and it was a shiny new toy, I almost never download models to print. Being able to make my own custom parts and such, though, has been an incredible superpower, and my printers have paid for themselves many times over that way.
  - aix1 4y ago
    It's a niche hobby for sure, but I think a slightly better metric to look at is the number of 3D printers sold. This seems to be about 2 million units per year.
wnevets 4y ago
> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. Generative AI has potential to immediately increase productivity, and thus revenue. The only real way to make money (in the short term at-least) with crypto and the metaverse was to convince other people the digital assets created were rare, valuable and worth paying for.
idopmstuff 4y ago
> Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for. I don't really understand this description - electricity is one of the most useful things in the history of civilization. I think the latter half of what you're saying is true, but it's true of everything. There's nothing inherently useful about my car, except that it gets me places. There's nothing inherently useful about my house, except that it shelters me from the elements. Generative AI will be useful for creating lots of things (probably primarily code in its various forms). I've used it to write a few Python scripts over the course of the last week that simply wouldn't have been possible for me to do (without a few weeks of teaching myself Python at least - I'm a somewhat-code-literate PM but very much not a programmer). Those have solved real problems for me and added real value to my life.
- kochikame 4y ago
  The comment you're replying to is trying to say that a house, just by existing, solves the shelter problem. Having a functioning car means you can just get in it and go somewhere. But just having electricity in and of itself does not solve any problem; you have to use it power something else (lights, TV, toaster), which is the thing that solves the problem, not the electricity.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
layoric 4y ago
I wouldn't quite go that far, but the longer I am building these models into systems, I think the good use case for LLMs/Generative AI can be categorized into a few types of systems. 1. Data collection - Obvious, creating a voice/text interface into an existing system where the problem and requirements are well known. Eg, booking a restaurant. It needs a time, place, people. Collecting that from voice/text can be convenient in many situations. Same with different types of models collecting data from video/images/etc. 2. Providing options - When the desired output is unknown, but a human can describe the problem. Eg, coding, art, many "I need an X that can Y for problem Z". ChatGPT does a great job of this and I think most of the value of generative AI is here currently. Most of the hype is around how far can we take the capabilities of solving this 2nd category to produce the third. 3. Agents - There are examples of solutions showing this potential but the 'killer app' I don't think has been demonstrated, at least well enough. AutoGPT, BabyAGI, etc are interesting, but in my experience don't yet perform nearly well enough. They fail far too often for any trust to be created. This doesn't mean GPT4 native plugins won't get there, they could and that will create a large amount of value in this category (I don't have access to Plugins). This is also where a lot of "selling the dream" is happening. It seems plausible we will get there, but still not clear how these will be accepted and used in the real world, by average users. One big area of value IMO for Agents is accessibility. People with physical disabilities, but still have the ability to speak I think will provide massive quality of life improvements through being able to interact more easily with more systems. Very interesting times, the speed of change has seemed amazing, and that for me is the part that creates the most unknown, and is hard to ignore the hype when plotting the rate of improvement and the possibility of Agents becoming an accepted tool in wider society. The value provided by Crypto/VR is way more limited, and the accessibility of the tech ranges from bad to worse. VR has a lot of utility, but due to the headset requirement, it is disconnected from a lot of the real world. Lots use cases for specific problems, but less widely accessible as generative AI by a long way. Crypto IMO should be ignored, at best it assists with the financialization of everything which doesn't provide value to a wide portion of society, it provides a means of value extraction.
karmelapple 4y ago
Your neighbor didn’t understand Google when it came out, but they were informed by a friend about how useful it was. Show them some of the power of an LLM and they too will realize the power I predict.
berniedurfee 4y ago
I’m starting to agree with this perspective. My opinion on generative AI is shifting from apocalyptic world breaking tech to something more like Siri 2.0. It’ll be neat for sure, but I think the plateau of useful applications will arrive soon and it won’t be as game-changing as it initially seemed. I kinda hope I’m wrong, but also hope I’m right.
richardw 4y ago
I heard a great interview response from a YC-related person recently. Might have been SamA: Nobody you know (roughly) uses VR many times a week/day, not in any extended fashion. Everyone might have them but they're in a drawer somewhere. Compare that to LLM's, which roughly everyone is or should be using. There are very few knowledge-economy jobs where an LLM can't be useful, within hours or days or definitely weeks with a bit of practice. And it'll get better every year. It's here to stay.
joeyfranklin 4y ago
[flagged]
Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
I know it sounds stupid, but generative AI has an incredible amount of potential for videogames, making those way more alive. It might not make millions directly, but it could unleash some very successful videogames, without decreasing accessibility (like vr) or a weird value proposition (crypto)
Deloritoono 4y ago
Ms just added helpful ai features to their office suite. Adobe will launch a ai driven graphics tool. I have tons of more examples. This never happened with crypto or VR. Chatgpt has real big impacts on school kids who use it for generating text too. I'm not understanding your analysis. We already have more usable ai than usable crypto or vr
nextaccountic 4y ago
> But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software. And military. There's a lot of videos showing VR being used to control drones in the Russian-Ukrainian War https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5lKupps8CM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5lKupps8CM

warning26 4y ago

> The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now? Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.

gspencley 4y ago
Cool, so I'm Joe Sixpack next door. Things I care about: how to feed my kids, avoid getting laid off at the manufacturing plant I work for and my oldest daughter is learning to drive and has no idea how she's going to be able to afford a home of her own and, despite how much I love my kids, I really want her to move out before she's 30 so that my wife and I can enjoy retirement. Things I do for fun: play sports, video games and drink. What problems in my life does generative AI immediately and obviously solve for me? Like I said, it is "abstract" which is why you can make such a claim with such a high degree of confidence. Every person who sees POTENTIAL with generative AI has their own ideas as to what sorts of applications it has that they would find useful. The very words "generative AI" and "ChatGPT" create a Barnum Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect). Right now, I would posit that ChatGPT is like pet rocks. It got popular because it is neat and novel. Once that effect wears off, people will stop caring and the hype train will die as fast as crypto. Therefore, until a company releases a product that uses ChatGPT under the hood and solves a real problem that a lot of people need solving right now, there's no tangible value that is inherent in the technology that can be identified. Only ideas and potentials.
- vikramkr 4y ago
  I mean, off the bat you might use it to replace Google, like bing is already doing. And it doesn't have to solve a problem for you to make an impact on your life- it can make your life worse too. If your daughter is interested in writing, graphic design,or programming, well, finding a job and moving out by 30 might become a lot harder. Bing is already in use. Copilot is already in use. These are not small markets or use cases.
  - gspencley 4y ago
    Bing was already in use before ChatGPT and Copilot is seen by most as an evolution of auto-complete. My last paragraph specifically said that I predict that the applications for generative AI will be in areas where we're already using ML. Search and auto-complete are two examples.
  - 4y ago

noodle 4y ago

FWIW, I've found uses for it already that will improve the company I'm building in the very short term. Maybe you disagree in the magnitude of the value, but I find it to be at least somewhat significant. Enough to pursue. I've never worked for any company where leaning into the Metaverse or crypto would generate any meaningful business value, short or long term. The promises for Metaverse and crypto are always about a nebulous future that could exist if only everyone collectively bought into the vision.

gspencley 4y ago
Anything that is limited to the the company you're building at the moment sounds to me like the very definition of "niche application." If you re-read my comment I didn't say that generative AI does not have any potential to solve any problems ever. What I said is that companies are currently racing to go to market with some "ai thing" and most are chasing it because it is the "next big thing" in their mind, not because they know what problems for their end users that it can actually help solve. I know of companies right now who are banking on "selling AI to customers." That is doomed to fail in my opinion. Customers don't care about AI outside of the novelty and entertainment value it may possess. They have actual problems that need solving. My point was that generative AI, as the broad umbrella that it is, will see the hype train die and people will realize that "it" is not the revolutionary and disruptive Internet or printing press like invention that they think it will be. The value will be in individual applications of it, of which there will be a few but not as many I think people think there will be.
- noodle 4y ago
  > that companies are currently racing to go to market with some "ai thing" and most are chasing it because it is the "next big thing" in their mind, not because they know what problems for their end users that it can actually help solve. And if you re-read my comment, what I am saying is that while I'm not exactly "racing", I do have a very clear problem for my end users that this actually helps to solve. Its possible I could've cobbled together a similar solution with other technologies, but I didn't see a very clear path forward on this user-facing problem until very recent developments. I suspect that the people in this same boat far outnumber people in the Metaverse or crypto equivalents.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

farts_mckensy 4y ago

[flagged]

billconan 4y ago

I never wanted to pay for metaverse and invest in crypto. But I'm paying for genAI (midjourney and openAI api)

re5i5tor 4y ago
Exactly, and for me, a third, ChatGPT+.

kenjackson 4y ago

I think crypto, metaverse, and generative AI are all really different -- and I agree with the original poster. Generative AI seems much more likely to be a game changer. Crypto was something I always struggled to make sense of. My son asked, "why didn't I buy bitcoin when it was a few cents?!" -- The simple answer was it didn't seem like it had much use. The value in crypto eventually came in the form of a pyramid scheme. Admittedly, I do use crypto to do transactions with untrustworthy people (don't have to worry about chargebacks and things like that). But it's hype was around it being a speculative commodity. For normal people -- it's just not all that useful. The metaverse is different in that I do see the theoretical value in it. But it seems a LONG way off. I haven't seen anything that really makes me think, "wow -- this is it". It doesn't seem like we're close. And honestly I think generative AI maybe a prerequisite to deliver a truly valuable metaverse. Generative AI is useful now and represents a huge leap over the state of the art, not that long ago. I worked with RNNs and LSTMs to answer questions not that many years ago, and honestly I wouldn't have predicted this level of effectiveness for LLMs for probably 20 plus years -- and I certainly didn't know how we'd do it. But more importantly I'm finding it valuable today. As I noted in another post -- ChatGPT-4 already has shown better differential diagnosis skills than my family's doctor. I use it literally every day already. There are things that I want it to do that would make my life 10x better -- and I could see a clear path to get there (like, if that was my day job I think I could put together a project plan to deliver it). I just don't think these techs are comparable at all.

thrashh 4y ago
People seem to see new developments as black boxes that you can't analyze. Like they see something new and ask themselves "will it work?" and then say it will work or not based on whether the last thing worked... with zero nuance. Let's try to analyze crypto on its own as an example: yes, crypto was a new frontier in money supply, but what makes it critically different? And are these critical differences actually desired? Crypto was critically different in that it would decentralize the financial system. Was it desired? Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations? No one could figure it out. So if crypto was trying to sell something that no one really wanted, how the heck could it work? ...then it crashed... because there was no centralized control. It's not like we haven't had this happen in history already.

Bjorkbat 4y ago

You've pretty much nailed what I've been thinking about when comparing generative AI hype to crypto/metaverse hype. I keep hearing this argument that generative AI has more utility, making it more "real". Sure, but they're missing the point, which is that people made some pretty ridiculous claims about the future utility of crypto / metaverse ($100k bitcoin, metaverse real-estate speculation) rather than the present day possibilities, and they're continuing to make ridiculous claims about the future utility of AI (the end of web development, AGI soon, etc). The hype isn't about present day possibilities, but about future speculation, and the future speculation can get off-the-rails crazy.

int_19h 4y ago
The hype exists, firstly, because the present day possibilities are already impressive enough to net actual financial gains from improved productivity, and secondly because it's obvious that all this stuff hasn't yet been scaled to the limit - but the scaling and improvement that we've seen so far (GPT 3 -> 3.5 -> 4) showed massive gains on every step in a very short period of time.
- Bjorkbat 4y ago
  Incidentally I was about to say that even speculation based on present utility can get a little bit out there. Modern AI is already quite good at generating code snippets, and it already increases developer productivity, but just how much is that going to really change things? Just how much more productive is an AI-augmented software developer? Are LLMs really the thing that was missing from no-code website / app builders? I wouldn't say it's obvious that this stuff hasn't been scaled to the limit. I mean, sure, you could make bigger LLMs, but I don't think it's a given that LLM performance will increase in performance in a predictable fashion. If anything I think that performance probably resembles an S curve where performance matches improvements in scale before sharply plateauing. When's the plateau? GPT-4 is a clear improvement over GPT-3, but it's also 6x larger, and so far I haven't quite seen any real evidence to suggest that it's 6x better, other than the fact that it scored better on tests.
  - 4y ago

WWLink 4y ago

> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. I don't disagree, but I think making that claim right now is saying the emperor has no clothes lol.

CRConrad 4y ago
I think that was what was meant.

babl-yc 4y ago

I'm a paid DAU of ChatGPT. I'm using it regularly as a tutor to help work through a technical online course I'm taking, and it is extremely good at that. My cousin who is in college says basically every student is using it to help study. There could be an excess of hype, but there is clear significant and immediate value of these tools.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
A great way to learn wrong stuff.
- snapdeus 4y ago
  It's actually a great way to learn stuff, but go ahead and gatekeep.
  - suzzer99 4y ago
    Here's ChatGPT confidently spewing a ton of very very wrong stuff about the Mesoamerican calendar: > Is the 1-earthquake inscription on monument 3 at San Jose Magote is the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date? > Yes, the 1-earthquake inscription on Monument 3 at San Jose Magote is considered the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date. This monument was discovered in Oaxaca, Mexico, and dates back to the Preclassic period of Mesoamerican civilization, around 1150 BCE. The inscription records a date in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which was a complex system of timekeeping used by various cultures in Mesoamerica. The date is given as 7.16.3.2.13, which corresponds to August 11th, 129 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. This is wrong. It's actually more like 647 BCE. > What does 1-earthquake mean? > "1-earthquake" is a term used in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which was a system of timekeeping used by various cultures in Mesoamerica. The Long Count calendar is based on cycles of time that are counted in base 20, and each cycle has a specific name and duration. The term "1-earthquake" refers to the beginning of a new cycle in the Long Count calendar, specifically the start of the 13th baktun, which is equivalent to 144,000 days or approximately 394 years. The Long Count calendar was used by Mesoamerican societies to track historical events, astronomical observations, and religious ceremonies, and it was an important part of their cultural and social identity. This is completely wrong. 1-Earhquake is a combination of two shorter cycles. It has nothing to do with beginning of a baktun. > What is the previous 1-earthquake to 7.16.3.2.13? > The previous occurrence of 1-earthquake in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar before the date 7.16.3.2.13 (August 11th, 129 BCE) would have been 12.19.19.17.19. This corresponds to August 13th, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar, which is the date that marks the beginning of the current cycle of the Long Count calendar, known as the 13th baktun. It's worth noting that the Long Count calendar was designed to be a continuous and cyclical system, so there is technically no "start" or "end" to the calendar. Instead, each cycle represents a new period of time, and the 1-earthquake date represents the beginning of a new cycle within that larger system. This doesn't even make sense given chatGPT's own internal reasoning. A baktun is 144,000 days or around 394 years. It's clearly just regurgitating training data and getting it all jumbled up.

tempestn 4y ago

I think you're both right. I think generative AI will be like the internet, and we'll experience a 90s-style bubble first, then it will gradually transform everything. Personally though, I've already used it for multiple real-world applications in my business and personal life, whereas crypto was only ever a toy. VR I'm less sure about; so far it's only a toy, and I think it will take longer than AI to make a real difference, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least AR and probably VR are both eventually very commonplace.

tablespoon 4y ago

> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. A common thread tying those three things together is that, in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve. Technologies like that are pretty much always overhyped and oversold.

dvt 4y ago
> in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve. I'm no AI fanboy, but let's be fair: machine learning has been solving problems for decades now. From OCR, to translation, to facial recognition, etc. While GPT4 or DALL-e may be "toys," large models (be they language, vision, or otherwise) definitely have a future in business automation, data collation, military applications, etc.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  I feel like this is some of where my own cynicism comes from: the machine learning that has been solving problems for decades now were almost all predicted and prototyped in the 60/70s "AI boom". The generative models were all "toys" then, too and none of the 60/70s "predictions" of when/where/how they might become more than "toys" ever really came to pass and sounded so much like people on HN are saying today. We're certainly doing more of (almost) everything explored/predicted by "the ancients", we're doing it all much, much faster with much more massive data sets of input and output. For me, though, there isn't a sense that we are doing anything substantially new beyond Moore's Law meets mega-scale GIGO. There's something of a pervasive feel to me to this hype cycle like we are just recreating past mistakes of boom and then (inevitable) bust and haven't learned enough from them. But I've become too cynical, perhaps.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    The tech may not be substantially new, but the emergent phenomena definitely are.
    - 4y ago

Hermitian909 4y ago

While it's early days yet AI is proving itself much more readily. If you're in the right networks you've heard that several companies who've rolled out AI features are on track to generate >100MM ARR charging for them. One feature I'm quite confident in: translation services for i18n in websites using GPT-4 + a much smaller number of human translators to check the work of low confidence translations and high value surfaces. I can confirm the end result for French is better than existing human translation services and much cheaper. Certainly businesses will need to walk back some AI features but it really seems like there's business value now, let alone in 2 years when publicly available LLMs are even better.

cjblomqvist 4y ago
Honestly curious, what are the companies generating (or close to/on track) these levels of revenue (which they would have otherwise)?

osigurdson 4y ago

The Metaverse is another name for a new kind of interface: glasses. If the interface gets good enough then everything else will follow.

__lbracket__ 4y ago

I mostly agree with this -- the converged value will be ~1% of the initial hype. 1% of hype is still massive. After the noise has calmed, I feel generative AI, at its core, will enhance information search and summarization; lookup and compression. That itself will have massive value. It will differentiate roles that require net new thinking from those that require regurgitation.

imhoguy 4y ago

As with any craze the best suited are the shovel sellers... NVDA.

germinalphrase 4y ago

“ Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people.” Tech should hire more broadly.

mbesto 4y ago

> And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software. VR will go the way of 3D Printing. A surgeon can walk into one of the largest medical device company's in the world, talk about a new idea for a broken bone transplant and within 24 hours can have a 3D prototype printed out. Great for innovation of broken bones, but it isn't the ubiquity we experienced with something like mobile phones, email, or social media. Meta thinks thats what VR is going to be.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
I know it's off-topic, but this simply baffles me about 3D printing. I have a 3D printer and I plan on buying more, but when you look at the most downloaded models on a huge website like printables.com, the number 1 has a bit more than 200K downloads, and the second drops all the way down to only 83K. Only 83,000 people downloaded the 2nd most downloaded model :| Every time I look at the numbers I realize how niche of a hobby it is, despite being easier and easier (and cheaper and cheaper) to get into and has pretty much endless applications.
- pulvinar 4y ago
  The reason for that is that 3D printing's strength is one-off designs. Any popular design would get mass-produced cheaper and better, and would then lose popularity on those sites.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I do a lot of 3D printing -- but outside of when I first started and it was a shiny new toy, I almost never download models to print. Being able to make my own custom parts and such, though, has been an incredible superpower, and my printers have paid for themselves many times over that way.
- aix1 4y ago
  It's a niche hobby for sure, but I think a slightly better metric to look at is the number of 3D printers sold. This seems to be about 2 million units per year.

wnevets 4y ago

> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto. Generative AI has potential to immediately increase productivity, and thus revenue. The only real way to make money (in the short term at-least) with crypto and the metaverse was to convince other people the digital assets created were rare, valuable and worth paying for.

idopmstuff 4y ago

> Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for. I don't really understand this description - electricity is one of the most useful things in the history of civilization. I think the latter half of what you're saying is true, but it's true of everything. There's nothing inherently useful about my car, except that it gets me places. There's nothing inherently useful about my house, except that it shelters me from the elements. Generative AI will be useful for creating lots of things (probably primarily code in its various forms). I've used it to write a few Python scripts over the course of the last week that simply wouldn't have been possible for me to do (without a few weeks of teaching myself Python at least - I'm a somewhat-code-literate PM but very much not a programmer). Those have solved real problems for me and added real value to my life.

kochikame 4y ago
The comment you're replying to is trying to say that a house, just by existing, solves the shelter problem. Having a functioning car means you can just get in it and go somewhere. But just having electricity in and of itself does not solve any problem; you have to use it power something else (lights, TV, toaster), which is the thing that solves the problem, not the electricity.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

layoric 4y ago

I wouldn't quite go that far, but the longer I am building these models into systems, I think the good use case for LLMs/Generative AI can be categorized into a few types of systems. 1. Data collection - Obvious, creating a voice/text interface into an existing system where the problem and requirements are well known. Eg, booking a restaurant. It needs a time, place, people. Collecting that from voice/text can be convenient in many situations. Same with different types of models collecting data from video/images/etc. 2. Providing options - When the desired output is unknown, but a human can describe the problem. Eg, coding, art, many "I need an X that can Y for problem Z". ChatGPT does a great job of this and I think most of the value of generative AI is here currently. Most of the hype is around how far can we take the capabilities of solving this 2nd category to produce the third. 3. Agents - There are examples of solutions showing this potential but the 'killer app' I don't think has been demonstrated, at least well enough. AutoGPT, BabyAGI, etc are interesting, but in my experience don't yet perform nearly well enough. They fail far too often for any trust to be created. This doesn't mean GPT4 native plugins won't get there, they could and that will create a large amount of value in this category (I don't have access to Plugins). This is also where a lot of "selling the dream" is happening. It seems plausible we will get there, but still not clear how these will be accepted and used in the real world, by average users. One big area of value IMO for Agents is accessibility. People with physical disabilities, but still have the ability to speak I think will provide massive quality of life improvements through being able to interact more easily with more systems. Very interesting times, the speed of change has seemed amazing, and that for me is the part that creates the most unknown, and is hard to ignore the hype when plotting the rate of improvement and the possibility of Agents becoming an accepted tool in wider society. The value provided by Crypto/VR is way more limited, and the accessibility of the tech ranges from bad to worse. VR has a lot of utility, but due to the headset requirement, it is disconnected from a lot of the real world. Lots use cases for specific problems, but less widely accessible as generative AI by a long way. Crypto IMO should be ignored, at best it assists with the financialization of everything which doesn't provide value to a wide portion of society, it provides a means of value extraction.

karmelapple 4y ago

Your neighbor didn’t understand Google when it came out, but they were informed by a friend about how useful it was. Show them some of the power of an LLM and they too will realize the power I predict.

berniedurfee 4y ago

I’m starting to agree with this perspective. My opinion on generative AI is shifting from apocalyptic world breaking tech to something more like Siri 2.0. It’ll be neat for sure, but I think the plateau of useful applications will arrive soon and it won’t be as game-changing as it initially seemed. I kinda hope I’m wrong, but also hope I’m right.

richardw 4y ago

I heard a great interview response from a YC-related person recently. Might have been SamA: Nobody you know (roughly) uses VR many times a week/day, not in any extended fashion. Everyone might have them but they're in a drawer somewhere. Compare that to LLM's, which roughly everyone is or should be using. There are very few knowledge-economy jobs where an LLM can't be useful, within hours or days or definitely weeks with a bit of practice. And it'll get better every year. It's here to stay.

joeyfranklin 4y ago

[flagged]

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

I know it sounds stupid, but generative AI has an incredible amount of potential for videogames, making those way more alive. It might not make millions directly, but it could unleash some very successful videogames, without decreasing accessibility (like vr) or a weird value proposition (crypto)

Deloritoono 4y ago

Ms just added helpful ai features to their office suite. Adobe will launch a ai driven graphics tool. I have tons of more examples. This never happened with crypto or VR. Chatgpt has real big impacts on school kids who use it for generating text too. I'm not understanding your analysis. We already have more usable ai than usable crypto or vr

nextaccountic 4y ago

> But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software. And military. There's a lot of videos showing VR being used to control drones in the Russian-Ukrainian War https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5lKupps8CM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5lKupps8CM