8 ms·

So far, AI is a money pit that isn't paying off

39 points by mmphosis 3y ago

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
In the last decades I read that about: - web ads - web stores - streaming websites - chat apps
- marban 3y ago
  — Last-mile Delivery — Blockchain — Metaverse — Scooters — Anything strapped to your head
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    TBH, Metaverse still hasn't taken off yet. But Blockchain already has quite a place in cryptocurrency. Actual, useful applications... like buying drugs on the dark web. Not satire, done it myself.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
AI feels like "internet" in the 90's, which caused a huge crash in 2002 before taking over the world.
- ajross 3y ago
  The "internet" itself was growing wildly through the dot com crash, though. That was an investment cycle: more money in aggregate was flinging around to "make network stuff" than there was revenue to be had selling it in the short term. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that everyone wanted and was rapidly adopting a global network and creating new markets. AI right now is way behind that spot on the adoption curve. We have a lot of very impressive stunts that don't yet seem like "products" or "markets". And we have a lot of ideas awaiting implementation. But it needs to cross that bridge. I think it's reasonable to assume there's at least one bust/boom cycle to come in the AI world before we get to a steady state.
- PreachSoup 3y ago
  Yep. The money crashed. But the technology never stopped
Anon84 3y ago
And yet GitHub's copilot just crossed $100M ARR https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1711792178031460618 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1711792178031460618
- object-a 3y ago
  > The problem is that users pay $10 a month subscription fee for Copilot but, according to a source interviewed by the Journal, Microsoft lost an average of $20 per user during the first few months of this year. Some users cost the company an average loss of over $80 per month, the source told the paper.
  - xxpor 3y ago
    $90 of inference time a month is... a lot. Are people just generating code in vscode to cause calls to copilot or something?
    - Kiro 3y ago
      Copilot sends huge prompts continuously since it includes adjacent files for context. That's why it's so good at "figuring out" your own esoteric code.
  - reader5000 3y ago
    I'm not sure why they don't charge per usage.
    - matthewdgreen 3y ago
      Because presumably the goal of copilot is not to make substantial amounts of money at this time, but instead to produce tons of training data for the tools that come after (and are significantly more profitable, because they reduce the amount of money firms spend on software developers.)
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Yeah, so far this looks like home assistants which are all money-losing. There isn't yet a killer app, like google ads/search, which is sticky and pervasive and where an effective monopoly emerges.
philipodonnell 3y ago
They’re waves. Going up the front it’ll change the world and going down the back it’s doom and gloom. Everyone is shouting all those things all the time, it’s just the balance shifting that we call a wave. But, as long every crest and trough are a little higher, that’s what we call progress, no matter who you’re listening to along the way.
jiscariot 3y ago
A link to gizmodo is the internet equivalent of those direct mailers that go directly to the recycle bin.
leto_ii 3y ago
For the original wsj article: https://archive.ph/jMM1k https://archive.ph/jMM1k
xnx 3y ago
This type naysaying feels like clickbait. The current Tensor-fueled AI wave is easily on-par or exceeding in significance that of the Internet, personal computing, or the smartphone. AI is extremely hyped right now and very expensive, but the landscape is changing quickly. On top of a few immediately valuable applications: text generation, code completion, image generation, etc., there are a million people trying to figure out how to make use of "AI" capabilities that already exist. Even if the technology did not improve at all past GPT4, we would see a decade of innovation as it works through industries. A huge portion of any AI project is collecting and preparing data. Now that we know that datasets like this can be valuable, more effort will be put into collecting: business conversations of all types (customer service, consulting, meetings, etc.), diagrams, blueprints, photos and video from manufacturing, healthcare, and constructions. The value equation is also rapidly changing with dozens of non-Nvidia chip makers furiously trying to capture a piece of the pie, and economically motivated developers (compute time is expensive!) developing more efficient code.
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  Unfortunately for you, we all heard the same exact promises and grand claims from people pushing previous hype cycles, such as VR, AR, EVs, cryptocurrency, Web 3.0, etc. Some people are addicted to hype.
  - xnx 3y ago
    They hype is definitely similar, but the situation is entirely different. You don't have to take anyone's hype/story about AI on faith. The future state is uncertain, but the current trajectory is clear and verifiable.
    - kylebenzle 3y ago
      In early 2020 I was doing a data science boot camp and one project was feeding in a bunch of scientific paper titles in a given area, then "predicting" a "next" future title, the idea was I could come up with ideas for future projects. What we have now is exactly the same except with a MUCH bigger training set. I am using GPT4 everyday but still can't believe the nonsense hype around it. ALL of AI would be lucky to generate a few $million a year of actual income for people. At BEST these LLMs are great spell checkers and code template fetching assistants but thats as far as LLMs on their own will ever go. Microsoft Word and Google Docs will have a built in "AI" spell checker that will dissapera into the background, and google search might get SLIGHTLY more relavent but thats it. No "AI revolution" is coming. I'd love to be wrong but looking at the details its hard to understand where people think this future revenue will come from.
arno1 3y ago
Love that I can grab Nvidia A100 and V100 GPUs on the Akash Network anytime - no wait! No KYC!
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
They said the same thing about the Internet is 2001. Industry is still reacting. Hollywood in particular will be completely upended. There are those in entertainment that haven't grasped the impact of what's available. The Chinese graphic design industry changed overnight and made millions of their designers redundant. In short: it's coming.
pasttense01 3y ago
"So Far, X Is a Money Pit That Isn't Paying Off" This can be said about most new technologies at some point in their development cycles.
aaroninsf 3y ago
To take issue with the lede, it's completely clear that the bet will pay off, just not for whom, when. There is zero ambiguity about that fact that everything is going to change, for a pretty sizable interpretation of "everything." That this hasn't been reflected in the quarterly numbers betrays either a droll sardonicism in service of generating clicks, or, a comical loss of perspective.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > it's completely clear that the bet will pay off I don't think that's completely clear. I mean, it probably will in some form, but it doesn't appear certain. That's why it's a "bet".
zackmorris 3y ago
Well ya, it doesn't cost a billion dollars to teach a child to read. In many ways, AI has been rolled out just exactly the opposite way that I might have done it. Just like I would have done almost everything the opposite way of what's been happening since the Dot Bomb around 2001. A few examples: we should have had CPUs with 100+ cores and local memories standard by now instead of SIMD video cards and various abstraction layers more abstruse than OpenGL. We should have had free distributed general computation runtimes like SETI@home but for any language. We should have had rich media documents with progressive enhancement like htmx instead of single-page applications and walled gardens that can't even be scraped or crawled by search engines. We should have had an open data interchange format like SOAP/JSONAPI/GraphQL/Open Graph/etc but not terrible, for supporting the semantic web. We should have had an approachable functional language like Erlang with the readability of Go and the vector handling of MATLAB, but we never got it, because the geeks who could make that stuff spent the last 20+ years as workaholics or struggling to survive on shoestring budgets in the open source community. We should have pushed for decommodification and right to repair instead of draconian IP laws like the DMCA. We should have had open funding like prosper.com and kickerstarter.com that actually worked (for all projects, not just creative ones) instead of VC firms and billionaires. We should have had Pragmatism instead of Move Fast and Break Things. We should be automating work to liberate us from forced labor, not automating art to strip away our dreams. We should be working towards UBI for every single person on the planet, not starting proxy wars between empire and the people who do the actual working and living and dying to support the 1%. I could go on forever, and the eventualities of these life choices have grown to capture our entire collective psyche. If we had all that stuff, I truly believe that AGI (or at least the liberation it represents) would have already arrived. But in the direction it's headed now, AI will almost certainly adopt the form of corporations (which arguably already are AIs with inhuman/amoral agendas) and deliver us into a dystopian future where the choice is lock-in under the yoke or survival in the wasteland. I still hold onto some small hope that AI can liberate us from the short-term scarcity mindset and bring about the New Age under some form of democratic socialism like on Star Trek. But it's so easy for the powers that be to sabotage all forward progress, even going as far as shutting down governments to get their way, that I worry it may already be too late. The safe bet is that we'll get the libertarian paradise of Star Wars instead. Present-day technologists will be tomorrow's rebels.
variadix 3y ago
This seems like a silly point to make. It’s still an emerging technology, and will ultimately be the end-all-be-all technology if humanity can solve AGI. Even if we don’t any time soon specialized models will certainly provide massive productivity gains. I think people are being unreasonably pessimistic about technology that is almost sci-fi-esque in its current capabilities, let alone its potential.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  The end-all-be-all technology, until the power and internet goes out...
  - galaxytachyon 3y ago
    To be honest, if the power and internet go out, not much would be left, including meat-based technologies such as elbow grease. Can't power the amount of bloodsacks we have with enough biofuels once the electricity goes down and supply chains are disrupted. Massive scaling down would be required, and we would need to "liquidate" a lot of bloodsacks if the loss of power and internet is permanent.
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      That's a truly bizarre claim, since plows and shovels work just fine without power or electricity... At any rate, everything else can survive the lack of power and connectivity for a few hours or a few days. AI is only usable when the customer, and the AI provider, have both.
myaccountonhn 3y ago
The environmental impacts of AI training are also abhorrent.

39 points by mmphosis 3y ago

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

In the last decades I read that about: - web ads - web stores - streaming websites - chat apps

marban 3y ago
— Last-mile Delivery — Blockchain — Metaverse — Scooters — Anything strapped to your head
- LoganDark 3y ago
  TBH, Metaverse still hasn't taken off yet. But Blockchain already has quite a place in cryptocurrency. Actual, useful applications... like buying drugs on the dark web. Not satire, done it myself.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

AI feels like "internet" in the 90's, which caused a huge crash in 2002 before taking over the world.

ajross 3y ago
The "internet" itself was growing wildly through the dot com crash, though. That was an investment cycle: more money in aggregate was flinging around to "make network stuff" than there was revenue to be had selling it in the short term. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that everyone wanted and was rapidly adopting a global network and creating new markets. AI right now is way behind that spot on the adoption curve. We have a lot of very impressive stunts that don't yet seem like "products" or "markets". And we have a lot of ideas awaiting implementation. But it needs to cross that bridge. I think it's reasonable to assume there's at least one bust/boom cycle to come in the AI world before we get to a steady state.
PreachSoup 3y ago
Yep. The money crashed. But the technology never stopped

Anon84 3y ago

And yet GitHub's copilot just crossed $100M ARR https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1711792178031460618 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1711792178031460618

object-a 3y ago
> The problem is that users pay $10 a month subscription fee for Copilot but, according to a source interviewed by the Journal, Microsoft lost an average of $20 per user during the first few months of this year. Some users cost the company an average loss of over $80 per month, the source told the paper.
- xxpor 3y ago
  $90 of inference time a month is... a lot. Are people just generating code in vscode to cause calls to copilot or something?
  - Kiro 3y ago
    Copilot sends huge prompts continuously since it includes adjacent files for context. That's why it's so good at "figuring out" your own esoteric code.
- reader5000 3y ago
  I'm not sure why they don't charge per usage.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    Because presumably the goal of copilot is not to make substantial amounts of money at this time, but instead to produce tons of training data for the tools that come after (and are significantly more profitable, because they reduce the amount of money firms spend on software developers.)
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Yeah, so far this looks like home assistants which are all money-losing. There isn't yet a killer app, like google ads/search, which is sticky and pervasive and where an effective monopoly emerges.

philipodonnell 3y ago

They’re waves. Going up the front it’ll change the world and going down the back it’s doom and gloom. Everyone is shouting all those things all the time, it’s just the balance shifting that we call a wave. But, as long every crest and trough are a little higher, that’s what we call progress, no matter who you’re listening to along the way.

jiscariot 3y ago

A link to gizmodo is the internet equivalent of those direct mailers that go directly to the recycle bin.

leto_ii 3y ago

For the original wsj article: https://archive.ph/jMM1k https://archive.ph/jMM1k

xnx 3y ago

This type naysaying feels like clickbait. The current Tensor-fueled AI wave is easily on-par or exceeding in significance that of the Internet, personal computing, or the smartphone. AI is extremely hyped right now and very expensive, but the landscape is changing quickly. On top of a few immediately valuable applications: text generation, code completion, image generation, etc., there are a million people trying to figure out how to make use of "AI" capabilities that already exist. Even if the technology did not improve at all past GPT4, we would see a decade of innovation as it works through industries. A huge portion of any AI project is collecting and preparing data. Now that we know that datasets like this can be valuable, more effort will be put into collecting: business conversations of all types (customer service, consulting, meetings, etc.), diagrams, blueprints, photos and video from manufacturing, healthcare, and constructions. The value equation is also rapidly changing with dozens of non-Nvidia chip makers furiously trying to capture a piece of the pie, and economically motivated developers (compute time is expensive!) developing more efficient code.

nathanaldensr 3y ago
Unfortunately for you, we all heard the same exact promises and grand claims from people pushing previous hype cycles, such as VR, AR, EVs, cryptocurrency, Web 3.0, etc. Some people are addicted to hype.
- xnx 3y ago
  They hype is definitely similar, but the situation is entirely different. You don't have to take anyone's hype/story about AI on faith. The future state is uncertain, but the current trajectory is clear and verifiable.
  - kylebenzle 3y ago
    In early 2020 I was doing a data science boot camp and one project was feeding in a bunch of scientific paper titles in a given area, then "predicting" a "next" future title, the idea was I could come up with ideas for future projects. What we have now is exactly the same except with a MUCH bigger training set. I am using GPT4 everyday but still can't believe the nonsense hype around it. ALL of AI would be lucky to generate a few $million a year of actual income for people. At BEST these LLMs are great spell checkers and code template fetching assistants but thats as far as LLMs on their own will ever go. Microsoft Word and Google Docs will have a built in "AI" spell checker that will dissapera into the background, and google search might get SLIGHTLY more relavent but thats it. No "AI revolution" is coming. I'd love to be wrong but looking at the details its hard to understand where people think this future revenue will come from.

arno1 3y ago

Love that I can grab Nvidia A100 and V100 GPUs on the Akash Network anytime - no wait! No KYC!

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

They said the same thing about the Internet is 2001. Industry is still reacting. Hollywood in particular will be completely upended. There are those in entertainment that haven't grasped the impact of what's available. The Chinese graphic design industry changed overnight and made millions of their designers redundant. In short: it's coming.

pasttense01 3y ago

"So Far, X Is a Money Pit That Isn't Paying Off" This can be said about most new technologies at some point in their development cycles.

aaroninsf 3y ago

To take issue with the lede, it's completely clear that the bet will pay off, just not for whom, when. There is zero ambiguity about that fact that everything is going to change, for a pretty sizable interpretation of "everything." That this hasn't been reflected in the quarterly numbers betrays either a droll sardonicism in service of generating clicks, or, a comical loss of perspective.

JohnFen 3y ago
> it's completely clear that the bet will pay off I don't think that's completely clear. I mean, it probably will in some form, but it doesn't appear certain. That's why it's a "bet".

zackmorris 3y ago

Well ya, it doesn't cost a billion dollars to teach a child to read. In many ways, AI has been rolled out just exactly the opposite way that I might have done it. Just like I would have done almost everything the opposite way of what's been happening since the Dot Bomb around 2001. A few examples: we should have had CPUs with 100+ cores and local memories standard by now instead of SIMD video cards and various abstraction layers more abstruse than OpenGL. We should have had free distributed general computation runtimes like SETI@home but for any language. We should have had rich media documents with progressive enhancement like htmx instead of single-page applications and walled gardens that can't even be scraped or crawled by search engines. We should have had an open data interchange format like SOAP/JSONAPI/GraphQL/Open Graph/etc but not terrible, for supporting the semantic web. We should have had an approachable functional language like Erlang with the readability of Go and the vector handling of MATLAB, but we never got it, because the geeks who could make that stuff spent the last 20+ years as workaholics or struggling to survive on shoestring budgets in the open source community. We should have pushed for decommodification and right to repair instead of draconian IP laws like the DMCA. We should have had open funding like prosper.com and kickerstarter.com that actually worked (for all projects, not just creative ones) instead of VC firms and billionaires. We should have had Pragmatism instead of Move Fast and Break Things. We should be automating work to liberate us from forced labor, not automating art to strip away our dreams. We should be working towards UBI for every single person on the planet, not starting proxy wars between empire and the people who do the actual working and living and dying to support the 1%. I could go on forever, and the eventualities of these life choices have grown to capture our entire collective psyche. If we had all that stuff, I truly believe that AGI (or at least the liberation it represents) would have already arrived. But in the direction it's headed now, AI will almost certainly adopt the form of corporations (which arguably already are AIs with inhuman/amoral agendas) and deliver us into a dystopian future where the choice is lock-in under the yoke or survival in the wasteland. I still hold onto some small hope that AI can liberate us from the short-term scarcity mindset and bring about the New Age under some form of democratic socialism like on Star Trek. But it's so easy for the powers that be to sabotage all forward progress, even going as far as shutting down governments to get their way, that I worry it may already be too late. The safe bet is that we'll get the libertarian paradise of Star Wars instead. Present-day technologists will be tomorrow's rebels.

variadix 3y ago

This seems like a silly point to make. It’s still an emerging technology, and will ultimately be the end-all-be-all technology if humanity can solve AGI. Even if we don’t any time soon specialized models will certainly provide massive productivity gains. I think people are being unreasonably pessimistic about technology that is almost sci-fi-esque in its current capabilities, let alone its potential.

gamblor956 3y ago
The end-all-be-all technology, until the power and internet goes out...
- galaxytachyon 3y ago
  To be honest, if the power and internet go out, not much would be left, including meat-based technologies such as elbow grease. Can't power the amount of bloodsacks we have with enough biofuels once the electricity goes down and supply chains are disrupted. Massive scaling down would be required, and we would need to "liquidate" a lot of bloodsacks if the loss of power and internet is permanent.
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    That's a truly bizarre claim, since plows and shovels work just fine without power or electricity... At any rate, everything else can survive the lack of power and connectivity for a few hours or a few days. AI is only usable when the customer, and the AI provider, have both.

myaccountonhn 3y ago

The environmental impacts of AI training are also abhorrent.