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Not really sure what exactly the author is getting at but let's be real: the IT industry is awash with investor dollars hoping to fund the next facebook. AI en

by luma 3y ago

Not really sure what exactly the author is getting at but let's be real: the IT industry is awash with investor dollars hoping to fund the next facebook. AI enters and it starts doing actual, useful work, and now there are a zillion VCs dumping out their wallets trying to get a piece of the next facebook. None of this means that AI is dumb, rather, VCs are dumb and will chase literally anything that smells like money.

theLiminator 3y ago
Are they dumb or are they good at investing in stuff on very favorable terms for them and then pumping and dumping their portfolio of hype companies on the unsuspecting masses at a major premium to their initial investment?
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  Can be both dumb and "good" at investing. >If you're so rich, why aren't you so smart? This is a question I wish people would ask more often, but instead, determinism has people associating wealth with merit, and even worse, absence of wealth with absence of merit.
softwaredoug 3y ago
Independent of the "real" value of AI My argument would be the sudden pivot of EVERYONE to AI is more indicative of a lack of good prospects for investments, rather than companies actually discovering products users want and like. Of course there's real value, but I'd believe the hype more in a strong tech economy, and am distrustful of every company becoming an AI expert overnight in our current weak tech economy.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  But this is how it's always been. Someone could have funded AI heavily (and a few did) during the web 3.0 hype but most went with the crowd. Same with streaming video services, social media companies, hardware companies, MMOs, search engines, cloud, etc.
- georgemcbay 3y ago
  ... and just prior to the big attention-boom for AI many of the same players were trying to make their variant of the "metaverse" the Next Big Thing -- most of them advocating for the importance of virtual meeting spaces while simultaneously mandating RTO.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > indicative of a lack of good prospects for investments This is what it looks like to me, too. Also, all the money that poured into "crypto" enterprises and schemes. People are inventing $THING_TO_INVEST_IN out of nothing, and capital piles in. I'm no economist, but this seems like the result of there being too much investor money chasing too few investment opportunities. Why's there too much money? I'd speculate that QE caused this. I've always thought that QE was nuts; the present global inflation scenario was entirely predictable.
  - ahhfhando6698 3y ago
    [dead]
AnotherGoodName 3y ago
And i wouldn't even say VCs are dumb because they keep hitting success chasing that money. It's why they have this money to throw around. The labor market is USD$144 trillion worldwide in salary. Automate a fraction of a percentage of the worldwide labor? You have a company with more annual revenue than Apple. Is it that hard to understand? Can people not think of scenarios where the current generation of AI may be able to automate some percentage of jobs? eg. Do people have any idea how much is spent on paralegals looking up case study law and how good LLMs are at finding such links in an automated way? I keep seeing people with no idea of the market pushing bad ideas. "LOL CEO said 'AI' to make stock go up". "Nvidia can't possibly be worth more than it once was because AI isn't real". "It's hype and doesn't work". etc.
- pluto_modadic 3y ago
  only if they can keep training from the commons and stealing other people's work.
  - natpalmer1776 3y ago
    Even looking at a world where training data, models, etc. are all public domain or otherwise free to use for commercial purposes, you will still see a huge number of companies that specialize in AI "as-a-service" simply due to the size of the ML talent pool, the desire to mitigate risk and purchase a known quantity rather than "roll your own AI", and the nature of how new technology is implemented at scale. Edit: and if copyright laws strike down current AI models and require some kind of BOM with established 'rights' to the data used to train models, you'll just end up with some variant of a gray market for training data that allows big corporations to do what they want with whatever data they can get their hands on, delegating risk to middle-man brokers making access to trained models EVEN MORE restricted to highly funded ventures.
  - afpx 3y ago
    Pretty soon, we'll be forced to wear glasses so that companies get revenue when we look at something copyrighted. I understand copyright holder's complaints. Maybe we can meet in the middle - reduce copyright to 5-10 years.
red_admiral 3y ago
There may be many dumb VCs, but both Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Graham have more money than I ever will. Whatever they're doing - and in Mark's case it might be evil - I wouldn't call it dumb.

by luma 3y ago

theLiminator 3y ago

Are they dumb or are they good at investing in stuff on very favorable terms for them and then pumping and dumping their portfolio of hype companies on the unsuspecting masses at a major premium to their initial investment?

VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Can be both dumb and "good" at investing. >If you're so rich, why aren't you so smart? This is a question I wish people would ask more often, but instead, determinism has people associating wealth with merit, and even worse, absence of wealth with absence of merit.

softwaredoug 3y ago

Independent of the "real" value of AI My argument would be the sudden pivot of EVERYONE to AI is more indicative of a lack of good prospects for investments, rather than companies actually discovering products users want and like. Of course there's real value, but I'd believe the hype more in a strong tech economy, and am distrustful of every company becoming an AI expert overnight in our current weak tech economy.

VirusNewbie 3y ago
But this is how it's always been. Someone could have funded AI heavily (and a few did) during the web 3.0 hype but most went with the crowd. Same with streaming video services, social media companies, hardware companies, MMOs, search engines, cloud, etc.
georgemcbay 3y ago
... and just prior to the big attention-boom for AI many of the same players were trying to make their variant of the "metaverse" the Next Big Thing -- most of them advocating for the importance of virtual meeting spaces while simultaneously mandating RTO.
denton-scratch 3y ago
> indicative of a lack of good prospects for investments This is what it looks like to me, too. Also, all the money that poured into "crypto" enterprises and schemes. People are inventing $THING_TO_INVEST_IN out of nothing, and capital piles in. I'm no economist, but this seems like the result of there being too much investor money chasing too few investment opportunities. Why's there too much money? I'd speculate that QE caused this. I've always thought that QE was nuts; the present global inflation scenario was entirely predictable.
- ahhfhando6698 3y ago
  [dead]

AnotherGoodName 3y ago

And i wouldn't even say VCs are dumb because they keep hitting success chasing that money. It's why they have this money to throw around. The labor market is USD$144 trillion worldwide in salary. Automate a fraction of a percentage of the worldwide labor? You have a company with more annual revenue than Apple. Is it that hard to understand? Can people not think of scenarios where the current generation of AI may be able to automate some percentage of jobs? eg. Do people have any idea how much is spent on paralegals looking up case study law and how good LLMs are at finding such links in an automated way? I keep seeing people with no idea of the market pushing bad ideas. "LOL CEO said 'AI' to make stock go up". "Nvidia can't possibly be worth more than it once was because AI isn't real". "It's hype and doesn't work". etc.

pluto_modadic 3y ago
only if they can keep training from the commons and stealing other people's work.
- natpalmer1776 3y ago
  Even looking at a world where training data, models, etc. are all public domain or otherwise free to use for commercial purposes, you will still see a huge number of companies that specialize in AI "as-a-service" simply due to the size of the ML talent pool, the desire to mitigate risk and purchase a known quantity rather than "roll your own AI", and the nature of how new technology is implemented at scale. Edit: and if copyright laws strike down current AI models and require some kind of BOM with established 'rights' to the data used to train models, you'll just end up with some variant of a gray market for training data that allows big corporations to do what they want with whatever data they can get their hands on, delegating risk to middle-man brokers making access to trained models EVEN MORE restricted to highly funded ventures.
- afpx 3y ago
  Pretty soon, we'll be forced to wear glasses so that companies get revenue when we look at something copyrighted. I understand copyright holder's complaints. Maybe we can meet in the middle - reduce copyright to 5-10 years.

red_admiral 3y ago

There may be many dumb VCs, but both Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Graham have more money than I ever will. Whatever they're doing - and in Mark's case it might be evil - I wouldn't call it dumb.