5 ms·

I have witnessed the same excitement and "never ending summer" psychology many times before. The cold winter always comes. We even had a big bubble recently wi

I have witnessed the same excitement and "never ending summer" psychology many times before. The cold winter always comes. We even had a big bubble recently with AI itself regarding self driving cars. It's amazing how every tech luminary went on stage and declared "This Year For Sure" to be when self driving cars would pick us all up... in 2019. It's perpetually 5 years away from mass deployment. Training LLMs has huge capital expenditure (capex) and is not producing revenues. As an anecdote, my brother in law works for a large 15k person Microsoft software shop, and they got a discount on their license renewal (yes, a discount) for including Github Copilot for every software engineer. We surmised this is to goose the number of "paying" licenses to help metrics. Extremely high salaries - extremely high capex - extremely high hype and gushing press - extremely nonexistent revenues (except for the pick and shovel sellers like NVDA) - this is a quintessential bubble in the making!

pixl97 3y ago
Eh, Until we have a "this is AGI" moment, self driving cars are going to be a pipe dream, so not sure if they are a great example. And, yea, put your money where you're mouth is with your investments... I think you'll quickly end up relearning what "The market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent" actually means. Trying to put discounts on license renewals on LLMs not selling is missing what the hell is going on in the market outside of AI. It is rough out there and business spending in general is way down. Trying to lump that in with lack of AI adoption may be a mistake.
nopinsight 3y ago
“OpenAI's annual run rate—a measure of one month's revenue multiplied by 12—hit the $2 billion revenue mark in December 2023, two people familiar with the knowledge told the Financial Times.” https://qz.com/openai-will-make-2-billion-revenue-soon-tech-ai-chatgpt-1851247985 https://qz.com/openai-will-make-2-billion-revenue-soon-tech-... Several well-known professional services firms have already deployed AI for their workforces. Many software engineers, esp younger ones, use ChatGPT or its equivalent every day at work.
- benreesman 3y ago
  Yeah but dolphin via ollama is a fine code assistant and didn’t require a zillion bucks or a Larry Summer-level shady insider Washington power play gone afoul. The revenue numbers are pricing in that someone makes Linux illegal, i.e. not real or a real tragic loss for humanity: pick one.
  - rusticpenn 3y ago
    It required some leaked weights to start right?
    - benreesman 3y ago
      Depends on how you count. Meta/FAIR realizing de-facto that open LLaMa was in their advantage is debatably causally related to everything that happened after, but there's a case people would have figured it out anyways. In this narrow instance it's not true at all: Mistral (pre-MSFT Mistral, we'll see going forward) released "Mixtral" 8x7B with de-facto "available weight" licensing and enough arch literature to make it the go-to for a long time. Dolphin is an Orca-style "non-operator de-alignment / operator-alignment" of that model, based on open work on this out of MSFT. And they did it on a very modest budget by the standards of foundation models in any modality but especially natural language and adjacent things. It's basically established at this point at least to my satisfaction that too much money hurts AI research. It's too easy to just throw money at it, and if you have that kind of backing, you have to show results on a very specific schedule (usually).
      - rusticpenn 3y ago
        Yes, my point is that there was a need/involvement of big companies to help the seed of these projects. Too much money definitely hurts any research as the "politicians" take over.
        benreesman 3y ago
        There was a need for some form of funding from somewhere to allow LLM research certainly, and there was probably a need for someone to subsidize a few expensive runs that didn't pan out before it became common enough knowledge how to train a foundation LLM. But the cat's out of the bag on that now, you might not get Opus, but that capability band between e.g. GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 (and it's various previews) is crowded with stuff that is well-explained in significant detail in purely public sources. So IDK, yeah, maybe we needed big giant companies to kickstart this thing, maybe not, the government used to do effective public/private partnerships or even useful stuff directly with academia and in places still does: CERN did the LHC without like, crazy direct corporate sponsorship written all over it (there may be indirect stuff that I don't know about not being involved in the LHC project). And anyone who thinks AI is more complicated or should be more capital-intensive than high-energy particle physics done at CERN and places like it is getting high on their own supply.
arvinsim 3y ago
I believe the hype will die down. But I think there are still some legit use cases for AIs and LLMs. Besides, you don't have to train LLMs. You can just use the trained ones to leverage it in your job or hobby.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  I believe in this technology too. It is classic for technologies to enter the hype cycle, with a bubble forming followed by the "trough of disillusionment". Huge potential with LLMs, but that doesn't mean pain isn't going to come.
echelon 3y ago
A few things that will happen: - Hollywood disrupted - Music industry disrupted - Gaming industry disrupted - Search disrupted - New forms of media and social media - Molecular and chemical discovery enhanced Things that will happen with one or two possibly low hanging fruit discoveries: - AI agents - AI reasoning Things that will happen on a longer time horizon: - Self-driving - Robots and automated manufacturing - Software automation It doesn't have to be perfect right away in order to strike at over a trillion dollars of (growing) TAM. And the field will keep getting better with more eyeballs, more practitioners, and more investment dollars.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  It's definitely possible, but there is a lot of hand waving going on with terms like "Music industry disrupted". Where is the AI that is top of the charts? What movie did AI create that I am forking over my hard earned money for? In the 1980s and 1990s there were many prognostications about how the internet would disrupt everything. And it basically did, to varying degrees, 10 to 25 years later...
  - arvinsim 3y ago
    I think there are many ways AI can be leveraged in the music industry other than just wholesale making the music for you. AI can do idea generation, mixing and mastering using assistance, generative tools for parts of a song, sample generation and identification, etc.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      Perhaps some kind of "generative listening" too, taking existing music and adapting it to the listener. Like how a lot of AI art is some kind of "remix" of existing things.
benreesman 3y ago
Waymo can get there, it’s tightening screws at Waymo. But it’s the exception that proves the rule: no one else ever gets there on today’s model. You’re basically right across the board. Cruise gets written down, Tesla still makes cars but you have to drive them, yeah…I think that covers everyone else.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure. Even if it worked 100%, I don't see a way that Waymo could ever be profitable enough to justify the investment. There just isn't enough margin. Alphabet can afford to subsidize it indefinitely but it's not going to become a moneymaker for anyone. In fact, as you point out, their serious competition is basically out of the game now. I expect within the next five years, Google will spin it off and call it a win, and Waymo itself will peter out a few years later.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    That's fair, in a game as crazy hard and complicated as self-driving, I shouldn't have implied it's a lock, I don't think anything is a lock when that much cutting-edge technology, complicated institutional incentives, regulators, and a topic guaranteed to interest the public all come together. I meant to say "I've ridden in Waymo vehicles, a number of times, in non-trivial situations, and it was flawless, so while I'm sure there's a long tail of crazy hard scenarios, it can drive you to and from a restaurant in heavy traffic that involves getting on something that sure looked big enough to be a freeway, getting back off it without trouble, and parking better than any human I know". How much they spent to get there, and if they're ever seeing that back? I wouldn't know where to begin estimating that. I'm basically sure from first-hand experience that Waymo can do the vast majority of the driving I've ever needed. Maybe it can't cope with insane weather or something, but most people can't really either. Do the economics ultimately make sense? Dunno.
HPsquared 3y ago
Even Nvidia refers to AI as a "goldmine". I mean, it fits...
- rjsw 3y ago
  They are selling shovels, always the best bit of the business to be in.
  - skywhopper 3y ago
    Until you build too many shovel factories that all open right when market growth suddenly slows down.

pixl97 3y ago

Eh, Until we have a "this is AGI" moment, self driving cars are going to be a pipe dream, so not sure if they are a great example. And, yea, put your money where you're mouth is with your investments... I think you'll quickly end up relearning what "The market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent" actually means. Trying to put discounts on license renewals on LLMs not selling is missing what the hell is going on in the market outside of AI. It is rough out there and business spending in general is way down. Trying to lump that in with lack of AI adoption may be a mistake.

nopinsight 3y ago

“OpenAI's annual run rate—a measure of one month's revenue multiplied by 12—hit the $2 billion revenue mark in December 2023, two people familiar with the knowledge told the Financial Times.” https://qz.com/openai-will-make-2-billion-revenue-soon-tech-ai-chatgpt-1851247985 https://qz.com/openai-will-make-2-billion-revenue-soon-tech-... Several well-known professional services firms have already deployed AI for their workforces. Many software engineers, esp younger ones, use ChatGPT or its equivalent every day at work.

benreesman 3y ago
Yeah but dolphin via ollama is a fine code assistant and didn’t require a zillion bucks or a Larry Summer-level shady insider Washington power play gone afoul. The revenue numbers are pricing in that someone makes Linux illegal, i.e. not real or a real tragic loss for humanity: pick one.
- rusticpenn 3y ago
  It required some leaked weights to start right?
  - benreesman 3y ago
    Depends on how you count. Meta/FAIR realizing de-facto that open LLaMa was in their advantage is debatably causally related to everything that happened after, but there's a case people would have figured it out anyways. In this narrow instance it's not true at all: Mistral (pre-MSFT Mistral, we'll see going forward) released "Mixtral" 8x7B with de-facto "available weight" licensing and enough arch literature to make it the go-to for a long time. Dolphin is an Orca-style "non-operator de-alignment / operator-alignment" of that model, based on open work on this out of MSFT. And they did it on a very modest budget by the standards of foundation models in any modality but especially natural language and adjacent things. It's basically established at this point at least to my satisfaction that too much money hurts AI research. It's too easy to just throw money at it, and if you have that kind of backing, you have to show results on a very specific schedule (usually).
    - rusticpenn 3y ago
      Yes, my point is that there was a need/involvement of big companies to help the seed of these projects. Too much money definitely hurts any research as the "politicians" take over.
      - benreesman 3y ago
        There was a need for some form of funding from somewhere to allow LLM research certainly, and there was probably a need for someone to subsidize a few expensive runs that didn't pan out before it became common enough knowledge how to train a foundation LLM. But the cat's out of the bag on that now, you might not get Opus, but that capability band between e.g. GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 (and it's various previews) is crowded with stuff that is well-explained in significant detail in purely public sources. So IDK, yeah, maybe we needed big giant companies to kickstart this thing, maybe not, the government used to do effective public/private partnerships or even useful stuff directly with academia and in places still does: CERN did the LHC without like, crazy direct corporate sponsorship written all over it (there may be indirect stuff that I don't know about not being involved in the LHC project). And anyone who thinks AI is more complicated or should be more capital-intensive than high-energy particle physics done at CERN and places like it is getting high on their own supply.

arvinsim 3y ago

I believe the hype will die down. But I think there are still some legit use cases for AIs and LLMs. Besides, you don't have to train LLMs. You can just use the trained ones to leverage it in your job or hobby.

monero-xmr 3y ago
I believe in this technology too. It is classic for technologies to enter the hype cycle, with a bubble forming followed by the "trough of disillusionment". Huge potential with LLMs, but that doesn't mean pain isn't going to come.

echelon 3y ago

A few things that will happen: - Hollywood disrupted - Music industry disrupted - Gaming industry disrupted - Search disrupted - New forms of media and social media - Molecular and chemical discovery enhanced Things that will happen with one or two possibly low hanging fruit discoveries: - AI agents - AI reasoning Things that will happen on a longer time horizon: - Self-driving - Robots and automated manufacturing - Software automation It doesn't have to be perfect right away in order to strike at over a trillion dollars of (growing) TAM. And the field will keep getting better with more eyeballs, more practitioners, and more investment dollars.

monero-xmr 3y ago
It's definitely possible, but there is a lot of hand waving going on with terms like "Music industry disrupted". Where is the AI that is top of the charts? What movie did AI create that I am forking over my hard earned money for? In the 1980s and 1990s there were many prognostications about how the internet would disrupt everything. And it basically did, to varying degrees, 10 to 25 years later...
- arvinsim 3y ago
  I think there are many ways AI can be leveraged in the music industry other than just wholesale making the music for you. AI can do idea generation, mixing and mastering using assistance, generative tools for parts of a song, sample generation and identification, etc.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Perhaps some kind of "generative listening" too, taking existing music and adapting it to the listener. Like how a lot of AI art is some kind of "remix" of existing things.

benreesman 3y ago

Waymo can get there, it’s tightening screws at Waymo. But it’s the exception that proves the rule: no one else ever gets there on today’s model. You’re basically right across the board. Cruise gets written down, Tesla still makes cars but you have to drive them, yeah…I think that covers everyone else.

skywhopper 3y ago
I wouldn't be so sure. Even if it worked 100%, I don't see a way that Waymo could ever be profitable enough to justify the investment. There just isn't enough margin. Alphabet can afford to subsidize it indefinitely but it's not going to become a moneymaker for anyone. In fact, as you point out, their serious competition is basically out of the game now. I expect within the next five years, Google will spin it off and call it a win, and Waymo itself will peter out a few years later.
- benreesman 3y ago
  That's fair, in a game as crazy hard and complicated as self-driving, I shouldn't have implied it's a lock, I don't think anything is a lock when that much cutting-edge technology, complicated institutional incentives, regulators, and a topic guaranteed to interest the public all come together. I meant to say "I've ridden in Waymo vehicles, a number of times, in non-trivial situations, and it was flawless, so while I'm sure there's a long tail of crazy hard scenarios, it can drive you to and from a restaurant in heavy traffic that involves getting on something that sure looked big enough to be a freeway, getting back off it without trouble, and parking better than any human I know". How much they spent to get there, and if they're ever seeing that back? I wouldn't know where to begin estimating that. I'm basically sure from first-hand experience that Waymo can do the vast majority of the driving I've ever needed. Maybe it can't cope with insane weather or something, but most people can't really either. Do the economics ultimately make sense? Dunno.

HPsquared 3y ago

Even Nvidia refers to AI as a "goldmine". I mean, it fits...

rjsw 3y ago
They are selling shovels, always the best bit of the business to be in.
- skywhopper 3y ago
  Until you build too many shovel factories that all open right when market growth suddenly slows down.