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Poll: Is AI Hype a Bubble?

60 points by mupuff1234 2y ago

NVDA market cap is bonkers, curious to hear what the HN consensus is for the near term future of AI (1-10 years away) Do you believe the current excitement surrounding AI is:

samspenc 2y ago
I think it will bring about change, but it will be a slow and long road. I don't think we are going to see instant results or changes in society, but rather something similar to the Internet and mobile, where it takes a few years to be adopted by more and more people and the technology improves over time, albeit a bit more slowly than early adopters are hoping for.
theuri 2y ago
Slow at first. Then fast. Then exponential.
- frenchie4111 2y ago
  Question is: what part of this growth curve are we on now?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    The wobbly one where we try to shoehorn tech into use cases until it sort of fits.
drannex 2y ago
Hype is, technology isn't.
davidguetta 2y ago
My opinion is that it's easy to get the impression it's a bubble because of the army of useless stuff that comes out of it (including the horrific cancer chatbots) But at the same time it is going to drastically change the way people work. In a very close future every single programmer is going to have chatgpt open. Every single marketer, researcher, lawyer, doctor etc... It's a revolution the same scale of internet itself. Everybody was on google everyday at some point, everybody will be on an AI at some point (if not most of the time they interact with a device)
- DeepYogurt 2y ago
  > It's a revolution the same scale of internet itself. Everybody was on google everyday at some point, everybody will be on an AI at some point (if not most of the time they interact with a device) Agreed that chatbots will change things. Hard disagree that it's on the scale of the internet. The internet at large touches way more than the habits of white collar workers
  - davidguetta 2y ago
    You'll literally be talking to some form of AI for each interaction on the net at some point in the future.
    - hammyhavoc 2y ago
      Bollocks. Absurdly inefficient. Where's all this energy and money for it going to come from?
    - throwawa14223 2y ago
      For what? Do you see LLMs replacing HTTP? Search Engines? Why would I want to?
      - davidguetta 2y ago
        apps
- mcnamaratw 2y ago
  It’s easy to forget this, but what we’re calling AI is chat bots.
- OJFord 2y ago
  > In a very close future every single programmer is going to have chatgpt open. I thought that for a little bit, paid for it for several months, but it's not enough better imo - and the hallucination rabbit holes burn harder than the productive chats make up for. But something like it probably, it just might be harder to say oh yeah LLMs did that it wasn't over hyped after all. Augmented search, or just improvements to search with a more familiar presentation. Summarise the small amount of information from blogspam and collapse them all, turn a NL question into a few different salient keyword searches, that sort of thing. I haven't tried Kagi's AI yet (I've only used it at all for a few searches while DDG was down recently) but maybe they're doing something interesting or worth watching at least.
andsoitis 2y ago
One point of view is that we tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.
zem 2y ago
I've seen some tightly focused, targeted uses of AI to eliminate a piece of drudgery, and I'm hopeful that that area will expand and mature over time. I'm not particularly hopeful about or for that matter interested in trying to replicate creativity via AI.
mywittyname 2y ago
I think it's valuable in a ton of ways, but I also think we are passed the inflection point for growth in novel applications. But I also think it's being overused or misapplied in so many situations. I've been involved in a couple of projects that were advertised as "AI" which were absolutely not, and I'm suspicious of any company advertising AI products.
kiernanmcgowan 2y ago
I've said for a bit that "something has been automated, but its on us to figure out what" since the launch of ChatGPT 3. Modern LLMs are really really useful in some domains, fun toys in others, and problem makers in most. My guess is that we're in for an AI winter in ~12-18mo as most AI startups fail and investors lose their shirts on a bunch of bets, but a few good use cases rise from the ashes. OpenAI is going to walk away with a tooon of VC money from startups spending on their APIs over the next year though.
- alexcnwy 2y ago
  wut. please unpack how LLMs are “problem makers” in “most” domains?
  - kdmccormick 2y ago
    Spam Phishing Buggy generated code Cheating in online courses ChatBots that try to do too much and do it worse than real human service reps, like that one that wrongly assured a customer that their airline ticket was refundable Deluge of low-value generated content taking attention and revenue away from high-value content creators
  - tnel77 2y ago
    Have you tried writing code or a paper that’s actually factual with ChatGPT? They are so obviously wrong in many cases that it’s often a hindrance rather than helpful when I’ve tried to use it. I do love using ChatGPT for fun stuff like “write me a recipe for enchiladas that’s also a country western song.” My kids and I find it hilarious.
    - Tao3300 2y ago
      We had a remote workshop with GitHub for Copilot. The example was to have it create various functions for a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. The extra exercise for afterward was to have it add the "Lizard and Spock" options. When I tried to have it do that, it spun its wheels for a little and told me the code it generated violated their responsible use guidelines or whatever. In retrospect it probably detected it generated something it didn't have the IP rights to give me, but ever since then I've described the state of the art as "like talking through the intercom at a McDonald's drive-thru, but every now and then the attendant says 'sorry, can we start over? I got distracted thinking about killing you.'"
resolutebat 2y ago
We are in the middle of dot.com bubble v2. There's a lot of over hyped AI garbage that will deservedly flame out and die, but it's still sowing the seeds of a future revolution.
- localfirst 2y ago
  while I agree we are in a bubble within a bubble I do not think the future is as rosy. We might have better graphics, more content, faster internet but hardly Jetson-esque/Fifth-element world. All in all looking at the technological innovations of the past century, I can't help but feel the technological novelty of previous growth spurts are just not achievable anymore. More importantly, we cannot go one day without being told what a happy and advanced wonderful western enlightened era given us: a technological cargo cult with a global serfdom ready to manifest old powers.
  - resolutebat 2y ago
    I'm not saying it's going to be a good revolution, just a change in the way we do many, many things.
sk11001 2y ago
It's hyped. It's also legitimately useful. I expect to see many more real use cases and integrations into existing technology and into everyday life. And that's just with the models we have at the moment, who knows if newer models can make even bigger leaps. I also expect to see markets and hype go up and down because these things go in cycles. If you expect it to completely change the world in the next couple of years, you're probably wrong. And if you think that it's a useless gimmick with a giant hype bubble around it, and that it will disappear as soon as the hype dies down, you're also very wrong.
- beoberha 2y ago
  Yeah the boring answer is the right answer. It’s very clear to see the benefits and I think we’re only going to see more use cases emerge outside of the immediately obvious like a coding copilot. That said, there’s clearly industries where it won’t stick or be too cost prohibitive to implement. My most “bold” take is that it’s going to end up as a loss leader consolidated at big companies. It’s much too expensive to run at scale and we will see a ton of companies dry up who can’t monetize it. I think we’ll see a general inability to monetize it even at the enterprise level.
  - benterix 2y ago
    > I think we’ll see a general inability to monetize it even at the enterprise level. Well, it depends. If you already have a lot of your own data, and can rent powerful hardware to train your model (and competent people do actually set up and manage the whole process), you can get a very powerful engine with interesting insights that will be relevant to you (and possibly to you only), with the effect probably proportional to how specific your data is. After the training phase, actually using the model doesn't need to be that expensive.
alexcnwy 2y ago
way underhyped go ask Joe Public how many times they used ChatGPT most people don’t know wtf chatgpt is Look outside your filter bubble
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I'm not sure "overhyped" is predicated on the scope of the hype. I believe it can be overhyped within the industry without the laymen having been exposed to it.
- chatmasta 2y ago
  23% of Americans have used ChatGPT [0], so you’ve got more than a 1 in 5 chance that Joe Public will say he’s used it. Those odds are pretty good for a product that was released less than two years ago. In fact I bet that level of population penetration is higher than even Facebook in its first few years. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/26/americans-use-of-chatgpt-is-ticking-up-but-few-trust-its-election-information/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/26/americans...
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > In fact I bet that level of population penetration is higher than even Facebook in its first few years. If memory serves me correctly, Canadians were the most likely to take an interest in Facebook in the early days. As of 2008, less than two years after being opened to the general public, 32.9% of Canadians were Facebook users. (If my memory fails me, it is possible that some other country had an even higher uptake.) Only 13.8% of those in the United States were Facebook users at the same time, so if you are referring to the USA specifically then your bet is a pretty safe one. But this also highlights that early interest in technology tends to be highly regional. Relatively high ChatGPT usage in the USA does not imply relatively high usage worldwide. Which is important as Joe Public hales from the UK. You might have been thinking of John Q. Public, which is the member of the Public family who lives in the USA, when you went to US figures. But I can find no ChatGPT usage data for the UK. The chances of what Joe Public will say are unknown. The odds are probably not as good as what you suggest.
throwaway42668 2y ago
Yes. It has all the telltale signs of a FOMO-hype bubble across multiple asset classes that's driven by multiple organizations cynically exploiting a combination of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect and human propensity to anthropomorphize things.
tmpz22 2y ago
It would be interesting to cross-examine ML expertise and what votes people give in the poll.
exitzer0 2y ago
the SLTs of all major tech companies and software companies are absolutely hyping AI. these people are have compensation packages with significant ties to stock prices and those go up with hype and inflated expectations.
hahahacorn 2y ago
I initially voted a realistic reflection, and then reconsidered upon "near future", and then I saw (1-10 years away), and re-voted for a realistic reflection. The hype _is_ justified. But we will not have AGI tomorrow. However, the pace of advancements has accelerated (in broad terms), and I believe will continue to accelerate. I would be unsure in 1-5 years. But 10 years is not the near future. To say the world today looks nothing like it did 10 years ago is an understatement. Collectively we will continue to stack (newly) outsized gains everyday, assisted by advancements in AI. And 10 years from now we won't recognize the constraints of today and instead will have all new expectations and problems. What does this mean for markets? Well, it doesn't matter _really_ matter for NVDA. We're in a gold rush, and NVDA is the only one selling good shovels, plus they have arguably the best plan for quality excavators, trommels, drills, conveyor belts and dump trucks for those who are serious about this long term. I bought a large stake in NVDA the day ChatGPT was announced and was adding to it until I started training for a triathlon which is now slurping up all my gold. Just gonna hold for the next couple of decades.
- Ctyra 2y ago
  > To say the world today looks nothing like it did 10 years ago is an understatement. 10 years ago was 2014. If I look back, most of the world seems similar. I would like to understand what drastic changes occurred in the last decade.
  - murderfs 2y ago
    Consumer off the shelf quadcopters being used extensively in a land war in Europe
  - Izkata 2y ago
    Robot vacuums made huge leaps between 2014 and now. In almost exactly that time period they went from borderline gimmick to amazing.
jfdi 2y ago
Imho there is hype and bubble yes but not at the core: at the core is AGI in 5 years and significant change. The bubble/hype is coming from where it seems to always come from - the non-core camp.
- Tao3300 2y ago
  LLMs aren't in the direction of AGI. Are you talking about some other branch of AI?
localfirst 2y ago
We've hit peak consumer/enterprise use with LLMs and not only is the net adoption not only underwhelming they are downright malicious across the board that its not a stretch to suggest the biggest winners from AI bubble are criminals, grifters (shady tech demos aimed at raising $$$ with undeliverables), foreign agents: - artists/content creators worried - enterprise/legal worried about implications (legal and production) - politicians are worried about AI crimes/threats I feel that we are close to a Minsky moment for this AI space that is currently distorted by capital gains being generated by piggying back off the hype. Over time, LLMs will run in our browser/phones but with the unchanged perceptions: Its a nifty toy but we need to hire back the people we let go from the initial hype with reduced wages since y'all can generate stuff now
- JSDevOps 2y ago
  Politicians are concerned because AI has the potential to eradicate middle-class jobs, especially those involving repetitive tasks like data entry. This could create significant socioeconomic issues. Consider how easily AI could replace project managers once integrated with tools like Jira, or how it could automate jobs that involve copying and pasting information between spreadsheets. This level of automation is what many have been anticipating, except for those without marketable skills, who may find themselves at a significant disadvantage.
siliconc0w 2y ago
It's being hyped by VCs because it's otherwise very hard to raise money in a high-interest rate environment Why invest in venture when you can just buy treasury bonds or low-risk corporate debt? Well because AI FOMO. It'll be adopted by companies in some way or another and I am very hopeful for things like AI tutors which can actually significantly improve learning but we're definitely going to see a pullback when revenue never materializes.
xnx 2y ago
LLM to AGI path is overhyped and unlikely. Machine learning is getting the attention it deserves, but there is only a small number of organizations that have enough high quality data to make it useful.
modeless 2y ago
It's the same as the dot com bubble. A lot of hype, a lot of investment in silly things, but also ultimately a huge amount of real value that continues increasing for decades.
- specialist 2y ago
  Interesting take. Supporting your view is the retrospective claim: Y2K justified huge spending, and the resulting dotcom bubble, resulted in a much needed economy-wide IT refresh. FWIW, I'm fine with burning bales of VC cash to upgrade everyone's infra. Which "AI" does in a way that "crypto" didn't.
Narhem 2y ago
NVIDIAs market cap is related to the extreme difficulty with producing the ASICs. Finding the raw material is basically a huge bag of worms. AI as a market is pretty promising in specific applications.
_5tsv 2y ago
I remember when bitcoin was taking off, and everyone instantly started saying "bitcoin may not win but one thing is for sure, the **blockchain** is here to stay." Then 15 years went by and the crypto market is basically bitcoin, which won as a store of value, and then a long tail of shitcoins that were "unlocked by the blockchain as a platform." AI feels to me like it's in a similar state. ChatGPT was a genuinely exciting breakthrough, and because of the previous example of web, everyone instantly wants to see "LLMs as a platform" take off. This has not happened whatsoever. I literally only use ChatGPT. I don't even use Copilot because it's janky and doesn't solve any real problems for me. I guess I sometimes use the RAG-based applications (like docs pages now support a ChatGPT interface), but these are basically ChatGPT with some extra context injected in-- so, ChatGPT. You talk to any of these AI companies and they all admit they're just using the AI label to fundraise and behind the scenes it's either a CRUD app or the thinnest GPT integration in front. I literally don't use any other AI applications. They're all annoying and flooding the web and it is pure clutter everywhere that adds no benefit ever, all because everyone wants to see "LLMs as a platform." I grew up being a huge fan of YC, and I would respect them so much more if they would take the contrarian (but in my humble opinion correct) view and say actually, judging by the structural evidence and actual results, it's not clear what exactly AI has to offer right now, and we're going to return to PG's founding philosophy and continue funding unsexy and unpopular but ultimately actually important things.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  I like using local LLMs via SillyTavern for roleplaying, which is fun, but is not going to be a source of revenue for anyone.
- mattnewton 2y ago
  One of the things I dislike about the multitude of get-rich-quick crypto scene so much is that many projects disproportionately punished people for trying out new technology and being early adopters. The scar tissue of that is going to be hard to unlearn. I think that “ai” as in generative models right now is under-hyped by a lot of people who dismiss it as another solution in search of a problem similar to blockchains, but it’s difficult to argue it’s under-hyped by the market overall with these insane valuations assuming realistic % chances of ASI right around the corner. I think a better analogy might be self driving cars: probably going to be as impactful as early hype people guessed eventually, but on much longer timescales than people originally thought.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
LLMs won't lead to "AGI" (which we can't even clearly define). We'll get some amazing tools and automate a lot of low level jobs, but ultimately this round of AI technology will make us cyborgs rather than give us skynet. When we have developed catalogues of models and other tools and we start training an agent to learn how to create arbitrary graphs of/programs with those tools we might be close. Think of Demis' "play any video game" AI but with successively more complex real world problems and sensor data.
- Izkata 2y ago
  > LLMs won't lead to "AGI" (which we can't even clearly define). I think one of the major problems is outside technical circles, where I get the impression plenty of people think we're already there. It's not a recent thing either, I remember having this impression last year, and it's just been growing since.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    If current LLM were AGI you could just tell it to write a book or make a software project and it would do it end to end on its own, just like a human worker does. But people tend to conflate knowledge for intelligence, many thinks that Google search is intelligent as well etc.
    - lamontcg 2y ago
      Or you could tell it to solve Goldbach's conjecture and make up any mathematical systems it needs in order to do that.
hakanderyal 2y ago
I'm in the LLM-wont-lead-to-AGI camp. But it's a game changer. Software development. Education. Marketing. Writing. It's already generating millions of dollars of value. Considering the speed things are improving right now, it's only going to go up. There are a lot of dynamics at play and I'm not sure how it'll turn out overall. I'm especially curious about how it will turn out when a generation of software developers that learned programming/graduated with GPT enters into the workforce.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  I expect they will excel at doing the kind of thing your average business can easily replace with a SaaS but nothing of consequence regarding scale, performance or complexity, because they won’t have had to reason those out.
UncleOxidant 2y ago
> Overhyped and likely to lead to disappointment in the near future. Define near future here. I think we could look back in 3 or 4 years and say that Nvidia overplayed it's hand back here in 2024 by trying to extract too many $$$ from the market and thus attracting lots of other players in to try to get a piece of the action. Certainly there are a lot of big players trying to bypass the Nvidia tax: Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel are all working on their own AI accelerators (Google's TPU has been around for almost 10 years now). CUDA is Nvidia's market moat because most ML/AI code relies on it. But if some other player can come in and undercut Nvidia's prices by a significant amount while offering a workable software stack that could be really compelling - the market seems to really be wanting something like that.
- fwdevsd 2y ago
  I think you might right about NVDA overplaying it’s hand here. One reason why nvidia has managed a monopoly is that the market they were in has never appealed to the really big players. With the current pricing that has changed. PyTorch already supports AMD and Arc GPU… not sure how seamlessly though. I think SW is hardly ever a strong moat. Given the right incentive it’s a moat that can be bridged. In this case avoiding nvda tax is a huge incentive.
eightysixfour 2y ago
I think your options are a bit of a false choice. The .com bubble was a bubble, but many of the ideas from that era also ended up being successful businesses eventually. Sometimes the market gets out in front of the value - it is accurate in assessing the potential of a technology and wrong about assessing the rate of adoption or who the winners will be. I'm using AI today to generate real business value in a couple of different industries but also feel that it is simultaneously overhyped for today and underhyped for the future. If the question is just "is it a bubble" the answer is obviously yes, it will come back down. But, how far is down and how long will it take for the world to catch up to the market? Maybe not that long.
xyproto 2y ago
None of the above: I think that AI is hyped, but I think the wrong things are hyped and that it will bring value.
complaintdept 2y ago
The only thing I'm unsure about is when to short nvidia.
jameshart 2y ago
Your range of "1-10 years" means predictions here are going to be subject to Amara's law: "we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run." Prospects in 1 year? Likely overhyped. Prospects in 10 years? We are unprepared for how much it will change.
29athrowaway 2y ago
Generative AI is a technology that moves the frontier of what is possible. This comes with many opportunities to solve problems that were not previously solvable by a reasonably sized team. Transformers have some interesting properties like in-context meta learning. This is indeed something to be excited about. But to say transformers can be AGI by simply increasing context windows is a doubtful proposition.
soneca 2y ago
I voted “overhyped” because some people are out there saying it is more important than the fire or whatever. These people are out of their mind (or just performing PR stunts). But I don’t think it’s a bubble. Not in terms of value — I think it is already delivering a lot of value and it will deliver more and more —, nor in terms of finance. Some overspending VC losing their bets does not constitute a bubble. NVidia has a somewhat diversified demand in games, crypto mining and AI. And it’s not negligible the chance of the next software big thing also use GPUs. I don’t think it will end up being more impactful to humanity than the internet itself, but it will be big and useful.
ThalesX 2y ago
I voted unsure. If I hadn't had this option, I would have voted overhyped. Last year I had a subscription for ChatGPT, I had two homegrown apps running on OpenAI API (which have since moved to Groq with LLama), I had Copilot on VSCode, I had Midjourney, I was playing around locally with LMStudio and Stable Diffusion... and I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting some things. Now I have nothing left. I use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (the free versions) from time to time, but it's a hit or miss and I'm extremely skeptical of GPT generated content which has a smell to it. The only people I know that use this constantly and unapologetically are the ex-blockchain grifters and junior (or wannabe) devs that think generating a small encapsulated function for a well known problem domain is a step away from the AI replacing humans. So yeah, I'm unsure, but leaning towards overhype based on personal experience. We'll see, I'm too dumb to ride this wave I guess.
mrtksn 2y ago
Maybe overhyped locally but IMHO not globally. Imagine being able to program every machine by just telling it what you need. For example, even toasters can have LLMs in them. Give it ability to control temperature and humidity and you have the perfect toaster machine that can toast everyones bread upon request. Maybe every machine in the future will have AI in it that will act both as a controller and UI. Any specialised industry getting wiped out. Doing home security? No more specialised applications or implementation, just tell the door whom should it let in. And LLMs are just one way of doing computer intelligence. The way software ate the world, AI will eventually eat software.
- Tao3300 2y ago
  Why the hell does a toaster need a language model to do that?
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    To make you amazing toasts, of course. Have you heard of the most expensive toaster? It’s a Mitsubishi toaster that can cook your toast just right. In the future, all toasters will be able make great toast when practically all devices come with the same control board, something similar to raspberry pi but with ability to run LLMs and the toaster makers will simply connect the heating elements and sensors without needing to understand computers and the AI will control that toaster to cook just right. :)
    - Tao3300 2y ago
      > Have you heard of the most expensive toaster? It’s a Mitsubishi toaster that can cook your toast just right. That's my point. It does that without a language model. Not only is perfect toast a solved problem, but slathering on a layer of LLM bullshit isn't going to make it more affordable than the Mitsubishi.
      - mrtksn 2y ago
        Yes, but it’s very expensive. My point is that it can be possible to bring down all kind of electronics control unit into single standard component. The toaster and your dishwasher can have the exact same electronics since they wouldn’t need specialized computer that needs to have specialized software and wouldn’t need specialized engineering to make the software work with the hardware. Just connect the sensors and the other hardware like the heating unit to the AI board and tell it what it is and tell it to act like a toaster.
westoque 2y ago
NVDA market cap for sure is bonkers but AI is here to stay. Anytime you question the future, think if you can see yourself in "that" future. For me, AI is already a part of my workflow and it's beneficial to my daily life. From coding, explainers, and to random questions in perplexity. In coding, it made me a lot more productive. No more do I have to scour Google or Stack Overflow. Instead, I get the answer straight from the AI. It might not be working at times but it's definitely better. Even random questions like "What is the cost to produce the Apple Pro Display XDR?" is being answered more promptly by AI. This is contrary to the crypto craze where there was expected use but sadly it did not come to fruition. And until now, it's still a speculative industry, a solution looking for a problem.
kimixa 2y ago
I think I see it as similar to the .com bubble, there's certainly useful and interesting tech involved, just the amount of money being thrown around doesn't look sustainable. Entire companies are putting huge proportions of their total budget into AI hardware, I cannot see the majority of those being profitable at the end of the day as there's simply not the consumer spending on those products to maintain it. Most current AI projects seem to be a "value-add" level, meanwhile nvidia's market cap, at $3.2 trillion, is $10k for every man, woman and child in the united states. And that's just one company - even if it may be the largest single representative of the AI-driven market. And all the largest 5 companies in the world (Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon) are also likely riding the AI hype valuation train, but maybe to a lesser amount. Summing them gives ~$14 trillion, or over 40k for every man, woman and child in the united states. How on earth do we expect the revenue that sort of valuation represents be extracted from the market?
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dredmorbius 2y ago
There's a possible fourth option: it's under-hyped and under-appreciated. I'm both highly critical of much of present-day Silicon Valley (as a metonym for the high-tech industry itself, not merely some geographical region centred near Sunnyvale, CA), and of the view that developments of the current AI boom, even if falling short of or manifesting in ways far different from what advocates claim could be absolutely profound. There are a couple of items I've been sitting on for a few years which might make interesting HN submissions. One is a Wikipedia list of defunct US automobile companies. There are a lot of them: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_manufacturers_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...> Another, which I cannot locate presently, was a list of hundreds of oil companies which had been registered in California. In both cases: - A huge number of individual enterprises sprang up. - A tiny minority of those survived. The rest were acquired or simply went out of business. - The resulting industries transformed absolutely everything, though not necessarily how early pioneers and backers advertised or anticipated. The most salient observation though is that these are events from which one can draw a profound boundary, with clear "before" and "after" times. Moreover, the concerns of those in the midst of the transformation often seem quaint because we live in the world shaped by that transition. Thinking from the perspective of those alive at the time, or before, their world DID in fact end. I'm reasonably certain of a few things: - AI seems like it will profoundly disrupt much of the present high-tech information technology sector. Particularly programming, data processing, data creation, data interpretation, design, and other elements. - There will be tremendous business failures. The end result will likely be profoundly monopolistic, with a very few large winners. To the extent that diversity is retained, it's likely to be grounded in legal, cultural, financial, and/or regulatory conditions, and not on the "free market" preserving competition. (The free market rarely preserves competition.) - There will be many unanticipated, and some anticipated, negative consequences. Growing lack of trustworthiness of information and media, use in mass propaganda and targeted manipulation, general disinformation, etc., are among the more obvious of these (and generally: are anticipated). These are only some of the consequences. - There will likely be sharp limitations or constraints on certain applications, again, some fairly evident, others not, but which will shape the resulting landscape. I find the bubble / no-bubble question something of a red herring. Both hugely transformational and stillborne technologies tend to arrive with bubbles. Markets and investment patterns tend to drive this. What really matters is how well the technology ultimately persists after the bodies have fallen.
philsquared_ 2y ago
I think overhyped in the sense of NVDA market cap but not overhyped in the sense of the utility. NVDA is useful for large data centers where companies can be the middle man for queries. I don't think this will be the future of LLM's for very long. I think as the technology adapts, the utility will be having chips on your existing hardware that can provide this functionality. Will LLMs always need super high end gpu's to process requests or will the algorithms improve enough to allow quick speeds with lesser hardware? I will tell you one thing for certain. NVDA's stock price is not based on any possibility of algorithm improvements and only based on the idea that more and more resources will be needed. It's based on the idea that there will always be the need for massive data centers to process these requests..
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throwawa14223 2y ago
Radically overhyped. Like blockhcain with fewer ethical uses. No path from LLMs to AGI.
burnte 2y ago
Massively overhyped. Companies are attaching AI to literally everything they can think of, no matter how useless, and people are already catching on. It'll bubble back down when there are more targeted successful products like summarizing, enhanced, search, etc.
- qup 2y ago
  What kind of stuff are you seeing? I haven't seen any weird uses yet that I can think of, outside of like GitHub projects
  - JSDevOps 2y ago
    It’s shoved in anything. Look at any product now from soap to cement somewhere someone has just slapped AI on the marketing material.
    - qup 2y ago
      Any examples? I really haven't seen one outside of hacker news launch attempts
      - notsydonia 2y ago
        I am not the OP but I've noticed it stuffed into recent plugin updates for Wordpress - WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, WP Bakery, Elementor to name just a few. It's also now relentlessly pushed in platforms like Adobe, iStock and Mail Chimp to the point that it is intrusive. I would love to use Open AI more but whenever I've asked Chat GP about things that I do know a lot about , the answers have been laughably limited or flat-out wrong. I personally would like a laundry drone that folds and puts away the clean washing, as well as match clean socks. Or a bot that can make calls to utility companies on my behalf.
panarky 2y ago
Just finished my first Waymo rides today in Los Angeles. Despite what feels like hype right now, it still doesn't price in the massive waves of transformations coming to nearly every sphere of modern life. This poll needs a fourth option: "What's coming in the next 1 to 10 years is far greater than what today's level of excitement indicates".
disambiguation 2y ago
IMO it's a lot like fusion. In theory, it should be possible, but we have no way of knowing if we're at that level of technical ability yet. But I think what's fascinating is the incredible strides in hardware we're seeing along side AI, that is cyclically fueling the hype. While the AI advances are not tangible, the hardware is.
shermozle 2y ago
When the CEO of Nvidia gets mobbed and ends up signing a woman's boob, yeah.
stavarotti 2y ago
The generative aspect might be slightly oversold, but I’m interested in the practical applications being targeted by DeepMind and similar labs. AlphaFold’s ability to predict protein structures for disease treatment is very exciting.
friend_and_foe 2y ago
I tell people, if you know how this stuff works, you'll understand its a fugazi. It produces a statistically likely sequence of tokens (words) that resemble data it was built with. There's nothing intelligent about it, it cannot create anything novel. It is truly nothing more than a language model. Everything that comes out of one of these is a hallucination, in the sense we mean when talking about AI. I think it's a poorly understood form of compression, a very lossy form of compression. I think it's big corporate adherents know all that, I think, particularly after the internet and the industry it unlocked, smartphone and the internet access that they made ubiquitous, software developers are just looking for things to sell to people. All the innovations have happened already in the software world, but this big industry was built while this happened and they can't just pack up and go home. The truth is, you can't just sell software to users, you have to sell utility, and most people don't have a real need for software beyond what they already have available, so shiny new trinkets it is. They've got video streaming, communication, information retrieval, report generation, and that's it. You can automate stuff, but that's not the end user buying software, that's the end user buying a widget that software is a component of, and a part they really don't care about. A symptom of what I'm talking about can be seen in the ever increasing needless complexity people keep finding in their lives, the software industry as it applies to direct to consumer sales is very little more than hype and noise and marketing. It's empty calories. AI is just another thing in a long line of these things, yesterday it was augmented reality, day before that it was IoT, the list goes back quite a number of years. The last real big innovations that end consumers bought that improved their lives was smartphones and video streaming. Everything an end user can benefit from software wise they already have. Easy communication, multimedia content and symmetry of distribution, near free information availability, I can't think of anything beyond those 3 broad categories, money maybe if you're into the bitcoin thing. Maybe "AI" as compression can help with local information retrieval when it's more mature, which is very powerful, but the branding and marketing around it as if it is a mind is not conducive to success on that front. Software is well on it's way to being a mostly business to business thing again, like it once was, which necessarily means a big bubble is going to pop. That's where the innovations are happening, but for us regular people it's all marginal improvement of what we already have as a side with a healthy serving of hype and disappointment.
JSDevOps 2y ago
The problem is that everyone is more desperate for money now than ever before. As a result, they indiscriminately associate everything with "AI" because they see it as a quick way to make money. This has led to the term "AI" becoming so overused and diluted that it has lost its meaning. AI toilet. AI coffee machine. AI fridge. AI BBQ etc. it’s just all bullshit which ruins the essence of the actual technology.
Ekaros 2y ago
AI does have some use-cases already. Low quality text and image generation for example where it is entirely sufficient. On other hand valuations are insane. And I believe many projects are pushing AI for sake of pushing something. See blockchains previously. So there is some use, but also lot of waste of time and money.
singularity2001 2y ago
The question in the title is different from the NVDA bubble.
ProxCoques 2y ago
I thought this was a good discussion of the issues regarding the nature of the bubble: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop "Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? ... "
- hodgesrm 2y ago
  This is the issue I would be examining very closely if I ran a company based on subsidized AI models. It's not necessary for companies like OpenAI to go out of business to cause problems: the costs just need to go up to levels necessary to make AI vendors profitable, like what happened with Uber.
cybersandwich 2y ago
Can it be both overhyped and revolutionary? This may actually fit the technical definition of a bubble. There is a good book called "Bubbles and Crashes" that talks about tech bubbles. I think the traditional definition of a bubble is when the price of an asset exceeds its fundamental value. Thats effectively impossible to know (during the bubble) because we can't predict the future but there are other ways to more practically look at bubbles even if you may be in the middle of one. If an asset is more than 2 standard deviations from the trend of the last 7 years, if there are a lot of novice investors effectively 'speculating', and having a 'narrative' that explains the odd 'non-fundamentals based' valuations. At least thats the definition they use in the book iirc. Thats definitely happening right now. There is also this obnoxious wall street/silicon valley hype train surrounding all of it-- which is by design. This is exactly what these companies want: a huge digital gold rush so they can try their hand at panning for gold using investor money. They try it with any new tech or buzzword they can because it brings in money. Its unfortunate because this technology feels revolutionary. This feels like the internet did to me as a kid. It wasn't all great. It wasn't perfect. But it was cool and there was something special about it. There are these new tools and services that all do slightly different things and when you combined them you could create really amazing things. AI feels that way. I'm not just talking LLMs either. I think those are impressive and useful, but there is so much else going on in the AI/ML space that can already really move the needle--and this is the worst it will ever be. I hate the comparisons to Bitcoin/block chain. They are being made because that same obnoxious wall street/silicon valley hype-model was at play there too, but I think anyone who was honest with themselves knew there were severe limitations with the tech and its usefulness. AI tools actually provide value, right now, and has a lot of room to grow. But back to the hype and "Bubble" question. I think its overhyped because thats whats what silicon valley is good at and wall street is good and amplifying it (and punishing anyone not riding the wave). We probably are in a bubble, but AI is here to stay. Its a new frontier of computing and its going to unlock new and interesting ways to interact with each other and the world around us. I also want to point out that AR is a perfect complement for all of the AI/ML tools that have been developed. The Meta Ray Bans are really interesting to me because they are marrying the two techs. I dont trust Facebook with that type of thing, but imagine if a privacy respecting company tried something like that? Apple is setting themselves up nicely in this space. They could create a new market with iGlass or Apple Vision with "apple intelligence" built in. This is the most excited I've been about tech in a long while.
Lewis324 2y ago
[dead]

60 points by mupuff1234 2y ago

NVDA market cap is bonkers, curious to hear what the HN consensus is for the near term future of AI (1-10 years away) Do you believe the current excitement surrounding AI is:

samspenc 2y ago

I think it will bring about change, but it will be a slow and long road. I don't think we are going to see instant results or changes in society, but rather something similar to the Internet and mobile, where it takes a few years to be adopted by more and more people and the technology improves over time, albeit a bit more slowly than early adopters are hoping for.

theuri 2y ago

Slow at first. Then fast. Then exponential.

frenchie4111 2y ago
Question is: what part of this growth curve are we on now?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rcarmo 2y ago
  The wobbly one where we try to shoehorn tech into use cases until it sort of fits.

drannex 2y ago

Hype is, technology isn't.

davidguetta 2y ago

My opinion is that it's easy to get the impression it's a bubble because of the army of useless stuff that comes out of it (including the horrific cancer chatbots) But at the same time it is going to drastically change the way people work. In a very close future every single programmer is going to have chatgpt open. Every single marketer, researcher, lawyer, doctor etc... It's a revolution the same scale of internet itself. Everybody was on google everyday at some point, everybody will be on an AI at some point (if not most of the time they interact with a device)

DeepYogurt 2y ago
> It's a revolution the same scale of internet itself. Everybody was on google everyday at some point, everybody will be on an AI at some point (if not most of the time they interact with a device) Agreed that chatbots will change things. Hard disagree that it's on the scale of the internet. The internet at large touches way more than the habits of white collar workers
- davidguetta 2y ago
  You'll literally be talking to some form of AI for each interaction on the net at some point in the future.
  - hammyhavoc 2y ago
    Bollocks. Absurdly inefficient. Where's all this energy and money for it going to come from?
  - throwawa14223 2y ago
    For what? Do you see LLMs replacing HTTP? Search Engines? Why would I want to?
    - davidguetta 2y ago
      apps
mcnamaratw 2y ago
It’s easy to forget this, but what we’re calling AI is chat bots.
OJFord 2y ago
> In a very close future every single programmer is going to have chatgpt open. I thought that for a little bit, paid for it for several months, but it's not enough better imo - and the hallucination rabbit holes burn harder than the productive chats make up for. But something like it probably, it just might be harder to say oh yeah LLMs did that it wasn't over hyped after all. Augmented search, or just improvements to search with a more familiar presentation. Summarise the small amount of information from blogspam and collapse them all, turn a NL question into a few different salient keyword searches, that sort of thing. I haven't tried Kagi's AI yet (I've only used it at all for a few searches while DDG was down recently) but maybe they're doing something interesting or worth watching at least.

andsoitis 2y ago

One point of view is that we tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.

zem 2y ago

I've seen some tightly focused, targeted uses of AI to eliminate a piece of drudgery, and I'm hopeful that that area will expand and mature over time. I'm not particularly hopeful about or for that matter interested in trying to replicate creativity via AI.

mywittyname 2y ago

I think it's valuable in a ton of ways, but I also think we are passed the inflection point for growth in novel applications. But I also think it's being overused or misapplied in so many situations. I've been involved in a couple of projects that were advertised as "AI" which were absolutely not, and I'm suspicious of any company advertising AI products.

kiernanmcgowan 2y ago

I've said for a bit that "something has been automated, but its on us to figure out what" since the launch of ChatGPT 3. Modern LLMs are really really useful in some domains, fun toys in others, and problem makers in most. My guess is that we're in for an AI winter in ~12-18mo as most AI startups fail and investors lose their shirts on a bunch of bets, but a few good use cases rise from the ashes. OpenAI is going to walk away with a tooon of VC money from startups spending on their APIs over the next year though.

alexcnwy 2y ago
wut. please unpack how LLMs are “problem makers” in “most” domains?
- kdmccormick 2y ago
  Spam Phishing Buggy generated code Cheating in online courses ChatBots that try to do too much and do it worse than real human service reps, like that one that wrongly assured a customer that their airline ticket was refundable Deluge of low-value generated content taking attention and revenue away from high-value content creators
- tnel77 2y ago
  Have you tried writing code or a paper that’s actually factual with ChatGPT? They are so obviously wrong in many cases that it’s often a hindrance rather than helpful when I’ve tried to use it. I do love using ChatGPT for fun stuff like “write me a recipe for enchiladas that’s also a country western song.” My kids and I find it hilarious.
  - Tao3300 2y ago
    We had a remote workshop with GitHub for Copilot. The example was to have it create various functions for a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. The extra exercise for afterward was to have it add the "Lizard and Spock" options. When I tried to have it do that, it spun its wheels for a little and told me the code it generated violated their responsible use guidelines or whatever. In retrospect it probably detected it generated something it didn't have the IP rights to give me, but ever since then I've described the state of the art as "like talking through the intercom at a McDonald's drive-thru, but every now and then the attendant says 'sorry, can we start over? I got distracted thinking about killing you.'"

resolutebat 2y ago

We are in the middle of dot.com bubble v2. There's a lot of over hyped AI garbage that will deservedly flame out and die, but it's still sowing the seeds of a future revolution.

localfirst 2y ago
while I agree we are in a bubble within a bubble I do not think the future is as rosy. We might have better graphics, more content, faster internet but hardly Jetson-esque/Fifth-element world. All in all looking at the technological innovations of the past century, I can't help but feel the technological novelty of previous growth spurts are just not achievable anymore. More importantly, we cannot go one day without being told what a happy and advanced wonderful western enlightened era given us: a technological cargo cult with a global serfdom ready to manifest old powers.
- resolutebat 2y ago
  I'm not saying it's going to be a good revolution, just a change in the way we do many, many things.

sk11001 2y ago

It's hyped. It's also legitimately useful. I expect to see many more real use cases and integrations into existing technology and into everyday life. And that's just with the models we have at the moment, who knows if newer models can make even bigger leaps. I also expect to see markets and hype go up and down because these things go in cycles. If you expect it to completely change the world in the next couple of years, you're probably wrong. And if you think that it's a useless gimmick with a giant hype bubble around it, and that it will disappear as soon as the hype dies down, you're also very wrong.

beoberha 2y ago
Yeah the boring answer is the right answer. It’s very clear to see the benefits and I think we’re only going to see more use cases emerge outside of the immediately obvious like a coding copilot. That said, there’s clearly industries where it won’t stick or be too cost prohibitive to implement. My most “bold” take is that it’s going to end up as a loss leader consolidated at big companies. It’s much too expensive to run at scale and we will see a ton of companies dry up who can’t monetize it. I think we’ll see a general inability to monetize it even at the enterprise level.
- benterix 2y ago
  > I think we’ll see a general inability to monetize it even at the enterprise level. Well, it depends. If you already have a lot of your own data, and can rent powerful hardware to train your model (and competent people do actually set up and manage the whole process), you can get a very powerful engine with interesting insights that will be relevant to you (and possibly to you only), with the effect probably proportional to how specific your data is. After the training phase, actually using the model doesn't need to be that expensive.

alexcnwy 2y ago

way underhyped go ask Joe Public how many times they used ChatGPT most people don’t know wtf chatgpt is Look outside your filter bubble

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I'm not sure "overhyped" is predicated on the scope of the hype. I believe it can be overhyped within the industry without the laymen having been exposed to it.
chatmasta 2y ago
23% of Americans have used ChatGPT [0], so you’ve got more than a 1 in 5 chance that Joe Public will say he’s used it. Those odds are pretty good for a product that was released less than two years ago. In fact I bet that level of population penetration is higher than even Facebook in its first few years. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/26/americans-use-of-chatgpt-is-ticking-up-but-few-trust-its-election-information/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/26/americans...
- randomdata 2y ago
  > In fact I bet that level of population penetration is higher than even Facebook in its first few years. If memory serves me correctly, Canadians were the most likely to take an interest in Facebook in the early days. As of 2008, less than two years after being opened to the general public, 32.9% of Canadians were Facebook users. (If my memory fails me, it is possible that some other country had an even higher uptake.) Only 13.8% of those in the United States were Facebook users at the same time, so if you are referring to the USA specifically then your bet is a pretty safe one. But this also highlights that early interest in technology tends to be highly regional. Relatively high ChatGPT usage in the USA does not imply relatively high usage worldwide. Which is important as Joe Public hales from the UK. You might have been thinking of John Q. Public, which is the member of the Public family who lives in the USA, when you went to US figures. But I can find no ChatGPT usage data for the UK. The chances of what Joe Public will say are unknown. The odds are probably not as good as what you suggest.

throwaway42668 2y ago

Yes. It has all the telltale signs of a FOMO-hype bubble across multiple asset classes that's driven by multiple organizations cynically exploiting a combination of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect and human propensity to anthropomorphize things.

tmpz22 2y ago

It would be interesting to cross-examine ML expertise and what votes people give in the poll.

exitzer0 2y ago

the SLTs of all major tech companies and software companies are absolutely hyping AI. these people are have compensation packages with significant ties to stock prices and those go up with hype and inflated expectations.

hahahacorn 2y ago

I initially voted a realistic reflection, and then reconsidered upon "near future", and then I saw (1-10 years away), and re-voted for a realistic reflection. The hype _is_ justified. But we will not have AGI tomorrow. However, the pace of advancements has accelerated (in broad terms), and I believe will continue to accelerate. I would be unsure in 1-5 years. But 10 years is not the near future. To say the world today looks nothing like it did 10 years ago is an understatement. Collectively we will continue to stack (newly) outsized gains everyday, assisted by advancements in AI. And 10 years from now we won't recognize the constraints of today and instead will have all new expectations and problems. What does this mean for markets? Well, it doesn't matter _really_ matter for NVDA. We're in a gold rush, and NVDA is the only one selling good shovels, plus they have arguably the best plan for quality excavators, trommels, drills, conveyor belts and dump trucks for those who are serious about this long term. I bought a large stake in NVDA the day ChatGPT was announced and was adding to it until I started training for a triathlon which is now slurping up all my gold. Just gonna hold for the next couple of decades.

Ctyra 2y ago
> To say the world today looks nothing like it did 10 years ago is an understatement. 10 years ago was 2014. If I look back, most of the world seems similar. I would like to understand what drastic changes occurred in the last decade.
- murderfs 2y ago
  Consumer off the shelf quadcopters being used extensively in a land war in Europe
- Izkata 2y ago
  Robot vacuums made huge leaps between 2014 and now. In almost exactly that time period they went from borderline gimmick to amazing.

jfdi 2y ago

Imho there is hype and bubble yes but not at the core: at the core is AGI in 5 years and significant change. The bubble/hype is coming from where it seems to always come from - the non-core camp.

Tao3300 2y ago
LLMs aren't in the direction of AGI. Are you talking about some other branch of AI?

localfirst 2y ago

We've hit peak consumer/enterprise use with LLMs and not only is the net adoption not only underwhelming they are downright malicious across the board that its not a stretch to suggest the biggest winners from AI bubble are criminals, grifters (shady tech demos aimed at raising $$$ with undeliverables), foreign agents: - artists/content creators worried - enterprise/legal worried about implications (legal and production) - politicians are worried about AI crimes/threats I feel that we are close to a Minsky moment for this AI space that is currently distorted by capital gains being generated by piggying back off the hype. Over time, LLMs will run in our browser/phones but with the unchanged perceptions: Its a nifty toy but we need to hire back the people we let go from the initial hype with reduced wages since y'all can generate stuff now

JSDevOps 2y ago
Politicians are concerned because AI has the potential to eradicate middle-class jobs, especially those involving repetitive tasks like data entry. This could create significant socioeconomic issues. Consider how easily AI could replace project managers once integrated with tools like Jira, or how it could automate jobs that involve copying and pasting information between spreadsheets. This level of automation is what many have been anticipating, except for those without marketable skills, who may find themselves at a significant disadvantage.

siliconc0w 2y ago

It's being hyped by VCs because it's otherwise very hard to raise money in a high-interest rate environment Why invest in venture when you can just buy treasury bonds or low-risk corporate debt? Well because AI FOMO. It'll be adopted by companies in some way or another and I am very hopeful for things like AI tutors which can actually significantly improve learning but we're definitely going to see a pullback when revenue never materializes.

xnx 2y ago

LLM to AGI path is overhyped and unlikely. Machine learning is getting the attention it deserves, but there is only a small number of organizations that have enough high quality data to make it useful.

modeless 2y ago

It's the same as the dot com bubble. A lot of hype, a lot of investment in silly things, but also ultimately a huge amount of real value that continues increasing for decades.

specialist 2y ago
Interesting take. Supporting your view is the retrospective claim: Y2K justified huge spending, and the resulting dotcom bubble, resulted in a much needed economy-wide IT refresh. FWIW, I'm fine with burning bales of VC cash to upgrade everyone's infra. Which "AI" does in a way that "crypto" didn't.

Narhem 2y ago

NVIDIAs market cap is related to the extreme difficulty with producing the ASICs. Finding the raw material is basically a huge bag of worms. AI as a market is pretty promising in specific applications.

_5tsv 2y ago

I remember when bitcoin was taking off, and everyone instantly started saying "bitcoin may not win but one thing is for sure, the **blockchain** is here to stay." Then 15 years went by and the crypto market is basically bitcoin, which won as a store of value, and then a long tail of shitcoins that were "unlocked by the blockchain as a platform." AI feels to me like it's in a similar state. ChatGPT was a genuinely exciting breakthrough, and because of the previous example of web, everyone instantly wants to see "LLMs as a platform" take off. This has not happened whatsoever. I literally only use ChatGPT. I don't even use Copilot because it's janky and doesn't solve any real problems for me. I guess I sometimes use the RAG-based applications (like docs pages now support a ChatGPT interface), but these are basically ChatGPT with some extra context injected in-- so, ChatGPT. You talk to any of these AI companies and they all admit they're just using the AI label to fundraise and behind the scenes it's either a CRUD app or the thinnest GPT integration in front. I literally don't use any other AI applications. They're all annoying and flooding the web and it is pure clutter everywhere that adds no benefit ever, all because everyone wants to see "LLMs as a platform." I grew up being a huge fan of YC, and I would respect them so much more if they would take the contrarian (but in my humble opinion correct) view and say actually, judging by the structural evidence and actual results, it's not clear what exactly AI has to offer right now, and we're going to return to PG's founding philosophy and continue funding unsexy and unpopular but ultimately actually important things.

jhbadger 2y ago
I like using local LLMs via SillyTavern for roleplaying, which is fun, but is not going to be a source of revenue for anyone.
mattnewton 2y ago
One of the things I dislike about the multitude of get-rich-quick crypto scene so much is that many projects disproportionately punished people for trying out new technology and being early adopters. The scar tissue of that is going to be hard to unlearn. I think that “ai” as in generative models right now is under-hyped by a lot of people who dismiss it as another solution in search of a problem similar to blockchains, but it’s difficult to argue it’s under-hyped by the market overall with these insane valuations assuming realistic % chances of ASI right around the corner. I think a better analogy might be self driving cars: probably going to be as impactful as early hype people guessed eventually, but on much longer timescales than people originally thought.

CuriouslyC 2y ago

LLMs won't lead to "AGI" (which we can't even clearly define). We'll get some amazing tools and automate a lot of low level jobs, but ultimately this round of AI technology will make us cyborgs rather than give us skynet. When we have developed catalogues of models and other tools and we start training an agent to learn how to create arbitrary graphs of/programs with those tools we might be close. Think of Demis' "play any video game" AI but with successively more complex real world problems and sensor data.

Izkata 2y ago
> LLMs won't lead to "AGI" (which we can't even clearly define). I think one of the major problems is outside technical circles, where I get the impression plenty of people think we're already there. It's not a recent thing either, I remember having this impression last year, and it's just been growing since.
- Jensson 2y ago
  If current LLM were AGI you could just tell it to write a book or make a software project and it would do it end to end on its own, just like a human worker does. But people tend to conflate knowledge for intelligence, many thinks that Google search is intelligent as well etc.
  - lamontcg 2y ago
    Or you could tell it to solve Goldbach's conjecture and make up any mathematical systems it needs in order to do that.

hakanderyal 2y ago

I'm in the LLM-wont-lead-to-AGI camp. But it's a game changer. Software development. Education. Marketing. Writing. It's already generating millions of dollars of value. Considering the speed things are improving right now, it's only going to go up. There are a lot of dynamics at play and I'm not sure how it'll turn out overall. I'm especially curious about how it will turn out when a generation of software developers that learned programming/graduated with GPT enters into the workforce.

rcarmo 2y ago
I expect they will excel at doing the kind of thing your average business can easily replace with a SaaS but nothing of consequence regarding scale, performance or complexity, because they won’t have had to reason those out.

UncleOxidant 2y ago

> Overhyped and likely to lead to disappointment in the near future. Define near future here. I think we could look back in 3 or 4 years and say that Nvidia overplayed it's hand back here in 2024 by trying to extract too many $$$ from the market and thus attracting lots of other players in to try to get a piece of the action. Certainly there are a lot of big players trying to bypass the Nvidia tax: Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel are all working on their own AI accelerators (Google's TPU has been around for almost 10 years now). CUDA is Nvidia's market moat because most ML/AI code relies on it. But if some other player can come in and undercut Nvidia's prices by a significant amount while offering a workable software stack that could be really compelling - the market seems to really be wanting something like that.

fwdevsd 2y ago
I think you might right about NVDA overplaying it’s hand here. One reason why nvidia has managed a monopoly is that the market they were in has never appealed to the really big players. With the current pricing that has changed. PyTorch already supports AMD and Arc GPU… not sure how seamlessly though. I think SW is hardly ever a strong moat. Given the right incentive it’s a moat that can be bridged. In this case avoiding nvda tax is a huge incentive.

eightysixfour 2y ago

I think your options are a bit of a false choice. The .com bubble was a bubble, but many of the ideas from that era also ended up being successful businesses eventually. Sometimes the market gets out in front of the value - it is accurate in assessing the potential of a technology and wrong about assessing the rate of adoption or who the winners will be. I'm using AI today to generate real business value in a couple of different industries but also feel that it is simultaneously overhyped for today and underhyped for the future. If the question is just "is it a bubble" the answer is obviously yes, it will come back down. But, how far is down and how long will it take for the world to catch up to the market? Maybe not that long.

xyproto 2y ago

None of the above: I think that AI is hyped, but I think the wrong things are hyped and that it will bring value.

complaintdept 2y ago

The only thing I'm unsure about is when to short nvidia.

jameshart 2y ago

Your range of "1-10 years" means predictions here are going to be subject to Amara's law: "we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run." Prospects in 1 year? Likely overhyped. Prospects in 10 years? We are unprepared for how much it will change.

29athrowaway 2y ago

Generative AI is a technology that moves the frontier of what is possible. This comes with many opportunities to solve problems that were not previously solvable by a reasonably sized team. Transformers have some interesting properties like in-context meta learning. This is indeed something to be excited about. But to say transformers can be AGI by simply increasing context windows is a doubtful proposition.

soneca 2y ago

I voted “overhyped” because some people are out there saying it is more important than the fire or whatever. These people are out of their mind (or just performing PR stunts). But I don’t think it’s a bubble. Not in terms of value — I think it is already delivering a lot of value and it will deliver more and more —, nor in terms of finance. Some overspending VC losing their bets does not constitute a bubble. NVidia has a somewhat diversified demand in games, crypto mining and AI. And it’s not negligible the chance of the next software big thing also use GPUs. I don’t think it will end up being more impactful to humanity than the internet itself, but it will be big and useful.

ThalesX 2y ago

I voted unsure. If I hadn't had this option, I would have voted overhyped. Last year I had a subscription for ChatGPT, I had two homegrown apps running on OpenAI API (which have since moved to Groq with LLama), I had Copilot on VSCode, I had Midjourney, I was playing around locally with LMStudio and Stable Diffusion... and I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting some things. Now I have nothing left. I use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (the free versions) from time to time, but it's a hit or miss and I'm extremely skeptical of GPT generated content which has a smell to it. The only people I know that use this constantly and unapologetically are the ex-blockchain grifters and junior (or wannabe) devs that think generating a small encapsulated function for a well known problem domain is a step away from the AI replacing humans. So yeah, I'm unsure, but leaning towards overhype based on personal experience. We'll see, I'm too dumb to ride this wave I guess.

mrtksn 2y ago

Maybe overhyped locally but IMHO not globally. Imagine being able to program every machine by just telling it what you need. For example, even toasters can have LLMs in them. Give it ability to control temperature and humidity and you have the perfect toaster machine that can toast everyones bread upon request. Maybe every machine in the future will have AI in it that will act both as a controller and UI. Any specialised industry getting wiped out. Doing home security? No more specialised applications or implementation, just tell the door whom should it let in. And LLMs are just one way of doing computer intelligence. The way software ate the world, AI will eventually eat software.

Tao3300 2y ago
Why the hell does a toaster need a language model to do that?
- mrtksn 2y ago
  To make you amazing toasts, of course. Have you heard of the most expensive toaster? It’s a Mitsubishi toaster that can cook your toast just right. In the future, all toasters will be able make great toast when practically all devices come with the same control board, something similar to raspberry pi but with ability to run LLMs and the toaster makers will simply connect the heating elements and sensors without needing to understand computers and the AI will control that toaster to cook just right. :)
  - Tao3300 2y ago
    > Have you heard of the most expensive toaster? It’s a Mitsubishi toaster that can cook your toast just right. That's my point. It does that without a language model. Not only is perfect toast a solved problem, but slathering on a layer of LLM bullshit isn't going to make it more affordable than the Mitsubishi.
    - mrtksn 2y ago
      Yes, but it’s very expensive. My point is that it can be possible to bring down all kind of electronics control unit into single standard component. The toaster and your dishwasher can have the exact same electronics since they wouldn’t need specialized computer that needs to have specialized software and wouldn’t need specialized engineering to make the software work with the hardware. Just connect the sensors and the other hardware like the heating unit to the AI board and tell it what it is and tell it to act like a toaster.

westoque 2y ago

NVDA market cap for sure is bonkers but AI is here to stay. Anytime you question the future, think if you can see yourself in "that" future. For me, AI is already a part of my workflow and it's beneficial to my daily life. From coding, explainers, and to random questions in perplexity. In coding, it made me a lot more productive. No more do I have to scour Google or Stack Overflow. Instead, I get the answer straight from the AI. It might not be working at times but it's definitely better. Even random questions like "What is the cost to produce the Apple Pro Display XDR?" is being answered more promptly by AI. This is contrary to the crypto craze where there was expected use but sadly it did not come to fruition. And until now, it's still a speculative industry, a solution looking for a problem.

kimixa 2y ago

I think I see it as similar to the .com bubble, there's certainly useful and interesting tech involved, just the amount of money being thrown around doesn't look sustainable. Entire companies are putting huge proportions of their total budget into AI hardware, I cannot see the majority of those being profitable at the end of the day as there's simply not the consumer spending on those products to maintain it. Most current AI projects seem to be a "value-add" level, meanwhile nvidia's market cap, at $3.2 trillion, is $10k for every man, woman and child in the united states. And that's just one company - even if it may be the largest single representative of the AI-driven market. And all the largest 5 companies in the world (Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon) are also likely riding the AI hype valuation train, but maybe to a lesser amount. Summing them gives ~$14 trillion, or over 40k for every man, woman and child in the united states. How on earth do we expect the revenue that sort of valuation represents be extracted from the market?

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dredmorbius 2y ago

There's a possible fourth option: it's under-hyped and under-appreciated. I'm both highly critical of much of present-day Silicon Valley (as a metonym for the high-tech industry itself, not merely some geographical region centred near Sunnyvale, CA), and of the view that developments of the current AI boom, even if falling short of or manifesting in ways far different from what advocates claim could be absolutely profound. There are a couple of items I've been sitting on for a few years which might make interesting HN submissions. One is a Wikipedia list of defunct US automobile companies. There are a lot of them: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_manufacturers_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...> Another, which I cannot locate presently, was a list of hundreds of oil companies which had been registered in California. In both cases: - A huge number of individual enterprises sprang up. - A tiny minority of those survived. The rest were acquired or simply went out of business. - The resulting industries transformed absolutely everything, though not necessarily how early pioneers and backers advertised or anticipated. The most salient observation though is that these are events from which one can draw a profound boundary, with clear "before" and "after" times. Moreover, the concerns of those in the midst of the transformation often seem quaint because we live in the world shaped by that transition. Thinking from the perspective of those alive at the time, or before, their world DID in fact end. I'm reasonably certain of a few things: - AI seems like it will profoundly disrupt much of the present high-tech information technology sector. Particularly programming, data processing, data creation, data interpretation, design, and other elements. - There will be tremendous business failures. The end result will likely be profoundly monopolistic, with a very few large winners. To the extent that diversity is retained, it's likely to be grounded in legal, cultural, financial, and/or regulatory conditions, and not on the "free market" preserving competition. (The free market rarely preserves competition.) - There will be many unanticipated, and some anticipated, negative consequences. Growing lack of trustworthiness of information and media, use in mass propaganda and targeted manipulation, general disinformation, etc., are among the more obvious of these (and generally: are anticipated). These are only some of the consequences. - There will likely be sharp limitations or constraints on certain applications, again, some fairly evident, others not, but which will shape the resulting landscape. I find the bubble / no-bubble question something of a red herring. Both hugely transformational and stillborne technologies tend to arrive with bubbles. Markets and investment patterns tend to drive this. What really matters is how well the technology ultimately persists after the bodies have fallen.

philsquared_ 2y ago

I think overhyped in the sense of NVDA market cap but not overhyped in the sense of the utility. NVDA is useful for large data centers where companies can be the middle man for queries. I don't think this will be the future of LLM's for very long. I think as the technology adapts, the utility will be having chips on your existing hardware that can provide this functionality. Will LLMs always need super high end gpu's to process requests or will the algorithms improve enough to allow quick speeds with lesser hardware? I will tell you one thing for certain. NVDA's stock price is not based on any possibility of algorithm improvements and only based on the idea that more and more resources will be needed. It's based on the idea that there will always be the need for massive data centers to process these requests..

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throwawa14223 2y ago

Radically overhyped. Like blockhcain with fewer ethical uses. No path from LLMs to AGI.

burnte 2y ago

Massively overhyped. Companies are attaching AI to literally everything they can think of, no matter how useless, and people are already catching on. It'll bubble back down when there are more targeted successful products like summarizing, enhanced, search, etc.

qup 2y ago
What kind of stuff are you seeing? I haven't seen any weird uses yet that I can think of, outside of like GitHub projects
- JSDevOps 2y ago
  It’s shoved in anything. Look at any product now from soap to cement somewhere someone has just slapped AI on the marketing material.
  - qup 2y ago
    Any examples? I really haven't seen one outside of hacker news launch attempts
    - notsydonia 2y ago
      I am not the OP but I've noticed it stuffed into recent plugin updates for Wordpress - WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, WP Bakery, Elementor to name just a few. It's also now relentlessly pushed in platforms like Adobe, iStock and Mail Chimp to the point that it is intrusive. I would love to use Open AI more but whenever I've asked Chat GP about things that I do know a lot about , the answers have been laughably limited or flat-out wrong. I personally would like a laundry drone that folds and puts away the clean washing, as well as match clean socks. Or a bot that can make calls to utility companies on my behalf.

panarky 2y ago

Just finished my first Waymo rides today in Los Angeles. Despite what feels like hype right now, it still doesn't price in the massive waves of transformations coming to nearly every sphere of modern life. This poll needs a fourth option: "What's coming in the next 1 to 10 years is far greater than what today's level of excitement indicates".

disambiguation 2y ago

IMO it's a lot like fusion. In theory, it should be possible, but we have no way of knowing if we're at that level of technical ability yet. But I think what's fascinating is the incredible strides in hardware we're seeing along side AI, that is cyclically fueling the hype. While the AI advances are not tangible, the hardware is.

shermozle 2y ago

When the CEO of Nvidia gets mobbed and ends up signing a woman's boob, yeah.

stavarotti 2y ago

The generative aspect might be slightly oversold, but I’m interested in the practical applications being targeted by DeepMind and similar labs. AlphaFold’s ability to predict protein structures for disease treatment is very exciting.

friend_and_foe 2y ago

I tell people, if you know how this stuff works, you'll understand its a fugazi. It produces a statistically likely sequence of tokens (words) that resemble data it was built with. There's nothing intelligent about it, it cannot create anything novel. It is truly nothing more than a language model. Everything that comes out of one of these is a hallucination, in the sense we mean when talking about AI. I think it's a poorly understood form of compression, a very lossy form of compression. I think it's big corporate adherents know all that, I think, particularly after the internet and the industry it unlocked, smartphone and the internet access that they made ubiquitous, software developers are just looking for things to sell to people. All the innovations have happened already in the software world, but this big industry was built while this happened and they can't just pack up and go home. The truth is, you can't just sell software to users, you have to sell utility, and most people don't have a real need for software beyond what they already have available, so shiny new trinkets it is. They've got video streaming, communication, information retrieval, report generation, and that's it. You can automate stuff, but that's not the end user buying software, that's the end user buying a widget that software is a component of, and a part they really don't care about. A symptom of what I'm talking about can be seen in the ever increasing needless complexity people keep finding in their lives, the software industry as it applies to direct to consumer sales is very little more than hype and noise and marketing. It's empty calories. AI is just another thing in a long line of these things, yesterday it was augmented reality, day before that it was IoT, the list goes back quite a number of years. The last real big innovations that end consumers bought that improved their lives was smartphones and video streaming. Everything an end user can benefit from software wise they already have. Easy communication, multimedia content and symmetry of distribution, near free information availability, I can't think of anything beyond those 3 broad categories, money maybe if you're into the bitcoin thing. Maybe "AI" as compression can help with local information retrieval when it's more mature, which is very powerful, but the branding and marketing around it as if it is a mind is not conducive to success on that front. Software is well on it's way to being a mostly business to business thing again, like it once was, which necessarily means a big bubble is going to pop. That's where the innovations are happening, but for us regular people it's all marginal improvement of what we already have as a side with a healthy serving of hype and disappointment.

JSDevOps 2y ago

The problem is that everyone is more desperate for money now than ever before. As a result, they indiscriminately associate everything with "AI" because they see it as a quick way to make money. This has led to the term "AI" becoming so overused and diluted that it has lost its meaning. AI toilet. AI coffee machine. AI fridge. AI BBQ etc. it’s just all bullshit which ruins the essence of the actual technology.

Ekaros 2y ago

AI does have some use-cases already. Low quality text and image generation for example where it is entirely sufficient. On other hand valuations are insane. And I believe many projects are pushing AI for sake of pushing something. See blockchains previously. So there is some use, but also lot of waste of time and money.

singularity2001 2y ago

The question in the title is different from the NVDA bubble.

ProxCoques 2y ago

I thought this was a good discussion of the issues regarding the nature of the bubble: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop "Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? ... "

hodgesrm 2y ago
This is the issue I would be examining very closely if I ran a company based on subsidized AI models. It's not necessary for companies like OpenAI to go out of business to cause problems: the costs just need to go up to levels necessary to make AI vendors profitable, like what happened with Uber.

cybersandwich 2y ago

Can it be both overhyped and revolutionary? This may actually fit the technical definition of a bubble. There is a good book called "Bubbles and Crashes" that talks about tech bubbles. I think the traditional definition of a bubble is when the price of an asset exceeds its fundamental value. Thats effectively impossible to know (during the bubble) because we can't predict the future but there are other ways to more practically look at bubbles even if you may be in the middle of one. If an asset is more than 2 standard deviations from the trend of the last 7 years, if there are a lot of novice investors effectively 'speculating', and having a 'narrative' that explains the odd 'non-fundamentals based' valuations. At least thats the definition they use in the book iirc. Thats definitely happening right now. There is also this obnoxious wall street/silicon valley hype train surrounding all of it-- which is by design. This is exactly what these companies want: a huge digital gold rush so they can try their hand at panning for gold using investor money. They try it with any new tech or buzzword they can because it brings in money. Its unfortunate because this technology feels revolutionary. This feels like the internet did to me as a kid. It wasn't all great. It wasn't perfect. But it was cool and there was something special about it. There are these new tools and services that all do slightly different things and when you combined them you could create really amazing things. AI feels that way. I'm not just talking LLMs either. I think those are impressive and useful, but there is so much else going on in the AI/ML space that can already really move the needle--and this is the worst it will ever be. I hate the comparisons to Bitcoin/block chain. They are being made because that same obnoxious wall street/silicon valley hype-model was at play there too, but I think anyone who was honest with themselves knew there were severe limitations with the tech and its usefulness. AI tools actually provide value, right now, and has a lot of room to grow. But back to the hype and "Bubble" question. I think its overhyped because thats whats what silicon valley is good at and wall street is good and amplifying it (and punishing anyone not riding the wave). We probably are in a bubble, but AI is here to stay. Its a new frontier of computing and its going to unlock new and interesting ways to interact with each other and the world around us. I also want to point out that AR is a perfect complement for all of the AI/ML tools that have been developed. The Meta Ray Bans are really interesting to me because they are marrying the two techs. I dont trust Facebook with that type of thing, but imagine if a privacy respecting company tried something like that? Apple is setting themselves up nicely in this space. They could create a new market with iGlass or Apple Vision with "apple intelligence" built in. This is the most excited I've been about tech in a long while.

Lewis324 2y ago

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