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It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while kno

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to the economy? AGI? It certainly doesn’t seem that way. Yes incremental (in this case a large increment!) improvements in the way we interact with machines. But humans stay winning.

deleted 2y ago
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tmpz22 2y ago
If it is a pop how can Big Tech walk it back? Am I overreacting here or have companies like Google and Microsoft pimped out their reputations in an irreversible fashion?
- pjc50 2y ago
  Not like you have a choice? Reputation for those two is kind of irrelevant.
- cogman10 2y ago
  How did big tech walk back crypto, ML, Web 2.0? They really don't need to walk back anything. If the features are too expensive to support and ultimately unused, then they'll just quietly kill them off. Otherwise, it'll just be another feature in the feature lists. Not something that really buys anything but also not something making them a lot of money.
  - dag11 2y ago
    I'm struggling to think of any mainstream big tech products that incorporated crypto at all. Besides some financial apps adding an additional tab for it.
  - j16sdiz 2y ago
    Funny you put crypto on the same list with ML. (and I guess you meant Web 3.0, not 2.0)
    - cogman10 2y ago
      Nah, web 2.0 was a super hype back in the late 90s early 00s. Everyone was all about advertising their adoption and development of web 2.0. Web 3.0 was never really a thing, beyond some crypto enthusiasts nobody cared. As for crypto, I probably should have said blockchain instead. There was one point recently where everything was block chained.
      - Hasu 2y ago
        They didn't walk web 2.0 back because web 2.0 won so completely that web 1.0 sites are noted for being quaint and charming callbacks to an older era. Web 2.0 was "social web", wikis, AJAX requests, and the move towards SPAs. It's very much still the reigning paradigm.
      - danaris 2y ago
        "Everything"—but not from the big tech giants. None of the FAANG companies, to my knowledge, offered a blockchain-based product.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - ben_w 2y ago
        """Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 I don't think I need to elaborate this quotation? But if I do, note the domain I'm quoting from and the website in which you are reading this comment from me.
  - gjm11 2y ago
    I don't think I understand your first sentence. Big tech wasn't invested in crypto in the way it is in AI. For a few days Meta pretended they were going to launch a cryptocurrency, but that's kinda it. Whereas in this case all the biggest tech players are making a lot of noise about how AI is The Future and investing a tremendous amount of resources into trying to make their AI be The Future. Big tech investment into machine learning didn't need walking back because machine learning morphed smoothly into AI. Big tech investment into "Web 2.0" didn't need walking back because "Web 2.0", to whatever extent it was a definite specific thing, was a huge success and now we just call it the web. (If you meant "Web 3.0", that didn't need walking back for the same reason as crypto didn't: it was never a very big thing for very big tech.) So I'm not seeing how any of those things was like AI today. If it turns out that present-day AI is a bubble and it bursts, it will not be like crypto or "Web 3.0" for the big tech companies because those were only ever fads that the big tech companies didn't particularly tie themselves to. It won't be like machine learning because it will be the same bubble, just later on. And it won't be like "Web 2.0" because that wasn't a bubble and didn't burst.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      A better example from Meta is probably the Metaverse losses: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66913551 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66913551
  - Theodores 2y ago
    There is a difference in zealotry. With blockchain technology there were many people prepared to die on that hill. It was going to solve world hunger albeit not the obesity epidemic. It also had all of its own lingo for not selling or buying the dip. I remember people saying how things would be replaced with blockchain technology such as ecommerce, and apps 'on the chain' would find many thousands of uses. People were quite insistent. On HN you risked getting modded down to hell and shadowbanned for life if you said anything wrongful about crypto. It was bizarre. With AI we don't have this level of zealotry. You can say it is a load of rubbish and nobody wants to kill you. Weird, but indicative that AI has found some use, even if it is for 'art' and just marketing. Nonetheless, if someone does get a bit zealous about it, I can tell them that I have all problems solved already with blockchain technology apps, just for trolling value.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Everyone will walk it back like they walked back 'blockchain.' And then they'll go and find another technology to conspicuously chase. The hype cycle will repeat.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Yeah, I think you are probably overreacting. Microsoft and Google already have sort of bad reputations anyway, but they haven’t actually done anything that widely hurt customers yet with this AI stuff. If it doesn’t work out, it will just be a silly R&D project from the public’s point of view. Or they’ll use it to make stuff like Cortana (or whatever they are calling it now) slightly less useless.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  None of the big players have staked reputation on AI yet at all, which is telling in its own way. They've invested in it and explored products and demonstrated their R&D commitment but they haven't made it their new brand identity or anything. The most vulnerable Big Tech organization are the ones like OpenAI and Anthropic that are swollen with investment specifically for AI but need to find a business or growth plan that can sustain that investment, plus the smaller and startup companies that have bet the farm on AI before it matured. But these same companies are the ones that have the potential to win big if there's another key breakthrough on either capabilities or product insight.
  - halostatue 2y ago
    I’m not sure how Google and Meta placing massive AI visibility in their everyday user interfaces isn’t staking reputation.
    - SXX 2y ago
      Will Google or Meta pop if they'll just remove all of that overnight? I doubt it.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  This kind of thing is not irreversible. Remember when Google tried to get everyone on Google+? A far more annoying product push than shoving AI into Google search.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  One thing big tech is very good at is walking it back. Microsoft was one of the earlier big adopters of cryptocurrency, and now it’s nowhere to be found. Nobody cares because Microsoft didn’t make a big deal out of it. Because current AI is effectively being pitched as assistants 2.0, I don’t see them wiping AI from their lineup, but letting it rot is a possibility as they all have done for their v1 assistants. Due to the attention economy, most aren’t going to care within a year. Google is still a dominant company despite killing off beloved services so if they can do that, the others certainly can weather failed AI products. There might be some exceptions like Adobe, it depends on what they do. That’s my take on it anyways, in general there was just way too much pumped into AI without much thorough thought. The fact that Rabbit was even a thing people got hyped over speaks volumes to how out of touch with reality current AI pushes are.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I mean, see, say, Google+, or that Facebook metaverse thing, or the various Windows Phones, or IBM's adventures in the blockchain. Companies get over-excited about the latest trend and do silly stuff all the time. People generally more or less forget.
shiandow 2y ago
The easiest prediction you can make is that it's going to have an impact in unexpected ways. It will be some time until we get to grips with all the implications of computers grokking language. Then again sci-fi has had computers understanding speech for ages as if it's the most natural thing in the world.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  I for one am definitely looking forward to having some proper droids around. Once multimodality and edge accelerators are sorted anyway.
GJim 2y ago
> I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates) Hallucinates? I'd use the term 'bullshits' when it doesn't know the right answer. This makes it a dangerous thing to trust.
- throwaway9143 2y ago
  People bullshit all the time, convincingly. Somehow, we get by.
  - throwawa14223 2y ago
    We stop trusting people who do deceive us, but with LLMs we promote them to the top of search results.
    - throwaway9143 2y ago
      And we don't collectively amplify human bullshitters? C'mon.
- delish 2y ago
  We need a different word than "hallucinate" or "bullshit" because the LLM is executing the same functionality when it _gets_ the correct answer or incorrect. It doesn't _know_ the correct answer in either case.
- lgas 2y ago
  You're of course free to use whatever terminology you want, but hallucination is the accepted term in the field for LLMs bullshitting.
- sqeaky 2y ago
  It absolutely can't be trusted, but it can focus searches for relevant information. I started researching network monitoring solutions and chatgpt provided suggestions for me to look at and provided terms that I use to find pages in documentation that were relevant to me. I saw real solutions that would work that my initial web searches missed. I got to relevant documentation much faster with a fair expectation of what I would find. It is a greatat summarizing but poor at understanding. It is great at concepts but crap at precision. And every actionable "fact" coming from it needs to be vetted.
finolex1 2y ago
Perhaps improvements might fizzle out, but a lot of smart people seem to think they won't. The AI models we are using today are the worst that models will ever be in the future. We can't base our valuations on our current experiences with AI today. 5 years ago, just getting a computer to form vaguely relevant grammatically correct sentences felt magical.
- HumblyTossed 2y ago
  > but a lot of smart people seem to think they won't. A lot of smart people _always_ seem to think <insert tech> won't fizzle out.
  - senordevnyc 2y ago
    Where have they been wrong?
    - danaris 2y ago
      Cryptocurrency? NFTs? The Metaverse? Google Glass? Betamax?
      - senordevnyc 2y ago
        Hmm...I didn't understand the comment to be about specific products, so I'd take Glass and Betamax off the list. I really don't think crypto or VR or AR are going to fizzle, I think they're just early in their overall lifecycle. I absolutely think that in ten or twenty years those categories will be much larger than today.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > Betamax? Please. My dad voted with his wallet for… Video 2000. (He also advised me to buy Lloyds shares when they were about x10 their current price).
    - HumblyTossed 2y ago
      You're kidding, right?
AlexandrB 2y ago
We're certainly a long way from last summer's AI hype where CEOs of AI companies were going in front of congress to explain how their AI is going to take over the world and needed to be tightly regulated.
crazygringo 2y ago
> It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Objectively, no it doesn't. Even if you think it's a bubble, then the bubble is just growing. There are zero signs of anything popping yet. Company valuations are only increasing. > Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? It makes sense when you look at the financials. It's like back in 1800's when railroads were the new thing, and imagine there were only one company that knew how to make locomotives, while everything else had multiple suppliers. It would have been the most valuable company as well. Nvidia is in an extremely enviable situation where they're simply the only company that makes a product that is in extreme demand. And for various reasons, no other companies appear to be able to make and deliver a substitute -- not yet and seemingly not in the near future. So they're able to produce an extreme level of profit, which shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, and their market valuation reflects that accurately. Remember, high market valuation isn't a reflection of expected future revenue or sales -- it's a reflection of expected future profit. And Nvidia is raking in crazy profits because nobody else is effectively competing with them.
- pjc50 2y ago
  The Standard Oil of our time? AMD ""just"" need to fix their software API ecosystem. Developers, developers, developers. Unfortunately I don't think they can do that even if promised a trillion dollar stock valuation. Not because it's technically difficult, either.
- thepasswordis 2y ago
  It objectively doesn’t feel like then bubble is popping?
- iknownthing 2y ago
  The locomotive analogy doesn't quite fit. The customers of the locomotive company would buy the locomotives and then use them to profit. Are Nvidia's customers making a profit from the billions they are spending on GPUs? I don't think so, at least not yet.
  - throwup238 2y ago
next_xibalba 2y ago
> It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. I wonder how much of this has to do with 15+ years of the narrative of AGI/"The Singularity" being near. Deep learning seemed to really reinforce the narrative as it has blown away classical machine learning and succeeded in so many applications. It started to look like all of Kurzweil, et al's predictions were dead on. Particularly as LLMs took off. Of course, we're now seeing the apparent limitations in very difficult applications like reasoning as LLMs have mostly been revealed to be a dead end path towards reasoning (with apologies to Blake Lemoine ;) ). And self driving is being revealed to be extremely, extremely difficult to solve with pattern matching alone. Even the traditionally conservative Apple seems to have bought into the hype (though some of the applications will be pretty useful, IMO, after a few generations of release). I saw somewhere (X I think) someone made the case that the latest generation of AI buzz has only created between $5-$50 billion in value despite investments measured as a multiple of that. I found it convincing. Personally, I'm still a believer that AGI will happen, but I am convinced by Yann Lecun's take. We're not even on the on ramp yet, and all the bluster and hand wringing over safety threatens to kill or tragically stall the most important technology in all of human history. [1][2][3][4] [1] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1662020967529435140 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1662020967529435140 [2] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1801018194121118103 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1801018194121118103 [3] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1791890883425570823 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1791890883425570823 [4] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1795032310590378405?lang=en https://x.com/ylecun/status/1795032310590378405?lang=en
ben_w 2y ago
I see things at a slightly different angle than you. Yes, there's a bubble. Those things you list, I find it very easy to believe they add up to at least 3% productivity boost globally. A single tech doing this in one year (or even 18 months) before we really understand how to best apply it, is a radical change all by itself, even if we don't use it to speed up future growth. The world economy is $109 trillion; 3% of that is thus just over $3 trillion per year, which is enough to justify NVIDIA's valuation… assuming they get to collect all the profits and nobody else manages any, which is unlikely given their hardware burns a lot of expensive (in aggregate) electricity. I can also easily believe that this triggers a painful demand increase for electricity. I hope it isn't economically dominant, because nobody is ready for that transition.
- wilsonnb3 2y ago
  > Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. I find it incredibly hard to believe that these things provide value anywhere close to 3% of GDP, that estimate is orders of magnitude too high. 3% is the entire economic output of the UK or India. The global agriculture industry is only like 4.5%.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Depending on which source I use, there are around 27 million software developers in the world. I'm not claiming it doubled our productivity, but I will say that if we earned an average of $100k, we'd be 2.5% of the global economy just by ourselves. I can't find out how many copy editors and copy writers there are in the world (I keep finding numbers for the USA alone). I don't know how many graphical artists there are, nor how many are willing to use the various image generator AI, but I am seeing that stuff pop up IRL. We know at least some lawyers have used it because they didn't check the output for hallucinations and it bit them hard; we don't know how many use it carefully.
theshaper 2y ago
Your opinion doesn't seem fair to Nvidia. >Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? This could just as easily be written as: Apple as the most valuable company in the world? Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world? Tesla as the most valuable company in the world? I won't be the one to defend Nvidia, but I don't find any solid arguments to consider its business model worse or better than those of the 'other' IT companies.

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tmpz22 2y ago

If it is a pop how can Big Tech walk it back? Am I overreacting here or have companies like Google and Microsoft pimped out their reputations in an irreversible fashion?

pjc50 2y ago
Not like you have a choice? Reputation for those two is kind of irrelevant.
cogman10 2y ago
How did big tech walk back crypto, ML, Web 2.0? They really don't need to walk back anything. If the features are too expensive to support and ultimately unused, then they'll just quietly kill them off. Otherwise, it'll just be another feature in the feature lists. Not something that really buys anything but also not something making them a lot of money.
- dag11 2y ago
  I'm struggling to think of any mainstream big tech products that incorporated crypto at all. Besides some financial apps adding an additional tab for it.
- j16sdiz 2y ago
  Funny you put crypto on the same list with ML. (and I guess you meant Web 3.0, not 2.0)
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Nah, web 2.0 was a super hype back in the late 90s early 00s. Everyone was all about advertising their adoption and development of web 2.0. Web 3.0 was never really a thing, beyond some crypto enthusiasts nobody cared. As for crypto, I probably should have said blockchain instead. There was one point recently where everything was block chained.
    - Hasu 2y ago
      They didn't walk web 2.0 back because web 2.0 won so completely that web 1.0 sites are noted for being quaint and charming callbacks to an older era. Web 2.0 was "social web", wikis, AJAX requests, and the move towards SPAs. It's very much still the reigning paradigm.
    - danaris 2y ago
      "Everything"—but not from the big tech giants. None of the FAANG companies, to my knowledge, offered a blockchain-based product.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - ben_w 2y ago
      """Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 I don't think I need to elaborate this quotation? But if I do, note the domain I'm quoting from and the website in which you are reading this comment from me.
- gjm11 2y ago
  I don't think I understand your first sentence. Big tech wasn't invested in crypto in the way it is in AI. For a few days Meta pretended they were going to launch a cryptocurrency, but that's kinda it. Whereas in this case all the biggest tech players are making a lot of noise about how AI is The Future and investing a tremendous amount of resources into trying to make their AI be The Future. Big tech investment into machine learning didn't need walking back because machine learning morphed smoothly into AI. Big tech investment into "Web 2.0" didn't need walking back because "Web 2.0", to whatever extent it was a definite specific thing, was a huge success and now we just call it the web. (If you meant "Web 3.0", that didn't need walking back for the same reason as crypto didn't: it was never a very big thing for very big tech.) So I'm not seeing how any of those things was like AI today. If it turns out that present-day AI is a bubble and it bursts, it will not be like crypto or "Web 3.0" for the big tech companies because those were only ever fads that the big tech companies didn't particularly tie themselves to. It won't be like machine learning because it will be the same bubble, just later on. And it won't be like "Web 2.0" because that wasn't a bubble and didn't burst.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    A better example from Meta is probably the Metaverse losses: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66913551 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66913551
- Theodores 2y ago
  There is a difference in zealotry. With blockchain technology there were many people prepared to die on that hill. It was going to solve world hunger albeit not the obesity epidemic. It also had all of its own lingo for not selling or buying the dip. I remember people saying how things would be replaced with blockchain technology such as ecommerce, and apps 'on the chain' would find many thousands of uses. People were quite insistent. On HN you risked getting modded down to hell and shadowbanned for life if you said anything wrongful about crypto. It was bizarre. With AI we don't have this level of zealotry. You can say it is a load of rubbish and nobody wants to kill you. Weird, but indicative that AI has found some use, even if it is for 'art' and just marketing. Nonetheless, if someone does get a bit zealous about it, I can tell them that I have all problems solved already with blockchain technology apps, just for trolling value.
ryandrake 2y ago
Everyone will walk it back like they walked back 'blockchain.' And then they'll go and find another technology to conspicuously chase. The hype cycle will repeat.
bee_rider 2y ago
Yeah, I think you are probably overreacting. Microsoft and Google already have sort of bad reputations anyway, but they haven’t actually done anything that widely hurt customers yet with this AI stuff. If it doesn’t work out, it will just be a silly R&D project from the public’s point of view. Or they’ll use it to make stuff like Cortana (or whatever they are calling it now) slightly less useless.
swatcoder 2y ago
None of the big players have staked reputation on AI yet at all, which is telling in its own way. They've invested in it and explored products and demonstrated their R&D commitment but they haven't made it their new brand identity or anything. The most vulnerable Big Tech organization are the ones like OpenAI and Anthropic that are swollen with investment specifically for AI but need to find a business or growth plan that can sustain that investment, plus the smaller and startup companies that have bet the farm on AI before it matured. But these same companies are the ones that have the potential to win big if there's another key breakthrough on either capabilities or product insight.
- halostatue 2y ago
  I’m not sure how Google and Meta placing massive AI visibility in their everyday user interfaces isn’t staking reputation.
  - SXX 2y ago
    Will Google or Meta pop if they'll just remove all of that overnight? I doubt it.
AlexandrB 2y ago
This kind of thing is not irreversible. Remember when Google tried to get everyone on Google+? A far more annoying product push than shoving AI into Google search.
lovethevoid 2y ago
One thing big tech is very good at is walking it back. Microsoft was one of the earlier big adopters of cryptocurrency, and now it’s nowhere to be found. Nobody cares because Microsoft didn’t make a big deal out of it. Because current AI is effectively being pitched as assistants 2.0, I don’t see them wiping AI from their lineup, but letting it rot is a possibility as they all have done for their v1 assistants. Due to the attention economy, most aren’t going to care within a year. Google is still a dominant company despite killing off beloved services so if they can do that, the others certainly can weather failed AI products. There might be some exceptions like Adobe, it depends on what they do. That’s my take on it anyways, in general there was just way too much pumped into AI without much thorough thought. The fact that Rabbit was even a thing people got hyped over speaks volumes to how out of touch with reality current AI pushes are.
rsynnott 2y ago
I mean, see, say, Google+, or that Facebook metaverse thing, or the various Windows Phones, or IBM's adventures in the blockchain. Companies get over-excited about the latest trend and do silly stuff all the time. People generally more or less forget.

shiandow 2y ago

The easiest prediction you can make is that it's going to have an impact in unexpected ways. It will be some time until we get to grips with all the implications of computers grokking language. Then again sci-fi has had computers understanding speech for ages as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

moffkalast 2y ago
I for one am definitely looking forward to having some proper droids around. Once multimodality and edge accelerators are sorted anyway.

GJim 2y ago

> I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates) Hallucinates? I'd use the term 'bullshits' when it doesn't know the right answer. This makes it a dangerous thing to trust.

throwaway9143 2y ago
People bullshit all the time, convincingly. Somehow, we get by.
- throwawa14223 2y ago
  We stop trusting people who do deceive us, but with LLMs we promote them to the top of search results.
  - throwaway9143 2y ago
    And we don't collectively amplify human bullshitters? C'mon.
delish 2y ago
We need a different word than "hallucinate" or "bullshit" because the LLM is executing the same functionality when it _gets_ the correct answer or incorrect. It doesn't _know_ the correct answer in either case.
lgas 2y ago
You're of course free to use whatever terminology you want, but hallucination is the accepted term in the field for LLMs bullshitting.
sqeaky 2y ago
It absolutely can't be trusted, but it can focus searches for relevant information. I started researching network monitoring solutions and chatgpt provided suggestions for me to look at and provided terms that I use to find pages in documentation that were relevant to me. I saw real solutions that would work that my initial web searches missed. I got to relevant documentation much faster with a fair expectation of what I would find. It is a greatat summarizing but poor at understanding. It is great at concepts but crap at precision. And every actionable "fact" coming from it needs to be vetted.

finolex1 2y ago

Perhaps improvements might fizzle out, but a lot of smart people seem to think they won't. The AI models we are using today are the worst that models will ever be in the future. We can't base our valuations on our current experiences with AI today. 5 years ago, just getting a computer to form vaguely relevant grammatically correct sentences felt magical.

HumblyTossed 2y ago
> but a lot of smart people seem to think they won't. A lot of smart people _always_ seem to think <insert tech> won't fizzle out.
- senordevnyc 2y ago
  Where have they been wrong?
  - danaris 2y ago
    Cryptocurrency? NFTs? The Metaverse? Google Glass? Betamax?
    - senordevnyc 2y ago
      Hmm...I didn't understand the comment to be about specific products, so I'd take Glass and Betamax off the list. I really don't think crypto or VR or AR are going to fizzle, I think they're just early in their overall lifecycle. I absolutely think that in ten or twenty years those categories will be much larger than today.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > Betamax? Please. My dad voted with his wallet for… Video 2000. (He also advised me to buy Lloyds shares when they were about x10 their current price).
  - HumblyTossed 2y ago
    You're kidding, right?

AlexandrB 2y ago

We're certainly a long way from last summer's AI hype where CEOs of AI companies were going in front of congress to explain how their AI is going to take over the world and needed to be tightly regulated.

crazygringo 2y ago

> It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Objectively, no it doesn't. Even if you think it's a bubble, then the bubble is just growing. There are zero signs of anything popping yet. Company valuations are only increasing. > Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? It makes sense when you look at the financials. It's like back in 1800's when railroads were the new thing, and imagine there were only one company that knew how to make locomotives, while everything else had multiple suppliers. It would have been the most valuable company as well. Nvidia is in an extremely enviable situation where they're simply the only company that makes a product that is in extreme demand. And for various reasons, no other companies appear to be able to make and deliver a substitute -- not yet and seemingly not in the near future. So they're able to produce an extreme level of profit, which shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, and their market valuation reflects that accurately. Remember, high market valuation isn't a reflection of expected future revenue or sales -- it's a reflection of expected future profit. And Nvidia is raking in crazy profits because nobody else is effectively competing with them.

pjc50 2y ago
The Standard Oil of our time? AMD ""just"" need to fix their software API ecosystem. Developers, developers, developers. Unfortunately I don't think they can do that even if promised a trillion dollar stock valuation. Not because it's technically difficult, either.
thepasswordis 2y ago
It objectively doesn’t feel like then bubble is popping?
iknownthing 2y ago
The locomotive analogy doesn't quite fit. The customers of the locomotive company would buy the locomotives and then use them to profit. Are Nvidia's customers making a profit from the billions they are spending on GPUs? I don't think so, at least not yet.
- throwup238 2y ago

next_xibalba 2y ago

> It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. I wonder how much of this has to do with 15+ years of the narrative of AGI/"The Singularity" being near. Deep learning seemed to really reinforce the narrative as it has blown away classical machine learning and succeeded in so many applications. It started to look like all of Kurzweil, et al's predictions were dead on. Particularly as LLMs took off. Of course, we're now seeing the apparent limitations in very difficult applications like reasoning as LLMs have mostly been revealed to be a dead end path towards reasoning (with apologies to Blake Lemoine ;) ). And self driving is being revealed to be extremely, extremely difficult to solve with pattern matching alone. Even the traditionally conservative Apple seems to have bought into the hype (though some of the applications will be pretty useful, IMO, after a few generations of release). I saw somewhere (X I think) someone made the case that the latest generation of AI buzz has only created between $5-$50 billion in value despite investments measured as a multiple of that. I found it convincing. Personally, I'm still a believer that AGI will happen, but I am convinced by Yann Lecun's take. We're not even on the on ramp yet, and all the bluster and hand wringing over safety threatens to kill or tragically stall the most important technology in all of human history. [1][2][3][4] [1] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1662020967529435140 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1662020967529435140 [2] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1801018194121118103 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1801018194121118103 [3] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1791890883425570823 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1791890883425570823 [4] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1795032310590378405?lang=en https://x.com/ylecun/status/1795032310590378405?lang=en

ben_w 2y ago

I see things at a slightly different angle than you. Yes, there's a bubble. Those things you list, I find it very easy to believe they add up to at least 3% productivity boost globally. A single tech doing this in one year (or even 18 months) before we really understand how to best apply it, is a radical change all by itself, even if we don't use it to speed up future growth. The world economy is $109 trillion; 3% of that is thus just over $3 trillion per year, which is enough to justify NVIDIA's valuation… assuming they get to collect all the profits and nobody else manages any, which is unlikely given their hardware burns a lot of expensive (in aggregate) electricity. I can also easily believe that this triggers a painful demand increase for electricity. I hope it isn't economically dominant, because nobody is ready for that transition.

wilsonnb3 2y ago
> Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. I find it incredibly hard to believe that these things provide value anywhere close to 3% of GDP, that estimate is orders of magnitude too high. 3% is the entire economic output of the UK or India. The global agriculture industry is only like 4.5%.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Depending on which source I use, there are around 27 million software developers in the world. I'm not claiming it doubled our productivity, but I will say that if we earned an average of $100k, we'd be 2.5% of the global economy just by ourselves. I can't find out how many copy editors and copy writers there are in the world (I keep finding numbers for the USA alone). I don't know how many graphical artists there are, nor how many are willing to use the various image generator AI, but I am seeing that stuff pop up IRL. We know at least some lawyers have used it because they didn't check the output for hallucinations and it bit them hard; we don't know how many use it carefully.

theshaper 2y ago

Your opinion doesn't seem fair to Nvidia. >Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? This could just as easily be written as: Apple as the most valuable company in the world? Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world? Tesla as the most valuable company in the world? I won't be the one to defend Nvidia, but I don't find any solid arguments to consider its business model worse or better than those of the 'other' IT companies.