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During a goldrush, sell shovels. Nvidia and TSMC are making insane profits, but that just means there's a demand for specialized compute. Like with the crypto

by crote 2y ago

During a goldrush, sell shovels. Nvidia and TSMC are making insane profits, but that just means there's a demand for specialized compute. Like with the crypto bubble, their success is unrelated to the quality of the final AI product sold to the consumer. OpenAI is in a similar position due to their SaaS model. It's all about pumping the hype and getting other businesses to build AI products on their platform. Not getting good results? Must be your poor prompt engineering! The real slaughter is going to be in the AI startups, and the companies trying to pivot to AI in an attempt to stay relevant. The general public is already starting to get tired of the whole AI hype, and we haven't seen anyone provide genuinely groundbreaking products yet. All of it is somewhere on a spectrum of "kinda neat, I guess" to "dystopian hellscape". Unless we see someone come out with a truly innovative must-have product, this hype is probably going to end sooner rather than later.

throwaway4aday 2y ago
I'm expecting much less drama. Maybe AI startups will fail at a higher rate than regular startups but there will still be success stories. Are we conveniently forgetting that the vast majority of businesses fail? There are still crypto businesses operating out there and not all of them are based around scams. It's just such a narrow domain of applicability that it's easy to never have contact with it. Language, image and audio models on the other hand are so widely applicable that you're going to wind up running into them everywhere whether you want to or not. The excitement around the novelty of these usecases may die down but it'll be the same way that excitement over sending email or having a video call died down and the technology just became part of everyday life.
RantyDave 2y ago
I don't think we can include TSMC in the list of AI goldrush companies, they have a pretty diverse client base.

by crote 2y ago

throwaway4aday 2y ago

I'm expecting much less drama. Maybe AI startups will fail at a higher rate than regular startups but there will still be success stories. Are we conveniently forgetting that the vast majority of businesses fail? There are still crypto businesses operating out there and not all of them are based around scams. It's just such a narrow domain of applicability that it's easy to never have contact with it. Language, image and audio models on the other hand are so widely applicable that you're going to wind up running into them everywhere whether you want to or not. The excitement around the novelty of these usecases may die down but it'll be the same way that excitement over sending email or having a video call died down and the technology just became part of everyday life.

RantyDave 2y ago

I don't think we can include TSMC in the list of AI goldrush companies, they have a pretty diverse client base.