4 ms·

Goldman is correct that AI is expensive and unreliable. But it's only overhyped if AI stays that way. The hype isn't coming from where AI is today, but where

Goldman is correct that AI is expensive and unreliable. But it's only overhyped if AI stays that way. The hype isn't coming from where AI is today, but where it will be in 2030 and 2040. What excites the true believers is the slope, not the intercept.

freejazz 2y ago
No, the hype is coming from where people are saying it will be in 2030 and 2040.
swatcoder 2y ago
That's not a very interesting opportunity for insitutional investors (hedge funds, banks, pensions, etc). They have the resources and confidence to move fast and cleverly and don't need to make big bets on far off possibilities. They have better things to do with their money in the meantime. The nearly $1T in investment hype since Q42022 was chasing the possibility that revolutionary commercialization of generative AI might arrive any day. That no longer seems likely. As you note, there seem to be at least a few more profound discoveries that need to be made and matured, and so that revolution is still a long way out (from the perspective of these investors), even if it looks meaningfully more possible than it did two years ago.
- Davidzheng 2y ago
  What is far off for you? Is it five years?
xk_id 2y ago
“Over an arbitrarily long timeline, assuming stable geopolitical conditions, technology will continue to improve, at an arbitrary rate”. What a groundbreaking insight, no wonder people are excited.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  Did you even look at the Wright brothers plane? Why are people excited about it? It's an expensive deathtrap!
  - xk_id 2y ago
    So you are basing your outlook on extrapolating from a completely different engineering domain and a completely different socio-historical context?
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      yes and im right
  - hervature 2y ago
    The Wright flight was in December 1903 and planes were considered for a ban as weapons at the international level in 1911 [1]. Their capabilities and potential were obvious to everyone before the flight occurred. Imagining traveling through the air like a bird was obviously going to be a game changer to even a simpleton. The "Attention Is All You Need" has now been out for over 7 years and so a directly comparable timeline. What do we have? Better autocomplete? Worse search results? An overall efficiency increase of 5%? For people knowledgeable about the technical details, a path to AGI as a bigger LLM is about as probable to a path to AGI as using a big random forest. Arguing by example is stupid. Plenty of other examples have been proposed elsewhere in this thread. My only contribution is that I think LLMs are not going to yield anything more than incremental efficiency gains. If the only result after 7 years is that NVidia became a new $1T company and no one else then I think it should be becoming more obvious that this is a gold rush situation and not an iPhone situation. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_World_War_I#cite_note-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_World_War_I#cite_n...
    - ls612 2y ago
      When the AI gets good enough to fly FPV drones with no datalink (which is sooner than you think) that will be the tipping point you are looking for.
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  The slope has changed between 10 years and ago. You are free to disagree, but don't pretend like you don't understand what the AI crowd is saying.
  - xk_id 2y ago
    Never in the history of man has the slope of progress been linear. The AI crowd is entirely predicated on a platitude.
    - Davidzheng 2y ago
      AI right now is like covid in March or climate change in the 1980s. It's no longer a real intellectual debate on whether it will arrive (that is basically over by 2022) now it's an emotional battle where people are incapable of accepting that such a possibility can exist vs actually calculating
      - Jensson 2y ago
        > AI right now is like covid in March March 2021 yeah, well known all over the world, everyone talks about it but not much has really changed in a while. Some fear COVID might mutate into something deadlier, and some think generative AI will turn into something completely different. The quick pace was GPT-2 and GPT-3, those happened 2019 and 2020, today it is a crawl in comparison, GPT-3 was like covid in march-2020, at the time most were barely aware of it but today it is mainstream. The revolution you are talking about has already happened, people all over the world interact with their computer using natural language, so your prediction here is a bit late.
        Davidzheng 2y ago
        Did we experience the same thing? March 2020 saw explosion in nyc and much of mainland US and widespread lockdowns. However many people were convinced the lockdowns would last two weeks at most with covid dropping to near zero (in hindsight completely ridiculous low probability thinking)
- tim333 2y ago
  That's not the hype you are looking for. It's more that by 2040 AI/robots will be considerably smarter than humans and we can kick back while they build us palaces and yachts. Not that that will definitely happen but it's not a business as usual scenario.
_heimdall 2y ago
The hype follows what OpenAI's latest release does though, not what OpenAI may release in a decade or two. > What excites the true believers is the slope, not the intercept. The phrase "true believers" jumps out to me here. It sure makes AI (well, ML) sound more like a religion than a field of technological research.
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  > The hype follows what OpenAI's latest release does though Yes, because what OpenAI releases today helps us improve the prediction of what it may release in a decade or so.
  - groby_b 2y ago
    That is only true if you believe research never has dead ends and progresses on a well-defined curve. It does neither. What OAI or others release next does, in the very best case, help set a floor. And if it's a blind alley to a local maximum, even that isn't super-helpful.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    But how can we actually quantify the accuracy of said predictions? Each release of an LLM is largely a black box. We don't know exactly how they work, what they learned, why they learned it, or what their limitations are. How exactly does that help us predict what could exist in a decade or two? And how do we align that predictive ability with the fact that so many people working in the industry would not have been able to predict where we are today a decade or two in the past?
- signal_space 2y ago
  Cult of the exponential, considers sigmoids heresy.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bugbuddy 2y ago
Your take reminds me how self driving car boosters have been saying for the last 20 years. I know Waymo is out there driving itself IF you don’t count the operators with remote controls connected over 5G. We could achieve AGI today if you don’t count the Indian worker sitting remotely typing a response to your chat messages.
- Davidzheng 2y ago
  lol the cognitive dissonance of knowing your own argument is wrong and still not able to admit it
  - bugbuddy 2y ago
    Please feel free to put your money where your mouth is and convert your portfolios into an AI frontier fund.
    - Davidzheng 2y ago
      Yes. This argument is kind of pointless because it's just a simple bet. I would be very happy if the market was full of people like you--i would gladly take a huge bet on AI against it. But i guess the market is not fully in agreement with you in this matter
inopinatus 2y ago
“All you need is irrational faith and you too can be unable to distinguish between hype and overhype!”
metaphor 2y ago
> The hype isn't coming from where AI is today, but where it will be in 2030 and 2040. Scott McNealy circa 2002[1][2] had some relevant food for thought: >> But two years ago we were selling at 10 times revenues when we were at $64. At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking? >> I was thinking it was at $64, what do I do? I'm here to represent the shareholders. Do I stand up and say, "Sell"? I'd get sued if I said that. Do I stand up and say, "Buy"? Then they say you're [Enron Chairman] Ken Lay. So you just sit there and go, "I'm going to be a bum for the next two years. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut, and I'm not going to predict anything." And that's what I did. [1] https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-2985.79-2985.928 https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-2985.79-2985.928 [2] https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-3009.1-3009.399 https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-3009.1-3009.399
advael 2y ago
There has been no convincing argument by anyone that this will change in a way that will drive the value that the grifters in silicon valley are promising. It's tautological to say that people making bets are making expected value estimations about the future, and goldman sachs are doing just that
wkat4242 2y ago
> The hype isn't coming from where AI is today, but where it will be in 2030 and 2040. Yeah but the investors they're talking to aren't thinking about 2030-2040. They are thinking about 2025. If they don't get their 2000% profits they are imagining now they will declare it a FLOP!!!! and drop it. Doing harm to the overall development of a technology that does have its merits but is just propped up to a position it's not ready for by a long shot. With this kind of pressure a slow slope is not enough to keep investors happy. These guys are all hitting themselves in the head every day that they didn't buy bitcoins when they cost $0.01 and they are constantly telling themselves the next big thing will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. They are ruining good tech this way. Metaverse was pretty decent too, it was just not for everyone yet (and it won't be for a loooong time), but it does have its niche uses.
meiraleal 2y ago
- The hype isn't coming from where Bitcoin is today, but where it will be in 2030 and 2040. I'm among the AI true believers but the change above made me have second thoughts.
smt88 2y ago
This is exactly the argument we were all having about crypto a few years ago. "It's early days!" they told us for 10 years. Now crypto is used primarily for crime and speculation, which is exactly what we'll be using GenAI for in a few years, especially as it poisons its own source of training data.
- kaonwarb 2y ago
  Key difference from my perspective: I never did hear a convincing use case for large-scale use of crypto. It's really easy to make one for AI.
  - sebastos 2y ago
    Well… “use it as money for the entire world” is about as large scale of a use case as you’ll ever find. The issue wasn’t that there was no use-case, it’s that none of the crypto technologies were good enough to actually fulfill that use case. Blockchain wasn’t the right answer - it was just a precursor technology flirting with the right concepts. I’d argue that transformer-driven AI could follow the exact same trajectory: hype cycle driven by people imagining legitimately transformative use cases, which is ultimately popped when we realize the actual here-and-now implementations don’t work that way. The idea of transferring value over the internet using one common, frictionless, ownerless system isn’t dead; it can’t be, because it’s simply too good of an idea. But nothing actually offers that. Actual artificial intelligence is, likewise, too good of an idea to ever be “dispelled” or dismantled. The only room for doubt is whether the technical designs we have today are actually AI… or just some wannabe scam coins that LOOK like AI.
- anytime5704 2y ago
  Crypto (currency) never served a real use case other than pump and dumps or dark web transactions. GenAI is used by people for all sorts of purposes. Anecdotally, it has largely replaced my own usage of traditional search engines. This strikes me as a false equivalence the same way comparisons to the dot com bubble do.
  - 2y ago
nabla9 2y ago
>But it's only overhyped if AI stays that way. This is a fallacy that comes from not doing discounting. When you apply discounting with any realistic discount rate, current investments don't pay off if AI becomes something in 2040. Fro investors eventually is not a good enough. They move money into some other asset and wait until the time comes.
gexla 2y ago
I didn't read the paper. But I opened it up in a tab, typed "unreliable" in the search box, and zero results. I'm wondering what words they actually used. I also didn't find "overhyped? or "expensive." I'm sure those words aren't unreasonable as a take-away from the paper. But they aren't in the paper.
ChildOfChaos 2y ago
Exactly. It's amazing how many people seem to be missing this. I think a big problem is the amount of companies rushing to add AI to it's products when it's not really that good at the moment or not really that useful so there is somewhat of a backlash against it and people hearing the headlines about AI changing the world, seeing that AI has been added to a product they use, testing it and seeing it's useless and then wondering what all the fuss is about. I stay up to date with AI news, I follow it quite closely and I interact with chatbots somewhat, however I've yet to find it useful in any real use cases for me, since I don't code and the answers it gives for everything else are usually fairly generic nonsense, but it's amazing just that they can do that and the improvement is there. Image generation is pretty crazy too, video is getting there and audio for sure is going to be done, so I wonder what happens to the music industry? Instead of having Spotify you can generate your own music on a whim. As a music lover, that is going to be very odd.
rldjbpin 2y ago
this sort of argument was used for web3/crypto, vr, quantum computing, heck even nuclear fusion. but the first half vs the rest of the list did not receive the same proportional funds, at least from the tech phase from what we can see. the core difference i can see now is that the sota is captivating the crowd enough, whether from demos alone or from personal tests.

freejazz 2y ago

No, the hype is coming from where people are saying it will be in 2030 and 2040.

swatcoder 2y ago

That's not a very interesting opportunity for insitutional investors (hedge funds, banks, pensions, etc). They have the resources and confidence to move fast and cleverly and don't need to make big bets on far off possibilities. They have better things to do with their money in the meantime. The nearly $1T in investment hype since Q42022 was chasing the possibility that revolutionary commercialization of generative AI might arrive any day. That no longer seems likely. As you note, there seem to be at least a few more profound discoveries that need to be made and matured, and so that revolution is still a long way out (from the perspective of these investors), even if it looks meaningfully more possible than it did two years ago.

Davidzheng 2y ago
What is far off for you? Is it five years?

xk_id 2y ago

“Over an arbitrarily long timeline, assuming stable geopolitical conditions, technology will continue to improve, at an arbitrary rate”. What a groundbreaking insight, no wonder people are excited.

brigadier132 2y ago
Did you even look at the Wright brothers plane? Why are people excited about it? It's an expensive deathtrap!
- xk_id 2y ago
  So you are basing your outlook on extrapolating from a completely different engineering domain and a completely different socio-historical context?
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    yes and im right
- hervature 2y ago
  The Wright flight was in December 1903 and planes were considered for a ban as weapons at the international level in 1911 [1]. Their capabilities and potential were obvious to everyone before the flight occurred. Imagining traveling through the air like a bird was obviously going to be a game changer to even a simpleton. The "Attention Is All You Need" has now been out for over 7 years and so a directly comparable timeline. What do we have? Better autocomplete? Worse search results? An overall efficiency increase of 5%? For people knowledgeable about the technical details, a path to AGI as a bigger LLM is about as probable to a path to AGI as using a big random forest. Arguing by example is stupid. Plenty of other examples have been proposed elsewhere in this thread. My only contribution is that I think LLMs are not going to yield anything more than incremental efficiency gains. If the only result after 7 years is that NVidia became a new $1T company and no one else then I think it should be becoming more obvious that this is a gold rush situation and not an iPhone situation. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_World_War_I#cite_note-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_World_War_I#cite_n...
  - ls612 2y ago
    When the AI gets good enough to fly FPV drones with no datalink (which is sooner than you think) that will be the tipping point you are looking for.
elevatedastalt 2y ago
The slope has changed between 10 years and ago. You are free to disagree, but don't pretend like you don't understand what the AI crowd is saying.
- xk_id 2y ago
  Never in the history of man has the slope of progress been linear. The AI crowd is entirely predicated on a platitude.
  - Davidzheng 2y ago
    AI right now is like covid in March or climate change in the 1980s. It's no longer a real intellectual debate on whether it will arrive (that is basically over by 2022) now it's an emotional battle where people are incapable of accepting that such a possibility can exist vs actually calculating
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > AI right now is like covid in March March 2021 yeah, well known all over the world, everyone talks about it but not much has really changed in a while. Some fear COVID might mutate into something deadlier, and some think generative AI will turn into something completely different. The quick pace was GPT-2 and GPT-3, those happened 2019 and 2020, today it is a crawl in comparison, GPT-3 was like covid in march-2020, at the time most were barely aware of it but today it is mainstream. The revolution you are talking about has already happened, people all over the world interact with their computer using natural language, so your prediction here is a bit late.
      - Davidzheng 2y ago
        Did we experience the same thing? March 2020 saw explosion in nyc and much of mainland US and widespread lockdowns. However many people were convinced the lockdowns would last two weeks at most with covid dropping to near zero (in hindsight completely ridiculous low probability thinking)
tim333 2y ago
That's not the hype you are looking for. It's more that by 2040 AI/robots will be considerably smarter than humans and we can kick back while they build us palaces and yachts. Not that that will definitely happen but it's not a business as usual scenario.

_heimdall 2y ago

The hype follows what OpenAI's latest release does though, not what OpenAI may release in a decade or two. > What excites the true believers is the slope, not the intercept. The phrase "true believers" jumps out to me here. It sure makes AI (well, ML) sound more like a religion than a field of technological research.

elevatedastalt 2y ago
> The hype follows what OpenAI's latest release does though Yes, because what OpenAI releases today helps us improve the prediction of what it may release in a decade or so.
- groby_b 2y ago
  That is only true if you believe research never has dead ends and progresses on a well-defined curve. It does neither. What OAI or others release next does, in the very best case, help set a floor. And if it's a blind alley to a local maximum, even that isn't super-helpful.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  But how can we actually quantify the accuracy of said predictions? Each release of an LLM is largely a black box. We don't know exactly how they work, what they learned, why they learned it, or what their limitations are. How exactly does that help us predict what could exist in a decade or two? And how do we align that predictive ability with the fact that so many people working in the industry would not have been able to predict where we are today a decade or two in the past?
signal_space 2y ago
Cult of the exponential, considers sigmoids heresy.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bugbuddy 2y ago

Your take reminds me how self driving car boosters have been saying for the last 20 years. I know Waymo is out there driving itself IF you don’t count the operators with remote controls connected over 5G. We could achieve AGI today if you don’t count the Indian worker sitting remotely typing a response to your chat messages.

Davidzheng 2y ago
lol the cognitive dissonance of knowing your own argument is wrong and still not able to admit it
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  Please feel free to put your money where your mouth is and convert your portfolios into an AI frontier fund.
  - Davidzheng 2y ago
    Yes. This argument is kind of pointless because it's just a simple bet. I would be very happy if the market was full of people like you--i would gladly take a huge bet on AI against it. But i guess the market is not fully in agreement with you in this matter

inopinatus 2y ago

“All you need is irrational faith and you too can be unable to distinguish between hype and overhype!”

metaphor 2y ago

> The hype isn't coming from where AI is today, but where it will be in 2030 and 2040. Scott McNealy circa 2002[1][2] had some relevant food for thought: >> But two years ago we were selling at 10 times revenues when we were at $64. At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking? >> I was thinking it was at $64, what do I do? I'm here to represent the shareholders. Do I stand up and say, "Sell"? I'd get sued if I said that. Do I stand up and say, "Buy"? Then they say you're [Enron Chairman] Ken Lay. So you just sit there and go, "I'm going to be a bum for the next two years. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut, and I'm not going to predict anything." And that's what I did. [1] https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-2985.79-2985.928 https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-2985.79-2985.928 [2] https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-3009.1-3009.399 https://archive.is/EZ6vD#selection-3009.1-3009.399

advael 2y ago

There has been no convincing argument by anyone that this will change in a way that will drive the value that the grifters in silicon valley are promising. It's tautological to say that people making bets are making expected value estimations about the future, and goldman sachs are doing just that

wkat4242 2y ago

> The hype isn't coming from where AI is today, but where it will be in 2030 and 2040. Yeah but the investors they're talking to aren't thinking about 2030-2040. They are thinking about 2025. If they don't get their 2000% profits they are imagining now they will declare it a FLOP!!!! and drop it. Doing harm to the overall development of a technology that does have its merits but is just propped up to a position it's not ready for by a long shot. With this kind of pressure a slow slope is not enough to keep investors happy. These guys are all hitting themselves in the head every day that they didn't buy bitcoins when they cost $0.01 and they are constantly telling themselves the next big thing will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. They are ruining good tech this way. Metaverse was pretty decent too, it was just not for everyone yet (and it won't be for a loooong time), but it does have its niche uses.

meiraleal 2y ago

- The hype isn't coming from where Bitcoin is today, but where it will be in 2030 and 2040. I'm among the AI true believers but the change above made me have second thoughts.

smt88 2y ago

This is exactly the argument we were all having about crypto a few years ago. "It's early days!" they told us for 10 years. Now crypto is used primarily for crime and speculation, which is exactly what we'll be using GenAI for in a few years, especially as it poisons its own source of training data.

kaonwarb 2y ago
Key difference from my perspective: I never did hear a convincing use case for large-scale use of crypto. It's really easy to make one for AI.
- sebastos 2y ago
  Well… “use it as money for the entire world” is about as large scale of a use case as you’ll ever find. The issue wasn’t that there was no use-case, it’s that none of the crypto technologies were good enough to actually fulfill that use case. Blockchain wasn’t the right answer - it was just a precursor technology flirting with the right concepts. I’d argue that transformer-driven AI could follow the exact same trajectory: hype cycle driven by people imagining legitimately transformative use cases, which is ultimately popped when we realize the actual here-and-now implementations don’t work that way. The idea of transferring value over the internet using one common, frictionless, ownerless system isn’t dead; it can’t be, because it’s simply too good of an idea. But nothing actually offers that. Actual artificial intelligence is, likewise, too good of an idea to ever be “dispelled” or dismantled. The only room for doubt is whether the technical designs we have today are actually AI… or just some wannabe scam coins that LOOK like AI.
anytime5704 2y ago
Crypto (currency) never served a real use case other than pump and dumps or dark web transactions. GenAI is used by people for all sorts of purposes. Anecdotally, it has largely replaced my own usage of traditional search engines. This strikes me as a false equivalence the same way comparisons to the dot com bubble do.
- 2y ago

nabla9 2y ago

>But it's only overhyped if AI stays that way. This is a fallacy that comes from not doing discounting. When you apply discounting with any realistic discount rate, current investments don't pay off if AI becomes something in 2040. Fro investors eventually is not a good enough. They move money into some other asset and wait until the time comes.

gexla 2y ago

I didn't read the paper. But I opened it up in a tab, typed "unreliable" in the search box, and zero results. I'm wondering what words they actually used. I also didn't find "overhyped? or "expensive." I'm sure those words aren't unreasonable as a take-away from the paper. But they aren't in the paper.

ChildOfChaos 2y ago

Exactly. It's amazing how many people seem to be missing this. I think a big problem is the amount of companies rushing to add AI to it's products when it's not really that good at the moment or not really that useful so there is somewhat of a backlash against it and people hearing the headlines about AI changing the world, seeing that AI has been added to a product they use, testing it and seeing it's useless and then wondering what all the fuss is about. I stay up to date with AI news, I follow it quite closely and I interact with chatbots somewhat, however I've yet to find it useful in any real use cases for me, since I don't code and the answers it gives for everything else are usually fairly generic nonsense, but it's amazing just that they can do that and the improvement is there. Image generation is pretty crazy too, video is getting there and audio for sure is going to be done, so I wonder what happens to the music industry? Instead of having Spotify you can generate your own music on a whim. As a music lover, that is going to be very odd.

rldjbpin 2y ago

this sort of argument was used for web3/crypto, vr, quantum computing, heck even nuclear fusion. but the first half vs the rest of the list did not receive the same proportional funds, at least from the tech phase from what we can see. the core difference i can see now is that the sota is captivating the crowd enough, whether from demos alone or from personal tests.