7 ms·

What are the threats to the AI boom?

20 points by viewtransform 2y ago

viewtransform 2y ago
https://archive.vn/poI2R https://archive.vn/poI2R
mouse_ 2y ago
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/openai-on-verge-of-bankruptcy-heading-for-5-billion-in-losses-report-2839622/ https://www.dexerto.com/tech/openai-on-verge-of-bankruptcy-h... When VCs sell their 2021-2023 bags, if the technology is still not yet economically self sustaining, it's over.
- 343rwerfd 2y ago
  Not really, China is just a step behind, in a year they will be at current US AI state-of-art, without competition, from there they'll have all the GPUs in the world to keep improving their models. Or most probably, US national interests will step in, just like it did with SpaceX, and will provide any amount of billions required to keep in the fight, at least till China steps out of the AI race. Beside the (naive?), naysayers, until the technology actually shows it is failing to keep the promise of super powerful AIs, it is a global, geopolitical race to get there (AGI/ASI), or till the point it fails (new AI winter). To make quite sure it really doesn't work, and not dropping out of the race just to see a chinese ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence), emerge a couple of years later.
  - oceanplexian 2y ago
    China isn't even close to state of the art. Take a look at the chips they put out, the Chinese repeatedly “claim” they are building chips equivalent to a 4 or 5 year old Intel chip (Which might as well be a century ago in terms of technology) until a tech YouTuber in the US actually gets their hands on one and realizes the benchmarks are completely fabricated.
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      Is there a particular video or channel you'd suggest?
- 343rwerfd 2y ago
  nor OpenAI or any of the prompt-based AI companies actually "need" the reveneu from the services they sell, the whole point of having a public (free or not), prompt facing the entire planet is just having live humans doing RLHF 24x7x365, that information, that dataset is more valuable than any symbolic amount of money anybody is willing to pay for any GPT or clone suscription. Anybody noticed already that any current or near future reveneu won't make a dench in the actual costs of running giant models, anyway, the models keep chugging along just fine. And the ("free") money keeps flowing in.
  - 343rwerfd 2y ago
    Moroever, those millions of non-paying clients prompting the models are 24x7x265 working with 100% real world problems are inputing the models with valuable prompts, generating valuable content (originated in real situations, actually distilled by unvaluable billions of human sensory input). That content can be and is used to train models, effectively cancelling the "data-wall", bit by bit, all the time.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      > That content can be and is used to train models, effectively cancelling the "data-wall", bit by bit, all the time. It really cannot.
      - CoastalCoder 2y ago
        I'm not familiar with this topic. Could you elaborate?
        jncfhnb 2y ago
        There’s so just much missing information or changing contexts. Forget any specific model. You will not become particularly good at any domain specific task by reading prompts of people asking questions. That data sucks.
borggambit 2y ago
What will kill the boom and wake people up from this mass hysteria is an outside AI economic shock. Of course, the maddness of crowds would conclude the risk here is underinvestmemt.
trescenzi 2y ago
Watching the ads during US olympics coverage and I’d say we’re right where we were in February 2022 for crypto. Every other ad is some very pricy AI ad. I think we’re likely in for a pop in maybe 6-9 months and then of course it will just slowly become normal.
tictacttoe 2y ago
I’m using AI in my daily life. ChatGPT has largely replaced Google. My programming output and ability is greatly enhanced. I’m working on projects that were impossible a few years ago. How can people say this is another hype bubble?
- oluminate 2y ago
  Because some other people are operating under the assumption that this wave of AI models will automate all labor on the planet, instead of making the average desk jockey 10-25 percent more efficient.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    A 25 percent efficiency boost to desk jockey labor is a profound impact.
    - onemoresoop 2y ago
      > A 25 percent efficiency boost to desk jockey labor is a profound impact. In terms of 25 productivity, yeah, I think that is a good thing and could be true. However, the problem is that it is sold under the pretense that you can fire a large chunk of workers and rely in large part on AI, which makes it a whole lot more attractive to investors.
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        That is precisely what you can do if your workers are 25% more efficient. Yes just a matter of recognizing it’s 25% of various job titles, not 100% of 25% of job titles Or alternatively, drastically lower the skill requirement for the job and replace your skilled workers with cheap unskilled workers
        onemoresoop 2y ago
        > That is precisely what you can do if your workers are 25% more efficient. If AI is just a tool that improves performance by 25% it changes what investors believe. It is a lot more expensive than 25% increase in productivity as investors were sold a different reality. > Or alternatively, drastically lower the skill requirement for the job and replace your skilled workers with cheap unskilled workers With the error rate of GenAI I'm curious to see how this plays out in the long run. It seems that only more skilled workers can pick up on the wrong answers.
0dayz 2y ago
I think the saddest thing with this that it shows how we humans act irrational while thinking we act rational. Investors are throwing endless amounts of money to companies with a "dead end" product (current image Gen/LLM has a hard limit on improvement and only a whole new approach will surpass it). Since the reality is that if we want real Ai we ought to invest in neuroscience and fields that can then convert to programmable logic (such as we can now create rudimentary emotions via logic gates).
- grobbyy 2y ago
  We have no idea the growth curve here. People make predictions like this, or on the other side, of singularity, but it's all just speculation. A good approach is to plan on all things, from plateau to linear growth to polynomial to exponential to singularity, as within the realm of possibility. Or to have the humility to acknowledge that we may be wrong.
  - ethagknight 2y ago
    “We have no idea the growth curve” does not merit a “no matter the price” investment model. What we do have is theory, hubris, potential, and speculation. And FOMO. Genuine question- Have any AI product marketers slapped a price tag on their services that comes remotely close to the cost of providing that service?
  - ohthatsnotright 2y ago
    There is some research toward understanding LLM limits, and it's not promising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ethagknight 2y ago
I would say once people realize that AI answers and solutions are frequently “convincing but wrong.” AI is amazing, but when I try to use it for anything technical in my field (real estate), I quickly see that it is more than eager to tell you the wrong answer. It’s like reading a consulting intern’s analysis and recommendations. I will keep trying it, but I’m not sure at what point I’ll decide to rely on it, thanks to the garbage output I’ve come across. I would guess, as with self driving, the initial sprint to 95% functionality is low hanging and requiring only a few 100 billion, but the last 5.9999% that makes it more usable than a human expert is a several more trillion dollars of spend away. That human expert only costs me $250,000/yr and I can hire him by the 6 min increment. We will get there though.
- mindslight 2y ago
  Personally, it blows my mind that there are people out there who haven't experienced LLMs writing paragraphs of polished flowing prose that are ultimately straight up wrong. Personally I only use LLMs for option/context discovery and to refine my own thinking, similar to how I'll bounce ideas off of friends. But even there they tend to get stuck on emphasizing obscure less-popular ideas. So it's more like checking with one friend who is happy to geek out on every topic, but has ended up going down some weird rabbit holes on many. Still I don't think this is going to be enough to kill the energy for it (humans are confident and wrong quite often as well). But this should be guiding how it's adopted and regulations surrounding it. For example, it shouldn't be used to make any decisions itself, rather just helping a human who is ultimately responsible for applying judgement, with their decisions necessarily rebuttable/appealable. Although given our past several decades of "computer says no" and "policy says no", I'm not so hopeful on this front.
  - ethagknight 2y ago
    It is a very interesting idea generator, in terms of kicking ideas around with friends. I think the sticking point is that, continuing with real estate, a very programmatic task I encounter is 'write a contract to purchase XYZ property at ABC address with the following requirements...' Not too different from spitting out some lines of code. An attorney does that for me, he will start with an old contract we've used in the past, and it takes his team 30 minutes to an hour, at a blended rate of $500/hr. So that starts to set an upper bound on the value of work to be performed, in one of the higher per-hour cost lines of work out there. When you really drill down on the question of "but how will it generate value," it is relegated to being an efficiency tool for many and a replacement for google search for most. The smart will get more effective and powerful with better information, the less intelligent will be running off inaccurate or old info.
JohnClark1337 2y ago
[dead]
renewiltord 2y ago
Lots of insightful comments here, just like when Facebook stock took a short down moment and we were able to explain how Mark Zuckerberg didn't get it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058
hnaccountme 2y ago
That it is a scam

20 points by viewtransform 2y ago

https://archive.vn/poI2R https://archive.vn/poI2R

https://www.dexerto.com/tech/openai-on-verge-of-bankruptcy-heading-for-5-billion-in-losses-report-2839622/ https://www.dexerto.com/tech/openai-on-verge-of-bankruptcy-h... When VCs sell their 2021-2023 bags, if the technology is still not yet economically self sustaining, it's over.

343rwerfd 2y ago
Not really, China is just a step behind, in a year they will be at current US AI state-of-art, without competition, from there they'll have all the GPUs in the world to keep improving their models. Or most probably, US national interests will step in, just like it did with SpaceX, and will provide any amount of billions required to keep in the fight, at least till China steps out of the AI race. Beside the (naive?), naysayers, until the technology actually shows it is failing to keep the promise of super powerful AIs, it is a global, geopolitical race to get there (AGI/ASI), or till the point it fails (new AI winter). To make quite sure it really doesn't work, and not dropping out of the race just to see a chinese ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence), emerge a couple of years later.
- oceanplexian 2y ago
  China isn't even close to state of the art. Take a look at the chips they put out, the Chinese repeatedly “claim” they are building chips equivalent to a 4 or 5 year old Intel chip (Which might as well be a century ago in terms of technology) until a tech YouTuber in the US actually gets their hands on one and realizes the benchmarks are completely fabricated.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    Is there a particular video or channel you'd suggest?
343rwerfd 2y ago
nor OpenAI or any of the prompt-based AI companies actually "need" the reveneu from the services they sell, the whole point of having a public (free or not), prompt facing the entire planet is just having live humans doing RLHF 24x7x365, that information, that dataset is more valuable than any symbolic amount of money anybody is willing to pay for any GPT or clone suscription. Anybody noticed already that any current or near future reveneu won't make a dench in the actual costs of running giant models, anyway, the models keep chugging along just fine. And the ("free") money keeps flowing in.
- 343rwerfd 2y ago
  Moroever, those millions of non-paying clients prompting the models are 24x7x265 working with 100% real world problems are inputing the models with valuable prompts, generating valuable content (originated in real situations, actually distilled by unvaluable billions of human sensory input). That content can be and is used to train models, effectively cancelling the "data-wall", bit by bit, all the time.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    > That content can be and is used to train models, effectively cancelling the "data-wall", bit by bit, all the time. It really cannot.
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      I'm not familiar with this topic. Could you elaborate?
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        There’s so just much missing information or changing contexts. Forget any specific model. You will not become particularly good at any domain specific task by reading prompts of people asking questions. That data sucks.

borggambit 2y ago

What will kill the boom and wake people up from this mass hysteria is an outside AI economic shock. Of course, the maddness of crowds would conclude the risk here is underinvestmemt.

trescenzi 2y ago

Watching the ads during US olympics coverage and I’d say we’re right where we were in February 2022 for crypto. Every other ad is some very pricy AI ad. I think we’re likely in for a pop in maybe 6-9 months and then of course it will just slowly become normal.

tictacttoe 2y ago

I’m using AI in my daily life. ChatGPT has largely replaced Google. My programming output and ability is greatly enhanced. I’m working on projects that were impossible a few years ago. How can people say this is another hype bubble?

oluminate 2y ago
Because some other people are operating under the assumption that this wave of AI models will automate all labor on the planet, instead of making the average desk jockey 10-25 percent more efficient.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  A 25 percent efficiency boost to desk jockey labor is a profound impact.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    > A 25 percent efficiency boost to desk jockey labor is a profound impact. In terms of 25 productivity, yeah, I think that is a good thing and could be true. However, the problem is that it is sold under the pretense that you can fire a large chunk of workers and rely in large part on AI, which makes it a whole lot more attractive to investors.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      That is precisely what you can do if your workers are 25% more efficient. Yes just a matter of recognizing it’s 25% of various job titles, not 100% of 25% of job titles Or alternatively, drastically lower the skill requirement for the job and replace your skilled workers with cheap unskilled workers
      - onemoresoop 2y ago
        > That is precisely what you can do if your workers are 25% more efficient. If AI is just a tool that improves performance by 25% it changes what investors believe. It is a lot more expensive than 25% increase in productivity as investors were sold a different reality. > Or alternatively, drastically lower the skill requirement for the job and replace your skilled workers with cheap unskilled workers With the error rate of GenAI I'm curious to see how this plays out in the long run. It seems that only more skilled workers can pick up on the wrong answers.

0dayz 2y ago

I think the saddest thing with this that it shows how we humans act irrational while thinking we act rational. Investors are throwing endless amounts of money to companies with a "dead end" product (current image Gen/LLM has a hard limit on improvement and only a whole new approach will surpass it). Since the reality is that if we want real Ai we ought to invest in neuroscience and fields that can then convert to programmable logic (such as we can now create rudimentary emotions via logic gates).

grobbyy 2y ago
We have no idea the growth curve here. People make predictions like this, or on the other side, of singularity, but it's all just speculation. A good approach is to plan on all things, from plateau to linear growth to polynomial to exponential to singularity, as within the realm of possibility. Or to have the humility to acknowledge that we may be wrong.
- ethagknight 2y ago
  “We have no idea the growth curve” does not merit a “no matter the price” investment model. What we do have is theory, hubris, potential, and speculation. And FOMO. Genuine question- Have any AI product marketers slapped a price tag on their services that comes remotely close to the cost of providing that service?
- ohthatsnotright 2y ago
  There is some research toward understanding LLM limits, and it's not promising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ethagknight 2y ago

I would say once people realize that AI answers and solutions are frequently “convincing but wrong.” AI is amazing, but when I try to use it for anything technical in my field (real estate), I quickly see that it is more than eager to tell you the wrong answer. It’s like reading a consulting intern’s analysis and recommendations. I will keep trying it, but I’m not sure at what point I’ll decide to rely on it, thanks to the garbage output I’ve come across. I would guess, as with self driving, the initial sprint to 95% functionality is low hanging and requiring only a few 100 billion, but the last 5.9999% that makes it more usable than a human expert is a several more trillion dollars of spend away. That human expert only costs me $250,000/yr and I can hire him by the 6 min increment. We will get there though.

mindslight 2y ago
Personally, it blows my mind that there are people out there who haven't experienced LLMs writing paragraphs of polished flowing prose that are ultimately straight up wrong. Personally I only use LLMs for option/context discovery and to refine my own thinking, similar to how I'll bounce ideas off of friends. But even there they tend to get stuck on emphasizing obscure less-popular ideas. So it's more like checking with one friend who is happy to geek out on every topic, but has ended up going down some weird rabbit holes on many. Still I don't think this is going to be enough to kill the energy for it (humans are confident and wrong quite often as well). But this should be guiding how it's adopted and regulations surrounding it. For example, it shouldn't be used to make any decisions itself, rather just helping a human who is ultimately responsible for applying judgement, with their decisions necessarily rebuttable/appealable. Although given our past several decades of "computer says no" and "policy says no", I'm not so hopeful on this front.
- ethagknight 2y ago
  It is a very interesting idea generator, in terms of kicking ideas around with friends. I think the sticking point is that, continuing with real estate, a very programmatic task I encounter is 'write a contract to purchase XYZ property at ABC address with the following requirements...' Not too different from spitting out some lines of code. An attorney does that for me, he will start with an old contract we've used in the past, and it takes his team 30 minutes to an hour, at a blended rate of $500/hr. So that starts to set an upper bound on the value of work to be performed, in one of the higher per-hour cost lines of work out there. When you really drill down on the question of "but how will it generate value," it is relegated to being an efficiency tool for many and a replacement for google search for most. The smart will get more effective and powerful with better information, the less intelligent will be running off inaccurate or old info.

JohnClark1337 2y ago

[dead]

renewiltord 2y ago

Lots of insightful comments here, just like when Facebook stock took a short down moment and we were able to explain how Mark Zuckerberg didn't get it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18450058

hnaccountme 2y ago

That it is a scam