9 ms·

This should really be retitled to “The AI investment bubble is losing hype.” LLMs as they exist today will slowly work their way into new products and use cases

This should really be retitled to “The AI investment bubble is losing hype.” LLMs as they exist today will slowly work their way into new products and use cases. They are an important new capability and one that will change how we do certain tasks. But as to the hype, we are in a brief pause before the election where no company wants to release anything that would hit the news cycle in a bad way and cause knee-jerk legislation. Are there new architectures and capabilities waiting? Likely some. Sora showed state of the art video generation, OpenAI has demoed an impressive voice mode, and Anthropic has teased that Opus 3.5 will be even more capable. OpenAI also clearly has some gas in the tank as they have focused on releasing small models such as GPT-4o and 4o mini. And many have been musing about agents and methods to improve system 2 like reasoning. So while there’s a soft moratorium on showing scary new capability there is still evidence of progress being made behind-the-scenes. But what will a state of the art model look like when all of these techniques have been scaled up on brand new exascale data centers? It might not be AGI, but I think it will at least be enough for the next hype Investment bubble.

dubcanada 2y ago
So you’re suggesting all innovation/new functionality releases are paused because US has elections coming up? I find that hard to believe.
- greg_V 2y ago
  "no no, it's not that the technology has reached it's current limits and these companies are bleeding money, they're just withholding their newest releases not to spook the normies!"
  - throwaway4aday 2y ago
    Here's an experiment you can try, go to https://www.udio.com/home https://www.udio.com/home and grab a free account which comes with more than enough credits to do this. Use a free chat LLM like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or ChatGPT 4o to workshop some lyrics that you like, just try a few generations and ask it to rewrite parts you don't like until you have something that you don't find too cringe. Then go back over to Udio, go to the create tab turn on the Manual Mode toggle and type in only 3 or 4 comma separated tags that describe the genre you like keep them very basic like Progressive Rock, Hip Hop, 1995, Male Vocalist or whatever you don't need to combine genres these are just examples of tags. Then under the Lyrics section choose Custom and paste in just the chorus or a single verse from the lyrics you generated and then click Create. It'll create two samples for you to listen to, if you don't like either of them then just click Create again to get another two but normally it doesn't take too many tries to get something that sounds pretty good. After you have one you like then click on the ... menu next to the song title and click Extend, you can add sections before or after and you just have to add the corresponding verse from the lyrics you generated or choose Instrumental if you want a guitar solo or something. You'll wind up with something pretty good if you really listen to each sample and choose the best one. Music generation is one of the easiest ways to "spook the normies" since most people are completely unaware of the current SOTA. Anyone with a good ear and access to these tools can create a listenable song that sounds like it's been professionally produced. Anyone with a good ear and competence with a DAW and these tools can produce a high quality song. Someone who is already a professional can create incredible results in a fraction of the time it would normally take with zero budget. One of the main limitations of generative AI at the moment is the interface, Udio's could certainly be improved but I think they have something good here with the extend feature allowing you to steer the creation. Developing the key UI features that allow you to control the inputs to generative models is an area where huge advancements can be made that can dramatically improve the quality of the generated output. We've only just scratched the surface here and even if the technology has reached its current limits, which I strongly believe it hasn't since there are a lot of things that have been shown to work but haven't been productized yet, we could still see steady month over month improvements based on better tooling built around them alone. Text generation has gone from markov chain babblers to indistinguishable from human written. Image generation has gone from acid trip uncanny valley to photorealistic. Audio generation has gone from 1930's AM radio quality to crystal clear. Video generation is currently in fugue dream state but is rapidly improving. 3D is early stages. ???? is next but I'm guessing it'll be things like CAD STL models, electronic circuits, and other physics based modelling outputs. The ride's not over yet.
    - dragandj 2y ago
      I've tried Udio when it appeared, and, while it is spectacularly fascinating from the technical perspective, and can even generate songs that "sound" OK, it is still as cringe as cringe can be. Do you have an example of any song that gained any traction among human audience? Not a Billboard hit, just something that people outside the techbubble accepted as a good song?
      - throwaway4aday 2y ago
        Have you tried the latest model? It's night and day. Edit: There's obviously still skill involved in creating a good song, it's not like you can just click one button and get a perfect hit. I outlined the simplest process in my first comment and specifically said you could create a "listenable" song, it's not going to be great but it probably rivals some of the slop you often hear on the radio. If you're a skilled music producer you can absolutely create something good especially now with access to the stemmed components of the songs. It's going to be a half manual process where you first generate enough to capture the feeling of the song and then download and make edits or add samples, upload and extend or remix and repeat. If you're looking for links and don't care to peruse the trending section they have several samples on the announcement page https://www.udio.com/blog/introducing-v1-5 https://www.udio.com/blog/introducing-v1-5
      - jononor 2y ago
        I think the frontpage/recommended on Udio and Suno both have some decent music these days. By decent I mean on the level one could expect from say browsing music on say YouTube in areas one is not familiar with. There is of course a lot of meme/joke content, but also some pleasant/interesting sounding songs. The really good stuff probably will not be marked as med with AI - and probably will also go via a DAW and proper mastering.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      The ride to what? The place where human musicians can't earn a living because they can't live on less than what it costs to have an AI regurgitate the melodic patterns, chord progressions, and other music theory it has learned? This benefits who, exactly? It's a race to the bottom. Who is going to pay anything for music that can be generated basically for free? Who is going to go to a concert or festival to listen to a computer? Who is going to buy merchandise? Are the hardware, models, and algorithms used going to capture the public interest like the personalities and abilities of the musicians in a band? Will anyone be a "fan" of this kind of music? Will there be an AI Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Prince, or Taylor Swift?
- futureshock 2y ago
  Yes, I do think it’s plausible. You’re talking Microsoft and Google. Two companies with extremely close ties to the US government. And Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic. It doesn’t take a conspiracy if the folks with majority stake in these companies are all friends and handshake agree over a steak dinner just off Capitol Hill. We live in a world where price fixing is a regular occurrence, and this is not so different. I think we will see a very nice boost in capability within 6 months of the election. I don’t personally believe all the apocalyptic AGI predictions, but I do think that AI will continue to feed a nice growth curve in IT investment and productivity growth, similar to the last few decades of IT investment.
- consf 2y ago
  [dead]
IAmGraydon 2y ago
I think we found the guy with NVDA calls.
DiscourseFan 2y ago
We’ll see, but I doubt its because of the election; as another commenter said companies can’t afford to lose that much money by waiting around for months for the right “moment” to release a product. GPT-4o is good, I’ll grant you that, but its fundenmentally the same tech as GPT3.5 and the fundenmental problem, “hallucination,” is not solved, even if there are more capabilities. No matter what, for anything besides code that may or may not be any good, someone has to go through and read the response and make sure its all tight so they don’t fuck up or embarass themselves (and even then, using AI for coding will introduce long term problems since you’ll have to go back through it for debugging anyway). We all, within a month of ChatGPT getting introduced, caught it in a contradiction or just plain error about some topic of specialist knowledge, and realized that its level of expertise on all topics was at that same level. Sam Altman royallly fucked up when he started believing his own bullshit, thinking AGI was on the horizon and all we needed was to waste more resources on compute time and datacenters. Its done, you can’t make another LLM, all knowledge from here on out is corrupted by them, you can never deliver an epistemic “update.” GPT will become a relic of the 21st century, like a magazine from the 1950s.
- cdelsolar 2y ago
  I don’t think you’ve used LLMs enough. They are revolutionary, every day. As a coder I’m several times more productive than I was before, especially when trying to learn some new library or language.
  - dax_ 2y ago
    Do you perhaps have some resources on how you use AI assistants for coding (I'm assuming Github Copilot). I've been trying it for the past months, and frankly, it's barely helping me at all. 95% of the time the suggestions are just noise. Maybe as a fast typer it's less useful, I just wonder why my experience is so different than what others are saying. So maybe it's because I'm not using it right?
    - kybernetyk 2y ago
      My experience is similar. Most of the results are not really useful so I have to put work in to fix them. But at that point I can do the small extra step of doing it completely myself.
nottorp 2y ago
> But as to the hype, we are in a brief pause before the election where no company wants to release anything that would hit the news cycle in a bad way and cause knee-jerk legislation. The knee-jerk legislation has mostly been caused by Altman's statements though. So I wouldn't call it knee-jerk, but an attempt by OpenAI to get a legally granted monopoly.
- futureshock 2y ago
  They are definitely working on that, but it needs to be the right kind of knee-jerk legislation, something that gives them regulatory capture. They can’t afford to lose control of the narrative and end up regulated to death.
  - hobs 2y ago
    Given enough money the united states government will capitulate to anyone; hell they didn't even finish prosecuting Scientology.
jajko 2y ago
Nope. I couldn't care less about some elections (I care about global consequences, but no point wasting time & energy now, when it comes it comes). Thats US theater to focus population on that freak show you guys made out of election process, rather than on actually important stuff and concrete policies or actions. What people, including me, are massively fed up is all the companies (I mean ALL) jumping on AI bandwagon in a beautiful show of how FOMO works and how even CEOs/shareholders are not immune to basic instincts. Literal hammer looking desperately for nails. Very few companies have amazing or potentially amazing products, rest not so much. I absolutely don't want every effin' thing infused with some AI, since it will be used to 1) monitor my usage or me directly for advertising / credit & insurance scoring purposes, absolutely 0 doubt there; and 2) it may stop working once wifi is down, product is deprecated or company changes its policy (Sonos anyone?). Internet of Things hate v2.0. I hate this primitive AI fashion wave, negative added value in most cases, 0 in the rest, yet users have to foot the bill. Seeing some minor industry crash due to unfulfilled expectations is just logical in such case.
- salemh 2y ago
  [dead]
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
"there’s a soft moratorium on showing scary new capability" Yes. There is also the Hype of the "End of the Hype Cycle". There is Hype that the Hype is ending. When really, there is something amazing being released weekly. People are so desensitized that just because we don't have androids walking the streets or suddenly have Blade Runner like space colonies staffed with robots, that somehow AI is over.
consf 2y ago
[dead]
jgalt212 2y ago
> The AI investment bubble is losing hype I disagree. Palantir is trading at 200X earnings.

dubcanada 2y ago

So you’re suggesting all innovation/new functionality releases are paused because US has elections coming up? I find that hard to believe.

greg_V 2y ago
"no no, it's not that the technology has reached it's current limits and these companies are bleeding money, they're just withholding their newest releases not to spook the normies!"
- throwaway4aday 2y ago
  Here's an experiment you can try, go to https://www.udio.com/home https://www.udio.com/home and grab a free account which comes with more than enough credits to do this. Use a free chat LLM like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or ChatGPT 4o to workshop some lyrics that you like, just try a few generations and ask it to rewrite parts you don't like until you have something that you don't find too cringe. Then go back over to Udio, go to the create tab turn on the Manual Mode toggle and type in only 3 or 4 comma separated tags that describe the genre you like keep them very basic like Progressive Rock, Hip Hop, 1995, Male Vocalist or whatever you don't need to combine genres these are just examples of tags. Then under the Lyrics section choose Custom and paste in just the chorus or a single verse from the lyrics you generated and then click Create. It'll create two samples for you to listen to, if you don't like either of them then just click Create again to get another two but normally it doesn't take too many tries to get something that sounds pretty good. After you have one you like then click on the ... menu next to the song title and click Extend, you can add sections before or after and you just have to add the corresponding verse from the lyrics you generated or choose Instrumental if you want a guitar solo or something. You'll wind up with something pretty good if you really listen to each sample and choose the best one. Music generation is one of the easiest ways to "spook the normies" since most people are completely unaware of the current SOTA. Anyone with a good ear and access to these tools can create a listenable song that sounds like it's been professionally produced. Anyone with a good ear and competence with a DAW and these tools can produce a high quality song. Someone who is already a professional can create incredible results in a fraction of the time it would normally take with zero budget. One of the main limitations of generative AI at the moment is the interface, Udio's could certainly be improved but I think they have something good here with the extend feature allowing you to steer the creation. Developing the key UI features that allow you to control the inputs to generative models is an area where huge advancements can be made that can dramatically improve the quality of the generated output. We've only just scratched the surface here and even if the technology has reached its current limits, which I strongly believe it hasn't since there are a lot of things that have been shown to work but haven't been productized yet, we could still see steady month over month improvements based on better tooling built around them alone. Text generation has gone from markov chain babblers to indistinguishable from human written. Image generation has gone from acid trip uncanny valley to photorealistic. Audio generation has gone from 1930's AM radio quality to crystal clear. Video generation is currently in fugue dream state but is rapidly improving. 3D is early stages. ???? is next but I'm guessing it'll be things like CAD STL models, electronic circuits, and other physics based modelling outputs. The ride's not over yet.
  - dragandj 2y ago
    I've tried Udio when it appeared, and, while it is spectacularly fascinating from the technical perspective, and can even generate songs that "sound" OK, it is still as cringe as cringe can be. Do you have an example of any song that gained any traction among human audience? Not a Billboard hit, just something that people outside the techbubble accepted as a good song?
    - throwaway4aday 2y ago
      Have you tried the latest model? It's night and day. Edit: There's obviously still skill involved in creating a good song, it's not like you can just click one button and get a perfect hit. I outlined the simplest process in my first comment and specifically said you could create a "listenable" song, it's not going to be great but it probably rivals some of the slop you often hear on the radio. If you're a skilled music producer you can absolutely create something good especially now with access to the stemmed components of the songs. It's going to be a half manual process where you first generate enough to capture the feeling of the song and then download and make edits or add samples, upload and extend or remix and repeat. If you're looking for links and don't care to peruse the trending section they have several samples on the announcement page https://www.udio.com/blog/introducing-v1-5 https://www.udio.com/blog/introducing-v1-5
    - jononor 2y ago
      I think the frontpage/recommended on Udio and Suno both have some decent music these days. By decent I mean on the level one could expect from say browsing music on say YouTube in areas one is not familiar with. There is of course a lot of meme/joke content, but also some pleasant/interesting sounding songs. The really good stuff probably will not be marked as med with AI - and probably will also go via a DAW and proper mastering.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    The ride to what? The place where human musicians can't earn a living because they can't live on less than what it costs to have an AI regurgitate the melodic patterns, chord progressions, and other music theory it has learned? This benefits who, exactly? It's a race to the bottom. Who is going to pay anything for music that can be generated basically for free? Who is going to go to a concert or festival to listen to a computer? Who is going to buy merchandise? Are the hardware, models, and algorithms used going to capture the public interest like the personalities and abilities of the musicians in a band? Will anyone be a "fan" of this kind of music? Will there be an AI Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Prince, or Taylor Swift?
futureshock 2y ago
Yes, I do think it’s plausible. You’re talking Microsoft and Google. Two companies with extremely close ties to the US government. And Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic. It doesn’t take a conspiracy if the folks with majority stake in these companies are all friends and handshake agree over a steak dinner just off Capitol Hill. We live in a world where price fixing is a regular occurrence, and this is not so different. I think we will see a very nice boost in capability within 6 months of the election. I don’t personally believe all the apocalyptic AGI predictions, but I do think that AI will continue to feed a nice growth curve in IT investment and productivity growth, similar to the last few decades of IT investment.
consf 2y ago
[dead]

IAmGraydon 2y ago

I think we found the guy with NVDA calls.

DiscourseFan 2y ago

We’ll see, but I doubt its because of the election; as another commenter said companies can’t afford to lose that much money by waiting around for months for the right “moment” to release a product. GPT-4o is good, I’ll grant you that, but its fundenmentally the same tech as GPT3.5 and the fundenmental problem, “hallucination,” is not solved, even if there are more capabilities. No matter what, for anything besides code that may or may not be any good, someone has to go through and read the response and make sure its all tight so they don’t fuck up or embarass themselves (and even then, using AI for coding will introduce long term problems since you’ll have to go back through it for debugging anyway). We all, within a month of ChatGPT getting introduced, caught it in a contradiction or just plain error about some topic of specialist knowledge, and realized that its level of expertise on all topics was at that same level. Sam Altman royallly fucked up when he started believing his own bullshit, thinking AGI was on the horizon and all we needed was to waste more resources on compute time and datacenters. Its done, you can’t make another LLM, all knowledge from here on out is corrupted by them, you can never deliver an epistemic “update.” GPT will become a relic of the 21st century, like a magazine from the 1950s.

cdelsolar 2y ago
I don’t think you’ve used LLMs enough. They are revolutionary, every day. As a coder I’m several times more productive than I was before, especially when trying to learn some new library or language.
- dax_ 2y ago
  Do you perhaps have some resources on how you use AI assistants for coding (I'm assuming Github Copilot). I've been trying it for the past months, and frankly, it's barely helping me at all. 95% of the time the suggestions are just noise. Maybe as a fast typer it's less useful, I just wonder why my experience is so different than what others are saying. So maybe it's because I'm not using it right?
  - kybernetyk 2y ago
    My experience is similar. Most of the results are not really useful so I have to put work in to fix them. But at that point I can do the small extra step of doing it completely myself.

nottorp 2y ago

> But as to the hype, we are in a brief pause before the election where no company wants to release anything that would hit the news cycle in a bad way and cause knee-jerk legislation. The knee-jerk legislation has mostly been caused by Altman's statements though. So I wouldn't call it knee-jerk, but an attempt by OpenAI to get a legally granted monopoly.

futureshock 2y ago
They are definitely working on that, but it needs to be the right kind of knee-jerk legislation, something that gives them regulatory capture. They can’t afford to lose control of the narrative and end up regulated to death.
- hobs 2y ago
  Given enough money the united states government will capitulate to anyone; hell they didn't even finish prosecuting Scientology.

jajko 2y ago

Nope. I couldn't care less about some elections (I care about global consequences, but no point wasting time & energy now, when it comes it comes). Thats US theater to focus population on that freak show you guys made out of election process, rather than on actually important stuff and concrete policies or actions. What people, including me, are massively fed up is all the companies (I mean ALL) jumping on AI bandwagon in a beautiful show of how FOMO works and how even CEOs/shareholders are not immune to basic instincts. Literal hammer looking desperately for nails. Very few companies have amazing or potentially amazing products, rest not so much. I absolutely don't want every effin' thing infused with some AI, since it will be used to 1) monitor my usage or me directly for advertising / credit & insurance scoring purposes, absolutely 0 doubt there; and 2) it may stop working once wifi is down, product is deprecated or company changes its policy (Sonos anyone?). Internet of Things hate v2.0. I hate this primitive AI fashion wave, negative added value in most cases, 0 in the rest, yet users have to foot the bill. Seeing some minor industry crash due to unfulfilled expectations is just logical in such case.

salemh 2y ago
[dead]

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

"there’s a soft moratorium on showing scary new capability" Yes. There is also the Hype of the "End of the Hype Cycle". There is Hype that the Hype is ending. When really, there is something amazing being released weekly. People are so desensitized that just because we don't have androids walking the streets or suddenly have Blade Runner like space colonies staffed with robots, that somehow AI is over.

consf 2y ago

[dead]

jgalt212 2y ago

> The AI investment bubble is losing hype I disagree. Palantir is trading at 200X earnings.