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great thing about collapse of LLM hype is that I no longer have FOMO as a software engineer.

by apwell23 2y ago

ibash 2y ago
Which means now’s the time to learn and build.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
Media collapse != collapse. Most people working on these things are about as bullish as ever.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Most people working on these things are still riding a wave of investor funding. The investor hype wave lags the media hype wave. We'll see how bullish they are once that wave crests and we hit AI Winter #3 (or however many waves you want to count [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    People building things and who understand LLMs actually believe in it. The people who believe because of investors and media aren't in that bucket. Re winter - there is a difference this time - a hugely useful product (ChatGPT + gpt4 apis) doing billions of revenue. And it's almost all inference revenue.
    - lispisok 2y ago
      >People building things and who understand LLMs actually believe in it. You can say the same thing about blockchain
      - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
        touche.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      I would suggest that the Venn diagram for "people building things" and "people who understand LLMs" is worth contemplating here. ChatGPT is certainly interesting, and some people are paying for it, but I think a) it's not clear how much of that use is also driven by hype, b) of the non-hype use, it's not clear how much will be sustained over the long term, and c) of that long-term use, it's not clear how much is actually of net benefit to society. Regarding A, an interesting parallel is blockchain hype. There were a zillion blockchain projects, from startups to enterprise efforts. I can't quickly find a reliable number for how much money product vendors, service vendors, and consulting companies took in, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was in the low billions at peak, to say nothing of all the investor and in-house money spent on staff and whatnot. And as far as I know, no non-cryptocurrency success was ever demonstrated. So we can't just suggest that revenue means something will last. Regarding B, it's a very volatile landscape both in terms of technology and in terms of market. E.g., for a hot minute, everybody loved lively AI generated images as stock photo replacement, but that fad is already past. People are getting a better sense for machine-generated text, too. I know of one company that fired their contract development shop because they kept getting machine-generated communications from the people they were paying to do actual work. Or we could look at Alexa and her kin as an example of something where despite initial excitement, it turns out people just don't care much. Same for VR; since the 1990s the technology keeps getting better and it keeps being a small niche. And we haven't even gotten to how competition and technological improvement will change (or perhaps eliminate) the margins here. And regarding C, a number of the uses people are paying for are things that are not making the world better. Academic cheating, for example, may be to the advantage of a student who just wants a credential, but it burns a lot of money and makes the world worse. The same applies for people in companies who want to give the appearance of work. Then we have things like spam and influence operations. Over the long term, parasites tend to get squished, however much they can flourish temporarily when they learn a new trick. So that's another slice of AI revenue that can't be counted on. And I should add that belief among the technically literate has so far been negatively correlated with there not being a winter. In this talk, iRobot founder and noted robot scientist takes a look at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgrzEHJTPPM#t=36m55s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgrzEHJTPPM#t=36m55s In particular, I set the timestamp to his list of AI hype cycles he had seen, 25 of them. Those all had people who understood the technology and believed in it. Maybe it's different this time, but that's what people say in every hype cycle.
- apwell23 2y ago
  not sure what media collapse is.

great thing about collapse of LLM hype is that I no longer have FOMO as a software engineer.

ibash 2y ago

Which means now’s the time to learn and build.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

Media collapse != collapse. Most people working on these things are about as bullish as ever.

wpietri 2y ago
Most people working on these things are still riding a wave of investor funding. The investor hype wave lags the media hype wave. We'll see how bullish they are once that wave crests and we hit AI Winter #3 (or however many waves you want to count [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  People building things and who understand LLMs actually believe in it. The people who believe because of investors and media aren't in that bucket. Re winter - there is a difference this time - a hugely useful product (ChatGPT + gpt4 apis) doing billions of revenue. And it's almost all inference revenue.
  - lispisok 2y ago
    >People building things and who understand LLMs actually believe in it. You can say the same thing about blockchain
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      touche.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    I would suggest that the Venn diagram for "people building things" and "people who understand LLMs" is worth contemplating here. ChatGPT is certainly interesting, and some people are paying for it, but I think a) it's not clear how much of that use is also driven by hype, b) of the non-hype use, it's not clear how much will be sustained over the long term, and c) of that long-term use, it's not clear how much is actually of net benefit to society. Regarding A, an interesting parallel is blockchain hype. There were a zillion blockchain projects, from startups to enterprise efforts. I can't quickly find a reliable number for how much money product vendors, service vendors, and consulting companies took in, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was in the low billions at peak, to say nothing of all the investor and in-house money spent on staff and whatnot. And as far as I know, no non-cryptocurrency success was ever demonstrated. So we can't just suggest that revenue means something will last. Regarding B, it's a very volatile landscape both in terms of technology and in terms of market. E.g., for a hot minute, everybody loved lively AI generated images as stock photo replacement, but that fad is already past. People are getting a better sense for machine-generated text, too. I know of one company that fired their contract development shop because they kept getting machine-generated communications from the people they were paying to do actual work. Or we could look at Alexa and her kin as an example of something where despite initial excitement, it turns out people just don't care much. Same for VR; since the 1990s the technology keeps getting better and it keeps being a small niche. And we haven't even gotten to how competition and technological improvement will change (or perhaps eliminate) the margins here. And regarding C, a number of the uses people are paying for are things that are not making the world better. Academic cheating, for example, may be to the advantage of a student who just wants a credential, but it burns a lot of money and makes the world worse. The same applies for people in companies who want to give the appearance of work. Then we have things like spam and influence operations. Over the long term, parasites tend to get squished, however much they can flourish temporarily when they learn a new trick. So that's another slice of AI revenue that can't be counted on. And I should add that belief among the technically literate has so far been negatively correlated with there not being a winter. In this talk, iRobot founder and noted robot scientist takes a look at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgrzEHJTPPM#t=36m55s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgrzEHJTPPM#t=36m55s In particular, I set the timestamp to his list of AI hype cycles he had seen, 25 of them. Those all had people who understood the technology and believed in it. Maybe it's different this time, but that's what people say in every hype cycle.
apwell23 2y ago
not sure what media collapse is.