4 ms·

I don't know about "Winter". The original "AI Winter" was near-total devastation. But it's probably reasonable to think that after the hype train of the last ye

by jerf 2y ago

I don't know about "Winter". The original "AI Winter" was near-total devastation. But it's probably reasonable to think that after the hype train of the last year or two we're due to be headed into the Trough of Disillusionment for LLM-based AI technologies on the standard Gartner hype cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

mewpmewp2 2y ago
Maybe, but modern AI, I find already immensely useful in a lot of ways and I see things constantly improving. E.g. realistic video generation, music generation, OpenAI advanced voice mode - it's still wild to me how good these are and how well LLMs can perform. I still remember even when seeing GPT3.5 I thought it must be impossible what it can do and that there must be some sort of trickery involved, but no. I feel like I'm still impressed and amazed daily what AI can do now.
- player1234 2y ago
  Infinite content produced by AI has close to no value.
- foogazi 2y ago
  It’s can’t be economically sustainable if this is it right ?
- jerf 2y ago
  Note the "trough of disillusionment" does not drop to 0. It is also a measure of hype, not utility. The current crop of AI tools have their uses and they aren't going away. However, the hype was basically built on the principle of "YOU CAN JUST WAVE AI AT ANYTHING AND REMOVE ALL THE PEOPLE!!!1!", without any need to think about how the AI will be useful, or think about how it will fail, or, you know, doing any of the usual engineering that new technologies inevitably need. You won't need to! The AI will just engineer itself! This is, of course, bunk.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    I am wondering if people are part of many different environments? I haven't witnessed this kind of hype except for few cherry picked maybe even out of the context statements. Where do people actually notice all of the hype? Because what I'm noticing more is people complaining about the AI hype than the hype itself. Since the beginning, basically. I'm not from the US so maybe I'm not exposed to those things, since when I did travel to SF some time ago I did see a lot of weird banners, so is this the hype that people are talking about? I do see people talking about the future and what AI could mean for the future, that it could replace X and Y with many different opinions with many different provided timelines, but I think that's all still plausible to happen. Do companies heavily invest in AI? Do they talk a lot about AI in their earnings release? Do they try to put AI into a lot of products? For sure - but I think that's a very reasonable thing to do when a new technology like this arises. It does have promise, we don't know exactly how much yet, but if we don't try it out, we won't find out either. You should try it out and see where it works and where it doesn't. Given the seeming promise of this, I think current investments in it are very, very reasonable. It could fail and plateau, but given where it is right now and how much it has evolved in the past years, I think it makes sense to invest that much in it. Despite seeing amazing things everyday that I wonder how they are possible, which I never would've thought 5 years ago would be possible now, there's people writing articles on how AI hype is dying out, how the AI winter is coming, which seems crazy to me. It's only been few years with amazing advancements. It's the time when tech has evolved with a pace never seen before and people are claiming that things are slowing down?
    - jerf 2y ago
      Well, one of the measures is, is anybody actually making money with this AI yet, in the sense of mining gold and not selling shovels? The answer is, it's fairly hard to find a solid yes. The ad companies claim it's contributing to revenue, but a lot of them have a lot of reason to keep the bubble going and aren't going to say anything else anyhow, and it's hard to establish what is contributing to what in the ad space anyhow. It's been put in a lot of things, but it is not at all clear that it is contributing money, as opposed to being in things that were loss leaders anyhow. How, exactly, does an AI assistant on Amazon's shopping site "make money"? It's an intrisically fuzzy question under the best of circumstances. Evidence that it has helped programmers is decidedly mixed at best. For everyone saying it has given them superpowers we have an awful lot of reports of buggy generated code and more bugs making it into final code as a result. You might say "it's not all about the money", which is true, but again, this is about hype, not social utility. I don't see AI living up to the hype. All the moneymakers are the shovel-sellers. If AI was living up to the hype, somebody ought to be making money by now. Part of the reason it has not lived up to the hype is the sky-high bar the hype has set. The stock market bubble is not pricing companies like nVidia to make some decent money on AI over the next few years. It's priced like they're going to be the only company that can do AI and that everyone has not yet begun to spend on AI. But if returns don't start coming back on the AI spend, that valuation is going to prove to be premature. It can help to look back at a previous example of this exuberance to see what I'm talking about: The Dot-Com boom. The reality is, basically everything that the Dot Com boom promised happened! Even the thing people mocked for years, "selling pet food online", happens now. But it happened 20 years later. Far too late for a company founded in 1998 that absolutely depended on having 2020-levels of internet infrastructure. AI isn't going to disappear and we may even be underestimating the change it will bring in the long term. But that doesn't mean that the curve is going to smoothly slope up over the next 50 years. These things often get out "over their skis". AI seems badly over its skis to me, not because it won't be as useful in 20 years as it is promised, but because it is not as useful right now as is promised.
contravariant 2y ago
Honestly I think we're already there, it just takes a bit before the realisation trickles down. The successful uses of LLMs don't seem to depart too far from the basic chatbot that started the whole hype. And the truly 'magic' uses seem to fail in practice because even a small error rate is way too high for a system that cannot learn from its mistakes (quickly).
- GaggiX 2y ago
  >don't seem to depart too far from the basic chatbot that started the whole hype. Is ChatGPT-3.5 a basic chatbot now? It's been less than two years since it was SOTA.
urbandw311er 2y ago
Nicely put
brotchie 2y ago
Feels different to past hype cycles (Internet bubble, Crypto bubble). LLMs with meaningful capabilities arrive very quickly. e.g. One week they were not that useful, the next week they gained meaningful capabilities. A function that takes text and returns text isn't that useful without it being integrated into products, and this takes time. Next 12-24 months will be the AIfication of many workflows: that is, discovering and integrating LLM-based reasoning into business processes. Assuming even a gradual improvement in capabilities of LLMs over time, all of these AI enhanced business processes will simply get better. Diffusion of technology is slow slow slow, and then fast. As I become more capable with AI (e.g. what tasks as an engineer are helped using AI) I'm getting better and better at it. So there's a non-linear learning curve where, as you learn to use the technology better, you can unlock more productivity.
- vrighter 2y ago
  the aiification of products to me sounds like being made both less reliable and less predictable. Not a good thing

by jerf 2y ago

mewpmewp2 2y ago

Maybe, but modern AI, I find already immensely useful in a lot of ways and I see things constantly improving. E.g. realistic video generation, music generation, OpenAI advanced voice mode - it's still wild to me how good these are and how well LLMs can perform. I still remember even when seeing GPT3.5 I thought it must be impossible what it can do and that there must be some sort of trickery involved, but no. I feel like I'm still impressed and amazed daily what AI can do now.

player1234 2y ago
Infinite content produced by AI has close to no value.
foogazi 2y ago
It’s can’t be economically sustainable if this is it right ?
jerf 2y ago
Note the "trough of disillusionment" does not drop to 0. It is also a measure of hype, not utility. The current crop of AI tools have their uses and they aren't going away. However, the hype was basically built on the principle of "YOU CAN JUST WAVE AI AT ANYTHING AND REMOVE ALL THE PEOPLE!!!1!", without any need to think about how the AI will be useful, or think about how it will fail, or, you know, doing any of the usual engineering that new technologies inevitably need. You won't need to! The AI will just engineer itself! This is, of course, bunk.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  I am wondering if people are part of many different environments? I haven't witnessed this kind of hype except for few cherry picked maybe even out of the context statements. Where do people actually notice all of the hype? Because what I'm noticing more is people complaining about the AI hype than the hype itself. Since the beginning, basically. I'm not from the US so maybe I'm not exposed to those things, since when I did travel to SF some time ago I did see a lot of weird banners, so is this the hype that people are talking about? I do see people talking about the future and what AI could mean for the future, that it could replace X and Y with many different opinions with many different provided timelines, but I think that's all still plausible to happen. Do companies heavily invest in AI? Do they talk a lot about AI in their earnings release? Do they try to put AI into a lot of products? For sure - but I think that's a very reasonable thing to do when a new technology like this arises. It does have promise, we don't know exactly how much yet, but if we don't try it out, we won't find out either. You should try it out and see where it works and where it doesn't. Given the seeming promise of this, I think current investments in it are very, very reasonable. It could fail and plateau, but given where it is right now and how much it has evolved in the past years, I think it makes sense to invest that much in it. Despite seeing amazing things everyday that I wonder how they are possible, which I never would've thought 5 years ago would be possible now, there's people writing articles on how AI hype is dying out, how the AI winter is coming, which seems crazy to me. It's only been few years with amazing advancements. It's the time when tech has evolved with a pace never seen before and people are claiming that things are slowing down?
  - jerf 2y ago
    Well, one of the measures is, is anybody actually making money with this AI yet, in the sense of mining gold and not selling shovels? The answer is, it's fairly hard to find a solid yes. The ad companies claim it's contributing to revenue, but a lot of them have a lot of reason to keep the bubble going and aren't going to say anything else anyhow, and it's hard to establish what is contributing to what in the ad space anyhow. It's been put in a lot of things, but it is not at all clear that it is contributing money, as opposed to being in things that were loss leaders anyhow. How, exactly, does an AI assistant on Amazon's shopping site "make money"? It's an intrisically fuzzy question under the best of circumstances. Evidence that it has helped programmers is decidedly mixed at best. For everyone saying it has given them superpowers we have an awful lot of reports of buggy generated code and more bugs making it into final code as a result. You might say "it's not all about the money", which is true, but again, this is about hype, not social utility. I don't see AI living up to the hype. All the moneymakers are the shovel-sellers. If AI was living up to the hype, somebody ought to be making money by now. Part of the reason it has not lived up to the hype is the sky-high bar the hype has set. The stock market bubble is not pricing companies like nVidia to make some decent money on AI over the next few years. It's priced like they're going to be the only company that can do AI and that everyone has not yet begun to spend on AI. But if returns don't start coming back on the AI spend, that valuation is going to prove to be premature. It can help to look back at a previous example of this exuberance to see what I'm talking about: The Dot-Com boom. The reality is, basically everything that the Dot Com boom promised happened! Even the thing people mocked for years, "selling pet food online", happens now. But it happened 20 years later. Far too late for a company founded in 1998 that absolutely depended on having 2020-levels of internet infrastructure. AI isn't going to disappear and we may even be underestimating the change it will bring in the long term. But that doesn't mean that the curve is going to smoothly slope up over the next 50 years. These things often get out "over their skis". AI seems badly over its skis to me, not because it won't be as useful in 20 years as it is promised, but because it is not as useful right now as is promised.

contravariant 2y ago

Honestly I think we're already there, it just takes a bit before the realisation trickles down. The successful uses of LLMs don't seem to depart too far from the basic chatbot that started the whole hype. And the truly 'magic' uses seem to fail in practice because even a small error rate is way too high for a system that cannot learn from its mistakes (quickly).

GaggiX 2y ago
>don't seem to depart too far from the basic chatbot that started the whole hype. Is ChatGPT-3.5 a basic chatbot now? It's been less than two years since it was SOTA.

urbandw311er 2y ago

Nicely put

brotchie 2y ago

Feels different to past hype cycles (Internet bubble, Crypto bubble). LLMs with meaningful capabilities arrive very quickly. e.g. One week they were not that useful, the next week they gained meaningful capabilities. A function that takes text and returns text isn't that useful without it being integrated into products, and this takes time. Next 12-24 months will be the AIfication of many workflows: that is, discovering and integrating LLM-based reasoning into business processes. Assuming even a gradual improvement in capabilities of LLMs over time, all of these AI enhanced business processes will simply get better. Diffusion of technology is slow slow slow, and then fast. As I become more capable with AI (e.g. what tasks as an engineer are helped using AI) I'm getting better and better at it. So there's a non-linear learning curve where, as you learn to use the technology better, you can unlock more productivity.

vrighter 2y ago
the aiification of products to me sounds like being made both less reliable and less predictable. Not a good thing