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There seems to be a consensus that we haven't yet seen the killer AI app that produces ROI that justifies the level of investment we're seeing. If that's true,

There seems to be a consensus that we haven't yet seen the killer AI app that produces ROI that justifies the level of investment we're seeing. If that's true, then it's all still up for grabs. My own view is that what AI is going after i.e. the size of the pie, is the $50 trillion per year portion of global GDP that makes up wages. Putting aside the risks - which are enormous - when you see it that way you begin to understand openai's valuation late last year, and that that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's coming. The risk of disrupting a sizable chunk of the world's wages is fuel for a separate post and conversation. IMHO it's the real risk of AI, and the Skynet scenario around ASI/AGI that has been popularized is a distraction.

janalsncm 2y ago
None of that matters if you are selling shovels. Cash is cash. Google could be selling TPUs and directly competing with Nvidia. You might think Nvidia’s valuation is inflated, but the fact of the matter is they sold $60B in hardware last year.
- mmaunder 2y ago
  Nvidia is selling shovels. Google will be selling gold if successful. And they make their own shovels.
  - m_mueller 2y ago
    When I look at current ChatGPT I honestly think that the gold has been found, and a significant amount of it is undermining Google’s home market, the presentation and aggregation of information on the web. Their product has become so much worse over the years while ChatGPT has improved many fold. It’s a better search engine among many other things.
    - rstuart4133 2y ago
      We've yet to see how enshittification will work it's magic on AI's. Maybe you're too young to remember AltaVista. Their search was OK'ish, and Google was slightly better - but AltaVista was the incumbent. It should have counted for something, but it was wiped out overnight. What killed AltaVista was them promoting paid search results without telling you. Ham fisted enshittification in other words. Google resisted it for a while. But slowly ads crept to the top, and then became near indistinguishable from search results. Worse, SEO triggered by their ad business undermined their search, and they famously didn't fix that because the ad business is their cash cow. It is an indirect form enshittification, probably not even a deliberate move, but enshittification nonetheless. Enshittification is killing Google search. Right now AI's look wonderful. The free ones as you say often replace search. But we are in the early phases. They are all surviving on VC money. That can't continue. Enshittification will hit the free ones, and when it does it seems like it will damage them far more than search. You can work around promoted search results by just looking at more results. How can you work around a hallucinating AI that's been paid to lie to you?
      - m_mueller 2y ago
        Oh absolutely - and I‘m not too young to remember AltaVista at all. Eventually everything new on the internet turns to shit. But that doesn‘t change what I wrote: Right now, ChatGPT is gold. It‘s the Windows 3.0 with Google being OS/2. Does that put a better age on me? ;-)
mullingitover 2y ago
> My own view is that what AI is going after i.e. the size of the pie, is the $50 trillion per year portion of global GDP that makes up wages. This is why AI is the smart investment play in the near term, but those ahead of the curve are long on canned goods and firearms.
dehrmann 2y ago
Not only isn't there a killer app, LLMs are getting to be commoditized.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  That will soon stop. When training is relatively cheap, many actors can do it. When training requires a $100B data center, there are only a few companies in the world that can afford that.
raxxor 2y ago
I believe the killer feature would be sensible embedding tools with respective functions that support generating facts about internal data. You generally cannot just push your data tables with millions of entries to your AI, but you can reduce them to statements that the AI then can work with. It would be quite nice for training if a company can embed their product catalogue or their process instructions. Or technical data and common faults for customer support. Also production monitoring would benefit from AI, but you also need to reduce the large amount of data into congestible statements. Usually the same work you do when you build some kind of dashboard. In most cases that would mean you either run an AI locally, which I would heavily prefer, or you serialize the result of said embeddings and have them be used with your cloud AI of choice.

janalsncm 2y ago

None of that matters if you are selling shovels. Cash is cash. Google could be selling TPUs and directly competing with Nvidia. You might think Nvidia’s valuation is inflated, but the fact of the matter is they sold $60B in hardware last year.

mmaunder 2y ago
Nvidia is selling shovels. Google will be selling gold if successful. And they make their own shovels.
- m_mueller 2y ago
  When I look at current ChatGPT I honestly think that the gold has been found, and a significant amount of it is undermining Google’s home market, the presentation and aggregation of information on the web. Their product has become so much worse over the years while ChatGPT has improved many fold. It’s a better search engine among many other things.
  - rstuart4133 2y ago
    We've yet to see how enshittification will work it's magic on AI's. Maybe you're too young to remember AltaVista. Their search was OK'ish, and Google was slightly better - but AltaVista was the incumbent. It should have counted for something, but it was wiped out overnight. What killed AltaVista was them promoting paid search results without telling you. Ham fisted enshittification in other words. Google resisted it for a while. But slowly ads crept to the top, and then became near indistinguishable from search results. Worse, SEO triggered by their ad business undermined their search, and they famously didn't fix that because the ad business is their cash cow. It is an indirect form enshittification, probably not even a deliberate move, but enshittification nonetheless. Enshittification is killing Google search. Right now AI's look wonderful. The free ones as you say often replace search. But we are in the early phases. They are all surviving on VC money. That can't continue. Enshittification will hit the free ones, and when it does it seems like it will damage them far more than search. You can work around promoted search results by just looking at more results. How can you work around a hallucinating AI that's been paid to lie to you?
    - m_mueller 2y ago
      Oh absolutely - and I‘m not too young to remember AltaVista at all. Eventually everything new on the internet turns to shit. But that doesn‘t change what I wrote: Right now, ChatGPT is gold. It‘s the Windows 3.0 with Google being OS/2. Does that put a better age on me? ;-)

mullingitover 2y ago

> My own view is that what AI is going after i.e. the size of the pie, is the $50 trillion per year portion of global GDP that makes up wages. This is why AI is the smart investment play in the near term, but those ahead of the curve are long on canned goods and firearms.

dehrmann 2y ago

Not only isn't there a killer app, LLMs are getting to be commoditized.

bufferoverflow 2y ago
That will soon stop. When training is relatively cheap, many actors can do it. When training requires a $100B data center, there are only a few companies in the world that can afford that.

raxxor 2y ago

I believe the killer feature would be sensible embedding tools with respective functions that support generating facts about internal data. You generally cannot just push your data tables with millions of entries to your AI, but you can reduce them to statements that the AI then can work with. It would be quite nice for training if a company can embed their product catalogue or their process instructions. Or technical data and common faults for customer support. Also production monitoring would benefit from AI, but you also need to reduce the large amount of data into congestible statements. Usually the same work you do when you build some kind of dashboard. In most cases that would mean you either run an AI locally, which I would heavily prefer, or you serialize the result of said embeddings and have them be used with your cloud AI of choice.