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Within the bounds of HN audience I would definitely describe myself as an A(G)I skeptic. But even I can see that this ""AI"" stuff is not going to blow over. T

Within the bounds of HN audience I would definitely describe myself as an A(G)I skeptic. But even I can see that this ""AI"" stuff is not going to blow over. That ship has sailed. Even if the current models get only marginal improvements, the momentum is unquestionably, inarguably there to make the adoption and productization 10x or even 100x wider than it is now. Robotics, automatization, self-driving, all kinds of kiosks, military applications (gathering and merging sensor data, controlling drone swarms, etc.)... Just the amount of money (it's going to be trillions before the decade is over) and the amount of students in the field (basically all computer science degrees nowadays teach AI in some form) guarantees we're stuck with ""AI"" forever (at least until it kills us or merges with us)

actionfromafar 1y ago
1000x more than it is now, at least. Imagine every kind of electronic thing ever made, but with a sprinkle of AI. Why? For the same reason now 32-bit CPUs and a megabyte of RAM run some Javascript or MicroPython to check a handful of logical conditions and flip a couple of I/O bits is no longer a custom curcuit or a handful of TTL-chips wired together.
Night_Thastus 1y ago
The reason I think it's going to blow over is that even the best models are frequently quite terrible. The fundamental problems of how they work can't really be fixed because they're a feature - the way that LLMs work. And no one has found a way to make any money with it. All the tech companies are burning money by the truckload so investors don't lose confidence, but none of them have actually shown it's a good financial investment. At the end of the day, I don't think anyone is going to want to pay what it really costs to run these models, just for a result that is so unreliable. Once they start to stagnate everyone will lose interest. The only reason it might stick around is because investors will get desperate to get returns and go full sunk-cost once it starts looking like they made a bad call. (Which they will blame the companies for, of course)

actionfromafar 1y ago

1000x more than it is now, at least. Imagine every kind of electronic thing ever made, but with a sprinkle of AI. Why? For the same reason now 32-bit CPUs and a megabyte of RAM run some Javascript or MicroPython to check a handful of logical conditions and flip a couple of I/O bits is no longer a custom curcuit or a handful of TTL-chips wired together.

Night_Thastus 1y ago

The reason I think it's going to blow over is that even the best models are frequently quite terrible. The fundamental problems of how they work can't really be fixed because they're a feature - the way that LLMs work. And no one has found a way to make any money with it. All the tech companies are burning money by the truckload so investors don't lose confidence, but none of them have actually shown it's a good financial investment. At the end of the day, I don't think anyone is going to want to pay what it really costs to run these models, just for a result that is so unreliable. Once they start to stagnate everyone will lose interest. The only reason it might stick around is because investors will get desperate to get returns and go full sunk-cost once it starts looking like they made a bad call. (Which they will blame the companies for, of course)