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Classic repeat of the Gartner Hype Cycle. This bubble pop will dwarf the dot-bomb era. There's also no guarantee that the "slope of enlightenment" phase will am

Classic repeat of the Gartner Hype Cycle. This bubble pop will dwarf the dot-bomb era. There's also no guarantee that the "slope of enlightenment" phase will amount to much beyond coding assistants. GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives. This bubble also seems to combine the worst of the two huge previous bubbles; the hype of the dot-com bubble plus the housing bubble in the way of massive data center buildout using massive debt and security bundling.

brookst 1y ago
The Internet in its 1999 form was never going to be fast enough or secure enough to support commerce, banking, or business operations.
- falcor84 1y ago
  Exactly, it took an evolution, but there was no discontinuity. At some point, things evolved enough for people like Tim O'Reilly to say that we know have "Web 2.0", but it was all just small steps by people like those of us here on this thread, gradually making things better and more reliable.
thecupisblue 1y ago
> GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives No, but GenAI in it's current form is insanely useful and is already shifting the productivity gears into a higher level. Even without 100% reliable "agentic" task execution and AGI, this is already some next level stuff, especially for non-technical people.
- ducktective 1y ago
  Very simple question: How do people trust the output of LLMs? In the fields I know about, sometimes the answers are impressive, sometimes totally wrong (hallucinations). When the answer is correct, I always feel like I could have simply googled the issue and some variation of the answer lies deep in some pages of some forum or stack exchange or reddit. However, in the fields I'm not familiar with, I'm clueless how much I can trust the answer.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    I get around this by not valuing the AI for its output, but for its process. Treat it like a brilliant but clumsy assistant that does tasks for you without complaint – but whose work needs to be double checked.
  - likium 1y ago
    We place plenty of trust with strangers to do their jobs to keep society going. What’s their error rate? It all ends up with the track record, perception and experience of the LLMs. Kinda like self-driving cars.
    - morpheos137 1y ago
      Strangers have an economic incentive to perform. AI does not. What AI program is currently able to modify its behavior autonomously to increase its own profitablity? Most if not all current public models are simply chat bots trained on old data scraped off the web. Wow we have created an economy based on cultivated Wikipedia and Reddit content from the 2010s linked together by bots that can make grammatical sentences and cogent sounding paragraphs. Isn't that great? I don't know, about 10 years ago before google broke itself, I could find information on any topic easily and judge its truth using my grounded human intelligence better than any AI today. For one thing AI can not even count. Ask google's AI to draw a woman wearing a straw hat. More often than not the woman is wearing a well drawn hat while holding another in her hand. Why? Frequently she has three arms. Why? Tesla self driving vision can't differentiate between the sky and a light colored tractor trailer turning across traffic resulting in a fatality in Florida. For something to be intelligent it needs to be able to think and evaluate the correctness of its thinking correctly. Not just regurgitate old web scrapings. It is pathetic realy. Show me one application where black box LLM ai is generating a profit that an effectively trained human or rules based system couldn't do better. Even if AI is able to replace a human in some tasks this is not a good thing for a consumption based economy with an already low labor force participation rate. During the first industrial revolution human labor was scarce so machines could economically replace and augnent labor and raise standards of living. In the present time labor is not scarce so automation is a solution in search of a problem and a problem itself if it increasingly leads to unemployment without universal bssic income to support consumption. If your economy produces too much with nobody to buy it then economic contraction follows. Already young people today struggle to buy a house. Instead of investing in chat bots maybe our economy should be employing more people in building trades and production occupations where they can earn an income to support consumption including of durable items like a house or a car. Instead because of the fomo and hype about AI investors are looking for greater returns by directing money toward scifi fantasy and when that doesn't materialize an economic contraction will result.
- lm28469 1y ago
  > especially for non-technical people. The people who use llms to write reports for other people who use llms to read said reports ? It may alleviate a few pain points but it generates an insane amount of useless noise
  - thecupisblue 1y ago
    Considering they were already creating useless noise, they can create it faster now. But once you get out of the tech circles and bullshit jobs, there is a lot of quality usage, as much as there is shit usage. I've met everyone from lawyers and doctors to architects and accountants who are using some form of GenAI actively in their work. Yes, it makes mistakes, yes, it hallucinates, but it gets a lot of fluff work out of the way, letting people deal with actual problems.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > I've met everyone from lawyers and doctors to architects and accountants who are using some form of GenAI actively in their work I can't wait for the first massive medical mistakes from LLM reliance
- RSHEPP 1y ago
  I would love to figure out why I don't see this at my company. People still shipping at the same rate as before, customers bringing up more and more bugs, problems that require planning for scale are not being thought about (more bugs), zero tests still being written. All the code I am seeing generated is like one shot garbage, with no context around our system or the codebase as a whole.
ben_w 1y ago
Mm. Partial agree, partial disagree. These things, as they are right now, are essentially at the performance level of an intern or recent graduate in approximately all academic topics (but not necessarily practical topics), that can run on high-end consumer hardware. The learning curves suggest to me limited opportunities for further quality improvements within the foreseeable future… though "foreseeable future" here means "18 months". I definitely agree it's a bubble. Many of these companies are priced with the assumption that they get most of the market; they obviously can't all get most of the market, and because these models are accessible to the upper end of consumer hardware, there's a reasonable chance none of them will be able to capture any of the market because open models will be zero cost and the inference hardware is something you had anyway so it's all running locally. Other than that, to the extent that I agree with you that: > GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives I do so only in that not everyone wants (or would even benefit from) a book-smart-no-practical-experience intern, and not all economic tasks are such that book-smarts count for much anyway. This set of AI advancements didn't suddenly cause all cars manufacturers to suddenly agree that this was the one weird trick holding back level 5 self driving, for example. But for those of us who can make use of them, these models are already useful (and, like all power tools, dangerous when used incautiously) beyond merely being coding assistants.
Traubenfuchs 1y ago
I fully agree that there will be a pop, there must be. Current evaluations and investments are based on monumentally society destroying assumptions. But with every disappointing, incremental and non evolutionary model generation the chance increases that the world at large realizes that those assumptions are wrong. What should I do with my ETF? Sell now, wait for the inevitable crash? Be all modern long term investment style: "just keep invested what you don't need in the next 10 years bro"? This really keeps me up at night.
- Dr4kn 1y ago
  If you're sure enough that there is going to be a big crash I would move the money into gold, bonds or other more secure assets. After a crash you can invest again. I don't know why buffet sold a lot of shares over the last few years to sit on a huge pile of cash, but I could guess. The Job market looks like shit, people have no money to buy stuff and credit card debt is skyrocketing. When people can't buy stuff it is bad for the economy. Even if AI is revolutionary then we would need people spending money to keep the economy going, and with more AI taking jobs that wouldn't happen. If AI doesn't work out the market is going to crash and the only companies keeping the market growing are going to wipe out all that growth. No matter how I look at it I don't see a thriving market.
bspammer 1y ago
Last week I tested out the agent mode of chatGPT by asking it to plan a week's meals, then add all the ingredients to an online shopping basket for me. It worked pretty much flawlessly, the only problem was it ran out of time before it could add the last few ingredients, which doesn't exactly seem like an unsolvable problem.

brookst 1y ago

The Internet in its 1999 form was never going to be fast enough or secure enough to support commerce, banking, or business operations.

falcor84 1y ago
Exactly, it took an evolution, but there was no discontinuity. At some point, things evolved enough for people like Tim O'Reilly to say that we know have "Web 2.0", but it was all just small steps by people like those of us here on this thread, gradually making things better and more reliable.

thecupisblue 1y ago

> GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives No, but GenAI in it's current form is insanely useful and is already shifting the productivity gears into a higher level. Even without 100% reliable "agentic" task execution and AGI, this is already some next level stuff, especially for non-technical people.

ducktective 1y ago
Very simple question: How do people trust the output of LLMs? In the fields I know about, sometimes the answers are impressive, sometimes totally wrong (hallucinations). When the answer is correct, I always feel like I could have simply googled the issue and some variation of the answer lies deep in some pages of some forum or stack exchange or reddit. However, in the fields I'm not familiar with, I'm clueless how much I can trust the answer.
- keiferski 1y ago
  I get around this by not valuing the AI for its output, but for its process. Treat it like a brilliant but clumsy assistant that does tasks for you without complaint – but whose work needs to be double checked.
- likium 1y ago
  We place plenty of trust with strangers to do their jobs to keep society going. What’s their error rate? It all ends up with the track record, perception and experience of the LLMs. Kinda like self-driving cars.
  - morpheos137 1y ago
    Strangers have an economic incentive to perform. AI does not. What AI program is currently able to modify its behavior autonomously to increase its own profitablity? Most if not all current public models are simply chat bots trained on old data scraped off the web. Wow we have created an economy based on cultivated Wikipedia and Reddit content from the 2010s linked together by bots that can make grammatical sentences and cogent sounding paragraphs. Isn't that great? I don't know, about 10 years ago before google broke itself, I could find information on any topic easily and judge its truth using my grounded human intelligence better than any AI today. For one thing AI can not even count. Ask google's AI to draw a woman wearing a straw hat. More often than not the woman is wearing a well drawn hat while holding another in her hand. Why? Frequently she has three arms. Why? Tesla self driving vision can't differentiate between the sky and a light colored tractor trailer turning across traffic resulting in a fatality in Florida. For something to be intelligent it needs to be able to think and evaluate the correctness of its thinking correctly. Not just regurgitate old web scrapings. It is pathetic realy. Show me one application where black box LLM ai is generating a profit that an effectively trained human or rules based system couldn't do better. Even if AI is able to replace a human in some tasks this is not a good thing for a consumption based economy with an already low labor force participation rate. During the first industrial revolution human labor was scarce so machines could economically replace and augnent labor and raise standards of living. In the present time labor is not scarce so automation is a solution in search of a problem and a problem itself if it increasingly leads to unemployment without universal bssic income to support consumption. If your economy produces too much with nobody to buy it then economic contraction follows. Already young people today struggle to buy a house. Instead of investing in chat bots maybe our economy should be employing more people in building trades and production occupations where they can earn an income to support consumption including of durable items like a house or a car. Instead because of the fomo and hype about AI investors are looking for greater returns by directing money toward scifi fantasy and when that doesn't materialize an economic contraction will result.
lm28469 1y ago
> especially for non-technical people. The people who use llms to write reports for other people who use llms to read said reports ? It may alleviate a few pain points but it generates an insane amount of useless noise
- thecupisblue 1y ago
  Considering they were already creating useless noise, they can create it faster now. But once you get out of the tech circles and bullshit jobs, there is a lot of quality usage, as much as there is shit usage. I've met everyone from lawyers and doctors to architects and accountants who are using some form of GenAI actively in their work. Yes, it makes mistakes, yes, it hallucinates, but it gets a lot of fluff work out of the way, letting people deal with actual problems.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > I've met everyone from lawyers and doctors to architects and accountants who are using some form of GenAI actively in their work I can't wait for the first massive medical mistakes from LLM reliance
RSHEPP 1y ago
I would love to figure out why I don't see this at my company. People still shipping at the same rate as before, customers bringing up more and more bugs, problems that require planning for scale are not being thought about (more bugs), zero tests still being written. All the code I am seeing generated is like one shot garbage, with no context around our system or the codebase as a whole.

ben_w 1y ago

Mm. Partial agree, partial disagree. These things, as they are right now, are essentially at the performance level of an intern or recent graduate in approximately all academic topics (but not necessarily practical topics), that can run on high-end consumer hardware. The learning curves suggest to me limited opportunities for further quality improvements within the foreseeable future… though "foreseeable future" here means "18 months". I definitely agree it's a bubble. Many of these companies are priced with the assumption that they get most of the market; they obviously can't all get most of the market, and because these models are accessible to the upper end of consumer hardware, there's a reasonable chance none of them will be able to capture any of the market because open models will be zero cost and the inference hardware is something you had anyway so it's all running locally. Other than that, to the extent that I agree with you that: > GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives I do so only in that not everyone wants (or would even benefit from) a book-smart-no-practical-experience intern, and not all economic tasks are such that book-smarts count for much anyway. This set of AI advancements didn't suddenly cause all cars manufacturers to suddenly agree that this was the one weird trick holding back level 5 self driving, for example. But for those of us who can make use of them, these models are already useful (and, like all power tools, dangerous when used incautiously) beyond merely being coding assistants.

Traubenfuchs 1y ago

I fully agree that there will be a pop, there must be. Current evaluations and investments are based on monumentally society destroying assumptions. But with every disappointing, incremental and non evolutionary model generation the chance increases that the world at large realizes that those assumptions are wrong. What should I do with my ETF? Sell now, wait for the inevitable crash? Be all modern long term investment style: "just keep invested what you don't need in the next 10 years bro"? This really keeps me up at night.

Dr4kn 1y ago
If you're sure enough that there is going to be a big crash I would move the money into gold, bonds or other more secure assets. After a crash you can invest again. I don't know why buffet sold a lot of shares over the last few years to sit on a huge pile of cash, but I could guess. The Job market looks like shit, people have no money to buy stuff and credit card debt is skyrocketing. When people can't buy stuff it is bad for the economy. Even if AI is revolutionary then we would need people spending money to keep the economy going, and with more AI taking jobs that wouldn't happen. If AI doesn't work out the market is going to crash and the only companies keeping the market growing are going to wipe out all that growth. No matter how I look at it I don't see a thriving market.

bspammer 1y ago

Last week I tested out the agent mode of chatGPT by asking it to plan a week's meals, then add all the ingredients to an online shopping basket for me. It worked pretty much flawlessly, the only problem was it ran out of time before it could add the last few ingredients, which doesn't exactly seem like an unsolvable problem.