4 ms·

I keep seeing articles like this but does anyone actually think we're not in a bubble? From what I've seen these companies acknowledge it's a bubble and that t

I keep seeing articles like this but does anyone actually think we're not in a bubble? From what I've seen these companies acknowledge it's a bubble and that they're overspending without a way to make the money back. They're doing it because they have the money and feel it's worth the risk in case it pays off. If they don't spend, another company does, and it hits big they will be left behind. This is at least insurance against other companies beating them.

ninetyninenine 1y ago
HN isn't always right. There was massive pushback against self driving and practically everyone was saying it would fail and is a bubble. The level of confidence people had about this opinion was through the roof. Like people who didn't know anything would say it with such utter confidence it would piss me off a bit. Like how do you know? Well they didn't and they were utterly wrong. Waymo showed it's not a bubble. AI is an unknown. It has definitely already changed the game. Changed the way we interview and changed the way we code and it's changed a lot more outside of that and I see massive velocity towards more change. Is it a bubble? Possibly. But the possibly not angle is also just as likely. Either way I guarantee you that 99% of people on HN KNOW for a fact that it's a bubble because they KNOW that all of AI is a stochastic parrot. I think the realistic answer is we don't actually know if it's a bubble. We don't fully know the limits of LLMs. Maybe it will be a bubble in the sense that AI will become so powerful that a generic AI app can basically kill all these startups surrounding specialized use cases of LLMs. Who knows?
- hx8 1y ago
  > Waymo showed it's not a bubble. Waymo is showing it might not be a bubble. They are selling rides in five cities. Let's see how they do in 100 cities.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    You aren't living it. I live in SF, I ride waymos every freaking day. SF has some of the tightest roads and hardest driving. Just living in SF I already know they can scale to the entire country.
    - player1234 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - ninetyninenine 1y ago
        You need to be banned from this site. This behavior is not acceptable.
- fred_is_fred 1y ago
  What was promised with self-driving and what we have are orders of magnitude off. We were promised fleets of autonomous taxis - no need to even own a car anymore. We were told truck drivers would be replaced en-masse and cargo would drive 24x7 by drivers who never needed breaks. We were told downtown parking lots would disappear since the car would drop you off and drive to an offsite lot and wait for you. In short a complete blow up of the economy with millions of jobs in shipped lost and hundreds of billions of spend on new autonomous vehicles. None of that happened. After 10 years we got self-driving cabs in 5 cities with mostly good weather. Cool, yes? Blowing up the entire economy and fundamentally changing society? No.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    I don't ride ubers anymore. It changed society in SF. You guys don't know what's coming.
    - player1234 1y ago
      [flagged]
- 9rx 1y ago
  > Waymo showed it's not a bubble. Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. Which is still really useful, but a far cry from the promise of everyone being able to buy a personal pod on wheels that takes you to and fro, no matter where you want to go, while you sleep that the bubble was premised on. In other words, Waymo has proven the bubble. It has been 20 years since Stanley, and I still have never seen a self-driving car in person. And I reside in an area that was officially designated by the government for self-driving car testing! > I think the realistic answer is we don't actually know if it's a bubble. While that is technically true, has there ever not been a bubble when people start dreaming about what could be? Even if AI heads towards being everything we hope it can become, it still seems highly likely that people have dreamed up uses for the potential of AI that aren't actually useful. The PetsGPT.com-types can still create a bubble even if the underlying technology is all that and more.
  - TimonKnigge 1y ago
    > Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. My understanding was that Waymo’s are autonomous and don’t have a remote driver?
    - 9rx 1y ago
      They are so-called "human in the loop". They don't have a remote driver in the sense of someone sitting in front of a screen playing what looks like a game of Truck Simulator. But they are operated by humans. It's kind of like when cruse control was added to cars. No longer did you have to worry about directly controlling the pedal, but you still had to remain the operator. In some very narrow sense you might be able to make a case that cruise control is autonomy, but the autonomous car bubble imagined that humans would be taken out of the picture entirely.
      - senordevnyc 1y ago
        This is absolutely false. In rare cases Waymo needs human intervention, but they do NOT have humans in the loop for the vast majority of their operations.
- driverdan 1y ago
  Autonomous cars did have a bubble moment. They were hyped and didn't deliver on the promises. We still don't have level 5 and consumer vehicles are up to level 3. It doesn't mean it's not a useful or cool technology. All great tech has gone through some kind of hype/bubble stage.
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    Bro waymo cars are level 4. I ride them on the regular. I don't use uber anymore.
    - driverdan 1y ago
      I didn't mention Waymo intentionally. I said consumer cars. No one can buy Waymo's technology. We have one company with level 4 in a limited area.
ACCount37 1y ago
I don't think it's a bubble. There's a very real possibility that all the AI research investment of today unlocks AGI, on a timescale between a couple of years and a couple of decades, and that would upend the economy altogether. And falling short of that aspiration could still get you pretty far. A lot of "AI" startups would crash and burn long before they deliver any real value. But that's true of any startup boom. Right now, the bulk of the market value isn't in those vulnerable startups, but in major industry players like OpenAI and Nvidia. For the "bubble" to "pop", you need those companies to lose big. I don't think that it's likely to happen.
deltarholamda 1y ago
>They're doing it because they have the money and feel it's worth the risk in case it pays off. If the current work in AI/ML leads to something more fundamental like AGI, then whoever does it first gets to be the modern version of the lone nuclear superpower. At least that's the assumption. Left outside of all the calculations is the 8 billion people who live here. So suddenly we have AGI--now what? Cures for cancer and cold fusion would be great, but what do you do with 8 billion people? Does everybody go back to a farm or what? Maybe we all pedal exercise bikes to power the AGI while it solves the Riemann hypothesis or something. It would be a blessing in disguise if this is a bubble. We are not prepared to deal with a situation where maybe 50-80% of people become redundant because a building full of GPUs can do their job cheaper and better.
rich_sasha 1y ago
I think we are in a bubble, which will burst at some point, AI stocks will crash and many will burn, and the growth will resume. Just like the dotcom bubble definitely was a bubble, but it was the foundation of all tech giants of today. The trouble with bubbles is that it's not enough to know you are in one. You don't know when it will pop, at what level, and how far back it will go.
gilbetron 1y ago
"bubble" is just an oversimplification and is overused. Uber was a bubble. Video games were a bubble. Streaming services were a bubble. Self-driving was a bubble. The reality is much more complex and nuanced. LLMs are legitimate AI for the first time, and have real use cases and have changed things across myriad industries. It's disrupting education in a big way. The google AI search thing is becoming useful. When I look at products on Amazon, I often ask it's AI review thing (Rufus?) questions and it gives me good answers, so good that I don't really validate anymore. There's massive, intense competition, and know one can predict how it is going to go, so there probably will be things that are bubble-y that pop, sure, but it's not like AI has hit a permanent plateau and we are as far as the tech is going to go. It's just getting started, but it'll probably be a weird and bumpy path.

ninetyninenine 1y ago

HN isn't always right. There was massive pushback against self driving and practically everyone was saying it would fail and is a bubble. The level of confidence people had about this opinion was through the roof. Like people who didn't know anything would say it with such utter confidence it would piss me off a bit. Like how do you know? Well they didn't and they were utterly wrong. Waymo showed it's not a bubble. AI is an unknown. It has definitely already changed the game. Changed the way we interview and changed the way we code and it's changed a lot more outside of that and I see massive velocity towards more change. Is it a bubble? Possibly. But the possibly not angle is also just as likely. Either way I guarantee you that 99% of people on HN KNOW for a fact that it's a bubble because they KNOW that all of AI is a stochastic parrot. I think the realistic answer is we don't actually know if it's a bubble. We don't fully know the limits of LLMs. Maybe it will be a bubble in the sense that AI will become so powerful that a generic AI app can basically kill all these startups surrounding specialized use cases of LLMs. Who knows?

hx8 1y ago
> Waymo showed it's not a bubble. Waymo is showing it might not be a bubble. They are selling rides in five cities. Let's see how they do in 100 cities.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  You aren't living it. I live in SF, I ride waymos every freaking day. SF has some of the tightest roads and hardest driving. Just living in SF I already know they can scale to the entire country.
  - player1234 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      You need to be banned from this site. This behavior is not acceptable.
fred_is_fred 1y ago
What was promised with self-driving and what we have are orders of magnitude off. We were promised fleets of autonomous taxis - no need to even own a car anymore. We were told truck drivers would be replaced en-masse and cargo would drive 24x7 by drivers who never needed breaks. We were told downtown parking lots would disappear since the car would drop you off and drive to an offsite lot and wait for you. In short a complete blow up of the economy with millions of jobs in shipped lost and hundreds of billions of spend on new autonomous vehicles. None of that happened. After 10 years we got self-driving cabs in 5 cities with mostly good weather. Cool, yes? Blowing up the entire economy and fundamentally changing society? No.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  I don't ride ubers anymore. It changed society in SF. You guys don't know what's coming.
  - player1234 1y ago
    [flagged]
9rx 1y ago
> Waymo showed it's not a bubble. Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. Which is still really useful, but a far cry from the promise of everyone being able to buy a personal pod on wheels that takes you to and fro, no matter where you want to go, while you sleep that the bubble was premised on. In other words, Waymo has proven the bubble. It has been 20 years since Stanley, and I still have never seen a self-driving car in person. And I reside in an area that was officially designated by the government for self-driving car testing! > I think the realistic answer is we don't actually know if it's a bubble. While that is technically true, has there ever not been a bubble when people start dreaming about what could be? Even if AI heads towards being everything we hope it can become, it still seems highly likely that people have dreamed up uses for the potential of AI that aren't actually useful. The PetsGPT.com-types can still create a bubble even if the underlying technology is all that and more.
- TimonKnigge 1y ago
  > Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. My understanding was that Waymo’s are autonomous and don’t have a remote driver?
  - 9rx 1y ago
    They are so-called "human in the loop". They don't have a remote driver in the sense of someone sitting in front of a screen playing what looks like a game of Truck Simulator. But they are operated by humans. It's kind of like when cruse control was added to cars. No longer did you have to worry about directly controlling the pedal, but you still had to remain the operator. In some very narrow sense you might be able to make a case that cruise control is autonomy, but the autonomous car bubble imagined that humans would be taken out of the picture entirely.
    - senordevnyc 1y ago
      This is absolutely false. In rare cases Waymo needs human intervention, but they do NOT have humans in the loop for the vast majority of their operations.
driverdan 1y ago
Autonomous cars did have a bubble moment. They were hyped and didn't deliver on the promises. We still don't have level 5 and consumer vehicles are up to level 3. It doesn't mean it's not a useful or cool technology. All great tech has gone through some kind of hype/bubble stage.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  Bro waymo cars are level 4. I ride them on the regular. I don't use uber anymore.
  - driverdan 1y ago
    I didn't mention Waymo intentionally. I said consumer cars. No one can buy Waymo's technology. We have one company with level 4 in a limited area.

ACCount37 1y ago

I don't think it's a bubble. There's a very real possibility that all the AI research investment of today unlocks AGI, on a timescale between a couple of years and a couple of decades, and that would upend the economy altogether. And falling short of that aspiration could still get you pretty far. A lot of "AI" startups would crash and burn long before they deliver any real value. But that's true of any startup boom. Right now, the bulk of the market value isn't in those vulnerable startups, but in major industry players like OpenAI and Nvidia. For the "bubble" to "pop", you need those companies to lose big. I don't think that it's likely to happen.

deltarholamda 1y ago

>They're doing it because they have the money and feel it's worth the risk in case it pays off. If the current work in AI/ML leads to something more fundamental like AGI, then whoever does it first gets to be the modern version of the lone nuclear superpower. At least that's the assumption. Left outside of all the calculations is the 8 billion people who live here. So suddenly we have AGI--now what? Cures for cancer and cold fusion would be great, but what do you do with 8 billion people? Does everybody go back to a farm or what? Maybe we all pedal exercise bikes to power the AGI while it solves the Riemann hypothesis or something. It would be a blessing in disguise if this is a bubble. We are not prepared to deal with a situation where maybe 50-80% of people become redundant because a building full of GPUs can do their job cheaper and better.

rich_sasha 1y ago

I think we are in a bubble, which will burst at some point, AI stocks will crash and many will burn, and the growth will resume. Just like the dotcom bubble definitely was a bubble, but it was the foundation of all tech giants of today. The trouble with bubbles is that it's not enough to know you are in one. You don't know when it will pop, at what level, and how far back it will go.

gilbetron 1y ago

"bubble" is just an oversimplification and is overused. Uber was a bubble. Video games were a bubble. Streaming services were a bubble. Self-driving was a bubble. The reality is much more complex and nuanced. LLMs are legitimate AI for the first time, and have real use cases and have changed things across myriad industries. It's disrupting education in a big way. The google AI search thing is becoming useful. When I look at products on Amazon, I often ask it's AI review thing (Rufus?) questions and it gives me good answers, so good that I don't really validate anymore. There's massive, intense competition, and know one can predict how it is going to go, so there probably will be things that are bubble-y that pop, sure, but it's not like AI has hit a permanent plateau and we are as far as the tech is going to go. It's just getting started, but it'll probably be a weird and bumpy path.