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The AI emperor has no clothes
- lazystar 1y ago> There are good use cases for machine learning, AI, etc. But sadly, the best ones are masked by the hype-train AI junk that is either useless or incredibly expensive in comparison to the amount of money being charged for it. so ive been in the industry ~8 years now, and this is the exact same discussion that was held during the NFT/blockchain hype. this cycle seems inevitable for any new disruptive tech.
- lucisferre 1y agoDoes NFT/blockchain actually have a cycle? I have not seen any real killer use cases. AI may be overhyped but the actual use cases and potential ones seem very clear.
- samcat116 1y agoI think we’ll start to see a bunch of fintech companies use stablecoins for things, but as more of an implementation detail and not really a speculative market like it was before.
- WJW 1y agoWell stablecoins by design cannot really fluctuate a lot in value (unless they collapse), so speculation on them is pretty much out. It's still pretty unclear to me why you'd actually want a blockchain for managing it though, rather than a traditional database hosted by the central bank that is responsible for the currency that the stablecoin is following. You'd get vastly more throughput at much lower costs, and it's not like you really need decentralization for such a system anyway. The stablecoin is backed by something the central bank already has authority over.
- galenmarchetti 1y agothen why hasn't the central bank done this yet
- WJW 1y agoDepends. Several central banks are working on exactly that, see for example the recent speech by the FED and the whole GENIUS act regulation framework. But to be honest where I am (northwest Europe) we already have subsecond person-to-person transactions via the normal banking system, no matter which bank the sender and receiver use. So stablecoin-ifying the Euro wouldn't make a huge difference. There might be more to gain if the region doesn't have that kind of payment infrastructure yet.
- mikepurvis 1y agoI agree that this is an odd comparison— blockchain and especially NFTs really are a scam and a pyramid scheme, whereas modern generative AI has dozens of real applications where it's already been massively disruptive. Maybe compare with something the development of motion pictures, with dozens of small studios trying different approaches to storytelling, different formats, etc, with live performances being the legacy thing getting disrupted. And then the market rapidly maturing and being consolidated down to a few winners that lasted for decades.
- filoleg 1y agoBlockchain does, NFTs not so much.
- kelvinjps10 1y agoI don't know about NFT, but blockains allows to me to send money to my Family in usdt/usdc for cents on the dollars, and for example in countries like Venezuela besides using it for receiving and sending money some people use it to save money because you cannot trust in the government and banks
- drivebyhooting 1y agoThat’s because organized crime provides the demand and liquidity needed for cryptocurrency. Without cartels and the like trying to bypass money laundering and capital control laws you would not easily transfer bitcoin to and from Venezuela.
- roland35 1y agoI feel like this isn't really a new or novel thing? Storing cash in a bank has risks, storing crypto in any sort of method also has risks, right? Sadly for those in unstable countries there are lots more risks in life, including financial. I'm not sure crypto is the best long term solution here
- warrenm 1y agoThe valid use cases for blockchain are relatively few The use cases where it gets applied are far more than the valid ones As for NFTs ... there never was (and never will be) a valid use case - it does not matter if you "own" a digital asset (like an image): a screenshot of it is good enough for 99.99999...% of people, so why pay for the "real" thing?
- lazystar 1y ago> The use cases where it gets applied are far more than the valid ones Yeah, and im seeing the same pattern with AI i think
- fabian2k 1y agoNFTs never had a real use case. Blockchains do have limited use, and cryptocurrencies are different enough that I don't think it's a valid comparison.
- filoleg 1y agoThe difference is that NFT always seemed to be just hype for hype’s sake, with zero functional/helpful use-case at all. No, “trading cards [more like hashes/serial numbers receipts of those tbh], but digital” is not a functional use-case. And afaik, that was the only use of NFTs that actually worked. The whole “omg you can buy skin in this one game as an nft, and then have it across multiple games” (as well as other bs of a similar nature) was always a ridiculous thing, as it still requires gamedevs to collab and actually do all the required integration work (which is rather infeasible). And even if they decided to ever do that, they would almost certainly find it much easier to accomplish without relying on NFT tech. AI also has a ton of hype and pipedreams that are vaporware, of course (just look at all the batches of chatgpt wrapper startups in thr past couple of years). However, what the AI hype has (that NFT never did) is a number of actual functional use-cases, and people utilize it heavily for actual work/productivity/daily help with great success. Claud Code/Gemini CLI alone can be such a boon in the hands of a good software engineer, it is undeniable.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoAI also doesn't have good use cases yet. It sucks at the one thing it's supposed to be good at (writing code).
- Ukv 1y agoTranscription, translation, material/product defect detection, weather forecasting/early warning systems, OCR, spam filtering, protein folding, tumor segmentation, drug discovery/interaction prediction, etc. seem fairly promising to me, with machine learning approaches often blowing traditional approaches out of the water. I feel the idea that there's only "one thing it's supposed to be good at (writing code)" is largely down to availability bias, in that we're in programming circles where LLM code completion gets talked about a lot. ChatGPT reportedly has 700 million weekly users - I'd assume many using it for tasks that I'm not even aware of (automating some tedious/repetitive part of their job).
- dwaltrip 1y agoIf Terence Tao says it can save hours of work for him, you might be holding it wrong.
- gkoberger 1y agoThe premise is true, but I disagree with the conclusion. There are many companies with outsized valuations, and few will ultimately survive. The valuations of these companies will go down; there clearly is no way the market can handle it all. But the revenue going into AI will not go down. The job loss will not go down. What you're seeing isn't AI being an empty promise, but rather many different people trying to win the market. It's like "tech"... 20 years ago, there was a category of companies we called tech and it was getting outsized valuations. Now every company is a tech company, whatever that means – there's as many programmers at Goldman Sachs or Walmart as there are at Airbnb or Dropbox.
- dehugger 1y agoAgree with you on this. I work for a large company with a number of different brands, mostly sporting goods. IT has been the biggest winner of the AI wave, as it's allowing us to suddenly start delivering on asks from the business that previously would have been deemed impossible/impractical with our resources.
- andrewmutz 1y agoThe AI bubble will be like the dot com bubble. There is too much hype and lots of investors will lose money. But at the same time, lots of successful and world-changing businesses will be created. Does that mean the AI emperor has no clothes? I don't think so.
- WJW 1y agoIt might be like the dot com bubble, where eventually a few winners emerged that went on to be hugely valuable. It could also be like the tulip bubble, where eventually prices collapsed and never recovered. Or for a more modern example, the NFT bubble.
- andrewmutz 1y agoI'm not saying that all bubbles build real businesses that have a big impact on the world, I am saying specifically this AI bubble will do so. I've already seen enough significant, real-world value being created by AI technology that I am a believer that it will have a big impact. It will also destroy a lot of investment money along the way, but that's just normal bubble stuff.
- warrenm 1y agoMost of the self-proclaimed 'emperors' have no clothes The actual emperors? They are dressed (or, at least, in the fabric section of the hobby store and have a sewing machine at home)
- logtrees 1y ago"There is no way the trillions of dollars of valuation placed on AI companies can be backed by any amount of future profit." This is just a case of the user being unable to see far enough into the future. Yes, there's huge future profit to be had.
- moffkalast 1y agoTrillions of dollars is pocket change if you wait for enough inflation.
- DocSavage 1y agoAside from the better versions of what AI is visibly doing now (software dev, human language translation, video gen, etc), many of the AI bears are dismissing the potential impact of hooking AI up with automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself. The impact on drug discovery, material science, and other domains are likely to be very significant. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold is just a glimpse of this future.
- gjsman-1000 1y agoA more sane answer is garbage in, garbage out, and this future never materializes.
- drcongo 1y agoThis popped up just after I'd finished my daily chore of adding AI spammers to my mail filters. I'm up to about 10 per day now.
- cs702 1y agoHmm... I'd say most AI emperors have no clothes -- that is, no profits and no prospect of them in the foreseeable future.[a] A tiny number of them are actually wearing something, like a fig leaf. They are the ones won't be caught in embarrassment when an innocent child points most emperors are walking around in the buff. --- [a] Cloud providers, who do earn profits, are service providers to emperors, not emperors on their own.
- warrenm 1y agoThis is precisely why nVidia is providing GPU to AI companies, and not trying to be one themselves ... loads more money to be made selling shovels to prospectors than in being a prospector
- DrNosferatu 1y agoFew companies will survive, but the ones that do will be in a world that will never be the same again.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gjsman-1000 1y agoI'm also giving it just 2-3 years before the scores from high schoolers are so bad, across the board, that a politician calls for age verification on AI platforms. Even if solely to force them to do school, other harms ignored. Especially on Windows 11: Who in Microsoft decided educators needed to compete with a colorful taskbar button that can't be turned off with parental controls? Watch the engagement plunge, and with that, the dreams of profit.
- pixl97 1y ago> that a politician calls for age verification on AI platforms And MS et al will grease the palms the the politicians running against them. Lobbying is easy when you're a huge corporation.
- criddell 1y agoAre the AI improvements of the past few years going to lead to advances in self driving cars? How close are we to where a robot could get into a car from 2010 and drive me around?
- warrenm 1y ago>How close are we to where a robot could get into a car from 2010 and drive me around? A long way away And here is why - driverless cars are a thing ... essentially making the car the "robot" General-purpose robots are an amusing scifi trope, but have no practical benefit in reality Purpose-built robots (even ones that can flex within that prupose to different applications) make far more sense (and have already been around for decades)
- drivebyhooting 1y agoGenetically engineered, properly “educated”, politically controlled, and brain washed humans would be far more useful than electromechanical robots we can build any time soon. This too is a common scifi trope. And it’s true. Industries have shown time and again that they’d rather send the work to paupers’ hands in countries without rather than automate to metals hands within.
- pixl97 1y ago>And it’s true. Industries have shown time and again that they’d rather send the work to paupers’ hands in countries without rather than automate I disagree, to the point I'd say the statement is nearly false. You have to look at what the 'expensive' point of the work is. In some cases it's electricity, those things generally don't get sent overseas, but instead are highly automated. In some cases it's waste by product. Those get sent to countries where they don't care if you dump it and poison it. In some cases it's proximity to other manufacturing of parts you need. In some cases it's cheap labor without the need for paying healthcare.
- drivebyhooting 1y ago
- keernan 1y agoWhen openAI made its Nov 2022 chatGPT announcement, why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms? Why did they push the idea it was a 'black box' that they didn't understand how it worked? That it was a serious threat to humanity and that government oversight was urgently needed (leading to a meeting at the White House)? I'm not suggesting GPT has no value. But in hindsight everything I described above was pure bull. I suppose it could be suggested that Sam Altman and his engineers didn't understand their own algorithms. But I don't buy that fairytale.
- warrenm 1y ago>why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms? Marketing, pure and simple People relate better to something that sounds humanesque (even though it is not) vs calling it what it is (in this case, a massively-backed (ie LLM-based) Markov Chain generator)
- rockercoaster 1y ago> When openAI made its Nov 2022 chatGPT announcement, why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms? Same reason they hyped up how worried they were about "safety" of the "we have to make sure these things are 'aligned' or they'll become Skynet!" variety: Altman was bullshitting to hype up the company. Even the "safety" stuff was just hype. "It's so capable it's literally scary, or soon will be... better invest in / use our product! Imagine how bad it'll be for you if you don't!" I was on the fence about how serious they were until I finally got around to skimming the "Attention Is All You Need" paper. LOL. LMFAO. No.
- appleaday1 1y ago[flagged]
- BizarroLand 1y agoIsn't it rather foolish to insert an AI generated response into a conversation between humans?
- fbn79 1y agoIs this true even if AI-2027.com is right?
- tmaly 1y agoFor regular users, LLM's are great, but the $20 a month subscriptions are not covering the bills. Eventually, the music will stop and people will start looking at the cash flow. It may take a bubble pop, but eventually business will figure out some good use cases that make sense. This happened with the DotCom.