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AI has a cargo cult problem

178 points by cs702 1y ago

empath75 1y ago
https://archive.ph/RVTHE https://archive.ph/RVTHE Un-paywalled version.
btucker 1y ago
https://archive.is/RVTHE https://archive.is/RVTHE
- jjangkke 1y ago
  I disagree with labeling AI to be a cargo cult. Crypto fits the description but the definition of a cargo cult has to imply some sort of ultimate end in which its follower's expectations are drastically reduced. What AI feels like is the early days of the internet. We've seen the dot com bubble but we ultimately live in the internet age. There is no doubt that post-AI bubble will be very much AI orientated. This is very different from crypto which isn't by any measure a technological leap rather more than a crowd frenzy aimed at self-enrichment via ponzi mechanisms.
ctoth 1y ago
The only cargo cult behavior I see here is Tett's own journalism! She casually drops that same debunked "95% of companies see no AI revenue gains" figure[0] without tracing it to source, performing the ritual of citation while missing the actual mechanism that makes evidence valuable. [0] https://aiascendant.com/p/why-95-of-ai-commentary-fails https://aiascendant.com/p/why-95-of-ai-commentary-fails
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
waprin 1y ago
edit: made a goal to avoid pointless internet flame wars that I briefly lapsed from
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  Ah, this is a good example!
- ellg 1y ago
  "shocking little amount of discussion" are we reading the same website...
- matusp 1y ago
  Fully agreed. The author also can't decide whether AI is a Ponzi scheme, a bubble, or a cargo cult; so let’s just use them all! It's just buzzwords without any real analysis beyond what is generally known about the field.
  - o11c 1y ago
    I mean, there's nothing wrong with all 3 potentially applying. It can be a Ponzi scheme for specific investors, a bubble in the stock market in general, and a cargo cult for the companies using it. One of the comments downthread did give an argument against "cargo cult" applying though - you need actual past successes (of the particular degree, not extrapolated) to assume that your actions will repeat them.
- stego-tech 1y ago
  From the perspective of AI critics like myself, HN is awash in posts showing what folks have done with AI or boosting AI PR pieces, while critics often get flagged and our submissions shunted away from the front page. AI Boosters claim that all this CAPEX will create a Utopia where nobody has to work anymore, economies grow exponentially forever, and societal ills magically disappear through the power of AGI. On the other side, a lot of AI Doomers point out the perils of circular financing, CAPEX investments divorced from reality, underlying societal and civilizational issues that will hinder any potential positive revolution from/by AI, and corporate valuations with no basis other than hype. Where commenters like yourself trip themselves up is a staunch refusal to be objective in your observations. Nobody is doubting the excitement of new technologies and their potential, including LLMs; we doubt the validity of the claims of their proponents that these magic boxes will somehow cure all diseases and accelerate human civilization into the galactic sphere through automated R&D and production. When Op-Eds, bloggers, and commenters raise these issues, they’re brow-beaten, insulted, flagged, and shunted away from the front page as fast as humanly possible lest others start asking similar questions. While FT’s Op-Eds aren’t exactly stellar to begin with, and this one is similarly milquetoast at first glance, the questions and concerns raised remain both valid and unaddressed by AI Boosters like yourselves. Specifics are constantly nitpicked in an effort to discredit entire arguments, rather than address the crux of the grievance in a respectable manner; boosters frequently come off like a sleazy Ambulance-Chasing Lawyer on TV discrediting witnesses through bad-faith tactics. Rather than bloviate about the glory of machine gods or whine about haters, actually try listening to the points of your opponents and addressing them in a respectful and honest manner instead of trying to find the proverbial weak point in the block tower. You - and many others - continue to willfully miss the forest for the specific tree you dislike within it, and that’s why this particular era in tech continues to devolve into toxicity. At the end of the day, there is no possible way short of actual lived outcome for either side to prove their point as objectively correct. Though when one side spends their time hiding and smearing critique from their opponents instead of discussing it in good faith, that does not bode well for their position.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
Tech has a cargo cult problem
- blackoil 1y ago
  Tech has a winner takes all problem. All those billions are chasing trillions of valuation. Many will fail, but some will be ruling(metaphorically) the world
  - fancyfredbot 1y ago
    Right now the AI business does not looking like a winner takes all situation at all. Everyone is losing money and nobody has any lock-in. Free open source models are only 6-12 months behind the frontier labs. Seems like a tricky business to me with no clear route to metaphorical world domination. Making stuff for AI companies looks like better business to me!
gdulli 1y ago
Maybe it's human nature that has a cargo cult problem and AI is just the current flypaper?
jerf 1y ago
Cargo cult as a metaphor doesn't work here. That's for when the cargo culters don't understand what is going on, and attempt to imitate the actions without understanding or accuracy. AI investors understand what is going on and understand that this may be a bubble and they may lose their investment. We may disagree with them about the probabilities of such an outcome, perhaps even quite substantially, but that's not the same thing as thinking that if I just write some number-looking-squiggles on a piece of paper and slide it under the door of a building that looks like it has computers on it I will have a pool and a lambo when I get home. That's what "cargo cult" investing would look like. The AI investors know what they are doing, by which I mean, if this is every bit the bubble some of us think it is and it pops as viciously as it possibly can and these investors lose everything from top to bottom, if they tried to say "I didn't know that could happen!" I simply wouldn't believe them and neither would anyone else. Of course they know it's possible. They may not believe it is likely, but they are 100% operating from a position of knowledge and understanding and taking actions that have a completely reasonable through-line to successfully achieving their goals. Indeed I'm sure some people have sufficiently cashed out of their positions or diversified them such that they have already completely succeeded; worries about the bubble are worries about a sector and a broad range of people but some individuals can and will come out of this successfully even if it completely detonates in the future. If nothing else the people simply drawing salaries against the bubble, even completely normal non-inflated ones, can be called net winners.
- leptons 1y ago
  The original "cargo culters" had nothing to lose, so your comment falls apart pretty quickly.
  - jerf 1y ago
    My comment about how "cargo culting" is not an appropriate metaphor "falls apart" because you named another way in which the metaphor is not appropriate? This is some bold new definition of "falls apart" with which I am not familiar.
- alphazard 1y ago
  Ironically, the author of TFA is playing the part of the cargo cult. They don't actually understand the cargo cult metaphor, but since it is a popular metaphor, they reference it in naive imitation hoping that people engage with their content.
llm_nerd 1y ago
The cargo cult metaphor is weak. If an article written in the year of our FSM 2025 describes Melanesian cargo cults to make a point, they're probably just copying a trope from other articles. Cargo culting, if you will, much like Melanesian cargo cults that would wear bamboo earpieces and... Is it a gold rush? Absolutely. There is a massive FOMO and everyone is rushing to claim some land, while the biggest profiteers of all are ones selling the shovels and pick axes. It's all going to wash out and in the end a very small number of players will be making money, while everyone else goes bust. While many people think the broadly described AI is overhyped, I think people are grossly underestimating how much this changes almost everything. Very few industries will be untouched.
- hansonkd 1y ago
  Yeah, Not seeing the connection to cargo cult unless AGI already appeared, offered us incredible bounty of benefits and then left, so we all created a religion in order to summon AGI back.
- saltcured 1y ago
  Yeah, if cargo cult were applied aptly, it would be more for the folks who are all-in on using LLMs yet not really getting any net productivity boost. Those basically just LARPing a dream world, but with no tangible benefit compared to the Old Ways.
- rjsw 1y ago
  The author is an anthropologist, I think she knows the original meaning of "cargo cult". The 'cult' behaviour described in the article is that of building big data centres without knowing how they will make money for the real business of the tech companies doing it. They have all bought AI startups but that doesn't mean that the management of the wider company understands it.
  - llm_nerd 1y ago
    >The author is an anthropologist, I think she knows the original meaning of "cargo cult". I am perplexed how you thought this refuted or offered any value to what I said. Or are you under delusions that her being an anthropologist also makes her an expert on AI and the tech industry, ergo ipso facto her metaphor isn't incredibly dumb and ill-suited? I never questioned if they knew the "original meaning". Yes, we've all read the meaning countless, countless times, in a million trope-filled blog entries. And indeed, the whole basis of her tosser "article" is some random blog entry that, as millions before have, decided to make everything about Cargo Cults. Protip: If you are busy writing a blog entry and you decide to describe some island tribe (it does not actually matter where said tribe is) that had bamboo headsets, delete the entire thing and go do something actually useful. It is a profoundly boring story at this point. And in this case, like with many, the metaphor is incredibly stupid and ill-suited. If these businesses were building "data centres" out of mud and drawings of GPUs it would be pertinent, but instead it's describing a gold rush where a lot of players are doing precisely the right thing to try to land grab o an obviously massive and important space (and in a very useful to them sense, see enormous capitalization gains in doing so), then trying to ham-fist some cliche "story" in. Like, if that tribe built functional runways with ATC towers, and then a fleet of cargo planes -- being well funded in the process by outsiders who see how lucrative the cargo business is -- but then it turns out that the cargo business is a bit saturated so it's going to be tough for them to make it profitable on their EBIDTA statements, boy, fire up the typewriter you got a winner! >The 'cult' behaviour described in the article is that of building big data centres without knowing how they will make money Utterly nonsensical.
moomin 1y ago
I want to ask ChatGPT to point to a behaviour described in the article that resembles cargo-culting with AI, but I don’t want to waste my future overlord’s time.
nextworddev 1y ago
Yes, this rally seems overextended. But investor sentiment - if anything - has already swung to very negative, which isn't ideal if you want it to crash. Bubbles don't pop without indiscriminate euphoria (Private markets are a different story, but VCs are fked anyways). If anything, the prices have reflected less than 20% of Capex projections, so the market clearly thinks OpenAI / Stargate / FAANG's capex plans are BS. p.s. if everyone thinks it's a bubble, it generally rallies even more..
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  >If anything, the prices have reflected less than 20% of Capex projections, so the market clearly thinks OpenAI / Stargate / FAANG's capex plans are BS. I'd say if anything the market is massively underestimating the scale of their capex plans. These things are using as much electricity as small cities. They are well past breaking ground, the buildings are going up as we speak. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-and-oracle-to-deploy-450000-gb200-gpus-at-stargate-abilene-data-center/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-and-oracle... https://x.com/sama/status/1947640330318156074/photo/1 https://x.com/sama/status/1947640330318156074/photo/1 There are dozens of these planned.
  - nextworddev 1y ago
    Think we said the same thing
  - andoando 1y ago
    Oh jesus. I think AI is useful, but I figure 95%+ of it used on complete nonsense.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Same thing happened with the dot-com boom and bust, except with fiber (later called dark fiber) and datacenters. A lot of people lost a lot of money. Post bankruptcy, it also fueled the later tech booms, as now there was a ton of dark fiber waiting to be used at rock bottom prices, and underutilized datacenters and hardware. Google was a major beneficiary.
tra3 1y ago
If I'm tired of one thing related to AI/llm/chatbots it's the claims that it's not useful. It 100% is. We have to separate the massive financial machinations from the actual tech. Reading this article though, I'm questioning my decision to avoid hosting open source LLMs. Supposedly the performance of Owen-coder is comparable to the likes of Sonnet4. If I invest in a homelab that can host something like Qwen3 I'll recoup my costs in about 20 months without having to rely on Anthropic.
- mynameisash 1y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful. Rather, they don't appear to live up to the hype, and they're sure as hell not a panacea. I'm pretty bearish on LLMs. I also think they're over-hyped and that the current frenzy will end badly (global economically speaking). Than said, sure, they're useful. Doesn't mean they're worth it.
  - tra3 1y ago
    Fair enough, I may have conflated "there's an AI bubble" with "AIs aren't useful". My employer pays for Claude pro access, and if they stopped paying tomorrow I'd consider paying for it myself. Although, it's much more likely for me to start self hosting them. So that's what it's worth to me, say $2500 USD in hardware over the next 3 years. I'd love to hear what your take on this is.
    - brailsafe 1y ago
      $2500 is a relatively small investment for any sort of useful tool over 3 years, but that seems very low to me for this specific self-hosting endeavor
  - Agingcoder 1y ago
    To some extent it’s not that they don’t live up to the hype - rather that the gains are hard to measure. Llms have spared me hours of research on exotic topics actually useful for my day job However, that’s the whole problem - I don’t know how much. If they had a real price ( accounting for OpenAI losses for example) with ChatGPT at 50 usd/month for everyone, OpenAI being profitable, and people actually paying for this, I think things might self adjust and we’d have some idea. Right now, we live in some kind of parallel world.
halayli 1y ago
The paper claims that 95% of companies see no AI revenue gains, which seems like an outrageous blanket statement. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. The real issue here is a fundamental statistical and categorical error: the paper lumps all industries, company sizes, and maturity levels under the single umbrella of "companies" and applies one 95% figure across the board. This is misleading and potentially produces false conclusions. How can anyone take this paper seriously when it makes such a basic mistake? Different industries have vastly different AI adoption curves, infrastructure requirements, and implementation timelines. It's equally concerning that journalists are reporting on this without recognizing or questioning this methodological flaw.
- fishmicrowaver 1y ago
  It's not clear to me how much companies are even attempting to quantify the value of 'AI'. Having 'AI' is the value. It's similar to the Data Science / Machine Learning craze where managers decided that we must have ML, instead of considering it one among many capabilities, that may or may not be useful for a particular problem.
- molyss 1y ago
  I think it's a bit disingenuous to reduce the article to a single sentence that's in parenthesis and links to a widely shared publication about an a MIT report. Especially when said article continues with "Don’t get me wrong: I am not denying the extraordinary potential of AI to change aspects of our world, nor that savvy entrepreneurs, companies and investors will win very big. It will — and they will." One doesn't have to agree with the original report, but one can't in good faith deny that the whole thing smells of a financial scheme with circular contracts, massive investments for an industry that's currently losing money by the billion and unclear financial upside for most other companies out there. I'm not saying AI is useless or that it will never be useful, I'm just saying that there are some legitimate reasons to worry about the amounts of money that are being poured into it and its potential impact on the economy at large. I believe the article is simply taking a similart stance
- Yaina 1y ago
  I think what we're seeing, and what the article describes, are company leaders across industries reacting to the AI hype by saying "we need AI too!" not because they've identified a specific problem it can solve, but because they want to appear innovative or cut labor costs. Right now, the market values saying you're doing AI more than actually delivering meaningful results. Most leaders don't seem to view AI as a practical tool to improve a process, but as a marketing asset. And let’s be honest: we're not talking about the broad field of machine learning here, but mostly about integrating LLMs in some form. So coming back to the revenue claims: Greenhouse (the job application platform) for example now has a button to improve your interview summary. Is it useful? Maybe. Will it drastically increase revenue? Probably not. Does it raise costs? Yes; because behind the scenes they’re likely paying OpenAI processing fees for each request. This is emblematic of most AI integrations I've seen: minor customer benefits paired with higher operational costs.
johnohara 1y ago
Not sure "Cargo Cult" is an apt description. Feynman's description of Cargo Cult Science was predicated on the behavior of islanders building structures in expectation it would summon the planes, cargo, personnel, etc. that used the island during WWII. Without a previous experience they would not have built anything. There is no previous AI experience behind today's pursuit of the AI grail. In other words, no planes with cargo driving an expectation of success. Instead, the AI pursuit is based upon the probability of success, which is aptly defined as risk. A correct analog would be the islanders building a boat and taking the risk of sailing off to far away shores in an attempt to procure the cargo they need.
- wmf 1y ago
  Arguably AI is already "successful" in terms of funding and press coverage and that's what many people are chasing.
- smogcutter 1y ago
  This is a good point as a tangent. “Cargo Cult” is a meaningful phrase for ritualizing a process without understanding it. Debasing the phrase makes it less useful and informative. It’s a cargo cult usage of “cargo cult”!
  - tremon 1y ago
    Isn't the entire point of an LLM to "ritualize" language without understanding a word of it?
- blamestross 1y ago
  Yeah, "cargo cult" is abused as a term. Those islanders were smarter than what is happening here. We use it dismissively but "cargo cult" behaviour is entirely reasonable. You know an effect is possible, and you observe novel things corellating with it. You try them to test the causality. It looks silly when you know the lesson already, but it was intelligent and reasonable behaviour the entire way. The current situation is bubble denial, not cargo culting. Blaming cargo culting is a mechanism of bubble denial here.
jasonthorsness 1y ago
Everyone has imperfect information; this isn't a cargo cult situation where it's massively asymmetric, this is more like when you see everyone else running, it's generally a good idea to start running too. But when that heuristic fails it fails in a pretty spectacular way.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
The problem is the self-reinforcing valuation entanglements that make NVIDIA have a market cap of 4.42 teradollars.. until Meta, Goog, Apple, and Microsoft develop their own custom NPUs or the fragile bubble bursts in some other way. There's value here, but probably not as much as the market thinks... yet.
tim333 1y ago
>Either way, anyone engaged ... needs to ... read up on those Melanesian cargo cults. So I had a look at Wikipedia and the cargo cults are not really as advertised: >The first documented cargo cults were religious movements that foretold followers would imminently receive an abundance of (often Western) food and goods (the "cargo") brought by their ancestors. >Cargo cults have a wide diversity of beliefs and practices, but typically (though not universally) include: charismatic prophet figures foretelling a coming cataclysm or utopia... So we are talking a religion rather than mixing up correlation and causation. The 'AI bubble' seems much more like the dot com bubble or 'railway mania' than a religious thing.

178 points by cs702 1y ago

empath75 1y ago

https://archive.ph/RVTHE https://archive.ph/RVTHE Un-paywalled version.

btucker 1y ago

https://archive.is/RVTHE https://archive.is/RVTHE

jjangkke 1y ago
I disagree with labeling AI to be a cargo cult. Crypto fits the description but the definition of a cargo cult has to imply some sort of ultimate end in which its follower's expectations are drastically reduced. What AI feels like is the early days of the internet. We've seen the dot com bubble but we ultimately live in the internet age. There is no doubt that post-AI bubble will be very much AI orientated. This is very different from crypto which isn't by any measure a technological leap rather more than a crowd frenzy aimed at self-enrichment via ponzi mechanisms.

ctoth 1y ago

The only cargo cult behavior I see here is Tett's own journalism! She casually drops that same debunked "95% of companies see no AI revenue gains" figure[0] without tracing it to source, performing the ritual of citation while missing the actual mechanism that makes evidence valuable. [0] https://aiascendant.com/p/why-95-of-ai-commentary-fails https://aiascendant.com/p/why-95-of-ai-commentary-fails

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

waprin 1y ago

edit: made a goal to avoid pointless internet flame wars that I briefly lapsed from

JohnMakin 1y ago
Ah, this is a good example!
ellg 1y ago
"shocking little amount of discussion" are we reading the same website...
matusp 1y ago
Fully agreed. The author also can't decide whether AI is a Ponzi scheme, a bubble, or a cargo cult; so let’s just use them all! It's just buzzwords without any real analysis beyond what is generally known about the field.
- o11c 1y ago
  I mean, there's nothing wrong with all 3 potentially applying. It can be a Ponzi scheme for specific investors, a bubble in the stock market in general, and a cargo cult for the companies using it. One of the comments downthread did give an argument against "cargo cult" applying though - you need actual past successes (of the particular degree, not extrapolated) to assume that your actions will repeat them.
stego-tech 1y ago
From the perspective of AI critics like myself, HN is awash in posts showing what folks have done with AI or boosting AI PR pieces, while critics often get flagged and our submissions shunted away from the front page. AI Boosters claim that all this CAPEX will create a Utopia where nobody has to work anymore, economies grow exponentially forever, and societal ills magically disappear through the power of AGI. On the other side, a lot of AI Doomers point out the perils of circular financing, CAPEX investments divorced from reality, underlying societal and civilizational issues that will hinder any potential positive revolution from/by AI, and corporate valuations with no basis other than hype. Where commenters like yourself trip themselves up is a staunch refusal to be objective in your observations. Nobody is doubting the excitement of new technologies and their potential, including LLMs; we doubt the validity of the claims of their proponents that these magic boxes will somehow cure all diseases and accelerate human civilization into the galactic sphere through automated R&D and production. When Op-Eds, bloggers, and commenters raise these issues, they’re brow-beaten, insulted, flagged, and shunted away from the front page as fast as humanly possible lest others start asking similar questions. While FT’s Op-Eds aren’t exactly stellar to begin with, and this one is similarly milquetoast at first glance, the questions and concerns raised remain both valid and unaddressed by AI Boosters like yourselves. Specifics are constantly nitpicked in an effort to discredit entire arguments, rather than address the crux of the grievance in a respectable manner; boosters frequently come off like a sleazy Ambulance-Chasing Lawyer on TV discrediting witnesses through bad-faith tactics. Rather than bloviate about the glory of machine gods or whine about haters, actually try listening to the points of your opponents and addressing them in a respectful and honest manner instead of trying to find the proverbial weak point in the block tower. You - and many others - continue to willfully miss the forest for the specific tree you dislike within it, and that’s why this particular era in tech continues to devolve into toxicity. At the end of the day, there is no possible way short of actual lived outcome for either side to prove their point as objectively correct. Though when one side spends their time hiding and smearing critique from their opponents instead of discussing it in good faith, that does not bode well for their position.

micromacrofoot 1y ago

Tech has a cargo cult problem

blackoil 1y ago
Tech has a winner takes all problem. All those billions are chasing trillions of valuation. Many will fail, but some will be ruling(metaphorically) the world
- fancyfredbot 1y ago
  Right now the AI business does not looking like a winner takes all situation at all. Everyone is losing money and nobody has any lock-in. Free open source models are only 6-12 months behind the frontier labs. Seems like a tricky business to me with no clear route to metaphorical world domination. Making stuff for AI companies looks like better business to me!

gdulli 1y ago

Maybe it's human nature that has a cargo cult problem and AI is just the current flypaper?

jerf 1y ago

Cargo cult as a metaphor doesn't work here. That's for when the cargo culters don't understand what is going on, and attempt to imitate the actions without understanding or accuracy. AI investors understand what is going on and understand that this may be a bubble and they may lose their investment. We may disagree with them about the probabilities of such an outcome, perhaps even quite substantially, but that's not the same thing as thinking that if I just write some number-looking-squiggles on a piece of paper and slide it under the door of a building that looks like it has computers on it I will have a pool and a lambo when I get home. That's what "cargo cult" investing would look like. The AI investors know what they are doing, by which I mean, if this is every bit the bubble some of us think it is and it pops as viciously as it possibly can and these investors lose everything from top to bottom, if they tried to say "I didn't know that could happen!" I simply wouldn't believe them and neither would anyone else. Of course they know it's possible. They may not believe it is likely, but they are 100% operating from a position of knowledge and understanding and taking actions that have a completely reasonable through-line to successfully achieving their goals. Indeed I'm sure some people have sufficiently cashed out of their positions or diversified them such that they have already completely succeeded; worries about the bubble are worries about a sector and a broad range of people but some individuals can and will come out of this successfully even if it completely detonates in the future. If nothing else the people simply drawing salaries against the bubble, even completely normal non-inflated ones, can be called net winners.

leptons 1y ago
The original "cargo culters" had nothing to lose, so your comment falls apart pretty quickly.
- jerf 1y ago
  My comment about how "cargo culting" is not an appropriate metaphor "falls apart" because you named another way in which the metaphor is not appropriate? This is some bold new definition of "falls apart" with which I am not familiar.
alphazard 1y ago
Ironically, the author of TFA is playing the part of the cargo cult. They don't actually understand the cargo cult metaphor, but since it is a popular metaphor, they reference it in naive imitation hoping that people engage with their content.

llm_nerd 1y ago

The cargo cult metaphor is weak. If an article written in the year of our FSM 2025 describes Melanesian cargo cults to make a point, they're probably just copying a trope from other articles. Cargo culting, if you will, much like Melanesian cargo cults that would wear bamboo earpieces and... Is it a gold rush? Absolutely. There is a massive FOMO and everyone is rushing to claim some land, while the biggest profiteers of all are ones selling the shovels and pick axes. It's all going to wash out and in the end a very small number of players will be making money, while everyone else goes bust. While many people think the broadly described AI is overhyped, I think people are grossly underestimating how much this changes almost everything. Very few industries will be untouched.

hansonkd 1y ago
Yeah, Not seeing the connection to cargo cult unless AGI already appeared, offered us incredible bounty of benefits and then left, so we all created a religion in order to summon AGI back.
saltcured 1y ago
Yeah, if cargo cult were applied aptly, it would be more for the folks who are all-in on using LLMs yet not really getting any net productivity boost. Those basically just LARPing a dream world, but with no tangible benefit compared to the Old Ways.
rjsw 1y ago
The author is an anthropologist, I think she knows the original meaning of "cargo cult". The 'cult' behaviour described in the article is that of building big data centres without knowing how they will make money for the real business of the tech companies doing it. They have all bought AI startups but that doesn't mean that the management of the wider company understands it.
- llm_nerd 1y ago
  >The author is an anthropologist, I think she knows the original meaning of "cargo cult". I am perplexed how you thought this refuted or offered any value to what I said. Or are you under delusions that her being an anthropologist also makes her an expert on AI and the tech industry, ergo ipso facto her metaphor isn't incredibly dumb and ill-suited? I never questioned if they knew the "original meaning". Yes, we've all read the meaning countless, countless times, in a million trope-filled blog entries. And indeed, the whole basis of her tosser "article" is some random blog entry that, as millions before have, decided to make everything about Cargo Cults. Protip: If you are busy writing a blog entry and you decide to describe some island tribe (it does not actually matter where said tribe is) that had bamboo headsets, delete the entire thing and go do something actually useful. It is a profoundly boring story at this point. And in this case, like with many, the metaphor is incredibly stupid and ill-suited. If these businesses were building "data centres" out of mud and drawings of GPUs it would be pertinent, but instead it's describing a gold rush where a lot of players are doing precisely the right thing to try to land grab o an obviously massive and important space (and in a very useful to them sense, see enormous capitalization gains in doing so), then trying to ham-fist some cliche "story" in. Like, if that tribe built functional runways with ATC towers, and then a fleet of cargo planes -- being well funded in the process by outsiders who see how lucrative the cargo business is -- but then it turns out that the cargo business is a bit saturated so it's going to be tough for them to make it profitable on their EBIDTA statements, boy, fire up the typewriter you got a winner! >The 'cult' behaviour described in the article is that of building big data centres without knowing how they will make money Utterly nonsensical.

moomin 1y ago

I want to ask ChatGPT to point to a behaviour described in the article that resembles cargo-culting with AI, but I don’t want to waste my future overlord’s time.

nextworddev 1y ago

Yes, this rally seems overextended. But investor sentiment - if anything - has already swung to very negative, which isn't ideal if you want it to crash. Bubbles don't pop without indiscriminate euphoria (Private markets are a different story, but VCs are fked anyways). If anything, the prices have reflected less than 20% of Capex projections, so the market clearly thinks OpenAI / Stargate / FAANG's capex plans are BS. p.s. if everyone thinks it's a bubble, it generally rallies even more..

vonneumannstan 1y ago
>If anything, the prices have reflected less than 20% of Capex projections, so the market clearly thinks OpenAI / Stargate / FAANG's capex plans are BS. I'd say if anything the market is massively underestimating the scale of their capex plans. These things are using as much electricity as small cities. They are well past breaking ground, the buildings are going up as we speak. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-and-oracle-to-deploy-450000-gb200-gpus-at-stargate-abilene-data-center/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-and-oracle... https://x.com/sama/status/1947640330318156074/photo/1 https://x.com/sama/status/1947640330318156074/photo/1 There are dozens of these planned.
- nextworddev 1y ago
  Think we said the same thing
- andoando 1y ago
  Oh jesus. I think AI is useful, but I figure 95%+ of it used on complete nonsense.
- lazide 1y ago
  Same thing happened with the dot-com boom and bust, except with fiber (later called dark fiber) and datacenters. A lot of people lost a lot of money. Post bankruptcy, it also fueled the later tech booms, as now there was a ton of dark fiber waiting to be used at rock bottom prices, and underutilized datacenters and hardware. Google was a major beneficiary.

tra3 1y ago

If I'm tired of one thing related to AI/llm/chatbots it's the claims that it's not useful. It 100% is. We have to separate the massive financial machinations from the actual tech. Reading this article though, I'm questioning my decision to avoid hosting open source LLMs. Supposedly the performance of Owen-coder is comparable to the likes of Sonnet4. If I invest in a homelab that can host something like Qwen3 I'll recoup my costs in about 20 months without having to rely on Anthropic.

mynameisash 1y ago
I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful. Rather, they don't appear to live up to the hype, and they're sure as hell not a panacea. I'm pretty bearish on LLMs. I also think they're over-hyped and that the current frenzy will end badly (global economically speaking). Than said, sure, they're useful. Doesn't mean they're worth it.
- tra3 1y ago
  Fair enough, I may have conflated "there's an AI bubble" with "AIs aren't useful". My employer pays for Claude pro access, and if they stopped paying tomorrow I'd consider paying for it myself. Although, it's much more likely for me to start self hosting them. So that's what it's worth to me, say $2500 USD in hardware over the next 3 years. I'd love to hear what your take on this is.
  - brailsafe 1y ago
    $2500 is a relatively small investment for any sort of useful tool over 3 years, but that seems very low to me for this specific self-hosting endeavor
- Agingcoder 1y ago
  To some extent it’s not that they don’t live up to the hype - rather that the gains are hard to measure. Llms have spared me hours of research on exotic topics actually useful for my day job However, that’s the whole problem - I don’t know how much. If they had a real price ( accounting for OpenAI losses for example) with ChatGPT at 50 usd/month for everyone, OpenAI being profitable, and people actually paying for this, I think things might self adjust and we’d have some idea. Right now, we live in some kind of parallel world.

halayli 1y ago

The paper claims that 95% of companies see no AI revenue gains, which seems like an outrageous blanket statement. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. The real issue here is a fundamental statistical and categorical error: the paper lumps all industries, company sizes, and maturity levels under the single umbrella of "companies" and applies one 95% figure across the board. This is misleading and potentially produces false conclusions. How can anyone take this paper seriously when it makes such a basic mistake? Different industries have vastly different AI adoption curves, infrastructure requirements, and implementation timelines. It's equally concerning that journalists are reporting on this without recognizing or questioning this methodological flaw.

fishmicrowaver 1y ago
It's not clear to me how much companies are even attempting to quantify the value of 'AI'. Having 'AI' is the value. It's similar to the Data Science / Machine Learning craze where managers decided that we must have ML, instead of considering it one among many capabilities, that may or may not be useful for a particular problem.
molyss 1y ago
I think it's a bit disingenuous to reduce the article to a single sentence that's in parenthesis and links to a widely shared publication about an a MIT report. Especially when said article continues with "Don’t get me wrong: I am not denying the extraordinary potential of AI to change aspects of our world, nor that savvy entrepreneurs, companies and investors will win very big. It will — and they will." One doesn't have to agree with the original report, but one can't in good faith deny that the whole thing smells of a financial scheme with circular contracts, massive investments for an industry that's currently losing money by the billion and unclear financial upside for most other companies out there. I'm not saying AI is useless or that it will never be useful, I'm just saying that there are some legitimate reasons to worry about the amounts of money that are being poured into it and its potential impact on the economy at large. I believe the article is simply taking a similart stance
Yaina 1y ago
I think what we're seeing, and what the article describes, are company leaders across industries reacting to the AI hype by saying "we need AI too!" not because they've identified a specific problem it can solve, but because they want to appear innovative or cut labor costs. Right now, the market values saying you're doing AI more than actually delivering meaningful results. Most leaders don't seem to view AI as a practical tool to improve a process, but as a marketing asset. And let’s be honest: we're not talking about the broad field of machine learning here, but mostly about integrating LLMs in some form. So coming back to the revenue claims: Greenhouse (the job application platform) for example now has a button to improve your interview summary. Is it useful? Maybe. Will it drastically increase revenue? Probably not. Does it raise costs? Yes; because behind the scenes they’re likely paying OpenAI processing fees for each request. This is emblematic of most AI integrations I've seen: minor customer benefits paired with higher operational costs.

johnohara 1y ago

Not sure "Cargo Cult" is an apt description. Feynman's description of Cargo Cult Science was predicated on the behavior of islanders building structures in expectation it would summon the planes, cargo, personnel, etc. that used the island during WWII. Without a previous experience they would not have built anything. There is no previous AI experience behind today's pursuit of the AI grail. In other words, no planes with cargo driving an expectation of success. Instead, the AI pursuit is based upon the probability of success, which is aptly defined as risk. A correct analog would be the islanders building a boat and taking the risk of sailing off to far away shores in an attempt to procure the cargo they need.

wmf 1y ago
Arguably AI is already "successful" in terms of funding and press coverage and that's what many people are chasing.
smogcutter 1y ago
This is a good point as a tangent. “Cargo Cult” is a meaningful phrase for ritualizing a process without understanding it. Debasing the phrase makes it less useful and informative. It’s a cargo cult usage of “cargo cult”!
- tremon 1y ago
  Isn't the entire point of an LLM to "ritualize" language without understanding a word of it?
blamestross 1y ago
Yeah, "cargo cult" is abused as a term. Those islanders were smarter than what is happening here. We use it dismissively but "cargo cult" behaviour is entirely reasonable. You know an effect is possible, and you observe novel things corellating with it. You try them to test the causality. It looks silly when you know the lesson already, but it was intelligent and reasonable behaviour the entire way. The current situation is bubble denial, not cargo culting. Blaming cargo culting is a mechanism of bubble denial here.

jasonthorsness 1y ago

Everyone has imperfect information; this isn't a cargo cult situation where it's massively asymmetric, this is more like when you see everyone else running, it's generally a good idea to start running too. But when that heuristic fails it fails in a pretty spectacular way.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

The problem is the self-reinforcing valuation entanglements that make NVIDIA have a market cap of 4.42 teradollars.. until Meta, Goog, Apple, and Microsoft develop their own custom NPUs or the fragile bubble bursts in some other way. There's value here, but probably not as much as the market thinks... yet.

tim333 1y ago

>Either way, anyone engaged ... needs to ... read up on those Melanesian cargo cults. So I had a look at Wikipedia and the cargo cults are not really as advertised: >The first documented cargo cults were religious movements that foretold followers would imminently receive an abundance of (often Western) food and goods (the "cargo") brought by their ancestors. >Cargo cults have a wide diversity of beliefs and practices, but typically (though not universally) include: charismatic prophet figures foretelling a coming cataclysm or utopia... So we are talking a religion rather than mixing up correlation and causation. The 'AI bubble' seems much more like the dot com bubble or 'railway mania' than a religious thing.