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To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still

by mmooss 1y ago

To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. If you add the value of the potential political power gained by controlling AI, then the value to the owners and investors is astronomical. Many of the investors have demonstrated a strong motivation to sacrifice money for political power, for example by supporting nationalism that undermines a global economy that they benefit enormously from. Somewhere, I read someone explaining their investment by saying 'it's the greatest transfer of power in (modern) history'. Also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983700

forgetfulness 1y ago
The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring trillions of dollars into these things thinking of automating away junior software engineers and low end design work. Edit: I forgot their other niche, that of generating homework and school test answers
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > thinking of automating away junior software engineers and low end design work. And it's really still very arguable imo if it's even doing this Like you said, it still needs strict supervision. In my opinion it is not a good use of your supervisory time to be babysitting an LLM versus mentoring actual juniors
  - kergonath 1y ago
    > In my opinion it is not a good use of your supervisory time to be babysitting an LLM versus mentoring actual juniors Right. Because at least juniors are supposed to learn and at some point become senior and stop needing this kind of supervision. Also, interacting with people can be more rewarding (or not, depending on the people)…
- ares623 1y ago
  Not only that, but it’s devaluing the sacred cows of the very same companies that are investing heavily. Search is dead or dying Social media is dead or dying Content creation is dead or dying If they cant make AI work, then they are left with AI at a level that continues to devalue their core business. They have no choice. They made a deal with the devil. And the devil means to collect. This is why I think Apple is lucky their attempt failed so bad. They dodged a bullet. They have an opportunity to guide a lost tech industry through a post AI bubble world.
- lagosfractal42 1y ago
  GPUs have massive applications such as Alphafold, CRISPR, Medical Imaging, Meteorology. The massive planetary investment is not to make more AI chats that summarize text. That's just short sighted.
  - ares623 1y ago
    That’s copium, as the kids say nowadays. The massive planetary investment is a 100% for AI chats. All those other things are taking the crumbs where they can.
    - chickensong 1y ago
      Big business and government aren't buying supercomputer clusters and licensing models to run chats.
      - munk-a 1y ago
        The really weird thing is that Big Business actually is buying supercomputer clusters to do just that. I can't really talk to the government side but a lot of businesses' early forays into AI was just slapping a chatbot on their product and hoping it'd attract a lot more business. I also think you'd be surprised how integrated really dumb chatbots are into business communication these days. I think most smart people are looking seriously at different models to try and improve the accuracy of any existing ML uses they had in their business but the new features built post-ChatGPT tend to often just be fancied up chats.
        chickensong 1y ago
        > just slapping a chatbot on their product That's happening of course, but that's not really the whole picture. Any org that already invests in R&D is likely considering or already implementing modern AI tech into their existing infrastructure. A big oil or pharmaceutical or materials company likely doesn't care much about chat bots, or any customer-facing tech for that matter.
- DuperPower 1y ago
  its helping people be more productive but its not helping firing people which was the wet dream
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  The value of LLM is reliable high quality translation between all languages. The economic value of this is at least trillions of dollars per year. The cultural and humanitarian value is equally gigantic, even if it can't be measured in dollars and cents.
  - munk-a 1y ago
    That is of immense social value - but manual translation services for commercial projects (like application localization) is already dirt cheap to do and automatic casual translation services for consumers would be incredibly difficult to monetize.
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      I think your perspective might be severely limited. There exists millions of businesses outside of big IT enterprises.
      - munk-a 1y ago
        I will freely admit this - but I have led a localization effort on a mobile game and worked on localization for a desktop application. I am also lucky enough to travel abroad quite a bit and am quite familiar with consumer offerings. So I would fairly limit my experience to consumer and medium-sized business uses - I have no experience with large corporate translation efforts (the largest would probably be Ubisoft or the Mouse-Ears company's gaming divisions if you consider them large) and even the small mobile game company I worked at had a budget in the millions range. It certainly hasn't been a focus of my career but I feel comfortable standing by my statement above.
        carlosjobim 1y ago
        You're only taking about IT stuff, while tourism is one of the largest global industries. Not to mention hundreds of other sectors which will benefit from better international communication.
  - 1y ago
- simianparrot 1y ago
  The hardware also wears out really fast. And every replacement is more expensive. How long can that party keep going when none of the companies make enough revenue to cover the expenses?
- ben_w 1y ago
  How many people graduate from a US software engineering degree each year? About 100k? If they (the 100k in the US) earn $100k each in the first year, before gaining the skills to earn more, that's $10 billion a year, every year. If you can capture that market for next 20 years, it's worth $200 billion. Except… can you capture it? A junior dev is… not exactly someone you want connecting to your business-critical database without supervision, and a real human dev will get better with a predictable rate. Will LLMs get better? The makers are betting on that, but we'll only know after the model releases, and even then after we play with them for a bit to differentiate between the record performance on whichever benchmark and the actual work we want them to do. Then there's the question of can you really keep an edge for 20 years with investments today: Sometime between 2030-2035, there's likely to be models matching 2025-SOTA performance that run on ${year}'s high-end smartphone. (Well, unless we all die in WW3 because of Russia getting desperate from its failure to remove Ukraine's sovereignty, or because China has a hot war with Taiwan and/or the USA messing with global consumer electronics supplies, but I don't think those get priced into the market…).
  - thousand_nights 1y ago
    > If you can capture that market for next 20 years, it's worth $200 billion. that's like 5% of NVIDIA's current market cap. sounds like peanuts when you lay it out like that
    - ben_w 1y ago
      Perhaps. But that's just the USA's software developers in just their first year after graduating. Software devs are 1% of the US job market, the first year after graduation is (66-21=45 years, 1/45 ~= 2%) of a working life, the US is just 4% of the world's population/25% GDP. For the 1% to matter, there have to be other jobs that LLMs can do as well as a fresh graduate. I don't know, are LLMs like someone the first year out of law school or medical school, or are those schools better than software? Certainly the home robotics' AI are nowhere near ready yet, no plumber, no driver (despite the news about new car AIs), would you trust an Optimus to cut your hair? etc. For the 2% to matter, depends how seriously you take the projections of improvements. Myself, I do not. Looks like exponential improvements come at exponential costs, and you run out of money to spend for further improvements very quickly. For the 4% to matter, depends on how fast other economies grow. 4% by population, about 25% by GDP. I believe China is still growing quite fast, likely to continue. Them getting +160% growth, and thus getting 2.6x times the money available to burn on AI tokens, over the next 20 years would be unsurprising. All in all, I don't think the USA is competent enough at large-scale projects to handle the infrastructure that this kind of AI would need, so I think it's a bubble and will burst before 2030 because of that. China seems to be able to pull off this kind of infrastructure, so may pull ahead after the US does whatever it does.
- VirusNewbie 1y ago
  Ok, ignoring any AGI or massive advances, let's just say an LLM can help the average office worker be 15% more productive... what do you think the economic value of that is?
  - forgetfulness 1y ago
    100 billion a year, with math that’s downright delusional. So, back of the envelope math, the US GDP is 27.72T USD, 80% (22.18) corresponds to the tertiary sector. Let’s say that this is a 15% increase over a 10 years period, because YoY a boom like the computer revolution itself looks like 2% increases a year.[1]. This amounts to about 1.5% increases each year. Let’s just make the huge leap that you can just scale the productivity up of all this just by making typing out reports and emails a faster activity, and summarizing information for which you’re not facing liability if the bot gets it wrong. Yes, including the nurses, cleaners, truckers, teamsters, all of it. 1.5% of it is a cool 330 billion. How much of a cut of that productivity increase could AI companies take? 30%? That’s 100 billion in one year there. So with pie-in-the-sky math, they could break even if their obligations throughout the decade don’t amount to 1 trillion (since those 1.5T in bonds issued this year mature in longer periods) 1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivity-slowdown-the-economy-wide-and-industry-level-analysis.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivit...
  - gizajob 1y ago
    They'll waste 15% more of the day.
- mancerayder 1y ago
  You forgot - cheating on job interviews, writing resumes to be repetitive, and adding an annoying flowery tone to non-native English speakers who think AI wrote something for them that isn't AI-obvious.
  - forgetfulness 1y ago
    Many of those things were already at a “good enough” level since GPT-3.5. There’s probably a good business usecase there for companies wanting to have smoother communication with offshore teams. Could that be a game-changer? I wouldn’t discount it, but it does sound like something that has to operate at a very low margin and that doesn’t merit a lot more investment.
  - refactor_master 1y ago
    I wonder how many market inefficiencies this creates. People with worse education, people who cheated their way to a job opening compared to a better candidate, etc. Basically counteracting the productivity gains AI was supposed to bring.
    - cousinbryce 1y ago
      There’s a corollary here. People with worse educations may be able to do much higher quality work.
- tartoran 1y ago
  > The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs Promise by who? I think the bet is that it would lay off nearly everyone white collar and let AI take its place.
- mmooss 1y ago
  That's the same mistake made with every new, and eventually successful, technology - we haven't found a valuable application yet, so the technology is not valuable. Finding the valuable application is often the hardest part. That it hasn't happened yet is meaningless. Some technologies sit on the shelf for decades. AI seems to have a lot of potential: It may be the most valuable technology ever; it may not provide more value than it does now, or something in between. Nobody actually knows. The challenge of innovation is managing that irreduceable risk. It starts by accepting risk, accepting that you don't know. One wrong way is to deny the risk - denying uncertainty - by either saying it's worthless or that success is guaranteed.
  - player1234 1y ago
    [dead]
- thefz 1y ago
  Don't forget they are great at generating speech to text. That's all, TBH. You summarized everything.
- thfuran 1y ago
  And propaganda.
redwood 1y ago
The value can be incredibly high... just like the value of the internet was incredibly high.. and it can still be a finanfial bubble. I feel like the people arguing against the bubble perspective are saying look the internet was actually valuable and so too will this.. and that's totally a valid perspective. The bubble is not about whether there's value but about whether or not the market will come down. All of the above can totally happen
- worik 1y ago
  > The value of modern AI seems very hig Very useful, clearly. But valuable? In aggregate it seems clear that it is. But where does that value acrue? It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. It does not seem possible that any conceivable business can pay for all the announced plans for developing data centres, nor energy available to power them. If AI systems can be developed to be trust worthy enough to act on their own, none so far (?), then I can see where the value could acrue, but as things stand?
  - mmooss 1y ago
    > It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. Won't the value will be concentrated in the few with the scale to build competitive AIs? In a sense, costs are spread thinly across the content creators whose work has been stolen. (But of course, it is indeed incredibly concentrated in building datacenters.)
    - worik 1y ago
      > content creators whose work has been stolen. The law is an ass. Current IP laws are too restrictive, but scraping public facing websites is not theft even under those crazy laws I have no moral objection to the use of Anna's Archive to train models. A good use, if illegal. But I do recogise and condemn the hypocrisy of Meta doing it. Not surprising, just disgusting The wasting of bandwidth is annoying, so silly. We should be better organized Calling it theft is buying into the mad bad and sad IP legal thinking that has become the dominant paradigm in the West
nitwit005 1y ago
You can have brilliant technology and still go broke. The internet was amazingly valuable, but many of the early companies failed. Investing in internet companies was hardly a sure bet.
- munk-a 1y ago
  There was a recent Bezos talk about the fact that (much like the dot-com) we've overspending on infrastructure that'll bubble and implode but then we'll have all this amazing infra for companies to build off of... but the process of that overspend and implosion is essentially a massive debt erasure - a lot of people are currently propping up this market with their capital and the companies they're propping up will collapse and those obligations liquidated - and that will result in massive society-wide pain. We may end up in a better place for the next generation because of this investment - but if you're a retail investor don't expect your 401k accounts to weather that burst gracefully... and, unlike the boomers, this will largely hit Millenials and Gen Z both of whom are currently under massive financial stress.
nonameiguess 1y ago
Arguably, it's exactly this mindset creating the problem. It's not the value of the technology that matters. It's the value of the companies. If one company was the only one that had a particular valuable technology, then that would matter, but otherwise 90% of them likely end up worthless even if the sector itself doesn't. How that washes out on net we'll have to see. I'm not gonna pretend I know more than anyone else. Just keep in mind that a major difference between now and 2000 is companies stay private a lot longer. An IPO forces you to open the books and sustain public scrutiny of the broad investor class. A still-private startup only needs to convince one funder of their value. That inevitably leads to higher variance and a greater risk of failure. That doesn't mean the whole sector is necessarily a bubble, but if it is, it can be sustained a lot longer without us knowing. A small number of people with $50 billion they need to park somewhere and no other obvious options can keep shitty ideas afloat in a way that wouldn't be possible if they had to be subjected to broader exposure. We like to believe people with $50 billion can't be wrong, but the wisdom of crowds always beats the wisdom of individual genius. Heck, AI itself taught us that same lesson!
- mmooss 1y ago
  Both are great points.
digdugdirk 1y ago
Alternate viewpoint - The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, might be a sign that the technology shouldn't be valued this highly at all
- mmooss 1y ago
  > That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, might be a sign that the technology shouldn't be valued this highly at all That might be true, but it also might be true that it's tremendously valuable. The conditions you identify exist for every new technology; obviously the outcomes vary greatly.
usrnm 1y ago
Absolutely nothing in your list prevents the AI from being a bubble. The Internet is an absolute marvel of engineering that completely changed the life of the majority of people in the world, and yet it crashed 25 years ago, and crashed hard. Both can be true at the same time.
- kergonath 1y ago
  Also, video games in the 1980s.
hyperbovine 1y ago
> The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. The same could be said for the internet. But, and I know this will be hard for younger readers to believe, I seem to recall the value proposition of the Internet being more immediately apparent at the time.
- mmooss 1y ago
  From what I've read, people spent a long time looking for the 'killer application'. Google didn't know how to make money off its search engine. Social media didn't exist in any mass form. Internet access on phones, beyond email, didn't exist in any usable way. Proprietary, walled garden services, with their own dial-up numbers, such as AOL and CompuServe, were seen as the future. Microsoft thought their similar service (MSN?) was the way forward and didn't integrate the Internet into Windows 95. That was after Netscape's browser was released and (relative to the time, I'm sure) very popular.
  - acdha 1y ago
    The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded. That’s part of the difference with AI now: the internet immediately generated significant value almost instantly for relatively modest investments, so there were a ton of small and mid-sized companies who saw almost immediate profits from moving catalog sales or support online, switching software distribution from mailing diskettes to downloads, etc. and some people were able to cut into established markets where the existing companies were slow to change. AI is different in two key ways: the first is the extremely high cost, which prevents a lot of the bottom-up growth we saw on the web, but the second is that it’s not a reliable technology like the web was so you can’t safely use it in the most valuable contexts. In the 90s, some people screwed up form validation badly but most people didn’t. Right now, companies would love to replace things like customer service or sales with chatbots but nobody on the market can make a system which is both safe and useful because things like prompt injection require theoretical breakdowns, not just attention to detail.
kergonath 1y ago
> To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. Not really. I mean, not only. The value of the web is immense. And yet, the dot-com bubble was indeed a bubble. What matters is the value in the short term compared to the value of the companies in the current context. Even if AI is huge 20 years from now, it can still crash dramatically tomorrow.
- tim333 1y ago
  I was going to say that. Also the bubble can be in some areas but not in others. I think the proposed data center build out is a bubble as in not economically justified presently, but I think money spent on AI research is reasonable.
logsr 1y ago
>still haven't figured out applications the real answer is that the applications for the military, surveillance, and population control are proven, and the pathways to scale those capacities are clear, so the money will pour in no matter what. the implication is that we had better come up with some more consumer/humanity friendly applications that create comparable value, or that is all we will get.
- mmooss 1y ago
  What are the clear military applications that differ from civilian ones?

by mmooss 1y ago

forgetfulness 1y ago

The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring trillions of dollars into these things thinking of automating away junior software engineers and low end design work. Edit: I forgot their other niche, that of generating homework and school test answers

bluefirebrand 1y ago
> thinking of automating away junior software engineers and low end design work. And it's really still very arguable imo if it's even doing this Like you said, it still needs strict supervision. In my opinion it is not a good use of your supervisory time to be babysitting an LLM versus mentoring actual juniors
- kergonath 1y ago
  > In my opinion it is not a good use of your supervisory time to be babysitting an LLM versus mentoring actual juniors Right. Because at least juniors are supposed to learn and at some point become senior and stop needing this kind of supervision. Also, interacting with people can be more rewarding (or not, depending on the people)…
ares623 1y ago
Not only that, but it’s devaluing the sacred cows of the very same companies that are investing heavily. Search is dead or dying Social media is dead or dying Content creation is dead or dying If they cant make AI work, then they are left with AI at a level that continues to devalue their core business. They have no choice. They made a deal with the devil. And the devil means to collect. This is why I think Apple is lucky their attempt failed so bad. They dodged a bullet. They have an opportunity to guide a lost tech industry through a post AI bubble world.
lagosfractal42 1y ago
GPUs have massive applications such as Alphafold, CRISPR, Medical Imaging, Meteorology. The massive planetary investment is not to make more AI chats that summarize text. That's just short sighted.
- ares623 1y ago
  That’s copium, as the kids say nowadays. The massive planetary investment is a 100% for AI chats. All those other things are taking the crumbs where they can.
  - chickensong 1y ago
    Big business and government aren't buying supercomputer clusters and licensing models to run chats.
    - munk-a 1y ago
      The really weird thing is that Big Business actually is buying supercomputer clusters to do just that. I can't really talk to the government side but a lot of businesses' early forays into AI was just slapping a chatbot on their product and hoping it'd attract a lot more business. I also think you'd be surprised how integrated really dumb chatbots are into business communication these days. I think most smart people are looking seriously at different models to try and improve the accuracy of any existing ML uses they had in their business but the new features built post-ChatGPT tend to often just be fancied up chats.
      - chickensong 1y ago
        > just slapping a chatbot on their product That's happening of course, but that's not really the whole picture. Any org that already invests in R&D is likely considering or already implementing modern AI tech into their existing infrastructure. A big oil or pharmaceutical or materials company likely doesn't care much about chat bots, or any customer-facing tech for that matter.
DuperPower 1y ago
its helping people be more productive but its not helping firing people which was the wet dream
carlosjobim 1y ago
The value of LLM is reliable high quality translation between all languages. The economic value of this is at least trillions of dollars per year. The cultural and humanitarian value is equally gigantic, even if it can't be measured in dollars and cents.
- munk-a 1y ago
  That is of immense social value - but manual translation services for commercial projects (like application localization) is already dirt cheap to do and automatic casual translation services for consumers would be incredibly difficult to monetize.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    I think your perspective might be severely limited. There exists millions of businesses outside of big IT enterprises.
    - munk-a 1y ago
      I will freely admit this - but I have led a localization effort on a mobile game and worked on localization for a desktop application. I am also lucky enough to travel abroad quite a bit and am quite familiar with consumer offerings. So I would fairly limit my experience to consumer and medium-sized business uses - I have no experience with large corporate translation efforts (the largest would probably be Ubisoft or the Mouse-Ears company's gaming divisions if you consider them large) and even the small mobile game company I worked at had a budget in the millions range. It certainly hasn't been a focus of my career but I feel comfortable standing by my statement above.
      - carlosjobim 1y ago
        You're only taking about IT stuff, while tourism is one of the largest global industries. Not to mention hundreds of other sectors which will benefit from better international communication.
- 1y ago
simianparrot 1y ago
The hardware also wears out really fast. And every replacement is more expensive. How long can that party keep going when none of the companies make enough revenue to cover the expenses?
ben_w 1y ago
How many people graduate from a US software engineering degree each year? About 100k? If they (the 100k in the US) earn $100k each in the first year, before gaining the skills to earn more, that's $10 billion a year, every year. If you can capture that market for next 20 years, it's worth $200 billion. Except… can you capture it? A junior dev is… not exactly someone you want connecting to your business-critical database without supervision, and a real human dev will get better with a predictable rate. Will LLMs get better? The makers are betting on that, but we'll only know after the model releases, and even then after we play with them for a bit to differentiate between the record performance on whichever benchmark and the actual work we want them to do. Then there's the question of can you really keep an edge for 20 years with investments today: Sometime between 2030-2035, there's likely to be models matching 2025-SOTA performance that run on ${year}'s high-end smartphone. (Well, unless we all die in WW3 because of Russia getting desperate from its failure to remove Ukraine's sovereignty, or because China has a hot war with Taiwan and/or the USA messing with global consumer electronics supplies, but I don't think those get priced into the market…).
- thousand_nights 1y ago
  > If you can capture that market for next 20 years, it's worth $200 billion. that's like 5% of NVIDIA's current market cap. sounds like peanuts when you lay it out like that
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Perhaps. But that's just the USA's software developers in just their first year after graduating. Software devs are 1% of the US job market, the first year after graduation is (66-21=45 years, 1/45 ~= 2%) of a working life, the US is just 4% of the world's population/25% GDP. For the 1% to matter, there have to be other jobs that LLMs can do as well as a fresh graduate. I don't know, are LLMs like someone the first year out of law school or medical school, or are those schools better than software? Certainly the home robotics' AI are nowhere near ready yet, no plumber, no driver (despite the news about new car AIs), would you trust an Optimus to cut your hair? etc. For the 2% to matter, depends how seriously you take the projections of improvements. Myself, I do not. Looks like exponential improvements come at exponential costs, and you run out of money to spend for further improvements very quickly. For the 4% to matter, depends on how fast other economies grow. 4% by population, about 25% by GDP. I believe China is still growing quite fast, likely to continue. Them getting +160% growth, and thus getting 2.6x times the money available to burn on AI tokens, over the next 20 years would be unsurprising. All in all, I don't think the USA is competent enough at large-scale projects to handle the infrastructure that this kind of AI would need, so I think it's a bubble and will burst before 2030 because of that. China seems to be able to pull off this kind of infrastructure, so may pull ahead after the US does whatever it does.
VirusNewbie 1y ago
Ok, ignoring any AGI or massive advances, let's just say an LLM can help the average office worker be 15% more productive... what do you think the economic value of that is?
- forgetfulness 1y ago
  100 billion a year, with math that’s downright delusional. So, back of the envelope math, the US GDP is 27.72T USD, 80% (22.18) corresponds to the tertiary sector. Let’s say that this is a 15% increase over a 10 years period, because YoY a boom like the computer revolution itself looks like 2% increases a year.[1]. This amounts to about 1.5% increases each year. Let’s just make the huge leap that you can just scale the productivity up of all this just by making typing out reports and emails a faster activity, and summarizing information for which you’re not facing liability if the bot gets it wrong. Yes, including the nurses, cleaners, truckers, teamsters, all of it. 1.5% of it is a cool 330 billion. How much of a cut of that productivity increase could AI companies take? 30%? That’s 100 billion in one year there. So with pie-in-the-sky math, they could break even if their obligations throughout the decade don’t amount to 1 trillion (since those 1.5T in bonds issued this year mature in longer periods) 1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivity-slowdown-the-economy-wide-and-industry-level-analysis.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivit...
- gizajob 1y ago
  They'll waste 15% more of the day.
mancerayder 1y ago
You forgot - cheating on job interviews, writing resumes to be repetitive, and adding an annoying flowery tone to non-native English speakers who think AI wrote something for them that isn't AI-obvious.
- forgetfulness 1y ago
  Many of those things were already at a “good enough” level since GPT-3.5. There’s probably a good business usecase there for companies wanting to have smoother communication with offshore teams. Could that be a game-changer? I wouldn’t discount it, but it does sound like something that has to operate at a very low margin and that doesn’t merit a lot more investment.
- refactor_master 1y ago
  I wonder how many market inefficiencies this creates. People with worse education, people who cheated their way to a job opening compared to a better candidate, etc. Basically counteracting the productivity gains AI was supposed to bring.
  - cousinbryce 1y ago
    There’s a corollary here. People with worse educations may be able to do much higher quality work.
tartoran 1y ago
> The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs Promise by who? I think the bet is that it would lay off nearly everyone white collar and let AI take its place.
mmooss 1y ago
That's the same mistake made with every new, and eventually successful, technology - we haven't found a valuable application yet, so the technology is not valuable. Finding the valuable application is often the hardest part. That it hasn't happened yet is meaningless. Some technologies sit on the shelf for decades. AI seems to have a lot of potential: It may be the most valuable technology ever; it may not provide more value than it does now, or something in between. Nobody actually knows. The challenge of innovation is managing that irreduceable risk. It starts by accepting risk, accepting that you don't know. One wrong way is to deny the risk - denying uncertainty - by either saying it's worthless or that success is guaranteed.
- player1234 1y ago
  [dead]
thefz 1y ago
Don't forget they are great at generating speech to text. That's all, TBH. You summarized everything.
thfuran 1y ago
And propaganda.

redwood 1y ago

The value can be incredibly high... just like the value of the internet was incredibly high.. and it can still be a finanfial bubble. I feel like the people arguing against the bubble perspective are saying look the internet was actually valuable and so too will this.. and that's totally a valid perspective. The bubble is not about whether there's value but about whether or not the market will come down. All of the above can totally happen

worik 1y ago
> The value of modern AI seems very hig Very useful, clearly. But valuable? In aggregate it seems clear that it is. But where does that value acrue? It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. It does not seem possible that any conceivable business can pay for all the announced plans for developing data centres, nor energy available to power them. If AI systems can be developed to be trust worthy enough to act on their own, none so far (?), then I can see where the value could acrue, but as things stand?
- mmooss 1y ago
  > It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated. Won't the value will be concentrated in the few with the scale to build competitive AIs? In a sense, costs are spread thinly across the content creators whose work has been stolen. (But of course, it is indeed incredibly concentrated in building datacenters.)
  - worik 1y ago
    > content creators whose work has been stolen. The law is an ass. Current IP laws are too restrictive, but scraping public facing websites is not theft even under those crazy laws I have no moral objection to the use of Anna's Archive to train models. A good use, if illegal. But I do recogise and condemn the hypocrisy of Meta doing it. Not surprising, just disgusting The wasting of bandwidth is annoying, so silly. We should be better organized Calling it theft is buying into the mad bad and sad IP legal thinking that has become the dominant paradigm in the West

nitwit005 1y ago

You can have brilliant technology and still go broke. The internet was amazingly valuable, but many of the early companies failed. Investing in internet companies was hardly a sure bet.

munk-a 1y ago
There was a recent Bezos talk about the fact that (much like the dot-com) we've overspending on infrastructure that'll bubble and implode but then we'll have all this amazing infra for companies to build off of... but the process of that overspend and implosion is essentially a massive debt erasure - a lot of people are currently propping up this market with their capital and the companies they're propping up will collapse and those obligations liquidated - and that will result in massive society-wide pain. We may end up in a better place for the next generation because of this investment - but if you're a retail investor don't expect your 401k accounts to weather that burst gracefully... and, unlike the boomers, this will largely hit Millenials and Gen Z both of whom are currently under massive financial stress.

nonameiguess 1y ago

Arguably, it's exactly this mindset creating the problem. It's not the value of the technology that matters. It's the value of the companies. If one company was the only one that had a particular valuable technology, then that would matter, but otherwise 90% of them likely end up worthless even if the sector itself doesn't. How that washes out on net we'll have to see. I'm not gonna pretend I know more than anyone else. Just keep in mind that a major difference between now and 2000 is companies stay private a lot longer. An IPO forces you to open the books and sustain public scrutiny of the broad investor class. A still-private startup only needs to convince one funder of their value. That inevitably leads to higher variance and a greater risk of failure. That doesn't mean the whole sector is necessarily a bubble, but if it is, it can be sustained a lot longer without us knowing. A small number of people with $50 billion they need to park somewhere and no other obvious options can keep shitty ideas afloat in a way that wouldn't be possible if they had to be subjected to broader exposure. We like to believe people with $50 billion can't be wrong, but the wisdom of crowds always beats the wisdom of individual genius. Heck, AI itself taught us that same lesson!

mmooss 1y ago
Both are great points.

digdugdirk 1y ago

Alternate viewpoint - The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, might be a sign that the technology shouldn't be valued this highly at all

mmooss 1y ago
> That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, might be a sign that the technology shouldn't be valued this highly at all That might be true, but it also might be true that it's tremendously valuable. The conditions you identify exist for every new technology; obviously the outcomes vary greatly.

usrnm 1y ago

Absolutely nothing in your list prevents the AI from being a bubble. The Internet is an absolute marvel of engineering that completely changed the life of the majority of people in the world, and yet it crashed 25 years ago, and crashed hard. Both can be true at the same time.

kergonath 1y ago
Also, video games in the 1980s.

hyperbovine 1y ago

> The value of modern AI seems very high. That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, is normal for any new technology. The same could be said for the internet. But, and I know this will be hard for younger readers to believe, I seem to recall the value proposition of the Internet being more immediately apparent at the time.

mmooss 1y ago
From what I've read, people spent a long time looking for the 'killer application'. Google didn't know how to make money off its search engine. Social media didn't exist in any mass form. Internet access on phones, beyond email, didn't exist in any usable way. Proprietary, walled garden services, with their own dial-up numbers, such as AOL and CompuServe, were seen as the future. Microsoft thought their similar service (MSN?) was the way forward and didn't integrate the Internet into Windows 95. That was after Netscape's browser was released and (relative to the time, I'm sure) very popular.
- acdha 1y ago
  The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded. That’s part of the difference with AI now: the internet immediately generated significant value almost instantly for relatively modest investments, so there were a ton of small and mid-sized companies who saw almost immediate profits from moving catalog sales or support online, switching software distribution from mailing diskettes to downloads, etc. and some people were able to cut into established markets where the existing companies were slow to change. AI is different in two key ways: the first is the extremely high cost, which prevents a lot of the bottom-up growth we saw on the web, but the second is that it’s not a reliable technology like the web was so you can’t safely use it in the most valuable contexts. In the 90s, some people screwed up form validation badly but most people didn’t. Right now, companies would love to replace things like customer service or sales with chatbots but nobody on the market can make a system which is both safe and useful because things like prompt injection require theoretical breakdowns, not just attention to detail.

kergonath 1y ago

> To say whether it's a bubble, we need to know the value of the technology. Not really. I mean, not only. The value of the web is immense. And yet, the dot-com bubble was indeed a bubble. What matters is the value in the short term compared to the value of the companies in the current context. Even if AI is huge 20 years from now, it can still crash dramatically tomorrow.

tim333 1y ago
I was going to say that. Also the bubble can be in some areas but not in others. I think the proposed data center build out is a bubble as in not economically justified presently, but I think money spent on AI research is reasonable.

logsr 1y ago

>still haven't figured out applications the real answer is that the applications for the military, surveillance, and population control are proven, and the pathways to scale those capacities are clear, so the money will pour in no matter what. the implication is that we had better come up with some more consumer/humanity friendly applications that create comparable value, or that is all we will get.

mmooss 1y ago
What are the clear military applications that differ from civilian ones?