5 ms·

As a bystander directly immune to the fortunes of AI going up or down, it does feel like there are a lot more people thinking this is inning 9 of the LLM story

As a bystander directly immune to the fortunes of AI going up or down, it does feel like there are a lot more people thinking this is inning 9 of the LLM story than there are people thinking it's inning 3. Which makes it tempting to believe it's probably closer to inning 3.

kube-system 3mo ago
I think it's the magnitude of the situation that is more concerning than how close we are. We might not know when it pops but when it does, the dominos are in a pretty precarious position.
XenophileJKO 3mo ago
It is like being in a city where Edison wired up lights.. and people are like..well I guess electricity has played out! We have only begun to extract the value of commoditized intelligence. Sure there are arguments on local models and pricing power.. but I think we will be compute constrained for the near future.
- scarlehoff 3mo ago
  Internet didn't disappear after the dotcom crash, but a lot of money did. This is what could happen here I think.
  - echelon 3mo ago
    The internet remains the biggest singular development of my entire life. The most valuable companies in the world are internet companies. Journalists have been eager to call AI "over" since 2022, and yet: - Models just got good at writing code this year - Models just got good at editing images last year - Models just got good at cinematic video this year This hasn't even played out. It hasn't even started. Why on earth would this be the end? The robotics story is just getting started, too. I literally do not write code anymore.
    - infecto 3mo ago
      People enjoy the narrative that AI is doomed. I am in the same mindset as you. I cannot see compute demand changing anytime soon.
      - goatlover 3mo ago
        This is a straw man position. Who is saying AI is doomed? There were previous winters but the technology kept improving. What people are doubting is all the current hype around it. Stuff like AGI and the singularity being right around the corner with fully automated societies and robots dong all your chores for you. Rather than it being presented as productivity tool for enhancing human labor and activity, it's presented as an eventual god that will radically transform the rules of economics and everything else, and thus it needs to be forced into everything. That's absurd hype and with it all the absurd VC funding and valuation. Thus it's seen as a huge financial bubble.
        margalabargala 3mo ago
        > robots dong all your chores for you This could happen this year or next, assuming you're willing to pay $30k for the hardware.
        echelon 3mo ago
        > the current hype around it. - Fable - Seedance - Nano Banana / GPT Image - Kimi - ChatGPT These tools are 80-90% of my day now. Google Search? Meh. Chrome? Eh. Mac or Linux? Honestly just input devices now. The models are the hottest thing in the world. I am getting so much done. If I told myself from two years ago the progress these models would have made, I wouldn't have believed it.
        infecto 3mo ago
        You’re arguing against claims I never made. You can reject AGI hype and still believe AI demand, infrastructure buildout, and commercial adoption will continue growing. Absolutely lots of hype but there is lots of value behind generated (unlike crypto) and we are still very early. This is what I was pointing at. There are folks on very extreme both sides, you are a good example, and I happen to believe it’s probably somewhere in the middle.
  - cyanydeez 3mo ago
    unfortunately, the dotcom ate just money; the housing crash ate money and people. This will be some combination of the two; I wouldn't doubt a few pension funds in the deep red states get crushed if it takes money and property with it.
    - cindyllm 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- pydry 3mo ago
  It's like having a bunch of walmart sized pets.coms.
- goatlover 3mo ago
  That doesn't preclude something like a dot-com crash. It also doesn't mean everything in the current hype cycle will come true either. Plenty of people still shop at physical stores, read printed materials, and actually don't like being stuck at home if they can help it. Similarly, majority of people still don't 3D-print stuff they can get cheaply at Walmart or from Amazon. Or use VR/AR as their primary form of interaction.
  - WarmWash 3mo ago
    >Plenty of people still shop at physical stores, read printed materials, and actually don't like being stuck at home if they can help it. I too would use "plenty" rather than look at the horribly depressing stats.
    - goatlover 3mo ago
      What are the horribly depressing stats that show otherwise? Maybe it's different where you live.
    - dan_sbl 3mo ago
      https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/online-vs-in-store-shopping-statistics/ https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/online-vs-in-store-s... Basically, 80% of sales are still brick-and-mortar. That doesn't seem very depressing?
- Razengan 3mo ago
  It's more likely that we're seeing the limitations of discrete/digital binary computing architectures, and this will speed up the birth of new or the resurgence of hitherto-"exotic" architectures, like ternary, analog, etcetera One thing's for certain: There's no way anyone who's come close to Sauron's Ring (made actual use of AI) wants to part with it :')
chasd00 3mo ago
inning 9 of the money/hype train, i think it's still inning 3 of the overall technology.
- tehjoker 3mo ago
  That feels more right to me. Maybe inning 8 on money/hype.
- ninkendo 3mo ago
  Indeed, the internet is absolutely gonna be with us forever, but I’d hate to be the guy who bought Cisco stock in August of 2000. (It took 25 years to recover.) Although at its peak, CSCO was up ~2500% in a 5-year period, whereas NVDA is “only” up ~1000% in a similar timeframe.
rybosworld 3mo ago
Right - black swans are by definition things that the majority didn't see coming. Ever since the 2008 housing crisis, people have been predicting the next bubble-burst/black-swan event. The one that really crushed the markets was the one almost body saw coming: Covid-19.
- kube-system 3mo ago
  Not every crash is due to a black-swan event. Many crashes are due to causes with predictable reasons, but unpredictable timing.
  - rybosworld 3mo ago
    You have any examples? Because all of the biggest and most famous crashes were events that only a very small minority of people ever saw coming. Tulips, 1929, Dotcom, Great Recession, 2010's Flash Crash - none of these were in the public discussion before they happened.
    - axus 3mo ago
      2008 financial crisis, after years of "mortgage bros" inflating that bubble.
      - rybosworld 3mo ago
        That's the great recession
      - prewett 3mo ago
        (somewhat tangential) We've got too much subtle deception going on, let's call it what it was: the Panic of '08. Because there was definitely some panic going on. Solvent companies like GE were days away from bankruptcy because they couldn't get a routine short-term loan for payroll.
    - kube-system 3mo ago
      > 1929, Dotcom, Great Recession, 2010's Flash Crash - none of these were in the public discussion before they happened. The "public discussion" is a whole different thing. They weren't in the public discussion because macroeconomic theory isn't something mom and pop like to chat about on the weekend. They only become dinner-table discussion topics when the impacts hit main street, after they happen. But bubbles in recent history have been pretty reliably identified beforehand: https://web.archive.org/web/20180330001927/https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB953335580704470544 https://web.archive.org/web/20180330001927/https://www.barro... https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/06/16/in-come-the-waves https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/06/16/in-come-... It isn't hard for economists to find bubbles, where the market is taking on high levels of risk. What is downright near impossible to do is predict what specific event will cause the dominos to begin dropping, or when it will happen.
darth_avocado 3mo ago
> As a bystander directly immune to the fortunes of AI going up or down Sorry to break it to you but you are neither immune nor a bystander to the fortunes of AI going down. You are part of it all whether you like it or not.
- bdangubic 3mo ago
  you can 100% and totally be immune to it
  - boelboel 3mo ago
    Which type of person is immune to it and where do they live?
    - vouaobrasil 3mo ago
      I guess if you're older, retired, sufficiently wealthy and have few needs (house paid off, lots of savings, don't care too much about acquiring new tech) then you can easily not be affected.
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
      - red-iron-pine 3mo ago
        "sufficiently wealthy" is quite a term -- doin a lot of heavy lifting there. there are a lot of older folks leaning on 401ks and IRAs that are heavy in big indexes and I suspect many of them may end up eating cat food to get by if/when the bottom drops out.
    - jujube3 3mo ago
      Homeless people who live in the sewers. But first, you have to learn karate.
    - mminer237 3mo ago
      Just don't be invested in AI stocks, heavily leveraged in the stock market and about to retire, or work at a place built on such?
xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
Can you convert that analogy to European?
- whall6 3mo ago
  first FIFA water break
- jrflowers 3mo ago
  It’s like when the quarterback throws one last Hail Mary to a receiver in the endzone and people are betting on an interception
techblueberry 3mo ago
Maybe inning 9 game 1 of the series.
- red-iron-pine 3mo ago
  that is perhaps a better analogy. end of chapter one of a long and complicated book. what will come out of the crash will likely be terrible for the average person, regardless.
TYPE_FASTER 3mo ago
> Which makes it tempting to believe it's probably closer to inning 3. Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. New ways of productizing the technology are still be defined as people are using it. The pricing models are evolving in real-time as the providers figure out what the market will bear.
jitokim 3mo ago
[dead]
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 3mo ago
That's a mildly weird take. Historically, by the time a bubble becomes broadly visible/acknowledged, it has already burst; it's just that the shockwave hasn't quite hit yet. You really only saw _widespread_ "eh, this is maybe a bit problematic" in about 2007, for the bubbles which drove the GFC, say.
tim333 3mo ago
Maybe inning 9 for LLMs, inning 3 for AI? Already the models have moved from language models to multi modal.

kube-system 3mo ago

I think it's the magnitude of the situation that is more concerning than how close we are. We might not know when it pops but when it does, the dominos are in a pretty precarious position.

XenophileJKO 3mo ago

It is like being in a city where Edison wired up lights.. and people are like..well I guess electricity has played out! We have only begun to extract the value of commoditized intelligence. Sure there are arguments on local models and pricing power.. but I think we will be compute constrained for the near future.

scarlehoff 3mo ago
Internet didn't disappear after the dotcom crash, but a lot of money did. This is what could happen here I think.
- echelon 3mo ago
  The internet remains the biggest singular development of my entire life. The most valuable companies in the world are internet companies. Journalists have been eager to call AI "over" since 2022, and yet: - Models just got good at writing code this year - Models just got good at editing images last year - Models just got good at cinematic video this year This hasn't even played out. It hasn't even started. Why on earth would this be the end? The robotics story is just getting started, too. I literally do not write code anymore.
  - infecto 3mo ago
    People enjoy the narrative that AI is doomed. I am in the same mindset as you. I cannot see compute demand changing anytime soon.
    - goatlover 3mo ago
      This is a straw man position. Who is saying AI is doomed? There were previous winters but the technology kept improving. What people are doubting is all the current hype around it. Stuff like AGI and the singularity being right around the corner with fully automated societies and robots dong all your chores for you. Rather than it being presented as productivity tool for enhancing human labor and activity, it's presented as an eventual god that will radically transform the rules of economics and everything else, and thus it needs to be forced into everything. That's absurd hype and with it all the absurd VC funding and valuation. Thus it's seen as a huge financial bubble.
      - margalabargala 3mo ago
        > robots dong all your chores for you This could happen this year or next, assuming you're willing to pay $30k for the hardware.
      - echelon 3mo ago
        > the current hype around it. - Fable - Seedance - Nano Banana / GPT Image - Kimi - ChatGPT These tools are 80-90% of my day now. Google Search? Meh. Chrome? Eh. Mac or Linux? Honestly just input devices now. The models are the hottest thing in the world. I am getting so much done. If I told myself from two years ago the progress these models would have made, I wouldn't have believed it.
      - infecto 3mo ago
        You’re arguing against claims I never made. You can reject AGI hype and still believe AI demand, infrastructure buildout, and commercial adoption will continue growing. Absolutely lots of hype but there is lots of value behind generated (unlike crypto) and we are still very early. This is what I was pointing at. There are folks on very extreme both sides, you are a good example, and I happen to believe it’s probably somewhere in the middle.
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  unfortunately, the dotcom ate just money; the housing crash ate money and people. This will be some combination of the two; I wouldn't doubt a few pension funds in the deep red states get crushed if it takes money and property with it.
  - cindyllm 3mo ago
    [dead]
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
pydry 3mo ago
It's like having a bunch of walmart sized pets.coms.
goatlover 3mo ago
That doesn't preclude something like a dot-com crash. It also doesn't mean everything in the current hype cycle will come true either. Plenty of people still shop at physical stores, read printed materials, and actually don't like being stuck at home if they can help it. Similarly, majority of people still don't 3D-print stuff they can get cheaply at Walmart or from Amazon. Or use VR/AR as their primary form of interaction.
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  >Plenty of people still shop at physical stores, read printed materials, and actually don't like being stuck at home if they can help it. I too would use "plenty" rather than look at the horribly depressing stats.
  - goatlover 3mo ago
    What are the horribly depressing stats that show otherwise? Maybe it's different where you live.
  - dan_sbl 3mo ago
    https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/online-vs-in-store-shopping-statistics/ https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/online-vs-in-store-s... Basically, 80% of sales are still brick-and-mortar. That doesn't seem very depressing?
Razengan 3mo ago
It's more likely that we're seeing the limitations of discrete/digital binary computing architectures, and this will speed up the birth of new or the resurgence of hitherto-"exotic" architectures, like ternary, analog, etcetera One thing's for certain: There's no way anyone who's come close to Sauron's Ring (made actual use of AI) wants to part with it :')

chasd00 3mo ago

inning 9 of the money/hype train, i think it's still inning 3 of the overall technology.

tehjoker 3mo ago
That feels more right to me. Maybe inning 8 on money/hype.
ninkendo 3mo ago
Indeed, the internet is absolutely gonna be with us forever, but I’d hate to be the guy who bought Cisco stock in August of 2000. (It took 25 years to recover.) Although at its peak, CSCO was up ~2500% in a 5-year period, whereas NVDA is “only” up ~1000% in a similar timeframe.

rybosworld 3mo ago

Right - black swans are by definition things that the majority didn't see coming. Ever since the 2008 housing crisis, people have been predicting the next bubble-burst/black-swan event. The one that really crushed the markets was the one almost body saw coming: Covid-19.

kube-system 3mo ago
Not every crash is due to a black-swan event. Many crashes are due to causes with predictable reasons, but unpredictable timing.
- rybosworld 3mo ago
  You have any examples? Because all of the biggest and most famous crashes were events that only a very small minority of people ever saw coming. Tulips, 1929, Dotcom, Great Recession, 2010's Flash Crash - none of these were in the public discussion before they happened.
  - axus 3mo ago
    2008 financial crisis, after years of "mortgage bros" inflating that bubble.
    - rybosworld 3mo ago
      That's the great recession
    - prewett 3mo ago
      (somewhat tangential) We've got too much subtle deception going on, let's call it what it was: the Panic of '08. Because there was definitely some panic going on. Solvent companies like GE were days away from bankruptcy because they couldn't get a routine short-term loan for payroll.
  - kube-system 3mo ago
    > 1929, Dotcom, Great Recession, 2010's Flash Crash - none of these were in the public discussion before they happened. The "public discussion" is a whole different thing. They weren't in the public discussion because macroeconomic theory isn't something mom and pop like to chat about on the weekend. They only become dinner-table discussion topics when the impacts hit main street, after they happen. But bubbles in recent history have been pretty reliably identified beforehand: https://web.archive.org/web/20180330001927/https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB953335580704470544 https://web.archive.org/web/20180330001927/https://www.barro... https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/06/16/in-come-the-waves https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/06/16/in-come-... It isn't hard for economists to find bubbles, where the market is taking on high levels of risk. What is downright near impossible to do is predict what specific event will cause the dominos to begin dropping, or when it will happen.

darth_avocado 3mo ago

> As a bystander directly immune to the fortunes of AI going up or down Sorry to break it to you but you are neither immune nor a bystander to the fortunes of AI going down. You are part of it all whether you like it or not.

bdangubic 3mo ago
you can 100% and totally be immune to it
- boelboel 3mo ago
  Which type of person is immune to it and where do they live?
  - vouaobrasil 3mo ago
    I guess if you're older, retired, sufficiently wealthy and have few needs (house paid off, lots of savings, don't care too much about acquiring new tech) then you can easily not be affected.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - red-iron-pine 3mo ago
      "sufficiently wealthy" is quite a term -- doin a lot of heavy lifting there. there are a lot of older folks leaning on 401ks and IRAs that are heavy in big indexes and I suspect many of them may end up eating cat food to get by if/when the bottom drops out.
  - jujube3 3mo ago
    Homeless people who live in the sewers. But first, you have to learn karate.
  - mminer237 3mo ago
    Just don't be invested in AI stocks, heavily leveraged in the stock market and about to retire, or work at a place built on such?

xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago

Can you convert that analogy to European?

whall6 3mo ago
first FIFA water break
jrflowers 3mo ago
It’s like when the quarterback throws one last Hail Mary to a receiver in the endzone and people are betting on an interception

techblueberry 3mo ago

Maybe inning 9 game 1 of the series.

red-iron-pine 3mo ago
that is perhaps a better analogy. end of chapter one of a long and complicated book. what will come out of the crash will likely be terrible for the average person, regardless.

TYPE_FASTER 3mo ago

> Which makes it tempting to believe it's probably closer to inning 3. Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. New ways of productizing the technology are still be defined as people are using it. The pricing models are evolving in real-time as the providers figure out what the market will bear.

jitokim 3mo ago

[dead]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

rsynnott 3mo ago

That's a mildly weird take. Historically, by the time a bubble becomes broadly visible/acknowledged, it has already burst; it's just that the shockwave hasn't quite hit yet. You really only saw _widespread_ "eh, this is maybe a bit problematic" in about 2007, for the bubbles which drove the GFC, say.

tim333 3mo ago

Maybe inning 9 for LLMs, inning 3 for AI? Already the models have moved from language models to multi modal.