Big tech is out of ideas and needs AI to work in order to drive growth.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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To have a bubble you need companies with no clear path to monetization, being over-valued to an extreme degree. This leaves me wondering : what company specifically ? Are they talking about nVidia ? OpenAI ? MidJourney ? Or the slew of LLM-powered SaaS products that have started appearing ? How exactly are we defining "over-valuation" here ? Are we talking about the tech industry as a whole ?
We often invite the comparison to the DotCom bubble but that's apples to oranges. You had companies making social networks for dogs or similar bullshit, valued in the billions and getting a ticker at the stock market before making a single dime. Or companies with outlandish promises such as delivering to any home in the US, in <1 hour, for a low price, and building warehouses by the hundreds before having a storefront. What would be the 2024 equivalent ? If a bubble is about to deflate then there should be dozens of comparable examples.
Exactly. There's a very clear path to monetisation for the bigger tech companies (ofc, not the random startup that screams "AI quantum computing blockchain reeeee").
Lemmy is just incredibly biased against AI, as it could replace a shit ton of jobs and lead to a crazy amount of wealth inequality. However, people need to remember that the problem isn't the tech- it's the system that the tech is being innovated in.
Denying AI is just going to make this issue a lot worse. We need to work to make AI be beneficial for all of us instead of the capitalists. But somehow leftist talk surrounding AI has just been about hating on it/ denying it, instead of preparing for a world in which it would be critical infrastructure very soon.
I don't think it's just Lemmy, i had similar conversations on Reddit. People don't realize that the companies they claim are over-valued actually have very strong business fundamentals. That's why in articles like OP's they will never mention any names or figures. I guess it's very convincing for outsiders but it doesn't stand any amount of scrutiny.
If you take OpenAI for example, they went from 0 to 3.6B$ annual revenue in just two fucking years. How is that not worth a boatload of money ? Even Uber didn't have that kind of growth and they burned a LOT more cash than OpenAI is burning right now.
As for the “AI quantum computing blockchain reeeee” projects... well they have a very hard time raising money right now and when they do, it's at pretty modest valuations. The market is not as dumb as it is portrayed.
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"Today’s hype will have lasting effects that constrain tomorrow’s possibilities."
Nope. No it won't. I'd love to have the patience to be more diplomatic but they're just wrong... and dumb.
I'm getting so sick of these anti AI cultists who seem to be made up of grumpy tech nerds behaving like "I was using AI before it was cool" hipsters and panicking artists and writers. Everyone needs to calm their tits right down. AI isn't going anywhere. It's giving creative and executive options to millions of people that just weren't there before.
We're in an adjustment phase right now and boundaries are being re-drawn around what constitutes creativity. My leading theory at the moment is that we'll all mostly eventually settle down to the idea that AI is just a tool. Once we're used to it and less starry eyed about it's output then individual creativity, possibly supported by AI tools, will flourish again. It's going to come down to the question of whether you prefer reading something cogitated, written, drawn or motion rendered by AI or you enjoy the perspective of a human being more. Both will be true in different scenarios I expect.
Honestly, I've had to nope out of quite a few forums and servers permanently now because all they do in there is circlejerk about the death of AI. Like this one theory that keeps popping up that image generating AI specifically is inevitably going to collapse in on itself and stop producing quality images. The reverse is so obviously true but they just don't want to see it. Otherwise smart people are just being so stubborn with this and it's, quite frankly, depressing to see.
Also, the tech nerds arguing that AI is just a fancy word and pixel regurgitating engine and that we'll never have an AGI are probably the same people that were really hoping Data would be classified as a sentient lifeform when Bruce Maddox wanted to dissassemble him in "The Measure of a Man".
How's that for whiplash?
It's fucking fantastic news, tbh.
Here's my take, let them dismiss it.
Let em! Remember Bitcoin at $15k after 2019?
Let em! And it's justified! If Ai isn't important right now, then why should its price be inflated to oblivion? Let it fall. Good! Lower prices for those of us that do see the value down the road.
That's how speculative investment works. In no way is this bad. Are sales bad? Sit back and enjoy the show.
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I have no idea how people can consider this to be a hype bubble especially after the o3 release. It smashed the ARC AGI benchmark on the performance front. It ranks as the 175th best competitive coder in the world on Codeforces' leaderboard.
o3 proved that it is possible to have at least an expert AGI if not a Virtuoso AGI (according to Deep mind's definition of AGI). Sure, it's not economical yet. But it will get there very soon (just like how the earlier GPTs were a lot dumber and took a lot more energy than the newer, smaller parameter models).
Please remember - fight to seize the means of production. Do not fight the means of production themselves.
Unless we invent cold fusion between the next 5 years, they will never be economical. They are the most energy inefficient thing ever invented by humanity and all prediction models state that it will cost more energy, not less, to keep making them better. They will never be energy efficient nor economical in their current state, and most companies are out of ideas on how to shake it up. Even the people who created generative models agree that they have just been brute forcing by making the models larger with more energy consumption. When you try to make them smaller or more energy efficient, they fall off the performance cliff and only produce garbage. I'm sure there are researchers doing cool stuff, but it is neither economical nor efficient.
Untrue. There are small models that produce better output than the previous "flagships" like GPT-2. Also, you can achieve much more than we currently do with far less energy by working on novel, specialised hardware (neuromorphic computing).
Your example is strange because, as far as I know, GPTs aren't economical either.
Why is it getting an AGI stamp now? I was under the impression humanity has not delivered a sentient AI? Which is what the AGI title was supposed to be used for...has that been pulled back again?
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