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Yes.
Nvidia is making a thing and selling it. No matter what happens with AI tech, they are going to keep their winnings.
Everybody else… well they borrowed/raised and spent a FORTUNE on R&D, chips, and electricity to make a product that has no realized commercial value (yet?). They are either going to figure out where the money comes from soon or the bills gonna come due. The next 12 months are going to be popcorn worthy if you like watching the tech industry.
“In a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling the shovels”
Nvidia is the shovel-seller right now. A couple of AI companies will probably get huge, 99% will fail. But Nvidia is getting paid by them all.
Well yeah, a company making the hardware that these AI companies utilize will probably be just fine, especially an entrenched one like Nvidia. Once the AI fad subsides, they might see a drop in revenue, but considering Nvidia makes more than AI processors, especially their graphics division (aka diversified), they won’t have too much issue pivoting to what’s next.
It’s kind of like the gold rush in the 1800s: the people who made bank and struck it rich weren’t necessarily the guys doing the mining, it was the ones supplying the miners with tools, clothes, supplies, etc.
Nvidia is probably making a huge sigh of relief right now. When the Crypto-Currency scam popped, they were looking at a huge inventory of graphics cards being dumped on the market. They lucked out that self-driving cars were the new shiny that kept their business growing. Now it’s AI. The AI hype-cycle is crashing fast though.
Recently Dell’s stock slipped 16%. Not because they were losing sales, not because their revenue was declining, but because analysts said their margins on AI computers weren’t big enough.
So there seems to be some patience wearing thin in the AI rush that includes the shovel makers.
Nvidia is making tons of money now, but they’re still going to be in hot water with investors when they have to explain why exponential revenue growth cannot be sustained as revenues crash back down to the norm.
You wanna know the real issue with the world? This right here, society as a whole accepting and promoting a system of measuring a company’s worth that by definition will make it fail after getting as much reach as possible. Almost ensuring everything will always be shit
Oh this quarter the company only got 74 billion in revenue instead of the projected 80? Sell everything it’s no longer profitable!!! Abandon ship!
Yep, it’s a system that relies on infinite growth and gets upset if there’s growth but it’s not fast enough or if there is any temporary setback no matter how minor or even if things level off for a bit. It’s ridiculous.
Ai isn’t the bubble, that’ll keep on improving, although probably not at this rate.
The hype bubble is companies adding AI to their product where it offers very little, if any, added value, which is incredibly tedious.
The latter bubble can burst, and we’ll all be better for it. But generative AI isn’t going anywhere.
We referred to the dotcom bubble as the dotcom bubble, but that didn’t mean that the web went away, it just meant that companies randomly tried stuff and had money thrown at them because the investors had no idea either.
So same here, AI bubble because it’s being randomly attempted without particular vision with lots and lots of money, not because the technology fundamentally is a bust.
That’s a good thing to put it in perspective, yeah. The amount of people who think AI is just a fad that will go away is staggering.
Yeah, right now the loudest voices are either “AI is ready to do everything right now or in a few months” or “This AI thing is worthless garbage” (both in practice refer to LLM specifically, even though they just say “AI”, the rest of AI field is pretty “boringly” accepted right now). There’s not a whole lot of attention given to more nuanced takes on what it realistically can/will be able to do or not do. With proponents glossing over the limitations and detractors pretending that every single use of LLM is telling people to eat rocks and glue.
Yeah, I’m super salty about the hype because if I had to pick one side or the other, I’d be on team “AI is worthless”, but that’s just because I’d rather try convincing a bunch of skeptics that when used wisely, AI/ML can be super useful, than to try talk some sense into the AI fanatics. It’s a shame though, because I feel like the longer the bubble takes to pop, the more harm actual AI research will receive
Some of it is a fad that will go away. Like you indicated, we’re in the “Marketing throws everything at the wall” phase. Soon we’ll be in the “see what sticks” phase. That stuff will hang around and improve, but until we get there we get AI in all conceivable forms whether they’re a worthwhile use of technology or not.
I just plan to keep using it. Also interesting thing at work I had an idea about a year ago for a sensing system that could predict when the machinery we sell needed some maintenance. No one thought it would work. This past month the CEO told me to go ahead with “his AI idea” and plans for us to file a patent. Be my second.
My point is if nothing else this raised the bar that much higher.
This
AI is actually providing value and advancing to a huge rate, I don’t know how people can dismiss that so easily
How has it helped you personally in every day life?
And if it’s doing some of your job with prompts that anybody could write, should you be paid less, or should you be replaced by someone juggling several positions?
I’m using LLMs to parse and organize information in my file directory, turning bank receipts into json files, I automatically rename downloaded movies into a more legible format I prefer, I summarize clickbaity-youtube-videos, I use copilot on vscode to code much faster, chatGPT all the time to discover new libraries and cut fast through boilerplate, I have a personal assistant that has access to a lot of metrics about my life: meditation streak, when I do exercise, the status of my system etc and helps me make decisions…
I don’t know about you but I feel like I’m living in an age of wonder
I’m not sure what to say about the prompts, I feel like I’m integrating AI in my systems to automate mundane stuff and oversee more information, I think one should be paid for the work and value produced
Your question sounds like a trap but I found a bunch of uses for it.
- Rewriting emails
- Learning quickly how to get popular business software to do stuff
- Wherever I used to use a search engine
- Setup study sessions on a topic I knew very little about. I scan the text. Read it. Give it to the AI/LLM. Discuss the text. Have it quiz me. Then move to the next page.
- Used it at a poorly documented art collection to track down pieces.
- Basically everything I know about baking. If you are curious my posts document the last 7 months or so of my progress.
- Built a software driver (a task I hate) almost completely by giving it the documentation
- Set it up so it can make practice tests for my daughters school work
- Explored a wide range of topics
Now go ahead and point out that I could have done all this myself with just Google, the way we did back in the day. That’s the thing about this stuff. You can always make an argument that some new thing is bad by pointing out it is solving problems that were already solved or solving problems no one cares about. Whenever I get yelled at or hear people complain about opposite things I know that they just want to be angry and they have no argument. It’s just rage full throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
You can always make an argument that some new thing is bad by pointing out it is solving problems that were already solved or solving problems no one cares about.
That’s not the issue. I’m not a luddite. The issue is that you can’t rely on its answers. The accuracy varies wildly. If you trust it implicitly there’s no way of telling what you end up with. Human learning process normally involves comparing information to previous information, some process of vetting, during which your brain “muscles” are exercised so they become better at it all the time. It’s like being fed in bed and never getting out to do anything by yourself, and to top it off you don’t even know if you’re being fed correct information.
The issue is that you can’t rely on its answers.
Cough… Wikipedia…cough. You remember being told how Wikipedia wasn’t accurate and the only true sources were books made by private companies that no one could correct?
Human learning process normally involves comparing information to previous information, some process of vetting, during which your brain “muscles” are exercised so they become better at it all the time. It’s l
Argument from weakness. Classic luddite move. I am old enough to remember the fears that internet search engines would do this.
In any case no one is forcing you to use it. I am sure if you called up Britianica and told them to send you a set they would be happy to.
Improving but to what end? If it’s not something that the public will ultimately perceive as useful it will tank no matter how hard it’s pushed.
I saw a quote that went something like, “I want AI to do my laundry so I can have time for my art, not to do art while I keep doing laundry”.
Art vs laundry is an extreme example but the gist of it is that it should focus on practical applications of the mundane sort. It’s interesting that it can make passable art but ultimately it’s mediocre and meaningless.
Nah but once the put AI on everything bubble bursts companies will have a sour taste on it and won’t be so interested in investing into it.
I believe we’ll get a lot of good improvements over it but in people’s minds AI will be that weird thing that never worked quite right. It’ll be another meme like Cortana on windows so it won’t drive stock price at all unless you’re doing something really cutting edge.
And good luck competing with the tech giants
Of course we are. Its really all a hype of half ass helpful prototypes at the moment.
Yes. Tech is a hype-based sector where the actual value of products is obfuscated by marketing. When the AI craze settles down, hopefully we’ll stop seeing it injected into everything.
It will be like the IoT bloom of 2015ish where everyone and their mother had a new IoT product on Kickstarter.
I just hope it dies fast so that we can concentrate on the actual utility of LLMs and other AI sectors.
By everything do you mean 1/3 lemmy.world articles and comments or?
I mean AI bullshit like Copilot being added to Windows then quietly paywalled, ridiculous products like the Rabbit R1, and the arms race involving products that aren’t ready for market or produced ethically. LLMs still just make shit up a lot of the time.
Anyone remember the dotcom boom (and bust)? The AI hype bubble reminds me a lot of that. It ticks all the same boxes: wild new tech showing up all the time, stratospheric hype, corporate FOMO, a money spigot that seems to be spraying investments at any company with AI in the name, business plans that lose money per unit sold but plan to “make it up at scale.” And unlike the last 16 years this is all happening when interest rates are non-zero so money actually costs something.
When I think about the dotcom boom and bust I tend to group the companies into 3 or so broad categories:
- Companies that were doing the right thing at the right time. These are the companies that weren’t necessarily pushing the envelope from a technology perspective; they were building a business model on where the technology was at the time but that could improve as the technology did. In the dotcom days the business model that most exemplifies that was e-commerce. Amazon and eBay grew up in the dotcom era and survived the bust no problem because they were already profitable by the time the investment money stopped flowing.
- Companies that were way too early. These are the ones that had a great vision but that were too far ahead of the technology curve. Did you know we had online grocery delivery in 1999? Webvan tried to move fast and corner the market but due to mismanagement and the tech and market not being ready they crashed hard in 2001. Grocery delivery is of course totally commonplace today, but even if Webvan wasn’t mismanaged I find it highly unlikely that they could have succeeded when less than half the country even had dialup and the common wisdom of the day was to not type your credit card number online.
- And last but not least, you’ve got the startups that never really had a business plan and the existing companies just jumping on the hype train because of FOMO. Startups were getting investment dollars just to … build a website. Big companies were putting up totally contentless “web experiences.” Suddenly every breakfast cereal had a website. Did it have nutrition information? No. Online ordering? No. Mostly it was just marketing drivel and maybe a recipe for snack mix if you’re lucky. These are the ones I think of when I hear that Taco Bell is going “AI-First.”
Anyways, there’s more I could say about why I think this will play out faster than crypto did but this is already a wall of text. For all the people who missed the dotcom boom: Enjoy the hype cycle. It’ll be a smoking crater before you know it. :)
I was in high school during the boom and my career plan was:
- Go work for a startup doing computer stuff
- Get stock options
- Retire before 30 when it goes public
The landscape after graduating college was… different.
What‘s not a bubble in this ill economy? It’s the new default.
The old default. They’ve been a part of market economies for a very long time. If anything we might have learned to tame them a bit as of late.
You’ve invoked Betteridge’s law of headlines.
It depends
is thst even a question?
Yeah seriously. This is 1998 all over again.
I remember 1998.
It wasn’t as dumb as this shit.
And these dorks should have learnt from the dot com and crypto-currency crashes.
How can there be a bubble when there are no AI products?
Eh, it depends on what we count as “AI”. I’m in a field where machine learning has been a thing for years, and there’s been a huge amount of progress in the last couple of years[1]. However, it’s exhausting that so much is being rebranded as “AI”, because the people holding the purse strings aren’t necessarily the same scientists who are sick of the hype.
[1] I didn’t get into the more computational side of things until 2021 or so, but if I had to point to a catalyst for this progress, I’d say that the transformer mechanism outlined in the 2017 paper “Attention is all you need”, by Google scientists.
Yes, and no.
The tech is absolutely astounding. Somebody posted a random idea on Facebook and it caused me to make it have a conversation between Fred Rogers and Steve Irwin and it absolutely nailed it. I’ve had it look at pictures of memes it got details like one person looking at another person.
The power wise, it’s rather unsustainable. There’s a real cost associated with each one of these queries were running and the price to train it with all the data. There are many jobs at which it makes financial sense to pay for it is a service but the vast majority of work or sending off to AI is nothing that anyone is willing to pay for.
We’re in an AI bubble because we can only make queries against AI as long as Microsoft and Google decide that it’s in their plans to allow us to do it for free.
You’re forgetting about models that are open source and able to run locally. Llama3 is not the best model, but it’s still very useful and will continue to get better along with the top closed source models.
This round of technology reminds me of when Google was the shiniest thing on the block, and everyone was trying to cram a site specific search engine into their website.
This resulted in open source projects such as Lucene, which is incredibly useful, but is not in reality anything like Google. Over time interest in these projects faded and now they’re just another pretty optional component of a website (many sites just use SQL queries rather than a search engine).
I think chatbots are pretty similar. The premier versions of these things cost way too much to run to be practical for most sites, so they’ll play with the scaled down, easier versions for a time before abandoning the functionality entirely over time unless it’s found to be actually useful.
Pretty much all technology goes through the same odd shape of adoption.
What is often really hard to tell is where you are until your definitely in the trough of Disillusionment. We could be practically very early on the way up and human level or above AI is coming or near the peak of Inflated expectations and its about to crash down before finally finding a use that is less hype and more worthwhile. The regulation will certainly slow things down a bit towards the peak.
I am not sure whether slightly better chat bots that still lie and image generators that do look reasonably good is the peak or just the beginning. Progress has been dramatic in the past years since invention but the cost of training is now immense and it requires a breakthrough to make big steps of improvement and I am not sure if we are going to make that. A lot of billionaire money riding on it.
The trough of disillusionment is definitely already there in academia but the market forces that be override that with massive amounts of hype, silicon, and YOLO. Billionaire capital and attitude can provide that, it can’t provide basic research, because velocity is valued way higher than going anywhere sensible.
Making it a question, makes me question in which reality the autor lives
it’s tl;dr news so normal.
I hope so, ‘cause I just gotta patent pending and I’m goin’ out to raise a bunch a money.
It always has been
