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Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

136 points by flarecoder 3y ago

flarecoder 3y ago
The move from crypto to artificial intelligence has fueled the markets this year, but some are questioning how much of it is real.
- dvh 3y ago
  At least ai seems significantly more useful than crypto.
  - dustymcp 3y ago
    I feel both things are not really ready for primetime, but i agree AI is way more useful.
    - cornholio 3y ago
      AI is undoubtedly useful, perhaps not revolutionary as heralded. Crypto was never anything else than a grift. The only true feature of de-fi is to evade financial regulators, for a time, and enable large scale movements of shady money.
      - ColoursofOSINT 3y ago
        Nice contradiction. > Crypto was never anything else than a grift. Ah, alright then, I guess it's not useful for anything. > evade financial regulators Sounds useful to me! > enable large scale movements of shady money. Large scale movements of money? Super useful!
        cornholio 3y ago
        >> Crypto was never anything else than a grift. >Ah, alright then, I guess it's not useful for anything. No. It's a simple English sentence: it means it's not useful for anything else other than grifting. The grifters find it particularly useful, just like MLMs, traditional ponzi schemes, HYIPs etc. But that doesn't mean any of those grifts are "useful". > Nice contradiction. Only for the monkey jpeg brigade, who feel that the artificial demand from criminals laundering money and posing as legitimate crypto investors is a feature, not an unacceptable bug. If the only ones using it are criminals, then it's no longer useful even for them, because the whole point is to claim legitimate crypto profits.
        ColoursofOSINT 3y ago
        > it's not useful for anything else other than grifting. I've paid for my domains and vps with crypto, I can pay for my search engine, send donations to non-profits I support, so there's your use case. I don't even have to hand over my personal banking information, so no worrying about data breaches, another use case! I'm sure you would consider paying for a legal service to be a legitimate use case. > monkey jpeg brigade Whoa, name calling, well that always shows the strength of your argument. > who feel that the artificial demand from criminals laundering money and posing as legitimate crypto investors is a feature Didn't realize I was a NFT supporter by calling out your contradiction. Oh, and a straw man too, always nice to see. Also, technology can be abused? Who would have thought? Its a shame that primary users are the criminal masterminds who've apparently become art connoisseurs of monkey jpegs. I don't seem to remember supporting "laundering money". Do you mean in the same way that banking at HSBC, BYN Mellon, Deutsche, Swedbank, Danke and others is supporting money laundering? [1-6] Or how banking with BoA is supporting fraud? [7] Although its nice to see that you believe in "legitimate crypto investors". 1: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/bnp-paribas-pleads-guilty-in-sanctions-case/ https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/... 2:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/swedbank-reportedly-behind-4-3-billion-in-suspicious-transfers#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/swedbank-... 3:https://www.acfcs.org/news/419424/Danske-Bank-reveals-Estonian-branch-may-have-laundered-230-billion-as-CEO-steps-down.htm https://www.acfcs.org/news/419424/Danske-Bank-reveals-Estoni... 4: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/business/bank-settles-us-inquiry-into-money-laundering.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/business/bank-settles-us-... 5:https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/17/deutsche-bank-faces-action-over-20bn-russian-money-laundering-scheme https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/17/deutsche-ba... 6:https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-news-for-jan-29-hsbcs-money-laundering-scandal-hbc-scbff-ing-cs-rbs0129.aspx https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n... 7:https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion-historic-justice-department-settlement-financial-fraud-leading https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion... > If the only ones using it are criminals, then it's no longer useful even for them, because the whole point is to claim legitimate crypto profits. Uh, sure? Sounds good man.
    - kaliqt 3y ago
      Indeed. Crypto when done to its philosophy is to gain financial and market freedom for businesses and people like you and I. Sadly, there's been a lot of co-opting and from that, a lot of uneducated people who will call anything that empowers individuals to be "shady" and "criminal". Alas, it would appear there are no such things as fundamental human rights, only laws, according to these people.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Crypto is 15 years old and still hasn't provided anything useful for normal people. The current generation of AI tools is barely a year old and we have seen so much progress.
adamnemecek 3y ago
Yeah the two are not comparable.
- jahnu 3y ago
  Right. We probably will actually get something substantial out of investment in AI even if it falls far short of the lofty promises.
  - adamnemecek 3y ago
    Indeed. There was never anything in crypto.
    - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
      Hindsight is awesome.
      - PartyOperator 3y ago
        With hindsight, I was correct about Bitcoin being worse than useless when I decided not to bother using my gaming PC and free electricity to mine it in 2011. With hindsight, this could also be seen as a mistake. Although I'm pretty sure I would have sold it at $25 and considered that an unreasonable gain.
satvikpendem 3y ago
AI investment is actually down recently, looks like the hype is wearing off since most of the companies funded were just wrapping OpenAI APIs. I will copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue. https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512 https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512 Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m --- 6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years. With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case. Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising. Let’s start with the losers. Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money. The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy. Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @LangChainAI and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way). In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round. (This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.) This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity. There are two causes for this: 1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended. 2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen. Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas." These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostmaa's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition. This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing. LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing. I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology. The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch. A few companies I would put in this group are: 1. https://cursor.so https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written. 2. https://harvey.ai https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices 3. https://runwayml.com https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for. If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious. Lets recap: 1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling. 2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups. 3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets. 4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns. It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see. And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category.
Almondsetat 3y ago
Routinely articles like these are written. I find them superfluous and a symptom of the human tendency to never sit down and reflect about stuff. Grifts prey on the ignorant, duping them through an informational gap. As such, grifts flourish in new and uncertain environments. Environments where expert opinion is still forming and is badly communicated, and scammers can sound knowledgeable to the average person without actually knowing anything. Now that experts have pushed against crypto and the whole field has become clearer in what can be done with it and what can't, it's obvious that grifters are moving to the new uncharted hotness: "AI". Writing articles like this, always talking about the specific events and never the global trend, does not help the wheel of grifting stop spinning.
- WaxProlix 3y ago
  Was this written by GPT? It feels very Trained On Hacker News.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    Yes, this was in fact generated by a GPT model I specifically tuned for HN and that I managed to run inside my brain with minimal latency and power requirements. [EDIT] In conclusion
    - throwawaymaths 3y ago
      You should have added an "in conclusion,". Your meatGPT model needs more training.
      - Almondsetat 3y ago
        You're right, I fixed the model
padolsey 3y ago
Summary: Investors don't know where to put their money and they're scared
- floucky 3y ago
  At least I can see more concrete applications than I did with the Web 3.0 bullshit (NFT, metaverse and other buzzwords).
  - gremlinsinc 3y ago
    I feel like everyone was jumping at the bit for x, y, z technologies to be the best big ground floor thing, then chatGPT came along, the x,y,z techs were getting hit hard the past year by bad luck, regulatory concerns, etc, and now that people lost their asses on that they're afraid ai will be the same, except I never really got value from nft, Blockchain, etc.... most people I know don't even know what all that is (non tech people, anyways). I know plenty of computer barely literate people who use chatGPT and other generative ai tools daily. The biggest problems I see though are openai and Microsoft essentially competing with people using the API to create products. If you build an app using openai and they add every feature that sets your app apart, you might as well throw in the towel. investors who bought into your startup when you thought there was a moat will lose.
kubb 3y ago
Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a fraction of their billions each to finance whatever seems remotely reasonable while squinting in that space, just for a chance to hit the jackpot and get more billions, maybe even a trillion, and their face onto Forbes and on TV. The poor suckers gotta scramble. They invent all kinds of bullshit, and they sell it to the other poor suckers who advise the rich guys. Teams of specialists are created. Whole organizations. There's HR, somebody to organize team building events. Every layer spawns another layer. Lawyers, somebody to give sexual harassment trainings, someone to run the cafeteria. Buildings are rented from the rich guys via managment companies run by the poor suckers. Every day a handful of people make it and can even buy a house! Codes of conduct are written, company values and mission statements. People pivot, jump from place to place, try to sign the best contract. Every once in a while an exec jumps ship with several hundred mil in the bank. It's a great life. What could be better?
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Money is not wealth. Once you have more of it than is necessary for basic needs, you have to figure out a way to get rid of it and exchange it for real wealth. Investing it in "tech" is an easy and dumb solution to the problem.
  - boxed 3y ago
    The problem is that the 0.1% don't seem to really understand this. If they did we would se massive investments in basic science and medicine from them. But we don't. Instead most of them seem to treat their wealth as internet points to compare to other super rich.
    - bombolo 3y ago
      They want investments with short term returns… and basic science isn't that.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Given the absurd pace of open source, I'm not sure if the money itself is in "AI", maybe certain applications but if I can run something 95% as good as ChatGTP-4 on my home desktop in a year or so, then I'm not going to be paying for any "AI" solutions.
- flangola7 3y ago
  In a year it may not be legal to run that GPT-4 on your desktop. Every nation sees the writing on the wall.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    How do you suppose this is enforced now ? Lol
    - flangola7 3y ago
      There's no enforcement right now because there's no law for it yet. Laws can change, nearly every legislature on the globe is working on this.
JimDabell 3y ago
Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trends and mistake the trend for the overall value. AI only looks like cryptocurrency / blockchain if you don’t know anything at all about either one beyond “they are trendy and attract people who like investing in trendy things”.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. AI solves real problems, and has been doing so for many years. Generative AI is just the latest and most accessible instantiating of it. My first company was a dialup ISP in the 90s. I look at GPT4 and I see the 56K modem of AI. There is so much upside to be discovered, we have barely started.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    > Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. True > AI solves real problems AI research and real products, most probably. All those new companies/startups that are wrappers around ChatGPT? Not that much. Maybe someone will do something that really brings value but most of them sound and act like the Blockchain startups we had til 12 months ago.
    - apexalpha 3y ago
      Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. Same like how the computers enabled billions to do the most complex calculations within a second, while before you needed to learn that skill over years or practise.
harry8 3y ago
Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped. Whether you believe AI is going to be massively transformative to the modern economy on a scale with cars or personal computing is actually not sufficient to start investing in the 'sector' (for want of a better term). So this is useful as a reverse indicator. Anyone investing buckets in AI is worth betting against in general. Everyone? Maybe not everyone. Maybe. Likewise even if the blockchain sector is dead. (Is it? No clue) This does not necessarily make the technology dead. (Even if you would like it to be). The web came back and reinvented as a massive distributed surveillance machine. Who would have predicted that in the crash? Who would have wanted it? Well we got it anyway.
- martindbp 3y ago
  You can always find some earlier example of a tech that lost. But if you invested in the first company to mass produce a car (Ford) you'd have done well. If you invested in the first of its kind smartphone (Apple) even better. Likewise there's been a lot of early failed AI startups in the past 20 years that you could point to, and now OpenAI is hitting it out of the park, expecting a billion in revenue next year on a pure AI consumer product. I think that shows this time is different.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    But each revolution is a multiplicator. A company making a billion a year is dime a dozen today. If they really were onto AI, then they’d be projected to make a trillion a year.
  - harry8 3y ago
    this is another way of saying "If you invested in the first one to be successful." Well yeah. Obviously. Time machines work great for investment decisions. edit: Whether it was first or not the nokia N95 was a smartphone and was definitely before the iphone. Forgotten like every earlier loser I guess.
ggm 3y ago
Firmly in the skeptic camp, here to say people are love bombing AI to make money, not because LLM are a gateway to AGI and AGI doesn't have to appear for people to make money. Belief in AGI is useful to sell stock and IPO. Few serious researchers in academia see AGI in what's going on, or even roadsigns. Look at the language Hinton uses more closely.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  he compared the latest AI advances to the invention of the wheel or discovery of fire. That sounds pretty cut and dry to me. This isn't a Nutjob, this is basically the father of AI saying even he's afraid of what might be wrought.
codelord 3y ago
IMO AI is more underrated than overhyped. The scale of value that AI can bring maybe larger than what internet brought. But, product design and engineering havn't caught up with the science yet. I think we are too narrowly looking at AI. LLMs are cool, but investors should look beyond that. ChatGPT wrappers aren't the next big thing. The fact that LLMs and image generation models work as good as they do now, should give investors a signal that the science of AI is approaching a tipping point where it's finally good enough to be incorporated into products. I see potential in 10 years time for a new FAANG, 5 trillion dollar companies with heavy reliance on AI that bring automation to various aspects of our lives.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I agree. LLMs have a ton of unrealised applications in business. Imagine training one on your company wiki and chat history. Barely any companies have done that yet because of legal and security concerns and because it isn't easy to do yet, but that will change. It's not going to be long before someone makes and end-to-end speech to speech model. A single model that incorporates speech recognition, LLM and speech synthesis. In fact I'm really surprised it hasn't happened already because it's such an obvious thing to try. That's going to blow people's minds.
- bambax 3y ago
  Yes that's probably true. The article makes a parallel between the current AI hype and crypto, but there's a huge difference. Crypto didn't bring any benefit to anyone and didn't do anything one couldn't do before (with orders of magnitude better efficiency and security). The current situation is more like the early dot-com boom of the 2000s; Webvan and pets.com or Altavista were ill-executed but they weren't stupid ideas. It was then that Amazon and Google were founded.
birracerveza 3y ago
It's all a grift. The whole economy is grifters grifting grifters, a game of musical chairs that's going on ever since the stock market was first invented. Probably even before.
- mawadev 3y ago
  I tried to get a really tiny crack in my windshield repaired yesterday. Something coincidentally went wrong during repair, so I have an appointment to get the entire windshield replaced next week!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - birracerveza 3y ago
    ... Cool story bro? Wrong comment?
shaburn 3y ago
Many bought crypto, few used it. Many use LLMs, few pay for them.
Havoc 3y ago
Well it’s more real than crypto in many ways so not a terrible gamble
mihaaly 3y ago
Money is always pouring into something shiny (looking from a limited perspective) thing. Probably too much money is with clueless but greedy and lazy (to discover) people?
ramesh31 3y ago
The skeptics will be wrong this time. LLMs will be the biggest tech revolution since smartphones. It's something that literally every single person can find a use for.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  I don't think LLMs will be, LLMs are entry level, embodied multi modal systems even if the body is just virtual or a simulation. LLMs, stable diffusion, text to speech and vice versa, image recognition, tactile understanding, other 'senses'we could imbue in it. LLMs definitely are amazing but they're only a piece of the real revolution coming.
Animats 3y ago
The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had off-road driving on empty roads working. Then there were a few experimental self-driving cars that sort of worked on general roads. Many startups, most went bust. Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco. 64 years since GM's Firebird III. (Which still exists, in driveable condition, in GM's in-house collection.) It may take a while to get from GPT-3 to Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0. But the path is clear now.
- drawfloat 3y ago
  Being able to take a cab in a single tiny part of the world remains firmly in “sort of works” camp.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Also when you start to get in more extreme but not actually extreme scenarios. I wonder how well will these do with let's say 5cm of fresh snow. With no other traffic yet meaning no road markings are visible, and in bad case signs could be covered. Probably a yearly scenario in many parts of the world.
- logifail 3y ago
  > The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. > Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco [...] From the outside, it sure does look like driverless is still firmly at "sort of works": "After California regulators approved the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco earlier this month, it took only a little more than 24 hours for a series of events to begin that seemed to justify the taxis’ detractors. The day after the vote, 10 autonomous vehicles operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, abruptly stopped functioning in the middle of a busy street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Posts to social media showed the cars jammed up, their hazard lights flashing, blocking traffic for 15 minutes. A few days later, another Cruise vehicle drove into a paving project in the Western Addition and got stuck in freshly poured concrete. And then last week, a Cruise car collided with a fire truck in the city, injuring a passenger in the car. So it was that last Friday Cruise agreed to a request from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to cut in half the number of vehicles it operated in San Francisco, even though regulatory approval for more remained in place. The company, which has had 400 driverless vehicles operating in the city, will now have no more than 50 cars running during the day and 150 at night."[0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/us/california-autonomous-vehicles.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/us/california-autonomous-...
rvz 3y ago
It is a grift regardless of usefulness. "But it is useful" is hardly a justification for destroying the planet [0] [1] [2] without any viable efficient methods available today in training, fine-tuning and running it on every inference on tons of data centers. All for so-called companies claiming to be 'AI companies' when they cannot even read or implement a technical paper and are just wrapping over someone elses API and immediately they are 'AI companies'. When it goes down they start crying over it 'not working'. That is a confidence trick which is the definition of a grift and most replying here with excuses of "But it is useful" are likely to be underwater over their investments in inflated ChatGPT wrapper companies. [0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water-consumption-b2318972.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/08/artificial-intelligence-industry-boom-environment-toll https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/08/artificia...
c7b 3y ago
What I find interesting about this wave of tech is not just how useful, but how accessible it is. Image generators like SD pretty much work out of the box on a lot of consumer-grade hardware, LLMs might be a bit more of a stretch but still doable (haven't tried that yet, though). It's quite unusual, compare that to how inaccessible the first computers were. Not sure I would love this fact if I was an AI investor, but for the rest of us, it's just a blessing. Let's hope it stays that way by supporting researchers/companies who do share their weights, and being mindful of the CEOs telling lawmakers that only they should be allowed to do matrix multiplications (not saying we don't need any regulation though). Those tools undeniably do create value, maybe not for every investor, but for countless users. And the investors should understand the risks, my guess is that if you'd invested in "cars" around 1900, chances that you'd have lost your money would have been quite high, even though your idea might have been right in principle.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
I was a complete believer in AI when chatGPT first dropped. The tech seemed revolutionary. GPT-4 even helped me write a ton of code for an app. But if you ask me now, I feel that the AI revolution is a little overstated. The tech, while incredibly good, is not really ready for large scale adoption. Individuals and hobbyists might benefit from it, but for large enterprises and serious applications, it's too inconsistent and unreliable. All I can see it accomplishing is pushing out the lowest end of the content/code creation totem pole. That's nice, but it's not nearly the "intelligence revolution" the promoters have been promising.
- Kaibeezy 3y ago
  Agree, and would add that I’m sensing the bigger value will be in analysis of huge, complex, noisy data sets. Most people don’t have those, so it’s not a widely accessible benefit. Sorting through legal discovery documents is a good example. A team of smart, trained, observant JDs will do a pretty good job given a few weeks to plough through it all; a reasonably tuned AI should be able produce similar value (even if not identical results) for a fraction of the cost and do it overnight.
nologic01 3y ago
The "AI" bubble has some similarities but also important differences from the "crypto/blockchain" bubble and the brief "metaverse" mania. The similarities are sort of obvious. The real economy is in a precarious state worldwide. Geopolitical strife, political polarization, exhausted and confused households, still reeling from the pandemic. All in a background of a deteriorating environment that either burns to ashes or is swamped by plastic. This is our real condition and there is no turnaround in sight. Yet the "optimism" and valuations must keep up or the system will collapse for good. The reliable pony delivering tricks is the tech sector. Being unregulated/oligopolistic with massive rent extraction, operating in an entirely virtual realm and by now controlling all digital communication channels it has massive resources and opportunity to pump up every nugget into a digital gold rush and it does so shamelessly and with predictable regularity. So what is different between these serial bubbles? crypto and metaverse require massive social and/or behavioral change. If you look at the problems that blockchain was supposed to solve, all of them would be solvable with lower tech if people actually had an interest to solve them. There far easier ways to make the monetary and financial systems more fair and honest than inventing a poor simulacra. The metaverse requires a collective migration into a fake reality. People are increasingly escapists and absurdists but strapping a heavy idiot-signaling device on your head is a virtual bridge too far for most. "AI" is a better fit to the status quo. Grabbing any and all accessible data and algorithmic manipulation of people is already enshrined as acceptable practice ("people so much enjoy the convenience"). So imho this bubble has some legs. Which means the fall will more painful when it happens. What will burst the bubble? Regulation on data collection and possible applications is one possible balloon prick. The other one is commoditization. Commoditization is an interesting one. If there is any silver lining in this dismal doom tech era we live through it is the fact that major information processing and communication capabilities are being built. It is conceivable that at some point these will be deployed in very different ways and with much bigger positive impact.
thorin 3y ago
Is this any different to "blockchain is the solution to everything", "big data", "cloud" etc etc?
LeanderK 3y ago
Regardless of wether it's the right idea right now, I am convinced that AI is at least not he complete vapourware that blockchain was. That really was some useless hype. There's something to show for and real applications, from self driving cars to other smart systems. Classifiers are everywhere. I interact with chatgpt regularly. It's in my smartphone classifying my photos. I don't know when I have ever interacted with a blockchain.
poulpy123 3y ago
I'm not a skeptic per se (I'm impressed by generative AI and LLMs) but I can't avoid to notice that the coding AI of these last months didn't lead to an explosion of software. AFAIK I haven't see any non trivial software that have been programmed either completely by AI or with the majority of the work done by AI.
renegade-otter 3y ago
I am not going to shed a tear for those VCs with dumb money who back the truck up and dump their cash into a "startup" that pivoted from blockchain to AI last week.

136 points by flarecoder 3y ago

The move from crypto to artificial intelligence has fueled the markets this year, but some are questioning how much of it is real.

dvh 3y ago
At least ai seems significantly more useful than crypto.
- dustymcp 3y ago
  I feel both things are not really ready for primetime, but i agree AI is way more useful.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    AI is undoubtedly useful, perhaps not revolutionary as heralded. Crypto was never anything else than a grift. The only true feature of de-fi is to evade financial regulators, for a time, and enable large scale movements of shady money.
    - ColoursofOSINT 3y ago
      Nice contradiction. > Crypto was never anything else than a grift. Ah, alright then, I guess it's not useful for anything. > evade financial regulators Sounds useful to me! > enable large scale movements of shady money. Large scale movements of money? Super useful!
      - cornholio 3y ago
        >> Crypto was never anything else than a grift. >Ah, alright then, I guess it's not useful for anything. No. It's a simple English sentence: it means it's not useful for anything else other than grifting. The grifters find it particularly useful, just like MLMs, traditional ponzi schemes, HYIPs etc. But that doesn't mean any of those grifts are "useful". > Nice contradiction. Only for the monkey jpeg brigade, who feel that the artificial demand from criminals laundering money and posing as legitimate crypto investors is a feature, not an unacceptable bug. If the only ones using it are criminals, then it's no longer useful even for them, because the whole point is to claim legitimate crypto profits.
        ColoursofOSINT 3y ago
        > it's not useful for anything else other than grifting. I've paid for my domains and vps with crypto, I can pay for my search engine, send donations to non-profits I support, so there's your use case. I don't even have to hand over my personal banking information, so no worrying about data breaches, another use case! I'm sure you would consider paying for a legal service to be a legitimate use case. > monkey jpeg brigade Whoa, name calling, well that always shows the strength of your argument. > who feel that the artificial demand from criminals laundering money and posing as legitimate crypto investors is a feature Didn't realize I was a NFT supporter by calling out your contradiction. Oh, and a straw man too, always nice to see. Also, technology can be abused? Who would have thought? Its a shame that primary users are the criminal masterminds who've apparently become art connoisseurs of monkey jpegs. I don't seem to remember supporting "laundering money". Do you mean in the same way that banking at HSBC, BYN Mellon, Deutsche, Swedbank, Danke and others is supporting money laundering? [1-6] Or how banking with BoA is supporting fraud? [7] Although its nice to see that you believe in "legitimate crypto investors". 1: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/bnp-paribas-pleads-guilty-in-sanctions-case/ https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/... 2:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/swedbank-reportedly-behind-4-3-billion-in-suspicious-transfers#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/swedbank-... 3:https://www.acfcs.org/news/419424/Danske-Bank-reveals-Estonian-branch-may-have-laundered-230-billion-as-CEO-steps-down.htm https://www.acfcs.org/news/419424/Danske-Bank-reveals-Estoni... 4: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/business/bank-settles-us-inquiry-into-money-laundering.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/business/bank-settles-us-... 5:https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/17/deutsche-bank-faces-action-over-20bn-russian-money-laundering-scheme https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/17/deutsche-ba... 6:https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-news-for-jan-29-hsbcs-money-laundering-scandal-hbc-scbff-ing-cs-rbs0129.aspx https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n... 7:https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion-historic-justice-department-settlement-financial-fraud-leading https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion... > If the only ones using it are criminals, then it's no longer useful even for them, because the whole point is to claim legitimate crypto profits. Uh, sure? Sounds good man.
  - kaliqt 3y ago
    Indeed. Crypto when done to its philosophy is to gain financial and market freedom for businesses and people like you and I. Sadly, there's been a lot of co-opting and from that, a lot of uneducated people who will call anything that empowers individuals to be "shady" and "criminal". Alas, it would appear there are no such things as fundamental human rights, only laws, according to these people.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Crypto is 15 years old and still hasn't provided anything useful for normal people. The current generation of AI tools is barely a year old and we have seen so much progress.

adamnemecek 3y ago

Yeah the two are not comparable.

jahnu 3y ago
Right. We probably will actually get something substantial out of investment in AI even if it falls far short of the lofty promises.
- adamnemecek 3y ago
  Indeed. There was never anything in crypto.
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    Hindsight is awesome.
    - PartyOperator 3y ago
      With hindsight, I was correct about Bitcoin being worse than useless when I decided not to bother using my gaming PC and free electricity to mine it in 2011. With hindsight, this could also be seen as a mistake. Although I'm pretty sure I would have sold it at $25 and considered that an unreasonable gain.

satvikpendem 3y ago

AI investment is actually down recently, looks like the hype is wearing off since most of the companies funded were just wrapping OpenAI APIs. I will copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue. https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512 https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512 Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m --- 6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years. With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case. Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising. Let’s start with the losers. Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money. The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy. Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @LangChainAI and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way). In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round. (This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.) This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity. There are two causes for this: 1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended. 2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen. Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas." These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostmaa's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition. This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing. LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing. I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology. The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch. A few companies I would put in this group are: 1. https://cursor.so https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written. 2. https://harvey.ai https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices 3. https://runwayml.com https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for. If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious. Lets recap: 1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling. 2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups. 3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets. 4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns. It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see. And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category.

Almondsetat 3y ago

Routinely articles like these are written. I find them superfluous and a symptom of the human tendency to never sit down and reflect about stuff. Grifts prey on the ignorant, duping them through an informational gap. As such, grifts flourish in new and uncertain environments. Environments where expert opinion is still forming and is badly communicated, and scammers can sound knowledgeable to the average person without actually knowing anything. Now that experts have pushed against crypto and the whole field has become clearer in what can be done with it and what can't, it's obvious that grifters are moving to the new uncharted hotness: "AI". Writing articles like this, always talking about the specific events and never the global trend, does not help the wheel of grifting stop spinning.

WaxProlix 3y ago
Was this written by GPT? It feels very Trained On Hacker News.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  Yes, this was in fact generated by a GPT model I specifically tuned for HN and that I managed to run inside my brain with minimal latency and power requirements. [EDIT] In conclusion
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    You should have added an "in conclusion,". Your meatGPT model needs more training.
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      You're right, I fixed the model

padolsey 3y ago

Summary: Investors don't know where to put their money and they're scared

floucky 3y ago
At least I can see more concrete applications than I did with the Web 3.0 bullshit (NFT, metaverse and other buzzwords).
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  I feel like everyone was jumping at the bit for x, y, z technologies to be the best big ground floor thing, then chatGPT came along, the x,y,z techs were getting hit hard the past year by bad luck, regulatory concerns, etc, and now that people lost their asses on that they're afraid ai will be the same, except I never really got value from nft, Blockchain, etc.... most people I know don't even know what all that is (non tech people, anyways). I know plenty of computer barely literate people who use chatGPT and other generative ai tools daily. The biggest problems I see though are openai and Microsoft essentially competing with people using the API to create products. If you build an app using openai and they add every feature that sets your app apart, you might as well throw in the towel. investors who bought into your startup when you thought there was a moat will lose.

kubb 3y ago

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a fraction of their billions each to finance whatever seems remotely reasonable while squinting in that space, just for a chance to hit the jackpot and get more billions, maybe even a trillion, and their face onto Forbes and on TV. The poor suckers gotta scramble. They invent all kinds of bullshit, and they sell it to the other poor suckers who advise the rich guys. Teams of specialists are created. Whole organizations. There's HR, somebody to organize team building events. Every layer spawns another layer. Lawyers, somebody to give sexual harassment trainings, someone to run the cafeteria. Buildings are rented from the rich guys via managment companies run by the poor suckers. Every day a handful of people make it and can even buy a house! Codes of conduct are written, company values and mission statements. People pivot, jump from place to place, try to sign the best contract. Every once in a while an exec jumps ship with several hundred mil in the bank. It's a great life. What could be better?

otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Money is not wealth. Once you have more of it than is necessary for basic needs, you have to figure out a way to get rid of it and exchange it for real wealth. Investing it in "tech" is an easy and dumb solution to the problem.
- boxed 3y ago
  The problem is that the 0.1% don't seem to really understand this. If they did we would se massive investments in basic science and medicine from them. But we don't. Instead most of them seem to treat their wealth as internet points to compare to other super rich.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    They want investments with short term returns… and basic science isn't that.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Given the absurd pace of open source, I'm not sure if the money itself is in "AI", maybe certain applications but if I can run something 95% as good as ChatGTP-4 on my home desktop in a year or so, then I'm not going to be paying for any "AI" solutions.

flangola7 3y ago
In a year it may not be legal to run that GPT-4 on your desktop. Every nation sees the writing on the wall.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  How do you suppose this is enforced now ? Lol
  - flangola7 3y ago
    There's no enforcement right now because there's no law for it yet. Laws can change, nearly every legislature on the globe is working on this.

JimDabell 3y ago

Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trends and mistake the trend for the overall value. AI only looks like cryptocurrency / blockchain if you don’t know anything at all about either one beyond “they are trendy and attract people who like investing in trendy things”.

doctor_eval 3y ago
Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. AI solves real problems, and has been doing so for many years. Generative AI is just the latest and most accessible instantiating of it. My first company was a dialup ISP in the 90s. I look at GPT4 and I see the 56K modem of AI. There is so much upside to be discovered, we have barely started.
- darkwater 3y ago
  > Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. True > AI solves real problems AI research and real products, most probably. All those new companies/startups that are wrappers around ChatGPT? Not that much. Maybe someone will do something that really brings value but most of them sound and act like the Blockchain startups we had til 12 months ago.
  - apexalpha 3y ago
    Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. Same like how the computers enabled billions to do the most complex calculations within a second, while before you needed to learn that skill over years or practise.

harry8 3y ago

Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped. Whether you believe AI is going to be massively transformative to the modern economy on a scale with cars or personal computing is actually not sufficient to start investing in the 'sector' (for want of a better term). So this is useful as a reverse indicator. Anyone investing buckets in AI is worth betting against in general. Everyone? Maybe not everyone. Maybe. Likewise even if the blockchain sector is dead. (Is it? No clue) This does not necessarily make the technology dead. (Even if you would like it to be). The web came back and reinvented as a massive distributed surveillance machine. Who would have predicted that in the crash? Who would have wanted it? Well we got it anyway.

martindbp 3y ago
You can always find some earlier example of a tech that lost. But if you invested in the first company to mass produce a car (Ford) you'd have done well. If you invested in the first of its kind smartphone (Apple) even better. Likewise there's been a lot of early failed AI startups in the past 20 years that you could point to, and now OpenAI is hitting it out of the park, expecting a billion in revenue next year on a pure AI consumer product. I think that shows this time is different.
- eastbound 3y ago
  But each revolution is a multiplicator. A company making a billion a year is dime a dozen today. If they really were onto AI, then they’d be projected to make a trillion a year.
- harry8 3y ago
  this is another way of saying "If you invested in the first one to be successful." Well yeah. Obviously. Time machines work great for investment decisions. edit: Whether it was first or not the nokia N95 was a smartphone and was definitely before the iphone. Forgotten like every earlier loser I guess.

ggm 3y ago

Firmly in the skeptic camp, here to say people are love bombing AI to make money, not because LLM are a gateway to AGI and AGI doesn't have to appear for people to make money. Belief in AGI is useful to sell stock and IPO. Few serious researchers in academia see AGI in what's going on, or even roadsigns. Look at the language Hinton uses more closely.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
he compared the latest AI advances to the invention of the wheel or discovery of fire. That sounds pretty cut and dry to me. This isn't a Nutjob, this is basically the father of AI saying even he's afraid of what might be wrought.

codelord 3y ago

IMO AI is more underrated than overhyped. The scale of value that AI can bring maybe larger than what internet brought. But, product design and engineering havn't caught up with the science yet. I think we are too narrowly looking at AI. LLMs are cool, but investors should look beyond that. ChatGPT wrappers aren't the next big thing. The fact that LLMs and image generation models work as good as they do now, should give investors a signal that the science of AI is approaching a tipping point where it's finally good enough to be incorporated into products. I see potential in 10 years time for a new FAANG, 5 trillion dollar companies with heavy reliance on AI that bring automation to various aspects of our lives.

IshKebab 3y ago
I agree. LLMs have a ton of unrealised applications in business. Imagine training one on your company wiki and chat history. Barely any companies have done that yet because of legal and security concerns and because it isn't easy to do yet, but that will change. It's not going to be long before someone makes and end-to-end speech to speech model. A single model that incorporates speech recognition, LLM and speech synthesis. In fact I'm really surprised it hasn't happened already because it's such an obvious thing to try. That's going to blow people's minds.
bambax 3y ago
Yes that's probably true. The article makes a parallel between the current AI hype and crypto, but there's a huge difference. Crypto didn't bring any benefit to anyone and didn't do anything one couldn't do before (with orders of magnitude better efficiency and security). The current situation is more like the early dot-com boom of the 2000s; Webvan and pets.com or Altavista were ill-executed but they weren't stupid ideas. It was then that Amazon and Google were founded.

birracerveza 3y ago

It's all a grift. The whole economy is grifters grifting grifters, a game of musical chairs that's going on ever since the stock market was first invented. Probably even before.

mawadev 3y ago
I tried to get a really tiny crack in my windshield repaired yesterday. Something coincidentally went wrong during repair, so I have an appointment to get the entire windshield replaced next week!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- birracerveza 3y ago
  ... Cool story bro? Wrong comment?

shaburn 3y ago

Many bought crypto, few used it. Many use LLMs, few pay for them.

Havoc 3y ago

Well it’s more real than crypto in many ways so not a terrible gamble

mihaaly 3y ago

Money is always pouring into something shiny (looking from a limited perspective) thing. Probably too much money is with clueless but greedy and lazy (to discover) people?

ramesh31 3y ago

The skeptics will be wrong this time. LLMs will be the biggest tech revolution since smartphones. It's something that literally every single person can find a use for.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
I don't think LLMs will be, LLMs are entry level, embodied multi modal systems even if the body is just virtual or a simulation. LLMs, stable diffusion, text to speech and vice versa, image recognition, tactile understanding, other 'senses'we could imbue in it. LLMs definitely are amazing but they're only a piece of the real revolution coming.

Animats 3y ago

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had off-road driving on empty roads working. Then there were a few experimental self-driving cars that sort of worked on general roads. Many startups, most went bust. Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco. 64 years since GM's Firebird III. (Which still exists, in driveable condition, in GM's in-house collection.) It may take a while to get from GPT-3 to Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0. But the path is clear now.

drawfloat 3y ago
Being able to take a cab in a single tiny part of the world remains firmly in “sort of works” camp.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Also when you start to get in more extreme but not actually extreme scenarios. I wonder how well will these do with let's say 5cm of fresh snow. With no other traffic yet meaning no road markings are visible, and in bad case signs could be covered. Probably a yearly scenario in many parts of the world.
logifail 3y ago
> The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. > Today you can take a driverless cab in San Francisco [...] From the outside, it sure does look like driverless is still firmly at "sort of works": "After California regulators approved the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco earlier this month, it took only a little more than 24 hours for a series of events to begin that seemed to justify the taxis’ detractors. The day after the vote, 10 autonomous vehicles operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, abruptly stopped functioning in the middle of a busy street in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Posts to social media showed the cars jammed up, their hazard lights flashing, blocking traffic for 15 minutes. A few days later, another Cruise vehicle drove into a paving project in the Western Addition and got stuck in freshly poured concrete. And then last week, a Cruise car collided with a fire truck in the city, injuring a passenger in the car. So it was that last Friday Cruise agreed to a request from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to cut in half the number of vehicles it operated in San Francisco, even though regulatory approval for more remained in place. The company, which has had 400 driverless vehicles operating in the city, will now have no more than 50 cars running during the day and 150 at night."[0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/us/california-autonomous-vehicles.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/us/california-autonomous-...

rvz 3y ago

It is a grift regardless of usefulness. "But it is useful" is hardly a justification for destroying the planet [0] [1] [2] without any viable efficient methods available today in training, fine-tuning and running it on every inference on tons of data centers. All for so-called companies claiming to be 'AI companies' when they cannot even read or implement a technical paper and are just wrapping over someone elses API and immediately they are 'AI companies'. When it goes down they start crying over it 'not working'. That is a confidence trick which is the definition of a grift and most replying here with excuses of "But it is useful" are likely to be underwater over their investments in inflated ChatGPT wrapper companies. [0] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water-consumption-b2318972.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-data-centre-water... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/08/artificial-intelligence-industry-boom-environment-toll https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/08/artificia...

c7b 3y ago

What I find interesting about this wave of tech is not just how useful, but how accessible it is. Image generators like SD pretty much work out of the box on a lot of consumer-grade hardware, LLMs might be a bit more of a stretch but still doable (haven't tried that yet, though). It's quite unusual, compare that to how inaccessible the first computers were. Not sure I would love this fact if I was an AI investor, but for the rest of us, it's just a blessing. Let's hope it stays that way by supporting researchers/companies who do share their weights, and being mindful of the CEOs telling lawmakers that only they should be allowed to do matrix multiplications (not saying we don't need any regulation though). Those tools undeniably do create value, maybe not for every investor, but for countless users. And the investors should understand the risks, my guess is that if you'd invested in "cars" around 1900, chances that you'd have lost your money would have been quite high, even though your idea might have been right in principle.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

I was a complete believer in AI when chatGPT first dropped. The tech seemed revolutionary. GPT-4 even helped me write a ton of code for an app. But if you ask me now, I feel that the AI revolution is a little overstated. The tech, while incredibly good, is not really ready for large scale adoption. Individuals and hobbyists might benefit from it, but for large enterprises and serious applications, it's too inconsistent and unreliable. All I can see it accomplishing is pushing out the lowest end of the content/code creation totem pole. That's nice, but it's not nearly the "intelligence revolution" the promoters have been promising.

Kaibeezy 3y ago
Agree, and would add that I’m sensing the bigger value will be in analysis of huge, complex, noisy data sets. Most people don’t have those, so it’s not a widely accessible benefit. Sorting through legal discovery documents is a good example. A team of smart, trained, observant JDs will do a pretty good job given a few weeks to plough through it all; a reasonably tuned AI should be able produce similar value (even if not identical results) for a fraction of the cost and do it overnight.

nologic01 3y ago

The "AI" bubble has some similarities but also important differences from the "crypto/blockchain" bubble and the brief "metaverse" mania. The similarities are sort of obvious. The real economy is in a precarious state worldwide. Geopolitical strife, political polarization, exhausted and confused households, still reeling from the pandemic. All in a background of a deteriorating environment that either burns to ashes or is swamped by plastic. This is our real condition and there is no turnaround in sight. Yet the "optimism" and valuations must keep up or the system will collapse for good. The reliable pony delivering tricks is the tech sector. Being unregulated/oligopolistic with massive rent extraction, operating in an entirely virtual realm and by now controlling all digital communication channels it has massive resources and opportunity to pump up every nugget into a digital gold rush and it does so shamelessly and with predictable regularity. So what is different between these serial bubbles? crypto and metaverse require massive social and/or behavioral change. If you look at the problems that blockchain was supposed to solve, all of them would be solvable with lower tech if people actually had an interest to solve them. There far easier ways to make the monetary and financial systems more fair and honest than inventing a poor simulacra. The metaverse requires a collective migration into a fake reality. People are increasingly escapists and absurdists but strapping a heavy idiot-signaling device on your head is a virtual bridge too far for most. "AI" is a better fit to the status quo. Grabbing any and all accessible data and algorithmic manipulation of people is already enshrined as acceptable practice ("people so much enjoy the convenience"). So imho this bubble has some legs. Which means the fall will more painful when it happens. What will burst the bubble? Regulation on data collection and possible applications is one possible balloon prick. The other one is commoditization. Commoditization is an interesting one. If there is any silver lining in this dismal doom tech era we live through it is the fact that major information processing and communication capabilities are being built. It is conceivable that at some point these will be deployed in very different ways and with much bigger positive impact.

thorin 3y ago

Is this any different to "blockchain is the solution to everything", "big data", "cloud" etc etc?

LeanderK 3y ago

Regardless of wether it's the right idea right now, I am convinced that AI is at least not he complete vapourware that blockchain was. That really was some useless hype. There's something to show for and real applications, from self driving cars to other smart systems. Classifiers are everywhere. I interact with chatgpt regularly. It's in my smartphone classifying my photos. I don't know when I have ever interacted with a blockchain.

poulpy123 3y ago

I'm not a skeptic per se (I'm impressed by generative AI and LLMs) but I can't avoid to notice that the coding AI of these last months didn't lead to an explosion of software. AFAIK I haven't see any non trivial software that have been programmed either completely by AI or with the majority of the work done by AI.

renegade-otter 3y ago

I am not going to shed a tear for those VCs with dumb money who back the truck up and dump their cash into a "startup" that pivoted from blockchain to AI last week.