5 ms·

Predicting the future is always hard. But the only thing I've seen in my life that most resembles what is happening with AI, the hype, its usefulness beyond th

Predicting the future is always hard. But the only thing I've seen in my life that most resembles what is happening with AI, the hype, its usefulness beyond the hype, vapid projects, solid projects, etc, is the rise of the internet. Based on this I would say we're in the 1999-2000 era. If it's true what does it mean for the future?

baxtr 1y ago
"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" - Yogi Berra (?) But let’s assume we can for a moment. If we’re living in a 1999 moment, then we might be on a Gartner Hype Cycle like curve. And I assume we’re on the first peak. Which means that the "trough of disillusionment" will follow. This is a phase in Hype Cycle, following the initial peak of inflated expectations, where interest in a technology wanes as it fails to deliver on early promises.
baggachipz 1y ago
Classic repeat of the Gartner Hype Cycle. This bubble pop will dwarf the dot-bomb era. There's also no guarantee that the "slope of enlightenment" phase will amount to much beyond coding assistants. GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives. This bubble also seems to combine the worst of the two huge previous bubbles; the hype of the dot-com bubble plus the housing bubble in the way of massive data center buildout using massive debt and security bundling.
- thecupisblue 1y ago
  > GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives No, but GenAI in it's current form is insanely useful and is already shifting the productivity gears into a higher level. Even without 100% reliable "agentic" task execution and AGI, this is already some next level stuff, especially for non-technical people.
  - ducktective 1y ago
    Very simple question: How do people trust the output of LLMs? In the fields I know about, sometimes the answers are impressive, sometimes totally wrong (hallucinations). When the answer is correct, I always feel like I could have simply googled the issue and some variation of the answer lies deep in some pages of some forum or stack exchange or reddit. However, in the fields I'm not familiar with, I'm clueless how much I can trust the answer.
    - keiferski 1y ago
      I get around this by not valuing the AI for its output, but for its process. Treat it like a brilliant but clumsy assistant that does tasks for you without complaint – but whose work needs to be double checked.
    - likium 1y ago
      We place plenty of trust with strangers to do their jobs to keep society going. What’s their error rate? It all ends up with the track record, perception and experience of the LLMs. Kinda like self-driving cars.
      - morpheos137 1y ago
        Strangers have an economic incentive to perform. AI does not. What AI program is currently able to modify its behavior autonomously to increase its own profitablity? Most if not all current public models are simply chat bots trained on old data scraped off the web. Wow we have created an economy based on cultivated Wikipedia and Reddit content from the 2010s linked together by bots that can make grammatical sentences and cogent sounding paragraphs. Isn't that great? I don't know, about 10 years ago before google broke itself, I could find information on any topic easily and judge its truth using my grounded human intelligence better than any AI today. For one thing AI can not even count. Ask google's AI to draw a woman wearing a straw hat. More often than not the woman is wearing a well drawn hat while holding another in her hand. Why? Frequently she has three arms. Why? Tesla self driving vision can't differentiate between the sky and a light colored tractor trailer turning across traffic resulting in a fatality in Florida. For something to be intelligent it needs to be able to think and evaluate the correctness of its thinking correctly. Not just regurgitate old web scrapings. It is pathetic realy. Show me one application where black box LLM ai is generating a profit that an effectively trained human or rules based system couldn't do better. Even if AI is able to replace a human in some tasks this is not a good thing for a consumption based economy with an already low labor force participation rate. During the first industrial revolution human labor was scarce so machines could economically replace and augnent labor and raise standards of living. In the present time labor is not scarce so automation is a solution in search of a problem and a problem itself if it increasingly leads to unemployment without universal bssic income to support consumption. If your economy produces too much with nobody to buy it then economic contraction follows. Already young people today struggle to buy a house. Instead of investing in chat bots maybe our economy should be employing more people in building trades and production occupations where they can earn an income to support consumption including of durable items like a house or a car. Instead because of the fomo and hype about AI investors are looking for greater returns by directing money toward scifi fantasy and when that doesn't materialize an economic contraction will result.
- brookst 1y ago
  The Internet in its 1999 form was never going to be fast enough or secure enough to support commerce, banking, or business operations.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Exactly, it took an evolution, but there was no discontinuity. At some point, things evolved enough for people like Tim O'Reilly to say that we know have "Web 2.0", but it was all just small steps by people like those of us here on this thread, gradually making things better and more reliable.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Mm. Partial agree, partial disagree. These things, as they are right now, are essentially at the performance level of an intern or recent graduate in approximately all academic topics (but not necessarily practical topics), that can run on high-end consumer hardware. The learning curves suggest to me limited opportunities for further quality improvements within the foreseeable future… though "foreseeable future" here means "18 months". I definitely agree it's a bubble. Many of these companies are priced with the assumption that they get most of the market; they obviously can't all get most of the market, and because these models are accessible to the upper end of consumer hardware, there's a reasonable chance none of them will be able to capture any of the market because open models will be zero cost and the inference hardware is something you had anyway so it's all running locally. Other than that, to the extent that I agree with you that: > GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives I do so only in that not everyone wants (or would even benefit from) a book-smart-no-practical-experience intern, and not all economic tasks are such that book-smarts count for much anyway. This set of AI advancements didn't suddenly cause all cars manufacturers to suddenly agree that this was the one weird trick holding back level 5 self driving, for example. But for those of us who can make use of them, these models are already useful (and, like all power tools, dangerous when used incautiously) beyond merely being coding assistants.
- Traubenfuchs 1y ago
  I fully agree that there will be a pop, there must be. Current evaluations and investments are based on monumentally society destroying assumptions. But with every disappointing, incremental and non evolutionary model generation the chance increases that the world at large realizes that those assumptions are wrong. What should I do with my ETF? Sell now, wait for the inevitable crash? Be all modern long term investment style: "just keep invested what you don't need in the next 10 years bro"? This really keeps me up at night.
  - Dr4kn 1y ago
    If you're sure enough that there is going to be a big crash I would move the money into gold, bonds or other more secure assets. After a crash you can invest again. I don't know why buffet sold a lot of shares over the last few years to sit on a huge pile of cash, but I could guess. The Job market looks like shit, people have no money to buy stuff and credit card debt is skyrocketing. When people can't buy stuff it is bad for the economy. Even if AI is revolutionary then we would need people spending money to keep the economy going, and with more AI taking jobs that wouldn't happen. If AI doesn't work out the market is going to crash and the only companies keeping the market growing are going to wipe out all that growth. No matter how I look at it I don't see a thriving market.
- bspammer 1y ago
  Last week I tested out the agent mode of chatGPT by asking it to plan a week's meals, then add all the ingredients to an online shopping basket for me. It worked pretty much flawlessly, the only problem was it ran out of time before it could add the last few ingredients, which doesn't exactly seem like an unsolvable problem.
keiferski 1y ago
Well, there’s a fundamental difference: the Internet blew up because it enabled people to connect with each other more easily: culturally, economically, politically. AI is more-or-less replacing people, not connecting them. In many cases this is economically valuable, but in others I think it just pushes the human connection into another venue. I wouldn’t be surprised if in-person meetup groups really make a comeback, for example. So if a prediction about AI involves it replacing human cultural activities (say, the idea that YouTube will just be replaced by AI videos and real people will be left out of a job), then I’m quite bearish. People will find other ways to connect with each other instead.
- dfedbeef 1y ago
  There's also the difference that the internet worked.
  - justonceokay 1y ago
    In a classically disruptive way, the internet provided an existing service (information exchange) in a way that was in many ways far less pleasant than existing channels (newspapers, libraries, phone). Remember that the early Internet was mostly text, very low resolution, un credentialed, flaky, expensive, and too technical for most people. The only reason that we can have such nice things today like retina display screens and live video and secure payment processing is because the original Internet provided enough value without these things. In my first and maybe only ever comment on this website defending AI, I do believe that in 30 or 40 years we might see this first wave of generative AI in a similar way to the early Internet.
- LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
  Businesses are overly optimistic about AI replacing people. For very simple jobs, like working in a call center? Sure. But the vast majority of all jobs aren't ones that AI can replace. Anything that requires any amount of context sensitive human decision making, for example. There's no way that AI can deliver on the hype we have now, and it's going to crash. The only question is how hard - a whimper or a bang?
api 1y ago
I too lived through the dot.com bubble and AI feels identical in so many ways. AI is real just like the net was real, but the current environment is very bubbly and will probably crash.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  It definitely feels identical. We had companies that never had any hope of being profitable (or even doing anything related to the early internet to begin with), but put .com in your name and suddenly you are flooded with hype and cash. Same thing now with AI. The capital is going to dry up eventually, no one is profitable right now and its questionable whether or not they can be at a price consumers would be willing or able to pay. Models are going to become a commodity, just being an "AI Company" isn't a moat and yet every one of the big names are being invested in as if they are going to capture the entire market, or if there even will be a market in the first place. Investors are going to get nervous, eventually, and start expecting a return, just like .com. Once everyone realizes AGI isn't going to happen, and realize you aren't going to meet the expected return running a $200/month chatbot, it'll be game over.
- bwfan123 1y ago
  I lived through dot-com, and there are so many parallels. Large amount of money is chasing a dream which wont materialize in the near term. Recent deja-vus are articles like this: "The 20-Somethings Are Swarming San Francisco’s A.I. Boom" and "Tech Billboards Are All Over San Francisco. Can You Decode Them?" If I recall correctly, after the 2000 bust, folks fled silicon valley abandoning their leased BMWs at the SFO airport. 101 had no traffic jams. I wonder if that will repeat this time around.
oezi 1y ago
It means you should hold on to your investments and be prepared to exit the market.
gilbetron 1y ago
Almost three years ago I gave a talk to a Staff+ group where I work and told them that AI felt like the internet in 1995 timeframe. It still does, and I agree we seem to be in the late-90s now. However, we need to be careful, this feels similar in a world-changing way, but it is different on so many levels. Amongst other things, the world is far more tech savvy than in the 90s. Plus nearly everyone alive and making decisions now were alive and making decisions in the 90s. That's why we're seeing this insane "all in" mentality - there is almost certainly going to be new Googles/Facebooks/Apples/Amazons that come out of this, or at least that is what capital believes. I hate, hate, hate the Gartner Hype Cycle thing, it's just a dumb statement that things can get overhyped. Instead, I see it as a Cambrian explosion of everybody everywhere trying to find use cases for this new tech. Nearly all of them will fail, but many won't and we'll have a different world in a few years. There will be crashes and crazes and (hopefully) generally positive changes in the world. It could be Terminator or Handmaid's Tale or 1984, too. The main difference between the 90s and now is that the world is much more educated on the downsides of tech and so there isn't that giddy sense of coolness from the 90s, and that bums me out.

baxtr 1y ago

"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future" - Yogi Berra (?) But let’s assume we can for a moment. If we’re living in a 1999 moment, then we might be on a Gartner Hype Cycle like curve. And I assume we’re on the first peak. Which means that the "trough of disillusionment" will follow. This is a phase in Hype Cycle, following the initial peak of inflated expectations, where interest in a technology wanes as it fails to deliver on early promises.

baggachipz 1y ago

Classic repeat of the Gartner Hype Cycle. This bubble pop will dwarf the dot-bomb era. There's also no guarantee that the "slope of enlightenment" phase will amount to much beyond coding assistants. GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives. This bubble also seems to combine the worst of the two huge previous bubbles; the hype of the dot-com bubble plus the housing bubble in the way of massive data center buildout using massive debt and security bundling.

thecupisblue 1y ago
> GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives No, but GenAI in it's current form is insanely useful and is already shifting the productivity gears into a higher level. Even without 100% reliable "agentic" task execution and AGI, this is already some next level stuff, especially for non-technical people.
- ducktective 1y ago
  Very simple question: How do people trust the output of LLMs? In the fields I know about, sometimes the answers are impressive, sometimes totally wrong (hallucinations). When the answer is correct, I always feel like I could have simply googled the issue and some variation of the answer lies deep in some pages of some forum or stack exchange or reddit. However, in the fields I'm not familiar with, I'm clueless how much I can trust the answer.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    I get around this by not valuing the AI for its output, but for its process. Treat it like a brilliant but clumsy assistant that does tasks for you without complaint – but whose work needs to be double checked.
  - likium 1y ago
    We place plenty of trust with strangers to do their jobs to keep society going. What’s their error rate? It all ends up with the track record, perception and experience of the LLMs. Kinda like self-driving cars.
    - morpheos137 1y ago
      Strangers have an economic incentive to perform. AI does not. What AI program is currently able to modify its behavior autonomously to increase its own profitablity? Most if not all current public models are simply chat bots trained on old data scraped off the web. Wow we have created an economy based on cultivated Wikipedia and Reddit content from the 2010s linked together by bots that can make grammatical sentences and cogent sounding paragraphs. Isn't that great? I don't know, about 10 years ago before google broke itself, I could find information on any topic easily and judge its truth using my grounded human intelligence better than any AI today. For one thing AI can not even count. Ask google's AI to draw a woman wearing a straw hat. More often than not the woman is wearing a well drawn hat while holding another in her hand. Why? Frequently she has three arms. Why? Tesla self driving vision can't differentiate between the sky and a light colored tractor trailer turning across traffic resulting in a fatality in Florida. For something to be intelligent it needs to be able to think and evaluate the correctness of its thinking correctly. Not just regurgitate old web scrapings. It is pathetic realy. Show me one application where black box LLM ai is generating a profit that an effectively trained human or rules based system couldn't do better. Even if AI is able to replace a human in some tasks this is not a good thing for a consumption based economy with an already low labor force participation rate. During the first industrial revolution human labor was scarce so machines could economically replace and augnent labor and raise standards of living. In the present time labor is not scarce so automation is a solution in search of a problem and a problem itself if it increasingly leads to unemployment without universal bssic income to support consumption. If your economy produces too much with nobody to buy it then economic contraction follows. Already young people today struggle to buy a house. Instead of investing in chat bots maybe our economy should be employing more people in building trades and production occupations where they can earn an income to support consumption including of durable items like a house or a car. Instead because of the fomo and hype about AI investors are looking for greater returns by directing money toward scifi fantasy and when that doesn't materialize an economic contraction will result.
brookst 1y ago
The Internet in its 1999 form was never going to be fast enough or secure enough to support commerce, banking, or business operations.
- falcor84 1y ago
  Exactly, it took an evolution, but there was no discontinuity. At some point, things evolved enough for people like Tim O'Reilly to say that we know have "Web 2.0", but it was all just small steps by people like those of us here on this thread, gradually making things better and more reliable.
ben_w 1y ago
Mm. Partial agree, partial disagree. These things, as they are right now, are essentially at the performance level of an intern or recent graduate in approximately all academic topics (but not necessarily practical topics), that can run on high-end consumer hardware. The learning curves suggest to me limited opportunities for further quality improvements within the foreseeable future… though "foreseeable future" here means "18 months". I definitely agree it's a bubble. Many of these companies are priced with the assumption that they get most of the market; they obviously can't all get most of the market, and because these models are accessible to the upper end of consumer hardware, there's a reasonable chance none of them will be able to capture any of the market because open models will be zero cost and the inference hardware is something you had anyway so it's all running locally. Other than that, to the extent that I agree with you that: > GenAI in its current form will never be reliable enough to do so-called "Agentic" tasks in everyday lives I do so only in that not everyone wants (or would even benefit from) a book-smart-no-practical-experience intern, and not all economic tasks are such that book-smarts count for much anyway. This set of AI advancements didn't suddenly cause all cars manufacturers to suddenly agree that this was the one weird trick holding back level 5 self driving, for example. But for those of us who can make use of them, these models are already useful (and, like all power tools, dangerous when used incautiously) beyond merely being coding assistants.
Traubenfuchs 1y ago
I fully agree that there will be a pop, there must be. Current evaluations and investments are based on monumentally society destroying assumptions. But with every disappointing, incremental and non evolutionary model generation the chance increases that the world at large realizes that those assumptions are wrong. What should I do with my ETF? Sell now, wait for the inevitable crash? Be all modern long term investment style: "just keep invested what you don't need in the next 10 years bro"? This really keeps me up at night.
- Dr4kn 1y ago
  If you're sure enough that there is going to be a big crash I would move the money into gold, bonds or other more secure assets. After a crash you can invest again. I don't know why buffet sold a lot of shares over the last few years to sit on a huge pile of cash, but I could guess. The Job market looks like shit, people have no money to buy stuff and credit card debt is skyrocketing. When people can't buy stuff it is bad for the economy. Even if AI is revolutionary then we would need people spending money to keep the economy going, and with more AI taking jobs that wouldn't happen. If AI doesn't work out the market is going to crash and the only companies keeping the market growing are going to wipe out all that growth. No matter how I look at it I don't see a thriving market.
bspammer 1y ago
Last week I tested out the agent mode of chatGPT by asking it to plan a week's meals, then add all the ingredients to an online shopping basket for me. It worked pretty much flawlessly, the only problem was it ran out of time before it could add the last few ingredients, which doesn't exactly seem like an unsolvable problem.

keiferski 1y ago

Well, there’s a fundamental difference: the Internet blew up because it enabled people to connect with each other more easily: culturally, economically, politically. AI is more-or-less replacing people, not connecting them. In many cases this is economically valuable, but in others I think it just pushes the human connection into another venue. I wouldn’t be surprised if in-person meetup groups really make a comeback, for example. So if a prediction about AI involves it replacing human cultural activities (say, the idea that YouTube will just be replaced by AI videos and real people will be left out of a job), then I’m quite bearish. People will find other ways to connect with each other instead.

dfedbeef 1y ago
There's also the difference that the internet worked.
- justonceokay 1y ago
  In a classically disruptive way, the internet provided an existing service (information exchange) in a way that was in many ways far less pleasant than existing channels (newspapers, libraries, phone). Remember that the early Internet was mostly text, very low resolution, un credentialed, flaky, expensive, and too technical for most people. The only reason that we can have such nice things today like retina display screens and live video and secure payment processing is because the original Internet provided enough value without these things. In my first and maybe only ever comment on this website defending AI, I do believe that in 30 or 40 years we might see this first wave of generative AI in a similar way to the early Internet.
LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
Businesses are overly optimistic about AI replacing people. For very simple jobs, like working in a call center? Sure. But the vast majority of all jobs aren't ones that AI can replace. Anything that requires any amount of context sensitive human decision making, for example. There's no way that AI can deliver on the hype we have now, and it's going to crash. The only question is how hard - a whimper or a bang?

api 1y ago

I too lived through the dot.com bubble and AI feels identical in so many ways. AI is real just like the net was real, but the current environment is very bubbly and will probably crash.

thewebguyd 1y ago
It definitely feels identical. We had companies that never had any hope of being profitable (or even doing anything related to the early internet to begin with), but put .com in your name and suddenly you are flooded with hype and cash. Same thing now with AI. The capital is going to dry up eventually, no one is profitable right now and its questionable whether or not they can be at a price consumers would be willing or able to pay. Models are going to become a commodity, just being an "AI Company" isn't a moat and yet every one of the big names are being invested in as if they are going to capture the entire market, or if there even will be a market in the first place. Investors are going to get nervous, eventually, and start expecting a return, just like .com. Once everyone realizes AGI isn't going to happen, and realize you aren't going to meet the expected return running a $200/month chatbot, it'll be game over.
bwfan123 1y ago
I lived through dot-com, and there are so many parallels. Large amount of money is chasing a dream which wont materialize in the near term. Recent deja-vus are articles like this: "The 20-Somethings Are Swarming San Francisco’s A.I. Boom" and "Tech Billboards Are All Over San Francisco. Can You Decode Them?" If I recall correctly, after the 2000 bust, folks fled silicon valley abandoning their leased BMWs at the SFO airport. 101 had no traffic jams. I wonder if that will repeat this time around.

oezi 1y ago

It means you should hold on to your investments and be prepared to exit the market.

gilbetron 1y ago

Almost three years ago I gave a talk to a Staff+ group where I work and told them that AI felt like the internet in 1995 timeframe. It still does, and I agree we seem to be in the late-90s now. However, we need to be careful, this feels similar in a world-changing way, but it is different on so many levels. Amongst other things, the world is far more tech savvy than in the 90s. Plus nearly everyone alive and making decisions now were alive and making decisions in the 90s. That's why we're seeing this insane "all in" mentality - there is almost certainly going to be new Googles/Facebooks/Apples/Amazons that come out of this, or at least that is what capital believes. I hate, hate, hate the Gartner Hype Cycle thing, it's just a dumb statement that things can get overhyped. Instead, I see it as a Cambrian explosion of everybody everywhere trying to find use cases for this new tech. Nearly all of them will fail, but many won't and we'll have a different world in a few years. There will be crashes and crazes and (hopefully) generally positive changes in the world. It could be Terminator or Handmaid's Tale or 1984, too. The main difference between the 90s and now is that the world is much more educated on the downsides of tech and so there isn't that giddy sense of coolness from the 90s, and that bums me out.