this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024

400 points (95.7% liked)

Technology

60047 readers

2966 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

400

Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate (ash.harvard.edu)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

145 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(page 3) 45 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But the line must go up!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The article does mention that when the AI bubble is going down, the big players will use the defunct AI infrastructure and add it to their cloud business to get more of the market that way and, in the end, make the line go up.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

That's not what the article says.

They're arguing that AI hype is being used as a way of driving customers towards cloud infrastructure over on-prem. Once a company makes that choice, it's very hard to get them to go back.

They're not saying that AI infrastructure specifically can be repurposed, just that in general these companies will get some extra cloud business out of the situation.

AI infrastructure is highly specialized, and much like ASICs for the blockchain nonsense, will be somewhere between "very hard" and "impossible" to repurpose.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Assuming a large decline in demand for AI compute, what would be the use cases for renting out older AI compute hardware on the cloud? Where would the demand come from? Prices would also go down with a decrease in demand.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Relaunching Stadia?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Haha. I believe the AMD Instinct / Nvidia Datacentre GPUs aren't that great for gaming.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Big tech is out of ideas and needs AI to work in order to drive growth.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

To have a bubble you need companies with no clear path to monetization, being over-valued to an extreme degree. This leaves me wondering : what company specifically ? Are they talking about nVidia ? OpenAI ? MidJourney ? Or the slew of LLM-powered SaaS products that have started appearing ? How exactly are we defining "over-valuation" here ? Are we talking about the tech industry as a whole ?

We often invite the comparison to the DotCom bubble but that's apples to oranges. You had companies making social networks for dogs or similar bullshit, valued in the billions and getting a ticker at the stock market before making a single dime. Or companies with outlandish promises such as delivering to any home in the US, in <1 hour, for a low price, and building warehouses by the hundreds before having a storefront. What would be the 2024 equivalent ? If a bubble is about to deflate then there should be dozens of comparable examples.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Exactly. There's a very clear path to monetisation for the bigger tech companies (ofc, not the random startup that screams "AI quantum computing blockchain reeeee").

Lemmy is just incredibly biased against AI, as it could replace a shit ton of jobs and lead to a crazy amount of wealth inequality. However, people need to remember that the problem isn't the tech- it's the system that the tech is being innovated in.

Denying AI is just going to make this issue a lot worse. We need to work to make AI be beneficial for all of us instead of the capitalists. But somehow leftist talk surrounding AI has just been about hating on it/ denying it, instead of preparing for a world in which it would be critical infrastructure very soon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I don't think it's just Lemmy, i had similar conversations on Reddit. People don't realize that the companies they claim are over-valued actually have very strong business fundamentals. That's why in articles like OP's they will never mention any names or figures. I guess it's very convincing for outsiders but it doesn't stand any amount of scrutiny.

If you take OpenAI for example, they went from 0 to 3.6B$ annual revenue in just two fucking years. How is that not worth a boatload of money ? Even Uber didn't have that kind of growth and they burned a LOT more cash than OpenAI is burning right now.

As for the “AI quantum computing blockchain reeeee” projects... well they have a very hard time raising money right now and when they do, it's at pretty modest valuations. The market is not as dumb as it is portrayed.

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[+] [email protected] -6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

"Today’s hype will have lasting effects that constrain tomorrow’s possibilities."

Nope. No it won't. I'd love to have the patience to be more diplomatic but they're just wrong... and dumb.

I'm getting so sick of these anti AI cultists who seem to be made up of grumpy tech nerds behaving like "I was using AI before it was cool" hipsters and panicking artists and writers. Everyone needs to calm their tits right down. AI isn't going anywhere. It's giving creative and executive options to millions of people that just weren't there before.

We're in an adjustment phase right now and boundaries are being re-drawn around what constitutes creativity. My leading theory at the moment is that we'll all mostly eventually settle down to the idea that AI is just a tool. Once we're used to it and less starry eyed about it's output then individual creativity, possibly supported by AI tools, will flourish again. It's going to come down to the question of whether you prefer reading something cogitated, written, drawn or motion rendered by AI or you enjoy the perspective of a human being more. Both will be true in different scenarios I expect.

Honestly, I've had to nope out of quite a few forums and servers permanently now because all they do in there is circlejerk about the death of AI. Like this one theory that keeps popping up that image generating AI specifically is inevitably going to collapse in on itself and stop producing quality images. The reverse is so obviously true but they just don't want to see it. Otherwise smart people are just being so stubborn with this and it's, quite frankly, depressing to see.

Also, the tech nerds arguing that AI is just a fancy word and pixel regurgitating engine and that we'll never have an AGI are probably the same people that were really hoping Data would be classified as a sentient lifeform when Bruce Maddox wanted to dissassemble him in "The Measure of a Man".

How's that for whiplash?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's fucking fantastic news, tbh.

Here's my take, let them dismiss it.

Let em! Remember Bitcoin at $15k after 2019?

Let em! And it's justified! If Ai isn't important right now, then why should its price be inflated to oblivion? Let it fall. Good! Lower prices for those of us that do see the value down the road.

That's how speculative investment works. In no way is this bad. Are sales bad? Sit back and enjoy the show.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)

[+] [email protected] -8 points 1 day ago (11 children)

I have no idea how people can consider this to be a hype bubble especially after the o3 release. It smashed the ARC AGI benchmark on the performance front. It ranks as the 175th best competitive coder in the world on Codeforces' leaderboard.

o3 proved that it is possible to have at least an expert AGI if not a Virtuoso AGI (according to Deep mind's definition of AGI). Sure, it's not economical yet. But it will get there very soon (just like how the earlier GPTs were a lot dumber and took a lot more energy than the newer, smaller parameter models).

Please remember - fight to seize the means of production. Do not fight the means of production themselves.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Unless we invent cold fusion between the next 5 years, they will never be economical. They are the most energy inefficient thing ever invented by humanity and all prediction models state that it will cost more energy, not less, to keep making them better. They will never be energy efficient nor economical in their current state, and most companies are out of ideas on how to shake it up. Even the people who created generative models agree that they have just been brute forcing by making the models larger with more energy consumption. When you try to make them smaller or more energy efficient, they fall off the performance cliff and only produce garbage. I'm sure there are researchers doing cool stuff, but it is neither economical nor efficient.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

Untrue. There are small models that produce better output than the previous "flagships" like GPT-2. Also, you can achieve much more than we currently do with far less energy by working on novel, specialised hardware (neuromorphic computing).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Your example is strange because, as far as I know, GPTs aren't economical either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

Why is it getting an AGI stamp now? I was under the impression humanity has not delivered a sentient AI? Which is what the AGI title was supposed to be used for...has that been pulled back again?

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (8 replies)

load more comments