Technology

No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to

As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I'd wager it's even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.

What I'm kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts... Who's gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs running on multi-kilowatt servers?

And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.

I am old enough to remember when the CEO of Nortel Networks got crucified by Wall Street for saying in a press conference that the telecom/internet/carrier boom was a bubble, and the fundamentals weren't there (who is going to pay for long distance anymore when calls are free over the internet? where are the carriers-- Nortel's customers-- going to get their income from?). And 4 years later Nortel ceased to exist. Cisco crashed too, though had enough TCP/IP router biz and enterprise sales to keep them alive even until today.

This all reminds me of the late 1990s internet bubble rather than the more recent crypto bubble. We'll all still be using ML models for all kinds of things more or less forever from now on, but it won't be this idiotic hype cycle and overvaluation anymore after the crash.

Shit, crypto isn't going anywhere either, it's a permanent fixture now, Wall Street bought into it and you can buy crypto ETFs from your stockbroker. We just don't have to listen to hype about it anymore.

Always invest in the spades never the gold mine

No shit.

Like all new technologies, there is a time when bunches of companies jump on the band wagon to get in on the action. You can see it all throughout the history of the industrial revolution.

They mostly know that there will come a great weeding out of those that can't handle the technology or just fail from poor management. But they are betting they will be among the 1% that wins the race and remain to dominate the market.

The rest will just bide their time until the next Big Thing comes along. And the process starts over again.

Yeah, but thanks to the glory of corporateworld, all the people involved in making these decisions will be in a higher position at a different company by the time the consequences come knocking.

You definitely will not regret spending billions of dollars on GPUs and electricity bills.

Maybe it's like the dotcom bubble: there is genuinely useful tech that has recently emerged, but too many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon.

LLMs do seem genuinely useful to me, but of course they have limitations.

10 to 30? Yeah I think it might be a lot longer than that.

Somehow everyone keeps glossing over the fact that you have to have enormous amounts of highly curated data to feed the trainer in order to develop a model.

Curating data for general purposes is incredibly difficult. The big medical research universities have been working on it for at least a decade, and the tools they have developed, while cool, are only useful as tools too a doctor that has learned how to use them. They can speed diagnostics up, they can improve patient outcome. But they cannot replace anything in the medical setting.

The AI we have is like fancy signal processing at best

Not shocked. It seems the tech bros like to troll us every few years.

Please please please please please please please please

If you're invested in these stocks, make sure you have your stop loss orders in place, 100%.

I imagine the bubble bursting will be quick and deadly.

Yeah, but the 0.1% remaining will take over the world.

Does anyone remember the era when there were a million search engines? Google didn't spawn alone.

Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.

People are trying to vindicate their dislike of AI, pointing to trends like this as if it were supporting evidence. But saying "AI is going to be a big flop because 99% of companies today will end up failing" is as stupid as saying "online shopping will never work because 99% of online stores will close by the year 2010"

AI companies specializing in spreading bullshit all across the internet have a bright future however

It will probably burst, but that does not man that AI will go away completly.

No shit

So, I have clients that are actively using AI on a daily basis and LOVE it. It is however a very narrow subset. Also, I’m pretty sure that a LARGE amount of Dollars are currently being spent on AI generated political articles.

People look at the advertising for this shit (and future tech-bro shit) and wonder, "who is this for"? Remember E.L.O.N. Exaggerated Lies Overlooked Narratives

Think of every manager and boss you've ever had. They don't think, they just do. Salesmen convince them using issues that don't exist, to sell solutions that don't really work, to people that don't understand how to use them. Repeat over 70 years and you have the modern American education system.

Now things are different. Money is scarce, things are getting tight. Tech-Bros have changed from a mildly infuriating strategy, to a downright abusive one. These simple minded managers think everything is under attack, and the only solution is what they already have, but heavily monetized and completely unusable.

They couldn’t keep their heads on fucking straight during the .com bubble, and here they are doing it all over again.

As someone who follows the startup space (and is thinking of starting their own, non-AI driven startup), the issue is all of the easily solvable problems have already been solved. The only thing that shakes up the tree is when new tech comes along and makes some of the old problems easy to solve.

So take a look at crypto - If you wanted to make a tip bot on Telegram, before crypto that was really hard. You needed to register with something like PayPal, have the recipient register with PayPal, etc etc etc. After crypto it was "Hey this person sent you 5$, use this private key if you want to recover it" (btw I made this service and it was used a lot).

Now look at AI - Imagine making a service that detects CSAM before AI took off. As an aside, I did NOT make this service, but I know a group of people who did. Imagine trying to make this without the AI boom - you'd need millions of images for training data, a PhD in machine learning, and so much more. Now, anyone can make it in their basement.

The point is, investors KNOW the bubble is a bubble and that it will pop. It doesn't matter though. They're looking for people who will solve problems that previously cost 1bln to solve with only 1mln of funding. If even 1% of their companies pay off, they make a profit.

Yeah, AI is really just a surveillance tool than anything else.

When AI "creates" something, it's just pulling up things related to words you typed in and making an amalgamation of what you typed in out of what it has.

The real purpose is for corporations and governments to look through people's devices and online storage at super speed.

this is why you all need to be using end-to-end encrypted storage for everything and VPNs with perfect forward secrecy

do your own research into the history of each provider of those things before you buy it