this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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[–] poo@lemmy.world 234 points 2 months ago (9 children)

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

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 178 points 2 months ago (19 children)

Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 103 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you're right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.

[–] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 37 points 2 months ago

Yes! "AI" defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 60 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.

[–] Graphy@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

Honestly kinda miss when the drugs I did were illegal. I used to buy weed from this online seller that was really into designer drugs. The amount of time I used to spend on Erowid just to figure out wtf I was about to take.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 54 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm glad you didn't say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!

[–] protist@mander.xyz 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Bro the GME short squeeze is going to hit any day now. We're going to be millionaires bro, you just wait

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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 75 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 27 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If bitnet takes off, that’s very good news for everyone.

The problem isn’t AI, it’s AI that’s so intensive to host that only corporations with big datacenters can do it.

[–] bamfic@lemmy.world 67 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (16 children)

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.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc 32 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Crypto is still just as awful as it ever was IMO. Still plenty of assholes ~~gambling~~ investing in crypto.

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[–] wrekone@lemmyf.uk 18 points 2 months ago

Well put.

Soon, it won't be this idiotic hype cycle, but it'll be some other idiotic hype cycle. Short term investors love hype cycles.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

We just don’t have to listen to the hype about it anymore.

True, it’s now in most circles just been mixed in as a commodity to trade on. Though I wish everyone would get that. There’s still plenty of idiots with .eth usernames who think there’s some new boon to be made. The only “apps” built on crypto networks were and are purely for trading crypto, I’ve never seen any real tangible benefit to society come out of it. It’s still used plenty for money laundering, but regulators are (slowly) catching up. And it’s still by far the easiest way to demonstrate what happens to unregulated markets.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

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[–] sirico@feddit.uk 61 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Always invest in the spades never the gold mine

[–] ByteOnBikes 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I went to a AI conference and you can just sense how bogus it all feels. Like "Our patent pending AI system references billions of crowd-sourced data points to identify what you are craving for breakfast! Never think about breakfast again!"

And as a engineer speaking with other engineers, we all collectively shrug and just keep taking the money. I'll AI your toaster for enough money IDGAF.

[–] weew@lemmy.ca 27 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's why Nvidia is making bank right now

[–] whoisearth@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 months ago (3 children)

And AMD won the console wars

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[–] bluewing@lemm.ee 51 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 46 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] GeneralInterest@lemmy.world 45 points 2 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago (28 children)

We need to stop viewing it as artificial intelligence. The parts that are worth money are just more advanced versions of machine learning.

Being able to assimilate a few dozen textbooks and pass a bar exam is a neat parlor trick, but it is still just a parlor trick.

Unfortunately probably the biggest thing to come out of it will be the marketing aspect. If they spend enough money to train small models on our wants and likes it will give them tremendous amounts of return.

The key to using it in a financially successful manner is finding problems that fit the bill. Training costs are fairly high, quality content generation is also rather expensive. There are sticky problems around training it from non-free data. Whatever you're going to use it for either needs to have a significant enough advantage to make the cost of training /data worth it.

I still think we're eventually going to see education rise. The existing tools for small content generation adobe's use of it to fill in small areas is leaps and bounds better than the old content aware patches. We've been using it for ages for speech recognition and speech generation. From there it's relatively good at helper roles. Minor application development, copy editing, maybe some VFX generation eventually. Things where you still need a talented individual to oversee it but it can help lessen the workload.

There are lots of places where it's being used where I think it's a particularly poor fit. AI help desk chatbots, IVR scenarios, It says brain dead as the original phone trees and flow charts that we've been following for decades.

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[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 33 points 2 months ago (17 children)

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

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not an expert so I might be wrong, but as far as I understand it, those specialised tools you describe are not even AI. It is all machine learning. Maybe to the end user it doesn't matter, but people have this idea of an intelligent machine when its more like brute force information feeding into a model system.

[–] RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Don't say AI when you mean AGI.

By definition AI (artificial intelligence) is any algorithm by which a computer system automatically adapts to and learns from its input. That definition also covers conventional algorithms that aren't even based on neural nets. Machine learning is a subset of that.

AGI (artifical general intelligence) is the thing you see in movies, people project into their LLM responses and what's driving this bubble. It is the final goal, and means a system being able to perform everything a human can on at least human level. Pretty much all the actual experts agree we're a far shot from such a system.

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[–] MyOpinion@lemm.ee 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 35 points 2 months ago

The tech bros are selling, but it's the VCs that are fueling this whole thing. They're grasping for the next big thing. Mostly they don't care if any of it actually works, as long as they can pump share value and then sell before it collapses.

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[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] turddle@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Set stop loss at 100%, got it 👍

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[–] weew@lemmy.ca 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (13 children)

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"

[–] dan@upvote.au 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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

Fun fact: the first online store still exists. It's Pizza Hut. They launched an experiment for online ordering in 1994. The first company to ever sell a product on the web.

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[–] Veneroso@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

Please please please please please please please please

[–] fluxion@lemmy.world 17 points 2 months ago

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

[–] menemen@lemmy.world 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

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[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 months ago
[–] TehWorld@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The web didn't die after the dot com bubble burst. The AI bubble will burst, but a smaller niche of companies will continue to exist.

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[–] don@lemm.ee 12 points 2 months ago

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

[–] MooseTheDog@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] Pulptastic@midwest.social 11 points 2 months ago

Aw, only 99%?

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