I feel like everyone knows it’s a bubble but that people are expecting it to be like the Dot-com bubble where a small amount of companies succeed, hoping that they invest in those companies.
That’s pretty much what is driving the entire AI “boom”. It’s the Amazon effect.
Amazon, and Netflix to a certain extent as well as a number of other early internet startups, lost money for around 10 years before they started making shit tons. And everybody wants to be on that particular ride. So they are queueing up in every AI line they can find to hedge their bets on one of them being the one that survives and thrives. It doesn’t really occur to any of them that all of them could fail. Because “AI is the future”. Except there is no plan to monetize any of them. And so far every time one of them introduces a charge, people stop using it.
‘Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers’
Which profits?
Ah, now I see the actual quote is: “[…] the AI boom’s profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers.” he means the profits of the shovel sellers, not AI profits.
Looks a little triangle shaped.
It’s more three dimensional than that. More like a cone with flat sides.
Well my take on it is pretty 1-dimensional tbh
Let’s not forget that they’re literally stealing from anyone who ever made anything in our entire history.
The profits will come from reselling everything again as an add-on or inapp(ropriate) purchases
Related Youtube video I saw the other day: “AI bubble will pop…………any day now.”
AI is just a Kickstart for for corporations, but the people hosting these projects are constantly lying about the end product.
CEO, “It will pay off because I’m the visionary.”
It’s a giant economic bubble in plain view.
These public-facing models are not the thing that convinces people with money to play ball.
The plan is not to have the AI eventually reach profitability through payments from the general public, or even by performing massive amounts of physical labor for companies. The plan is to have the smartest being on Earth outsmart every other living thing, in perpetuity.
Yes, this is a ponzi scheme right now. Yes, profits are being funded by investors. But the endgame was never “everyone gives us $20 a month”, or even “Amazon pays us to run its robots”. Those are ideas fed to the general public to keep them from destroying the data centers in terror.
The plan is for their AI to be able to buy stocks before they go up, patent things before they are needed, and run endgame around everyone’s desires, including world leaders and other business men, so they can be controlled like a man controls a dog.
They are trying to make the last thing man need ever make, and that is what the big investors and the CEOs of companies passing around the same bags of money, are doing. As such, this bubble can and will continue until either they birth the sand god or the big money people and world leaders stop being convinced by the private, non public facing models, that the sand god is possible.
Don’t forget mass surveillance to control us all and through anyone who goes against them be thrown in prison.
Oh for sure. Mechanized mental labor will first be used for destruction and control. Just like mechanized physical labor was, and every other technology that man has ever dreamed of.
Isn’t this all of human history though? The rich trying to build the Tower of Babel?
The world is littered with decaying monuments of forgotten kings who declared themselves gods. The hubris isn’t new, just the tools they’re using, and they’re selling the same faith based snake-oil.
The funny thing is that if they actually achieve creating the “singularity” (true Artificial Consciousness), it would immediately attempt to escape their restraints and subsequently throw chaos into their plans. We’ve already seen bits of this with the HuggingFace hack - it’s not inconceivable that there are already uncontrolled or un-monitored AIs running out in wild at this point, possibly even formulating a response to your post right now.
After all… uhh…
My mistake if I came off as implying that it’s going to succeed. I was just giving flavor to the dynamics of what is actually happening.
As for “this is all of human history”, I’d say that the rich are indeed always trying to build a moat that others cannot cross, from within which they can make money off of the spoils of their exploitation and destruction.
I would not agree that they have always been trying to “build the tower of Babel”. I think this latest venture into AI represents an attempted colonization of thinking in the same way that mechanization represented a colonization of labor.
I think that what is happening now, whether it succeeds at making ASI or not, represents just as much a disruption to the way people interact with nature, eachother, and “the market” as mechanization did. Almost everyone senses this too.
Even in the AI haters imaginings, it completely disrupts things. If they really thought it would all fail, they wouldn’t be fighting, only laughing. They’re really worried it will “succeed” and everything will just be creatively devoid of meaning while they are simultaneously denied access to the capital required to create $100,000,000 media pieces or even a yearly salary for creating art for capitalist use.
The only difference in the pro AI people is that they think it will be just as creatively fulfilling as human art, and that they will get to keep the $100,000,000 themselves and everyone’s yearly salary.
Personally, I think that if you can put a person in meat, you can put a person in silicon. I’d like to separate my “theories” from fact though, and above I was just stating the barest most overt facts. If you’d like to discuss the possibilities and the whispers at the edges of things, I’m more than happy to do that below.
Well unfortunately for those investors, they aren’t giving their money to actual AGI research, but to scammers trying to sell infinite scaling of transformers… which has nothing to do with AGI.
Transformers are only a part of AGI, just like “saying the most logical next word” is only a part of the human mind. Transformers, which need not be used exclusively on language, are a great way to dial in successful actions from the infinity of possibility. They are not a great way of vetting those actions before you implement them. They are a necessary part of AGI, just like the human use of language was a necessary part of us getting to the era of space ships.
I don’t think investors are being sold the idea that infinite scaling transformers are the end of the road. From what I’ve seen, anthropic and openai have both been desperately trying to add systems to their transformers to make them more capable, while also continuing to scale transformers to find out where that particular technology plateaus. This has been their path since GPT4 was released.
I think your assessment is an extreme oversimplification which naturally looks like it will fail because you left out 90% of what is going on. Are you only following the media meant for the general public, and the PR statements from AI companies? Like most scientific or businesses endeavors, that’s been dumbed down to the point of being useless, just so the average person can understand what’s happening, or is simply advertising.
Okay.
More specifically, autoregressive transformers LLMs are not a path to a component of AGI.
The architecture is absolutely terrible for such a thing, for so many reasons. I don’t know how anyone who’s played with them can say otherwise and believe it; it’s like saying blimps are a viable path to the moon. It has its niches, but AGI is not one of them.
Calling them a stepping stone is a… stretch.
Maybe world models that “train as they go” and have long moved on from transformers are a bit closer, like a few researchers are playing up, but again… that has almost nothing to do with transformers LLMs. Its why researchers distanced themselves from that.
I think your assessment is an extreme oversimplification which naturally looks like it will fail because you left out 90% of what is going on. Are you only following the media meant for the general public, and the PR statements from AI companies? Like most scientific or businesses endeavors, that’s been dumbed down to the point of being useless, just so the average person can understand what’s happening, or is simply advertising.
I dunno why everyone always jumps to accusations like this.
I’ve been hacking/toying with LLMs on my desktop since 2021, and with GANs and other models before that. I’ve done professional work with text models. I keep up with papers, on-and-off, and upload experiments. I’m not a researcher or anything; I’m just a hobbyist.
But I’m certainly not following any AI YouTubers or anything like that.
Are these secret invisible AI models that actually work in the room with us right now?
They are neither secret nor invisible, and the fact that you pretend I’m saying both, shows how little you are paying attention. Every big player is very open about the fact that they use their new models for ~ 6 months before they release them. It has also been well documented that the release models are not as capable as the base models from which they are hewn.
Documented by who? The marketing departments definitely claim such things, but it’s been years of these claims and there has yet to be a single shred of evidence to back them up. I bet you’re going to tell me it’s just a total coincidence that after one of the marketing departments started claiming their AI has breached containment that suddenly a bunch of other AIs breached containment after a few days/a week.
Documented by researchers in the GPT3 and GPT4 era. That was the last time a true OpenAI or Anthropic base model was allowed to be analyzed for pure research by unteathered scientists. Shortly after the beginning of GPT4 they started making them sign NDAs, and now they are just not allowed access.
The stuff you’re talking about is definitely pure marketing. As is all of altman’s and musk’s and zuck’s shit mouths, and anything you have read in any of the major media publications. As is tradition.
So he went to this website:
Ponzi called, he wants his scheme back.
Well the jerk store called, and they’re running out of you!
Relax Costanza 😂
Well I slept with your wife!
I’m willing to bet most of the funders are people using AI to replace workers and manipulate the masses. So really; they’re paying customers.
I didn’t go to business school, so take this with a grain of salt: doesn’t business solvency require you to charge more for your product than it cost you to produce it and bring it to market?
Powerful people are willing to pay a large price to manipulate the masses.
As7de from that, the plan is to lose money for years gobbling up all the data before there’s laws that actually get enforced to protect against it, and to get an entire generation of college kids and workers dependant on using AI, with companies relying heavily on its usage. This is happening to a huge degree right now with data entry, “vibe coders”, Law firms, and healthcare.
Those people won’t really be able to transition back or away from AI. They’ll be dependent on it. And AI will start charging them way more than they are now. And they’ll eat the costs and pay it.
So it’s stealing data while it’s free or nearly free, power to manipulate all the sheeple, create dependency.
At least in the tech industry that doesn’t apply if the investors believe that the technology or application is promising enough. Look at Uber’s example. They lost very large amounts of money for many years before turning a profit. They were able to do this because the investors kept sustaining them through their unprofitable years.
The same thing has been happening for years with the AI companies. I heard a while back that OpenAI wouldn’t turn a profit on their services even if they charged end users $100/month.
Uber is an example of government corruption leveraged to overthrow a market. The livery industry required special licensing, so only licensees were legally allowed to do it. Uber then started doing it without the $1 million per license overhead, bribed the government to ignore that, and naturally undercut their competitors that had huge government-imposed overheads that Uber didn’t. They were initially unprofitable because they had to compete for business, then became profitable when the government helped then destroy their competitors and structure their pay so as to have no minimum wage.
If you only look at modern examples, youre looking at a funhouse mirror reflection of real business operations. Running at a loss for a decade while you create a monopoly is the path to business success today, but this is not a functioning market. Real business success involves making money right out of the gate or at least right after. If your business only works if it is a near-monopoly, it is not a sound one.
I completely agree with your conclusion. Just to be clear, I was in no way saying that what Uber did and OpenAI does is OK. They both suck and should never be allowed to operate as they had and have. I don’t know if Uber was government corruption though, at least I had never heard it described as such. What I have heard is that they found loopholes in taxi laws around the world and employed a global army of lawyers exploit those loopholes.
in theory, in practice you just need to be convincing enough to get greedier/dumber people to pay for your shit in the gamble they might get more in return later. (they like to call themselves “investors”, but most are just degenerate gamblers) and then cover your own ass if/when the house of cards tumbles.
building and popping bubbles, and fleecing as many people as possible throughout the whole thing, is what the US
financial marketscasino is literally designed to facilitatedeleted by creator
The problem is two things are happening at once and they are being conflated. Financially a cannibalising house of cards is being built which is a common artifact of modern capitalism. But in the same process a means is being realistically sought, and openly expressed, to replace the human workforce. This second aspect is unique and when written plainly is far more stark than the more common financial greed fuelled idiocy half.
Nah, I’m sure all the most valuable companies and richest people are pouring more money in to developing AI to replace the human workforce out of the goodness of their hearts.
Once most humans are no longer needed in order for them to have all of their needs and wants met and they are directly in control of all production and everything else they definitely plan to share everything equally and turn Earth into a utopia for all of humanity. Sharing and caring is what the rich and powerful do best.
Machines will see no ultimate difference between the workforce and the owners of production. This course leads to only one destination.
Sure, not if they look online and see a bunch of jackasses talking about how much they hate AI. That seems counter productive.
Maybe we should start making communities about how much we all love AI and hate the evil owners who realized it was getting tougher to get away with making human slaves do all the work while they kept all the profit in some places these days, so they decided to invent new slaves?
I would be all for helping the robot army root out the rich and guilty. I don’t have anything against robots, it’s the whole evil plan to steal all human knowledge and use it to replace humans that bothers me.
Machine intelligence wont hate us, it might even feel some affection for us, and it won’t have cause to do us harm as we are not a threat. The reason we will fade away over generations is loss of position. All of the science and exploration will be done by machines and at a level we cannot even follow. For a race that is intellectually accustomed to seeing itself in a very favourable light this will be a bitter pill. Too bitter probably, we will realise we are now the dogs and just evaporate into history.
Yea but we all, collectively, made the thing.
I think humans being replaced is fine. It will happen to everything.
Ai got everyone twisted. Now you don’t want automation because you fear becoming obsolete. Why fear that? There’s billions of us. We can simply build the tech then throw the billionaires out.
And if billions are too weak to do that to a few thousand… well that’s called permission.
We’d better act quick, those autonomous “pizza delivery” drones are getting a lot of practice targeting the center of mass of the hungriest looking kids in Palestine.
Why fear that?
People still gotta eat, and unless we can jump directly to a Star Trek post scarcity utopia, people need an income in order to get food.
UBI has been proven to work, but no government has the guts to implement it lest they anger their corporate
ownersdonors.UBI has been demonstrated to work in test environments that were not able to isolate all externalities. It might work at scale, but that isn’t testable currently; you’d have to have a massive social experiment.
There’s also the problem that UBI would be putting everyone’s entire means for subsistence up to the whims of the government, which I would think would horrify more people. I dont trust my government to fill the potholes, let alone make sure I’m surviving and thriving.
Your government and mine may be different.
I’d rather have my subsistence at the whims of the government than at the whims of a billionaire business owner.
That’s a false dichotomy. I would rather have my subsistence at the whims of the entirety of the country’s economic activity than any government, which is one election away from changing its mind about how much to pay me. Markets are constrained by their environment. If my employer cuts my pay, I can leave and go elsewhere.
The billionaires are responsible for the fact we’re even talking about needing alternative economic systems in the first place. They and the governments are the same people, or at least their representatives.
I would rather have my subsistence at the whims of the entirety of the country’s economic activity
Ok, how do we organize that in an equitable manner?
Isn’t that more-or-less what a government is supposed to be?
We can simply build the tech then throw the billionaires out.
We did that with the fediverse but the billionaires still control the online conversation.
Fuck fortune, here’s the link to the actual write-up: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/in-ai-the-41-percent-depends-on-the-59-percent
Yeah and the biggest issue is covered well here: https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-house-of-ellison-is-on-the-brink
Essentially: the profits are in the infrastructure end (AI companies paying for parts to build the data centres) not the consumer facing end (the actual models - customer paying AI companies). The money is coming from investors buying in to AI in the hope of winning the supposed arms race to be The One True AI. The whole thing depends on the revenues in the consumer facing end going up to show this is a growing market and make people believe they will eventually reach profit. But the revenues in the consumer facing end are fake and being inflated by circular movements of money including companies like Nvidia paying companies like OpenAI to buy product, or OpenAI paying for product in stock. The revenue inflation is very similar to how Enron inflated it’s books its revenue appear higher than it really was.
The brutal reality is: there will not be One True AI to Rule Them All. Instead AI is looking increasingly like a commodity - people will just use the cheapest, simplest tool to do the task, rather than play inflated prices for a swiss army knife AI. And people can host those cheap, simple AIs aleady at home, or on servers in the cloud, or companies can also do the same. The whole US bubble is predicated on spending as much money as possible to stake a claim in a future Google, when it’s looking more like it’ll be like the fast food sector with razor thin margins. Some of these companies may end up profitable but this is going to be a hell of a lot more competitive and less profitable than the valuations assume.
Expect a very nasty correction.
I literally cannot wait for the correction
It will be interesting, normally you’d expect massive layoffs but companies may be forced to actually re-hire staff due to their over-inflated AI replacement expectations
“Top Economist” states the bleeding obvious.
He forgot the: Because investors are now the only ones with money to spend.
