You don’t believe in the quantum block chain 3D printed AI cloud future mining asteroids for the private Mars colony (yet with no life extension)?
Luddite.
Quantum was popular as “oh god, our cryptography will die, what are we going to do”. Now post-quantum cryptography exists and it doesn’t seem to be clear what else quantum computers are useful for, other than PR.
Blockchain was popular when the supply of cryptocurrencies was kinda small, now there’s too many of them. And also its actually useful applications require having offline power to make decisions. Go on, tell politicians in any country that you want electoral system exposed and blockchain-based to avoid falsifications. LOL. They are not stupid. If you have a safe electoral system, you can do with much more direct democracy. Except blockchain seems a bit of an overkill for it.
3D printing is still kinda cool, except it’s just one tool among others. It’s widely used to prototype combat drones and their ammunition. The future is here, you just don’t see it.
Cloud - well, bandwidths allowed for it and it’s good for companies, so they advertised it. Except even in the richest countries Internet connectivity is not a given, and at some point wow-effect is defeated by convenience. It’s just less convenient to use cloud stuff, except for things which don’t make sense without cloud stuff. Like temporary collaboration on a shared document.
“AI” - they’ve ran out of stupid things to do with computers, so they are now promising the ultimate stupid thing. They don’t want smart things, smart things are smart because they change the world, killing monopolies and oligopolies along the way.
No room-temperature superconductor fusion reactors, space-based solar, or private space mining? Luddite.
#1 is like tactical nuke tech available for all civilians, #2 would make sense if all the production line and consumers are in space too, #3 would make sense as part of the same.
Earth gravity well is a bitch. We live in it. Sending stuff up is expensive, sending stuff down is stupid when it’s needed up there, but without some critical complete piece of civilization to send up at once, you’ll have to send stuff up all the time.
It’s too expensive and the profits are transcendent, as in “ideological achievement and because we can”. Also they may eventually start sending nukes down.
Thus it all makes sense only when we can build and equip an autonomous colony to send at once. Self-reliant with the condition that they will get needed materials from wherever they are sent.
I suggest something with gravity though. Europa or Ganymede or Enceladus. Something like that.
Are you a Space Nutter?
It’s not going to happen. No one is going to move to space or send nukes down or mine asteroids.
Ever.
Are you a round earth nutter?
It’s not going to happen. No one is going to get past the edge of the world or sail the whole world or find new land.
Ever.
If you don’t see how that’s a completely dumb comparison, this is hopeless. I’m reality-based, you are not.
Sure, friend. You can see reality thousands of years into the future and know exactly what happens.
My bad.
It’s going to be great when the AI hype bubble crashes
SSSSIIIIIIIGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH…
Looks like I’ll have to prepare for yet another once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse.
As someone who works with integrating AI- it’s failing badly.
At best, it’s good for transcription- at least until it hallucinates and adds things to your medical record that don’t exist. Which it does and when the providers don’t check for errors - which few do regularly- congrats- you now have a medical record of whatever it hallucinated today.
And they are no better than answering machines for customer service. Sure, they can answer basic questions, but so can the automated phone systems.
They can’t consistently do anything more complex without making errors- and most people are frankly too dumb or lazy to properly verify outputs. And that’s why this bubble is so huge.
It is going to pop, messily.
and most people are frankly too dumb or lazy to properly verify outputs.
This is my main argument. I need to check the output for correctness anyways. Might as well do it in the first place then.
And they are no better than answering machines for customer service. Sure, they can answer basic questions, but so can the automated phone systems.
This is what drives nuts the most about it. We had so many incredibly efficient, purpose-built tools using the same technologies (machine learning and neural networks) and we threw them away in favor of wildly inefficient, general-purpose LLMs that can’t do a single thing right. All because of marketing hype convincing billionaires they won’t need to pay people anymore.
As someone who is actually an AI tool developer (I just use existing models) - it’s absolutely NOT failing.
Lemmy is ironically incredibly tech illiterate.
It can be working and good and still be a bubble - you know that right? A lot of AI is overvalued but to say it’s “failing badly” is absurd and really helps absolutely no one.
Lemmy is ironically incredibly tech illiterate
I disagree with all these self hosting Linux running passionate open source advocates, so they must be technology illiterate.
According to whom? No one’s running their instance here. I’m a software dev with over 20 years of foss experience and imo lemmy’s user base is somewhat illiterate bunch of contrarians when it comes to popular tech discussions.
We’re clearly not going to agree here without objective data so unless you’re willing to provide that have a good day, bye.
No one’s running their instance here.
speak for yourself
If I was China, I would be thrilled to hear that the west are building data centres for LLMs, sucking power from the grid, and using all their attention and money on AI, rather than building better universities and industry. Just sit back and enjoy, while I can get ahead in these areas.
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They’ve been ahead for the past 2 decades. Government is robbing us blind because it only serves multinational corporations or foreign governments. It does not serve the people.
They have a demographic pit in front of them which they themselves created with “1 child policy”.
Also CCP too doesn’t exactly serve the people. It’s a hierarchy of (possibly benevolent) bureaucrats.
I never said they were ahead on social issues. They aren’t and have never been. Their infrastructure shits on ours. Hell look at their healthcare system.
The one child policy and the nightmare that will cause is not just a social policy.
And yes, China’s infrastructure is very very impressive, however it’s also true that when everything has been built in the past 30 years, it’s inevitably going to be a lot more efficient and modern than a country that has a lot of legacy baggage. A prime example of that is probably the UK, who are still trying to keep Victorian-era rail infrastructure working. Tearing out old stuff and replacing it is time consuming, complex, and expensive.
Alright, you act like China isn’t older than the UK or the US.
It’s older than both combined.
Yeah, but they only industrialised very recently
Ahh so it’s even more impressive
I feel like literally everybody knew it was a bubble when it started expanding and everyone just kept pumping into it.
How many tech bubbles do we have to go through before we leave our lesson?
I get that people who sell AI-services wants to promote it. That part is obvious.
What I don’t get is how gullible the rest of society at large is. Take the norwegian digitalization minister, who says that 80% of the public sector shall use AI. Whatever that means.
Or building a gigantic fuckoff openai data centre, instead of new industry https://openai.com/nb-NO/index/introducing-stargate-norway/
Jared Diamond had a great take on this in “Collapse”. That there a countless examples of societies making awful decisions - because the decisionmakers are insulated from the consequences. On the contrary, they get short term gains.
what lesson? it’s a ponzi scheme and whoever is the last holding the bag is the only one losing.
Plus everyone else that pays taxes as they will have to continue to pay for unemployment insurance, food stamps, rent assistance, etc (not the CEOs and execs that caused it that’s for sure).
When this puppy pops it’s gonna splatter all of us with chunky bits.
So is it smart to short on the ai bubble ? 👉👈
The question is when, not if. But it’s an expensive question to guess the “when” wrong. I believe the famous idiom is: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Best of luck!
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Willing to take real life money bet that bubble is not going to pop despite Lemmy’s obsession here. The value is absolutely inflated but it’s definitely real value and LLMs are not going to disappear unless we create a better AI technology.
In general we’re way past the point of tech bubbles popping. Software markets move incredibly fast and are incredibly resilient to this. There literally hasn’t been a software bubble popping since dotcom boom. Prove me wrong.
Even if you see problems with LLMs and AI in general this hopeful doomerism is really not helping anyone. Now instead of spending effort on improving things people are these angry, passive, delusional accelerationists without any self awareness.
I get the thinking here, but past bubbles (dot com, housing) were also based on things that have real value, and the bubble still popped. A bubble, definitionally, is when something is priced far above its value, and the “pop” is when prices quickly fall. It’s the fall that hurts; the asset/technology doesn’t lose its underlying value.
LLMs can absolutely disappear as a mass market technology. They will always exist in some sense as long as there are computers to run them and people who care to try, but the way our economy has incorporated them is completely unsustainable. No business model has emerged that can support them, and at this point, I’m willing to say that there is no such business model without orders of magnitude gains in efficiency that may not ever happen with LLMs.
I mean we haven’t figured out how to make AI profitable yet, and though it’s a cool technology with real world use cases, nobody has proven yet that the juice is worth the squeeze. There’s an unimaginable amount of money tied up in a technology on the hope that one day they find a way to make it profitable and though AI as a technology “improves”, its journey towards providing more value than it costs to run is not.
If I roleplayed as somebody who desperately wanted AI to succeed, my first question would be “What is the plan to have AI make money?” And so far nobody, not even the technology’s biggest sycophants have an answer.
The profit of ai lies in this: mass surveillance and ads. Thats it.
The revenue of AI lies in mass surveillance and ads. But even going full dystopia, that has not been enough to make AI companies profitable.
AI is absolutely profitable just not for everybody.
AI as a technology is so far not profitable for anybody. The hardware AI runs on is profitable, as might be some start ups that are heavily leveraging AI, but actually operating AI is so far not profitable, and because increasingly smaller improvements in AI use exponentially more power, there’s no real path that is visible to any of us today that suggests anyone’s yet found a path to profitability. Aside from some kind of miracle out of left field that no one today has even conceived, the long term outlook isn’t great.
If AI as a technology busts, so does the insane profits behind the hardware it runs on. And without that left field technological breakthrough, the only option to pursue to avoid AI going completely bust is to raise prices astronomically, which would bust any companies currently dependent on all the AI currently being provided to them for basically next to nothing.
The entire industry is operating at a loss, but is being propped up by the currently abstract idea that AI will some day make money. This isn’t the “AI Hater” viewpoint, it’s just the spot AI is currently in. If you think AI is here to stay, you’re placing a bet on a promise that nobody as of today can actually make.
Who is it profitable for right now? The only ones I see are the ones selling shovels in a gold rush, like Nvidia.
In a capitalist society, what is good or best is irrelevant. All that matters is if it makes money. AI makes no money. The $200 and $300/month plans put in rate limits because at those prices they’re losing too much money. Lets say the beak-even cost for a single request is somewhere between $1-$5 depending on the request just for the electricity, and people can barely afford food, housing, and transportation as it is. What is the business model for these LLMs going to be? A person could get a coffee today, or send a single request to an LLM? Now start thinking that they’ll need newer gpus next year. And the year after that. And after that. And the data center will need maintenance. They’re paying literally millions of dollars to individual programmers.
Maybe there is a niche market for mega corporations like Google who can afford to spend thousands of dollars a day on LLMs, but most companies won’t be able to afford these tools. Then there is the problem where if the company can afford these tools, do they even need them?
The only business model that makes sense to me is the one like BMW uses for their car seat warmers. BMW requires you to pay a monthly subscription to use the seat warmers in their cars. LLM makers could charge a monthly subscription to run a micro model on your own device. That free assistant in your Google phone would then be pay walled. That way businesses don’t need to carry the cost of the electricity, but the LLM is going to be fairly low functioning compared to what we get for free today. But the business model could work. As long as people don’t install a free version.
I don’t buy the idea that “LLMs are good so they are going to be a success”. Not as long as investors want to make money on their investments.
people can barely afford food, housing, and transporation as it is.
Citation needed. The doomerism in this thread is so cringe.
62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Perhaps saying most Americans are struggling is doomerism, but what percentage living paycheck to paycheck no longer counts as doomerism and is just a harsh truth? 75%? 90%? Do you think the number of people living paycheck to paycheck is increasing or decreasing this year?
