It also reminds me of crypto. Lots of people made money from it, but the reason why the technology persists has more to do with the perceived potential of it rather than its actual usefulness today.

There are a lot of challenges with AI (or, more accurately, LLMs) that may or may not be inherent to the technology. And if issues cannot be solved, we may end up with a flawed technology that, we are told, is just about to finally mature enough for mainstream use. Just like crypto.

To be fair, though, AI already has some very clear use cases, while crypto is still mostly looking for a problem to fix.

Or computers decades before that.

Many of these advances are incredibly recent.

And also many of the things we use in our day to day are ai powered without people even realising.

The current breed of generative "AI" won't 'die out'. It's here to stay. We are just in the early Wild-West days of it, where everyone's rushing to grab a piece of the pie, but the shine is starting to wear off and the hype is juuuuust past its peak.

What you'll see soon is the "enshittification" of services like ChatGPT as the financial reckoning comes, startup variants shut down by the truckload, and the big names put more and more features behind paywalls. We've gone past the "just make it work" phase, now we are moving into the "just make it sustainable/profitable" phase.

In a few generations of chips, the silicon will have made progress in catching up with the compute workload, and cost per task will drop. That's the innovation to watch out for now, who will de-throne Nvidia and its H100?

Hm. I think you should zoom out a bit and try to recognize that AI isn't stagnant.

Voice recognition and translation programs to years before they were appropriate for real-world applications. AI is also going to require years before it's ready. But that time is coming. We haven't reached a 'ceiling' for AI's capabilities.

There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.

But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.

In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.

AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It's not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.

I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn't overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.

Oh surprise surprise, looks like generative AI isn't going to fulfill Silicon Valley and Hollywood studios' dream of replacing artist, writers, and programmers with computer to maximize value for the poor, poor shareholders. Oh no!

It really is incredible how much this rhymes with the crypto hype. To be fair, the technology does actually have uses but, as someone in the latter category, after I saw it in action, I quickly felt less worried about my job prospects.

Fortunately, enough people in charge of staffing seem to have listened to people with technical knowledge to not make my earlier prediction (mass layoffs directly due to LLMs, followed by mass, panicked re-hirings when said LLMs ruined the business) come true. But, the worry itself, along with the RTO pushes (not to mention exploitation of contractors and H1B holders) really underscore his desperately the industry needs to get organized. Hopefully, what's going on in the games industry with IATSE gets more traction and more of my colleagues on the same page but, that's one area where I'm not as optimistic as I'd like to be - I'll just have to cheer on SAG, WGA, and UAW for the time being.

(For as much crap as I give Zuck for the other awful things they do, I do admire their commitment to open source.)

Absolutely agreed. There's a surprising amount of good in the open source world that has come from otherwise ethically devoid companies. Even Intuit donated the Argo project, which has evolved from a cool workflow tool to a toolkit with far more. There is always the danger of EEE, however, so, we've got to stay vigilant.

In my case, I still want to know if it's not making rich people richer, because a) fuck rich people, and b) I don't want to buy into things that will disappear in a year when the hype dies down. As a "consumer" my purchasing decisions impact my life, and the actions of the wealthy affect that more than you'd like.

So far I've only seen AI being used to fire employees that a company totally absolutely still needs but just doesn't want to pay wages to. Companies are dumb as fuck, that's my conclusion, but what else can you expect by organizations run by ladder-climbing CEO figures?

What I'm curious is what's going to happen to all these companies that went all-in on building data centers when they weren't doing it previously. Places like Meta and Amazon are huge enough that it's always been a sound investment but with this hype there are other companies trying to set up server farms with no real prize in sight.

Because people assume all these investors know what they are doing. They don't. Now, some investors are good, but they usually don't go for shit like this. At lot of investors are VCs, rich upper class twits, who can afford to lose money. Pure and simple. It's like a bunch of lotto winners telling people they know how to pick numbers, betting outside bets once in a while, get lucky, and have selective bias.

Plus, they have enough money to hedge their bets. For example, say you invest $1mil in companies A, B, C, D, E, and F. All lose everything except A and B, which earn you $3mil each. You put in $6mil, got back $6mil. You broke even, tell people you knew what you were doing because you picked A and B, and conveniently never mention the rest. Then rich twits people invest in what YOU invest in. So you invest in H, others invest in H because you did, drives up the value. Now magnify this by a lot of investors, hundreds of letters, and it's all like some weird game of luck and timing.

But a snapshot in time leads to your 2) ?????? Point. Many know this is a confidence game, based on luck, charm, and timing. Some just stumble through it, and others are fleeced, but who cares? Daddy's got money.

Money works different for rich people. It's truly puzzling.

If you think businesses have sunk this much money and effort into AI and didn’t do a cost-benefit analysis that stretched out decades, you are being naive or disingenuous.

Are you kidding? We literally just watched the same bubble and burst in companies that rushed to get their piece of the Metaverse and NFT cash grab. I worked at a SaaS company that decided to add AI features because it was in the news and Azure offered it as a service. There was zero financial analysis done, just like for every other feature they added

I'm sure Microsoft has a plan since they invested heavily. But even Google is playing catch-up like they did with GCP.