When is it gonna pop already?! So sick of it
i’m hoping before the brownouts next summer. like really crossing my fingers this could save thousands of lives
It will pop in October or maybe November.
It’s only been going for like 2 years, most bubbles live longer than that.
At least the dotcom bubble was built on an actual useful service, right? Whereas AI is fucking useless to the average person.
The dotcom bubble was famously composed of companies who raked in investor money as long as they included some vague allusion to the “internet” in their business plan. Most of them were useless websites who weren’t even worth the disk space where they were hosted.
It’s absolutely not useless to the average person. AI can do tons of useful things already. Just a few examples off top of my head are grammar/spell check assistant, text to speech narrations, translations, image descriptions for visually impaired, subtitle generation, document summaries, and language learning.
I find these tools also work great as sounding boards, and they can write code to varying degrees. While people sneer at the fact that they often produce shitty code, the reality is that if somebody has a problem they need automated their only option before was to pay thousands of dollars to a software developer. If a kludgy AI generated script can solve their problem then it’s still a win for them.
Okay you’re right it does have some uses for the average person. I’m just incredibly jaded towards it.
Image generation can also be somewhat useful for language learning if you want to make a very specific illustration for a flashcard or include some mnemonics in the image. It’s not useless, but the path to profitability for LLMs is not very good.
For sure, I expect that the most likely outcome is that LLMs will be something you run locally going forward unless you have very specific needs for a very large model. On the one hand, the technology itself is constantly getting better and more efficient, and on the other we have hardware improving and getting faster. You can already run a full blown DeepSeek on a Mac studio for 8k or so. It’s a lot of money, but it’s definitely in the consumer realm. In a few years the cost will likely drop enough that any laptop will be able to run these kinds of models.
I think there should be gentle pushback for the language learning aspect as I’ve definitely had it mangle intent when seeing how it translates and interprets things in my second language, as well as grammar and it’s somewhat rigid approach for grammatical rules but both of those are somewhat contextual and are mostly because from my experience LLM is best in contexts where you know enough to correct it and if you’re using it for those two, you won’t notice any particular peculiarities. If you mean the narrow context of you needing a reminder for rules that you mostly know already, then I agree it can be useful.
For context regular translations by humans and old-school ML translation have the same intent and meaning issues, ML to a much worse degree than both LLM and humans in my experience, so I frankly don’t find an issue with it in a translation context.
I like to call LLMs the whatchamacallit machines, as the handful of times I’ve interacted with it, it worked best in contexts where I needed something I would know when I saw it but couldn’t generate.
I’ve been using this app to learn Mandarin, and the AI chat bot in it seems to work really well https://www.superchinese.com/
I can imagine that it might fail at something very nuanced, but at my level it’s really useful because I just need basic practice and being able to have it do casual conversation and check my pronunciation is incredibly helpful.
I like to call LLMs the whatchamacallit machines, as the handful of times I’ve interacted with it, it worked best in contexts where I needed something I would know when I saw it but couldn’t generate.
In general, that’s the rule of thumb I have as well with these things. It’s most useful in a context where you understand the subject matter well, and you can make good independent judgments on correctness of the output.
I can imagine that it might fail at something very nuanced, but at my level it’s really useful because I just need basic practice and being able to have it do casual conversation and check my pronunciation is incredibly helpful.
Oh in that case yeah, if you just need the basics tends not to be too bad, I feel once you close in on intermediate it starts to fall off but so do a lot of tools at that point.
Oh yeah, but once I’m at that stage I can just talk to actual people. :)
think this is the first time ive seen you talk positively about AI and not have someone come in to start an argument with you lol
lol now that you mention it…
I don’t know why this is controversial, something, anything were to happen to NVIDIA and this shit is dead within 6 months. Its irrelevant to talk about AI model A vs B or investment coming from company A vs B when everything depends upon and ultimately goes back to NVIDIA.
Despite all the talk years ago how Taiwan is so important nothing has changed, CHIPS, building anything in the US? That was a pipe dream. The US is (un)willingly planning to pop this as soon as the war with China gets off.
On a larger scale every current trend relies upon the continuation of the current normalcy of neoliberalism and the global economy. We know this wont last, be it war or climate change. Who gives a single fuck about some garbage AI model on iPhone 227 pro max HD when the water wars kick off. Its the same for the delusional stupid Chinese AI grifters too they`re just as much a lost cause as their western counterparts.
The US is (un)willingly planning to pop this as soon as the war with China gets off.
Agree. The real freakish shit is that despite the US flooding weapons into Taiwan, the US has committed to bombing TSMC themselves in the event of a Chinese unification attempt just to deny China.
It’s not true. There’s still Google making their own processors which enabled a lot of this to begin with. Plus Apple’s hardware is great for AI and now getting better, it’s their software that is behind atm.
Aren’t their TPUs also fabbed at TSMC?
You can believe that but IMO the idea the monopoly will switch from NVIDIA to Apple why? So China will buy iPhones? They will have their own AI slop and the collective west can’t really afford $1000 slop machines much longer imo. This is literally why its a bubble, like 2008 but now its selling premium garbage phones with premium AI “functionality” to people who… can’t afford rent or food next month? This is why its a bubble, its completely disconnected from the real economy. Look at NVIDIA themselves, they’re destroying the desktop GPU market in favor of AI, they don`t give a fuck nobody can afford a $800 GPU. We’ve been here before, look at Apple Vision which was made to capitalize on the VR boom… except it was like 5 years late and the same “premium” Apple garbage. I’m very confident history will continue to repeat itself.
As far as Google goes, I mean the one company that destroyed their core business model(search) and is known for 20 years track record of buying companies and starting projects just to abandon/fail them soon after… Yeah about that.
I’m going to disagree, just a tad. American strategy on AI is a bubble because they are not looking to increase productivity but to bring about further austerity and dislocate entire employment sectors. They think they’ll lock in ludicrously profitable contracts where this AI or that does the job of various departments, but without paying customers they are going to be in for a rough fucking time, and the bubble will pop - if the country doesn’t collapse first.
I am gonna, and I apologize for this ahead of time, paraphrase Thomas Friedman in his podcast interview with Ezra Klein: The Chinese economy is also investing in AI, they have AI modules in their software suites but they are not doing that AND firing staff. Now the employees get done in 3 hours what took them several weeks. AI can, and is, helping a lot of people do a variety of things. Of course, in this country where most jobs are bullshit, its value is often meaningless, but I’ve been using it at work for a bunch of things in an underfunded and understaffed department. And it works.
It’s a force multiplier. Hexbear tends to hate on it reflexively which, given the externalities, makes sense. But to write it off as useless is a mistake. The models are constantly improving, and to your point there are real and valuable applications. The hard part is separating the signal from the noise.
Great can’t wait to lose my fucking house cause Google doesn’t understand consent.
C’mon pop alreadyIt’s almost like this happens every 3 years
Another banger from the Wet Water Times
AI Luddites Unite!
The problem with this take is that most of the “AI boom” research and development is happening in house at firms that do generate unfathomable amounts of money. Google is developing its own AI funded by its insane ad profits, Facebook is doing the same thing. OpenAI has massive investors with fuck tons of money to burn, including Masayoshi Son’s Softbank Investment Fund that is really just a front for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, and Claude/Anthropic has huge Amazon investments. The bubble won’t “pop” because unlike the dot-com bubble these companies aren’t propped up by massive valuations on the stock market that can be destroyed at the slightest shift in investor sentiment. Instead, their propped up by cash hoards of some of the largest and most profitable firms in the history of humanity. Two of the biggest players in this field are even private, entirely unconnected from stock valuations.
Bigger players will obviously survive, and that was the case during dotCom bubble as well. However, there are tons of small startups funded by VC money that are grifting all kinds of AI based solutions right now. That’s where the actual bubble is. Also, it’s not at all clear that the business model the large players have is going to make sense long term. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all banking on AI as a service business model. However, open source players are rapidly catching up and are now even outperforming them as seen with recent Kimi 2 release https://venturebeat.com/ai/moonshot-ais-kimi-k2-outperforms-gpt-4-in-key-benchmarks-and-its-free/
Chinese companies took a completely different approach to AI, where models are released as open source and treated as a common foundation for building things on top of. I expect that Chinese approach will win in the end because it invites collaboration while amortizing research and development costs. Open models will inevitably be setting the standards globally, making it increasingly harder for closed models to compete.
Ah I see what you mean, yeah basically every AI company that is not developing an actual model is 100% fucked in the long wrong, because their entire business model is essentially “we make a prompt around ChatGPT API calls” which is not sustainable as soon as pricing for APIs starts going way up. I also think that the larger players banking on AI as a service business model is not going to work out for the reasons you mentioned (Deepseek R1 alone, which I can run on like a normal laptop, is already fantastic) BUT even if none of that doesn’t work out Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple et al. are going to be fine, because their revenue is not actually from AI at all. There’s no bubble to pop there.
I agree, the big corps are gonna be fine in the end. They’ll probably also gobble up any startups that end up producing genuinely useful stuff.
I hate to say this but I think AI is being under-hyped. It’s going to change white collar jobs like automation and outsourcing did to factory jobs. More specialized white collar roles will be there sure, but knowing how to get them and what to go to school for isn’t um, scaleable.
it just googles shit. its not even ai. i dont give af about white collar crackers and their fake jobs but i am not convinced ai will actually replace many jobs. we’ll just be constantly threatened with it so we dont ask for raises. have you been thru an AI drivethru? ai cant even properly take a fast food order. imagine if ai was a real person, who couldn’t even take an order at mcdonalds properly, and all the authority figures in your life were telling you “better watch out for that guy, he’s coming for your job!”
Plenty of work to go around these days for graphic designers, entry level coders, and copywriters
Literally how will it do that, though? LLM’s literally don’t do anything that they are claimed to. What exactly can they automate?
The Internet changed things too, but there was still a huge bubble. The article is not about the impact on jobs or our lives, but on the question, if all the investments in AI will eventually be profitable or not.
Apple did a thorough research on llm’s and the results made it look even more gimmicky.
Anthropic had a model that tried to do all aspects of a job and it failed massively and completely tanked a business
