“LLMs such as they are, will become a commodity; price wars will keep revenue low. Given the cost of chips, profits will be elusive,” Marcus predicts. “When everyone realizes this, the financial bubble may burst quickly.”
Please let this happen
I wish just once we could have some kind of tech innovation without a bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects while they get super rich off it.
… bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects…
one doesn’t imagine any of them even remotely thinks a technological panacaea is feasible.
… while they get super rich off it.
because they’re only focusing on this.
Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.
Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.
That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.
Yeah my management was all gungho about exploiting AI to do all sorts of stuff.
Like read. Not generative AI crap, but read. They came to us and said quite literally: “how can we use something like ChatGPT and make it read.”
I don’t know who or how they convinced them to use something that wasn’t generative AI, but it did convince me that managers think someone being convincing and confident is correct all the time.
No no, I disagree I think that shoving AI into all these apps is a solid plan on their behalf. People are going to stop recall and shut it off. So instead they put AI components into every app, It now has the right to overview everything you’re doing and every app collects data on you sending it home to update their personalized models for you so they can better sell you products.
Some are just opportunists, but there are certainly true believers — either in specific technologies, or pedal-to-the-metal growth as the only rational solution to the world’s problems.
Andreessen is pretty open about it: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
I think Andreessen is lying and the “techno optimist manifesto” is a ruse for PR.
a16z has been involved in various crypto pump and dumps. They are smart enough to know that something like “play to earn” is not sustainable and always devolves into a pyramid scheme. Doesn’t stop them from getting in early and dumping worthless tokens on the marks.
The manifesto honestly reads like it was written by a teenager. The style, the tone, the excessive quotes from economists. This is pretty typical stuff for American oligarch polemics, no?
No shit. This was obvious from day one. This was never AGI, and was never going to be AGI.
Institutional investors saw an opportunity to make a shit ton of money and pumped it up as if it was world changing. They’ll dump it like they always do, it will crash, and they’ll make billions in the process with absolutely no negative repercussions.
Turns out AI isn’t real and has no fidelity.
Machine learning could be the basis of AI but is anyone even working on that when all the money is in LLMs?
I’m not an expert, but the whole basis of LLM not actually understanding words, just the likelihood of what word comes next basically seems like it’s not going to help progress it to the next level… Like to be an artificial general intelligence shouldn’t it know what words are?
I feel like this path is taking a brick and trying to fit it into a keyhole…
learning is the basis of all known intelligence. LLMs have learned something very specific, AGI would need to be built by generalising the core functionality of learning not as an outgrowth of fully formed LLMs.
and yes the current approach is very much using a brick to open a lock and that’s why it’s … ahem … hit a brick wall.
shouldn’t it know what words are?
Not necessarily, but it should be smart enough to associate symbols with some form of meaning. It doesn’t do that, it juts associates symbols with related symbols, so if there’s nothing similar that already exists, it’s not going to be able to come back with anything sensible.
I think being able to create new content with partial sample data is necessary to really be considered general AI. That’s what humans do, and we don’t necessarily need the words to describe it.
largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence
Who said that LLMs were going to become AGI? LLMs as part of an AGI system makes sense but not LLMs alone becoming AGI. Only articles and blog posts from people who didn’t understand the technology were making those claims. Which helped feed the hype.
I 100% agree that we’re going to see an AI market correction. It’s going to take a lot of hard human work to achieve the real value of LLMs. The hype is distracting from the real valuable and interesting work.
OpenAI published a paper about GPT titled “Sparks of AGI”.
I don’t think they really believe it but it’s good to bring in VC money
That is a very VC baiting title. But it’s doesn’t appear from the abstract that they’re claiming that LLMs will develop to the complexity of AGI.
The call is coming from inside. Google CEO claims it will be like alien intelligence so we should just trust it to make political decisions for us bro: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2024/ai/former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-urges-ai-acceleration-dismisses-climate
I read a lot I guess, and I didn’t understand why they think like this. From what I see, are constant improvements in MANY areas! Language models are getting faster and more efficient. Code is getting better across the board as people use it to improve their own, contributing to the whole of code improvements and project participation and development. I feel like we really are at the beginning of a lot of better things and it’s iterative as it progresses. I feel hopeful
It’s so funny how all this is only a problem within a capitalist frame of reference.
What they call “AI” is only “intelligent” within a capitalist frame of reference, too.
