I'm now a heavy user of AI personally & professionally (as a dev). The two work projects I'm involved with are increasing by a lot the usage of GPU to apply LLM tech.
I don't see this coming back. The market growth rate will slow down, but it'll continue to grow (and not come back) for quite a few years, I think.
When it starts to slow (growth rate, not market), I guess there'll be other breakthroughs in AI like GPT that'll renew the trend.
Kinda like the dotcom bubble.
Over the long long term it will be enormous, but they're many growing pains until then
Looking at my chatgpt history, my partner and I seem to average about 3 conversations a day. We would use it a lot more than that if we had a way to invoke it with our voices, like Siri. Our usage is increasing over time as we figure out the sort of questions it’s good at answering.
I’m not saying all the hype is justified, but if anything I think people underestimate how useful AI can already be in their lives. It just takes some learning to figure out how and when to use it.
This is markedly different from both web3 and VR. It’s 2023 and I still make purchases with my Visa card and play most video games with mouse and keyboard (while my quest - cool as it is - gathers dust).
As of the end of august only 18% of US adults had tried ChatGPT at all (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/28/most-amer...).
For me, the biggest obstacle to get over is trust. I have seen ChatGPT make up facts far too often for it to be useful for a lot of what I ask of google. I also would be VERY leery of integrating it into customer support, etc. At some point I expect some company to have its chat bot enter into a contract with a customer and end up having to deliver.
Another time I asked this:
> C minor and G major sound good together. What key are they in?
And it answered that incorrectly, saying there wasn't a key which contained both chords. But thats not quite right - they're both contained in C harmonic minor.
When you ask it to write code, the code often contains small bugs. But that can still be very helpful a lot of the time, to a lot of people.
And its also utterly fantastic as a tool for creative writing, where you don't care about facts at all. For example, the output of prompts like this are utterly fantastic:
> I'm writing the character of a grumpy innkeeper in a D&D campaign and I want the character to have some quirks to make them interesting for the players. List 20 different weird quirks the innkeeper could have.
I just put it in and got things like this:
4. Height Requirement: Refuses to serve anyone taller or shorter than him, with a height chart at the door for reference.
9. Historical Enthusiast: Dresses and talks like he's from a different era, insists patrons do the same to get service.
I’d like it to say “C harmonic minor” but honestly my knowledge of music theory might not be good enough to properly evaluate its response. What do you think?
If anything what should amaze us is that ChatGPT managed to command that kind of market share in such a very short time. That's approximately 46 million individuals.
A different poll from the same org found that the number of people who had used it was 14% back in May.
If I'm remembering the timeline right, it really hit the zeitgeist hard in February, so it seems as if the growth is leveling off.
In any case, getting 18% of people in the US to use your product in less than a year is still nothing to sneeze at.
If 18% of adults have used GPT at least once, that sounds accurate, but how about every other tool?
Free+Hype makes me not that impressed with the number of people who have tried ChatGPT. Smartphone ubiquity today is way more amazing to me than a lot of people giving the weird new chatbot a try.
If you can come back and tell me a year from now that even 10% of adults use something like ChatGPT once a month as anything other than a search engine replacement, I will be impressed. Really, I will. When the chatbot market gets bigger than a rounding error of the smartphone/tablet market, then I will be impressed.
I think they are fun. I can and do run the big models locally on my research hardware. People in my lab are doing some pretty neat things with LLMs and other tools in the current hype cycle. I personally like them. But there is massive, so-far-unwarranted hype.
What percentage of people are paying users, or have somehow integrated the product of ChatGPT/AI into their lives/work beyond just telling it to make a picture of a horse with tentacles to see if it could.
Do you mind sharing examples of what you guys use it for? I basically never use LLM's and I am curious what uses others have found for it. From what I have seen, it is mostly used by students as a better search engine
> I'm visiting Oxford University for a few days. What are some things I should know before I travel? How do I fit in with people on my trip? Take the persona of a stuffy old Brittish aristocrat while answering.
> Help me edit this text to write it in a way which is less likely to cause offense: (...)
> I’m writing a story with different city states, where each city state has a different mix of cultural values. For example, one city might be very individualistic while another is more communal. The values exist to support storytelling. Each should be justifiable but also have interesting strengths and weaknesses that can be explored through stories told in those cultures. What are some other values by which real or fictional cultures could diverge in interesting ways?
> Is rapeseed oil ok / good for baking? We’re oven baking broccoli and potatoes. (followup): How hot should you make an oven to roast potatoes and cauliflower? How long should it be in the oven for?
> How do you make crepes?
> We’re in an Airbnb and the bathroom smells like arse. Any idea why?
It's interesting to me that people bring up 'The Dot Com Bubble' as an example of empty hype, when in fact, investing in the Internet even at the peak (deploying capital proportional to 1999 market caps) has one of the best IRR's in the history of time (Amazon, eBay/PayPal, eTrade, etc.).
I don't think hype will die down so much as winners will be chosen and the long tail will stop buying GPUs (in the same way Pets.com and Webvan stopped building warehouses).
Do you have a source for this claim? Like, you or someone else has a market cap dataset of 1999 web companies and their market cap, including such 1999 darlings as stanlee.net, pets.com, etc. And you or someone else calculated the perormance of a .com portfolio circa 1999 if held for some time period past 1999?
That sounds like a dubious claim, especially because there isn't a clear line between a .com company and a non .com company. I recall related tech companies were also part of the .com hype cycle.
Let's put it this way - at the end of 1999, the top 10 companies were Yahoo! ($110bn)| Amazon ($27bn) | Yahoo! Japan ($25bn) | eBay ($17bn) | Infosapce/Blucora ($10bn) | Lycos ($8bn) | Priceline ($7bn) | eTrade ($7bn) | Monster.com ($6bn) | CNET ($4bn)
Pets.com made a lot of noise in the media, but peaked at a $400mn valuation.
Yahoo! exited in 2015 for $5bn plus about $40bn of Alibaba stock (bad but not awful)
Amazon is the real driver as it went from $27bn to $1,500bn today, a 56x return and a 20% IRR (it's nice when your #2 position does that).
Yahoo! Japan went from $25bn to $32bn.
eBay was $17bn, combined eBay and PYPL are $100bn.
Priceline was $7bn and is now $113bn.
eTrade was bought by Morgan Stanley for $13bn in 2020.
Lycos was acquired by a Spanish telecom in 2000 for $13bn.
The rest of the Top 10 were basically zeroes, but going down the list you also get Expedia ($1bn to $15bn).
And keep in mind this is buying at basically the peak.
The key is you actually had to listen to the wisdom of the market and not try to play in the penny stocks, which still largely holds true today.
I'm just saying that the 'Dotcom Bubble' is wildly misremembered. It was a broad market bubble with media coverage of the Internet.
EDIT: To add to the point. The companies you cite are 'picks and shovels' companies (don't even get me started there - what's the biggest pick and shovel company? the phrase should be 'jeans, coffee and banks'). There was certainly a 'picks and shovels' bubble that Nvidia may very well repeat, but the Internet was/has always been a good investment.
I agree many didn't but in what way was there any impediment for people to do this? We both know eTrade existed back then...
It's like saying "who would buy Apple in 2005 and hold to today?"
The answer is "only a handful of now billionaires," but that doesn't mean it's an invalid strategy (again, it's one of the greatest strategies in the history of time).
If you're making the separate point that investing in Coca-Cola, Corning, or Intel in 2000 was a bad idea that many people did do, then I agree with you, but again that was a broad market bubble that sent people looking for explanations.
It's 1999 and I have 10,000 dollars to invest. How the heck do I invest it among 382 internet companies at market cap rate on etrade? Etrade isn't going to let me buy fractional shares of stock in 1999 in proportion to the market cap. Good luck dividing your investment so you own 382 companies in proportion to the market cap.
And have you considered Etrade was probably charging 6 dollars per trade? $2,292 dollars in expenses to own 382 companies means I've lost before I began.
"(again, it's one of the greatest strategies in the history of time)"
It's not really a strategy so much as a data mining exercise. It doesn't even seem to have resulted in a lesson you can apply today, you earlier said you don't even know if Nvidia is a good buy.
I think you should go check the absolute $ cost of those stocks in 1999. The fractional share thing is an outcrop of just how well all these companies did in the period we are discussing
>And have you considered Etrade was probably charging 6 dollars per trade? $2,292 dollars in expenses to own 382 companies means I've lost before I began.
Again, of that $10k, $1k of it was Amazon and that's now worth $56k. Let's instead assume that you in practice bought $994 of Amazon. That is now $55,650. Literally start in a $9,006 hole - only buy Amazon with a fee and literally burn the rest of the cash - you're still at an 8% market-beating IRR.
I don't know why you are choosing to die on this hill of focusing on how much it would cost to accumulate the long tail, when it's the primarily the big ones that make the money anyway.
>It's not really a strategy so much as a data mining exercise.
In 2023 it's a data mining exercise. In 1999, it was a strategy. That's how time works.
>It doesn't even seem to have resulted in a lesson you can apply today, you earlier said you don't even know if Nvidia is a good buy.
I'm telling you the lesson - don't invest in weird penny stocks or picks and shovels, invest in innovative companies that are driving use-cases forward. If you are having trouble finding those companies through proprietary research, the market is actually already pretty good at selecting them for you (though you still want to index to an extent).
You don't have to take that advice but you should (because, again, keep in mind we are talking about buying at the peak, nearly any other entry point 2-3x'es these IRRs).
That at least is sort of a strategy in that it's not a collection of folksy wisdom, assuming you had a methodology in determining what is and is not an Internet stock, which you maybe wouldn't have had, as this may only have been obvious in hindsight. But the problem with this strategy is investing at market cap is a non trivial exercise as I pointed out.
(Edit to add: Barnes and Nobles launched a ecommerce site in 1997. So I hope it's on your "deploying capital proportional to 1999 market caps" Internet firm dataset. /)
But now we seem to have moved the goalposts to "invest in innovative companies that are driving use-cases forward that are not shovel stocks or penny stocks" which is folksy advice kind of like "pick good companies and avoid bad companies."
In that spirit I offer my own advise: "Be better at predicting the future than the person you are buying or selling from." It works every time.
Nvidia shares is probably overpriced right now, but we're talking about the demand for its technology and its market dominance.
> Kinda like the dotcom bubble.
Would 1999 investors have lost money if they held Amazon.com shares - prior to dotcom bubble burst - to this day?
Are you arguing the "dotcom" market was a hype that went away? Do you live in the same planet Earth as I do?
It's not exactly the same, but the hype is similar.