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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there's a lot of hype and buzzwords. Certainly companies are slapping the "AI" label onto their products and jumping on the bandwagon in order to gin up interest.

But there's a real technological change going on. Machines are capable of performing tasks that were nearly unthinkable two years ago. There's real progress beneath the hype.

AI workloads are going to be dramatically more significant in the next decade. A shift like this opens up real opportunities for smaller players to capture enormous market share. If SiFive manages to develop the best AI hardware, they could become bigger than Apple. Or they could fumble and go out of business. Either of these outcomes is genuinely possible when this kind of technological shift happens.

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> But there's a real technological change going on. Machines are capable of performing tasks that were nearly unthinkable two years ago. There's real progress beneath the hype.

Like what? What's unthinkable tasks are so useful thanks to AI?

> Like what? What's unthinkable tasks are so useful thanks to AI?

Erasing strangers or unwanted items in the background on pictures taken by my phone locally from my Phone's photo app was unthinkable a few years since you needed Photoshop on a PC for that. I assume the TPU is doing heavy lifting on image segmentation since the UX is pretty much touch-to-erase.

It does a bunch of useful things already. Arguably most users of Copilot see it as having a positive contribution or they would not pay the price. Generative Image models are pretty good at fixing photos and creating vector art. Chatbots, even though they hallucinate, are consistently polite, helpful and efficient. They are good at sparking new ideas, playing fantasy games, debugging and rubberducking. Maybe they are also good therapists, when prompted right. They are universally used for summarisation, text based question answering, and extracting data in JSON.

Do any of those uses justify hyperbole that SiFive will be worth a trillion dollars?

A trillion dollars? Heck no.

They may be worth more than Arm, Ltd. in a decade or so. That also depends upon Arm making some more bone-headed decisions too.

I asked SD to generate me a photo of Putin eating Turkish food and 30s later had a photo of Putin eating something that looks a lot like Turkish food. If I kept trying or threw more processing time at it, I'd have gotten something nicer. Probably.

https://i.imgur.com/y5BfxBF.jpg

Two years ago this immensely useful feat would have been impossible to accomplish in 30 seconds.

On a more serious note, ChatGPT has made made me a much more productive person. Recent example where it helped me a lot in getting an understanding of a new topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37622335 - Even when it's making a fair amount of mistakes, it can be like a personal tutor who points you into the right directions when you're stumbling around in an unfamiliar field. Sort of like a much smarter search engine.

Granted, useful to me doesn't mean useful to you. But there's also people to whom search engines aren't useful, because they don't know how or when to use them.

Mid-journey is a good example.

So AI has made nightmare fuel hands and photoshopped pictures cheaper. Was this unthinkable? Is it trillion dollar valuation worthy?

We are running towards the holodeck at shocking speed

Speech -> immersive vr is an engineering challenge at this point.

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