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Comment by mewse-hn | Hacker News Reader

Intel would be fucking crazy to give up on GPUs again, given the rise of AI processing workloads. I know a lot of companies cut their own throats chasing quarterly results but apparently Intel have a real engineer leading the ship right now.

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Or maybe the whole AI bubble is about to deflate as the inevitable copyright battles begin, and as more people turn against a technology that threatens to automate away interesting/creative jobs rather than mundane and repetitive ones...

I remember reading stuff like this in March 2000 when all the .com's were blowing up...

And then a year later most websites died, and then it was 10-15 years until most of the tech companies like Cisco reached their 2001 stock valuations?

The difference today is that AI companies aren't jumping at the chance to go public.

Becuase the AI cycle is still in the hype phase, and VCs and private capital is getting in right now before unloading onto retail investors to hold the bags.

And also, like every major tech invention in the past 40 years (smartphones, search, operating systems, social media, e-commerce), AI will quickly be dominated by a single corporation that will hold 80%+ of the market share. Nvidia on the hardware side and Microsoft/ClosedAI on the software side.

> Becuase the AI cycle is still in the hype phase, and VCs and private capital is getting in right now before unloading onto retail investors to hold the bags.

I don't think so. Had this been the early SPAC days, we would have seen a lot of AI companies try that route right away. SEC has since cracked down on SPACs making them a lot harder to do. So, I don't think we are going to see the same runup of companies trying to go public that we did 25 years ago since there isn't as easy of an avenue to do so now.

As for the domination, I also don't believe that either. I don't think that there has been a single company that owns each of those categories that you list. There are many large players.

MI300x is 1/3 the FLOPS/$ than H100's and offers more ram. The hardware AI companies will leapfrog each other on each new release, and the software ones will be extremely competitive with each other thanks to the ability to just rent the high end hardware to do their training/inference.

The copyright battles affect models that were trained with datasets where the copyright holder's approval is missing. Copyright law will be adapted to consider that usage, and model trainers will make deals with large copyright holders.

It is very rare for any technology to be completely abandoned. Usually it only happens if is being obsoleted by a more capable successor. AI is here to stay, even if a minor cooldown is coming as LLMs get somewhat regulated.

> The copyright battles affect models that were trained with datasets where the copyright holder's approval is missing.

Which is likely to be most/all of the high-profile text and image generation stuff. Where do you get a vast and varied enough library of non-copyrighted text and images on a vast range of subjects? (Even if you rely on something like owning a social media platform, how do you filter out copyright-infringing content that users will inevitably post?)

More specialised datasets for specific tasks can be gathered safely, but, with the exception of self-driving vehicles, that's not really where the AI hype bubble is. It's all about ChatGPT, AI art, and the push for for AGI.

I agree that high-quality datasets, usually proprietary, are key to good model performance. Microsoft's Phi-2 model for example is punching way above its weight thanks to being fed high-quality textbooks and encyclopedias. But that's not a total showstopper. To use those, deals can be arranged since many textbooks come from just a few publishing houses. Heavyweights like Microsoft can do that. And a comparatively small model might actually be less likely to reproduce content versatim even if prompted.

I am more curious whether researchers and private persons will be permitted to continue uploading models on Huggingface.

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