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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

There is no AI bubble.

What about the points raised in the video?

This is true of and only if they actually create AGI. Otherwise it's value destroying given the huge costs associated with producing what are essentially very good chat bots.

My cost is $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus, and the value I get out of that far exceeds $20. That is value creation, not destruction, right now. Not some imagined AGI future hypothetical.

I think the idea is that it cost a lot more than $20/mo/user to create the tech, and that investment in the tech-creation won't be recouped by your tech-consumption.

I think it depends on how far out you run the numbers for the area under the curve and all the various costs and profits. Seems clear to me that the individual tech-creation might end up being losses but that the net global will be gain very shortly as we continue to adapt and accelerate based on using the tech.

And OpenAPI is spending more than $20 to provide you that service...

Not to mention boiling the oceans

Sad state of affairs that people downplay this part of the problem. The energy usage is insane

How much energy is being used to provide that $20 service?

>Otherwise it's value destroying given the huge costs associated with producing what are essentially very good chat bots.

It's astonishing that anyone even tech-adjacent can say something like this.

I'd argue these tools are already beyond "very good chat bots". And you think this is it? This is as far as we'll get with them, or AI? That's impossible to believe looking at history. Besides the fact that laying miles and miles of "excess" fibre was once seen as a bubble...

> It's astonishing that anyone even tech-adjacent can say something like this.

Then I'll present my credentials. 25 years in tech and I use ChatGPT every day. It's an incredibly good chat bot and code snippet generator. The more I use it the more I see how much of a stochastic parrot it is. It's usually not that hard to find the code it based it's response on on GitHub and Stack overflow if you've got time to kill.

>Then I'll present my credentials. 25 years in tech and I use ChatGPT every day.

I think you're proving my point: long-time tech person who'd rather look stuff up on Stack Overflow, but yet uses the tool every day.

What? I use ChatGPT so I dont have to look it up.

And that's the point I've been making in this thread: GenAI is an incredible summarizer. But that's not nearly good enough to justify the investment and multiples were seeing now.

Only AGI can justify the money being laid out right now. Without AGI companies like OpenAI have negative value because they will always loose money.

If you've got time to kill -- that says to me that it is faster, and therefore better. Time is money. How much time are we talking? If this is a 10x speed up on your research cycle then that sounds like a subtle revolution.

Just ignore him. It's just like the people who refused to get a smart phone years after everyone had them. Some combination of being threatened by AI, not wanting to have to learn a new thing, and wanting to seem cool and "in the know" by rejecting the popular opinion.

Anyone that has actually used ChatGPT etc al can trivially see its value.

I don’t know – I look at history and I see series of AI bubbles directly after a breakthrough that led to a great advancement in the science and nothing else. And then AI crashes and winters.

I think it’s completely possible to look around and think that this is as good as ChatGPT is going to get, or maybe it’ll get to 5.5 in a few years and peter out there (instead of here). And then we’ll spend the next decade shrinking and cramming and maybe we’ll even get 5.5 intelligence on our watches, but it’s never getting smarter than that.

Then in 2040 we’ll have another breakthrough, another hype cycle, and things will get smarter again, for another few years.

Looking at history, that’s a future I can believe in.

—-

PS. Generally I think these large transformer models are amazing, show great utility, and I use them every day.

Yeah, like there is/was no crypto bubble.

AI actually does something useful. A boom isn’t necessarily a bubble.

Crypto does something useful, how else would you buy drugs and rocket launchers from the dark web?

Yeah but that was already an established function by the time the public learned about Bitcoin. The recent crypto bubble is about speculation and web3 and NFT nonsense, none of which will last (while the drug buying probably will).

Sure. But the assertion was that it had no utility whatsoever and that's obviously not the case. Even tulips could be planted, despite them having had a crazy valuation.

I think it was pretty clear that they meant no utility beyond the original one that they had before the bubble.

I think I replied to the wrong comment

Crypto does nothing useful for the average person who has an average amount of trust in their local bank. It has literally zero utility beyond gambling.

Dude, no one was using crypto for anything besides speculations. People are using LLMs quite a bit it seems. I do too occasionally.

If owners are using it preserve value because of lack of faith in USD, it’s not “just” speculation, that’s a valid value preservation strategy in uncertain economic times, and now a real part of the global economy. Full disclosure: I do NOT own any BTC.

Like there was no social media bubble.

If you call everything a bubble, yeah, sometimes you'll be right. Something about economists predicting 10 recessions out of the last 5.

The crypto bubble has been bursting almost constantly from 2011 onwards while bitcoin has crashed from $10 to $50000. The AI bubble will probably keep bursting in a similar way. (bitcoin deaths https://www.bitcoindeaths.com/)

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