Hacker News Reader

> The AI bubble folks are sitting in roles that are not doing the cutting edge AI work

Ah, the "trust me bro" argument. No one I know of, including Zitron, denies that this tech will increase margins by some number of percentage points.

But that's not the game the core AI guys are playing. They're raising money based on the promise of creating a digital god.

From what I saw in the video, Ed is the “trust me, bro.” Many recited popular knowledge arguments and no boots-on-the-ground industry experience. This guy is a literal influencer.

I see significant improvements nearly every other week or so, and I feel like I'm barely following the industry. He's making an "any day now" argument and is not quoting what AI companies are doing or dealing with. For example, improving training data has been delivering massive improvements vs. "gathering more". Identifying and iterating on approaches to dealing with recognized flaws is another area delivering massive improvements. Lots of basic research is still being done.

You don’t have to trust me. I’m just stating my first hand experiences. If you find me someone untrustworthy then feel free to stick with your own biases.

AI in its current incarnation felt on part with word processing, or even spreadsheet (which powers a big portion of the financial industry, so no mean feat)... but it's not the internal combustion engine, or comparable to the discovery of electricity.

I mean can you really compare anything with the discovery of electricity? If someone invented warp drive right now it still wouldn't be on par.

When it appears, AGI will certainly either be comparable or incomparable on the other direction.

Computers are a comparable innovation. The internet is a comparable innovation. Or, if you decide to go back, mechanical engineering was comparable too.

Ok? But how much value did the spreadsheet give the modern economy? Almost every person learns how to use word processors and spreadsheets in any school that has any semblance of modernity, and it’s required in every job that has even marginal knowledge work.

I’d also note we are only a few years into practical generative AI models and less than that in terms of how to integrate and use them. So… hard to tell what the end is going to be like at this point isn’t it? In 20 years of improvement and refinement, will it rival IC cars ? Who knows. But who cares. It’s still amazing.

This consistent lack of self-awareness across tech is getting ridiculuous. From Musk to pg's past occasional oblique defenses of Altman. It's gotten to the point where we need to replace the pledge of allegiance with Upton Sinclair's quote:

"Don't expect someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it."

Don't get me wrong what you're saying may be 100% true. But the sentence immediately after your stated your expertise should be, "Don't take my word for it, verify it yourself."

There is almost certainly a bunch of ventures that started too early. A bunch that are misguided. A bunch that will contribute a lot of understanding but will disappear having evaporated investor money. But that’s the way new foundational technologies -are- . That isn’t a bubble that’s how new markets behave.

This is where you should have checked yourself and realized something was off with what you were saying, as this description fits the dotcom bubble rather well.

Your are not providing any specific evidence, just stating an argument from authority.

Yeah the hucksters are selling hard. I don’t buy their end vision is as easy as they claim it is. But I also don’t deny that at least in Musk there’s been a history of doing amazing things about 5 years later than he claimed he would. I don’t like the man but I am amazed at how he took our inability to dream any more and turned it on its head.

You can verify it yourself, but don’t expect the out of the tin stuff with a web UI and a iPhone app to be where the power lies. Those are demo ware. They’re literal toys. The current state of the art use requires a lot of trial and error, struggling with shitty abstractions, lack of knowledge or draw on, and a lot of fumbling with a brand new technique let alone technology. It also requires understanding how generative AI works, loss functions, a fair amount of intuitively understood math, and some really creative ideas. It’s all more or less open source or where it’s not the per api fees are reasonable and there are cloud services you can use. It’s all possible it’s just not -easy- to verify. And - since I’ve done it myself and seen its power first hand in what I do I actually don’t have a lot of drive to convince others. Everyone will see sooner or later as the abstractions and the techniques mature.

As such I don’t feel compelled to build a body of evidence in the least. Don’t believe me - ok! Don’t want to really dig in and verify things at the cutting edge of work being done because it’s a lot of work? Ok! But likewise, asserting the contrary without having done that work is just as fallacious, and doesn’t change my first hand experiences in the least.

Since my comment was alreadly long I didn't want to add a long parenthesis to elaborate the details with Musk, but I wasn't referring to his concrete accomplishments, which I don't deny and am also irritated when others needlessly deny. I am referring to his ridiculuously and transparently hypocritical 180 change in behavior after he meets with leaders of countries he was criticizing prior to meeting them. He has not tweeted anything remotely negative on China and Israel after meeting Xi and Netanyahu, clearly due to transactional quid pro quo he was able extract from those meetings regarding his business interests. I have no doubt his railing against the Biden admin would have been tempered had they been more accomadating to his business interests. It is abjectly pathetic and spineless behavior.