We've entered the AI grift era
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
I guess that's kind of how it's always been, but it's also not the same. We've almost learned, in a way, that we can now mass-consume all the thoughts, information, and data from everything. But the only people who can truly parse through it and figure out things from it are those with infinite money, all the resources, and those at the top. I guess that's always been the way.
People are just going to retreat into smaller communities where they can guarantee they're interacting with a person and the era of widely sharing art or music or writing will be over.
At least assuming that the grift train doesn't derail and catch fire before them.
We've been here before and will be here again. But we will never learn.
The peril came from being led into dangerous waters. Maybe your analogy is more right than you know. The question is, who’s Titanic, Olympic, and Brittanic…
Eh? No it didn't; operating in water with icebergs was entirely standard for ocean liners of that era. Titanic was operator error, coupled with some questionable design, and extremely poor safety regulations around lifeboats (Titanic actually had more boat space per capita than was common at the time; the lifeboats were largely envisaged for ferrying people from a stricken ship to an assisting ship, and weren't really planned around a ship _rapidly_ sinking. It wasn't until after the accident that regulators required enough boat space for the entire complement.)
But mostly operator error. The captain _should_ have hit the iceberg head-on, and indeed this was standard procedure if you couldn't stop in time. This would certainly have damaged the ship, but would not have sunk it.
Like AI developer rent seekers leading is into a new Ponzi scheme to generate more bag holders than unicorns.
Trickle down on us! Open your mouths all and say aaaaah
https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/Value-Spreads-Back...
To my untrained eye it looks like most of the Magnificent Seven are priced as though they captured the entire pie at the expense of all the others, which more or less can't happen by definition.
The amount of the US equity market based on that pricing outlook would be a terrifying thing to see corrected abruptly.
I’m perplexed that a low-key armchair chart trader hot take would run up 5 and back down while brutal Swiftian genocides of everything from Docker to Paul Graham get upvoted.
Why is this a thing?
When everyone gets a 401(k), and everyone gets the cookie-cutter advice that index funds are cheap and tend to outperform active management on the long term, it couples WAY more of the American public to the stock market than was conventional.
If the market fizzled in 1980, it would bankrupt some rich traders and a few over-margined firms, but the aspects of the economy that actually made and sold useful things would soldier on. People with guaranteed pensions and secured debts would make it out (relatively) whole.
Today, a proper reckoning would be political suicide. We're now forced to deal with the political consequences of "NVDA retreating to $10 per share means a bunch of grandpas (who vote) are evicted from their retirement homes."
I expect we'll see a lot of elaborate Rube Goldberg schemes to keep stock prices afloat. We'll insist there's an AI gap with China to unlock endless federal grift, much as the missile gap with the USSR made it of vital national interest that we showered Lockheed and Raytheon with trillions. I wonder if we'd eventually see the equivalent of 'capital controls'-- limiting the ability of institutional investors to sell their shares to prevent price deflation if there's a "market-spooking" event.
Of course, this bleeds actual productive assets, and when the bottom finally falls out-- when there's no amount of state intervention that will hold back the obvious-- it's going to burn far worse. Maybe the final endgame is that we end up nationalizing part of the market-- swallowing everyone's IRAs/401(k)s/ESAs and converting them to funny-money that can be marked at whatever price is necessary to keep Grandpa from losing his shirt.
I share this concern, but would also like to point out that there are lots of well-run low cost index funds out there that do not track the S&P500 and/or exclude the Magnificent 7.
"I can have this postmodern values but if you don't like it I can have these other ones. Repeat until something sticks."
Y Combinator has not been discriminating for a while. This is a graph of the companies they have graduated in the last 40 batches.
It's gone from 8 companies per batch to 400 in the last few years. Granted the insanity has died down a bit since covid and we're now only looking at ~200 per batch.
450 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
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250 |-+ AA-|
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100 |-+ A A +-|
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50 |-+ A A A A +-|
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0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40> Apply to the Most Innovative Companies Awards and be recognized as an organization driving the world forward through innovation.
This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with our tech culture pushing forward and rewarding "innovation" for its own sake, with little regard for whether it's actually solving previously unsolved problems. I mean, if the organization is already driving the world forward, it probably doesn't really need FastCompany's award.
A new renaissance of slop content? Great, another boom in hiring and pay for web developers, followed by, oh look at that, a massive bust when it turns out that GenAI slop won't make any money, not enough to justify the engineering time in making and hosting it at least.
Actually, on the face of it, how can any of this work? Why would people (investors) believe that the general public is going to leave facebook, instagram, twitter etc to go look at https://sloppify.io in very large numbers? No, they're going to do exactly what is happening right now: fill social media with the genslop. So no, no building and maintaining website renaissance.
I don't think there is enough money, and only winners will be the good SEO people.
Each time, we observe the same pattern: the established storytellers predict doom, fearing the loss of their privileged role. Once again, we're eliminating the middleman. We're approaching a state where peer-to-peer communication is once more possible (something we lost when we grew from tribes into nations and "the world"). This development is deeply unsettling to existing gatekeepers who have derived money and power from controlling the flow of information.
And "information wants to be free" after all, so things like "licences" and "intellectual properties" are going to suffer too.
And a reminder that the full quote from the 1960s (!) is this:
"On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other."
But we've used that control of information to form super-tribes and it sits at the base of our civilization. National identity, various large group identities. Fandoms.
What happens when everyone is in an n=1 bubble?
Do we revert to bloodlines? Do we let AI match us? Physical proximity?
I confess that I am somewhat excited about AI. Most of us have tried coding with ChatGPT at our side and it is picking amazing that it works at all. But, because I've been around the block myself, it's more of a measured excitement.
> journalism & editorial standards keep getting lower.
> it used to be that journalists had the self-respect to not make up a 'trend' or 'era' before they could cobble together at least 3 anecdotes
Ironically, these claims could use the support of "at least 3 anecdotes" itself. Granted, this is HN, we are not journalists, that's not part of our standards.
> OP can barely even manage 1
Aside from Pear, TFA also mentioned the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI pin. Which brings it to a grand total of...three.
Also has the following:
> [TFA] Funding for AI firms reached $23.2 billion in the second quarter of the year—the highest level on record, according to analyst firm CB Insights.
> [TFA] Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google’s AI research team, told the Financial Times earlier this year that he worries that the cash flooding the AI space “brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting.” Hassabis, who cofounded DeepMind, compared the present AI space unfavorably to crypto.
The latter quote was followed by the sentence mentioning Rabbit and Humane.
Honestly, I try to have a healthy amount of cynicism for what counts as "news" nowadays but being critical of a news item for the heck of it strays from the constraints of the operative word "healthy". If I'm being generous, I'd call the article's title sensationalist in its confidence but all things considered, the text provides ample evidence to support the thesis of the title no? We can debate the merits of the evidence the author presented but for us to do that we need to actually---ahem---read the article in good faith and start it from there.