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I've already seen enough of the drive-by PRs of hallucinated bugfixes and people putting comments through an LLM to "make them more professional" while also changing the meaning completely, to have been completely turned off the idea of using LLMs for anything that requires precision and reliability.

On the other hand I think arts and entertainment is where AI will likely still survive scrutiny, as imprecision is tolerated reasonably.

> ChatGPT is neat. For all we know we’re near a local maxima of what we’re capable of achieving without another completely new approach that will take 10 or 15 years to figure out. There’s no proof that the acceleration and capabilities we’ve seen over the last 2 to 3 years will continue like that.

Two issues here:

1) we are only about ~10 years into the deep learning boom

2) we've seen deep learning scale with compute over this 10 years, not only over the last 2-3 years.

It could be we've reached the end of the road for NLP, no one really knows. But generally we see breakthroughs in lockstep with big jumps in compute capability (typically, GPU releases, occasionally with architecture changes).

>... local maxima ... new approach that will take 10 or 15 years ...

I was listening to the recent interviews with Sam Altman and the Anthropic guy who are familiar with current research and they are very not like that. It's more wow we've got so much to build, AGI in a couple of years. (For it seems to me a rather limited version of AGI - more can code well rather than can fix your plumbing.)

Their future success is heavily tied to that set of opinions being correct and drumming up further investment. Even with the best will in the world, this type of quantitative opinion will be hugely positively biased.

They are CEOs, half the job is public cheerleading.

> AGI in a couple of years.

this will be the new "fusion in 10 years", but with the added downside of expending a small-country's worth of carbon per day while not actually getting us there.

like, of course sam altman is going to talk about how close they are and how they need more money.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-go...

Yeah, we don’t know for sure. But it seems like there are signs the easy gains may be over.

> a homework help company called Chegg uwu

That's a very charitable take on that site. I'd call it a site where people pay money for solutions to assignments they can't be assed to complete themselves.

Agree on this, wife is a professor at a local college and the loss of Chegg will not be mourned. Honestly, AI at least can provide predictive text that might send the student down a path of realization. Chegg… is not useful for this.

aye Chegg is cancer, no RIP here

What you're describing is the opposite of hype. You're describing a better product that displaced less effective/valuable products. Should I be feeling sad for Google because I use GPT more than their search engine? At the end of the day, I want the most effective tool.

But we don’t know that.

One product worked and made money.

The other is (effectively) being dumped on the market by VCs in hopes of being a valuable unicorn.

It may never turn a profit.

My argument is that that VC bet on something that may not work out may have destroyed lots of real jobs. It wasn’t harmless, even if you ignore all the other externalities about resource usage.

It doesn't matter if some company turns a profit. AI is out of the box. I can run llama at home on a 3070 and it does a pretty serviceable job. It's not going to go away and it's not going to get any worse. Whether or not X company survives isn't relevant. There are plenty of auto companies that didn't survive idk 1910 but cars didn't go away. Tech doesn't go away if it's clearly useful.

It matters.

It’s not OK in my mind for VC to just stand-up companies that destroy parts of the economy and then go out of business because it turns out they were never profitable in the first place.

It would be insane for that to be considered good economic policy.

> It’s not OK in my mind for VC to just stand-up companies that destroy parts of the economy and then go out of business because it turns out they were never profitable in the first place.

Is this a real thing that happens? Can you name some historical examples? What is stopping from destroyed businesses from being rebuilt pretty quickly? Uber subsidized taxi rides for millions of people for years, but if Uber went out of business, legacy taxis would come right back. And even if they didn't for X amount of time, X would have to be > the amount of subsidy that was received in the meantime. And if the legacy business was so vulnerable that people were willing to try and replace it with some big matrixes, the replacement company might still escape the local maximum that the previous company was trapped in.

The VCs are irrelevant. The concept of an engine is separate from Ford, Chevy, Tesla, etc, and the other companies that sell variations of it.

Edit: Also, the VCs that are just GPT wrappers deserve to die. The only people it hurts are the investors with more money than sense.

How are the VCs irrelevant?

It’s their massive money injections that allows these distortions to happen.

If people had been having to pay for the resources ChatGPT (etc) uses to use it then they wouldn’t have had the deleterious effects they have.

One definition of dumping: “Selling goods at less than their normal price, especially in the export market as a means of securing a monopoly.”

Isn’t that exactly what’s going on? Grow too big to fail fast so you’re the winner and people have to use you?

> I just saw a mention about how a homework help company called Chegg has had their stock drop 99% because everyone is just using ChatGPT.

I don’t understand, this seems like the opposite of an example of “hype” causing damage. These customers found a better/cheaper alternative.

A bunch of people are out of a job from a VC funded thing that may be gone in year for all we know.

There are tons of business that probably went through this.

businesses don't exist to just give people jobs. If there's no value in the market, they should go out of business. That's how it works.

This is going to happen to so many businesses and industries that a universal basic income will become a necessity if we don't want revolts.

The waste comes from everyone assuming that AI is a ticket to a successful company that does deserve to exist.

VCs don’t exist to destroy parts of the economy.

There was value in the market. VCs destroyed it through dumping. And for all we know they’ll give up in a year and we’ll have nothing. No jobs and no existing solution.

OpenAI alone employs thousands of engineers _more_ than Chegg, and does a better job than it. Destroying old stuff is part of creating something new. "The economy" wasn't destroyed by a legacy company folding.

Exactly. Homework is one of the best areas for ChatGPT. My daughter uses it for French -- and while I'm sure its probably sometimes wrong (I actually don't speak French), it has helped my daughter to a 99% so far in her class. She considers it her own private tutor. It generates quizzes for her, explains not only what the answer is, but why she probably answered the way that she did -- the number of times my daughter has said, "Oh, now that makes sense!" has been plenty.

Chegg wasn't a victim — it was a middleman profiting from locked-up educational content and exploiting students’ needs. ChatGPT didn't "lure" users; it provided a superior, accessible alternative, democratizing learning rather than hiding it behind paywalls. The argument against AI due to resource usage is selectively blind to the inefficiencies of legacy systems like Chegg. Calling this hype is like dismissing the internet as a fad — it’s a failure of imagination. Disruption always displaces incumbents, but clinging to outdated, exploitative models is far worse than embracing a tool that genuinely empowers users.

Chegg felt predatory.

They had no real original content of their own, just worked solutions to homework problems they pulled from textbooks. They were good at SEO and would appear at the top. You clicked on it because it lied to you: showing you part of the content you wanted. Just enough for the search engine preview. That probably boosted them further, wasting more time by others tricked by the same fake results.

To see the rest of the answer, they wanted you to pay money and hope it was what you wanted. Who would subscribe to that other than students desperate for homework answers?

Then ChatGPT comes in without any of the scammy tactics. Sure, it's often wrong, but so are Chegg and Quora.

The difference here is that Chegg was actually profitable. It is still unknown if OpenAI will be.

Right. It was an easy to understand example on hand of a business that was DESTROYED.

I’m sure there are plenty of good places that were destroyed. I just don’t have verifiable anecdotes for any others at hand.

As others have pointed out, some of your examples are very bad, because they're the opposite of hype - they're companies that innovated and created a better product by leveraging new technology. This gave actual consumers a better, cheaper option, as judged by the consumers themselves (who are the judges that matter).

You express a lot of concern that these are just "VC pumped up companies" or something, as if that negates the technology. But it doesn't! The technology has already been developed because of these VC investments, and much of it is public.

Moreover, even if these companies go out of business tomorrow and aren't replaced, having years of consumers paying less money and getting a better product is a good unto itself. Yes, a company that made something inferior went out of business in the process - but if, after the big companies are shut down, there really is somehow no alternative - a new company based on the old method can always start again.

I just don't understand how you can spin as bad the idea that VCs are spending billions on unprofitable companies, meaning that they are spending billions that go straight into either innovation, or consumer's pockets. Who loses out here except for the VCs?

And while I have empathy and respect for people who lose their jobs, companies going out of business is an everyday occurrence. We should wish it only happened because better-for-consumers solutions came along.

I think the upside is that we stop spending limited human time on mundane/easy things and focus on higher-value pursuit.

Because you can no longer be a cheap artist, because you can no longer help students on easy problems en masse, because family businesses no longer need a webmaster.

That's a step in the right direction, maybe even towards UBI.

On growth, I disagree that we reached the plateau already. We won't fundamentally change things but larger context windows, speed, compute and cost? Obviously.

That in itself is a major evolution.

It looks like it is fading out of hype maybe, but that's just like all things. LLMs aren't going anywhere, just like Rails got version 8 out and it's better than ever.

> All the electricity, the silicon, the water for cooling, the new data center is being built that won’t be needed.

> Just tons and tons of waste everywhere.

I worry about this not just for AI, but in general. That's capitalism right there, profit now - who cares later. And I am becoming radicalized against it.