ML is about hit another winter. Maybe intel is ahead of industry.
Or we can keep asking high computers questions about programming.
Or we can keep asking high computers questions about programming.
I agree ML is about to hit (or has likely already hit) some serious constraints compared to breathless predictions of two years ago. I don't think there's anything equivalent to the AI winter on the horizon, though—LLMs even operated by people who have no clue how the underlying mechanism functions are still far more empowered than anything like the primitives of the 80s enabled.
Nvidia had a revenue of $27billion in 2023 - that's about $160 per person per year [0] for every working age person in the USA. And it's predicted to more than double in 2024. If you reduce that to office workers (you know, the people who might actually get some benefit, as no AI is going to milk a cow or serve you starbucks) that's more like $1450/year. Or again more than double that for 2024.
How much value add is the current set of AI products going to give us? It's still mostly promise too.
Sure, like most bubbles there'll probably still be some winners, but there's no way the current market as a whole is sustainable.
The only way the "maximal AI" dream income is actually going to happen is if they functionally replace a significant proportion of the working population completely. And that probably would have large enough impacts to society that things like "Dollars In A Bank" or similar may not be so important.
[0] Using the stat of "169.8 million people worked at some point in 2022" https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/work.pdf
[1] 18.5 million office workers according to https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.nr0.htm
Seems like a lot of CV solutions have seen fairly steady but small incremental advances over the past 10-15 years, quite unrelated to the current AI hype.
We've been through multiple AI Winters, as a new technique is developed, it does increase the capabilities. Just not as much as the hype suggested.
To say there won't be a bust implies this boom will last forever, into whatever singularity that implies.
For example ?
(besides deep fakes)
Used them in the garden while weeding and in the garden store while planning what to plant, in both cases to identify plants by image and tell me about them — though I'd say image capable AI are no longer mere "large language models".
Used ChatGPT while shopping to help me locate products in the store I was in, when I couldn't find just by wandering the isles, by uploading a photo of the aisle I happened to be in at the point I gave up.
> Nvidia had a revenue of $27billion in 2023 - that's about $160 per person per year [0] for every working age person in the USA
As a non-American, I'd like to point out we also earn money.
> as no AI is going to milk a cow or serve you starbucks
Cows have been getting the robots for a while now, here's a recent article: https://modernfarmer.com/2023/05/for-years-farmers-milked-co...
Robots serve coffee as well as the office parts of the coffee business: https://www.techopedia.com/ai-coffee-makers-robot-baristas-a...
Some of the malls around here have food courts where robots bring out the meals. I assume they're no more sophisticated than robot vacuum cleaners, but they get the job done.
Transformer models seem to be generally pretty good at high-level robot control, though IIRC a different architecture is needed down at the level of actuators and stepper motors.
And I know restricting it to the US is a simplification, but so is restricting it to Nvidia, it's just to give a ballpark back-of-the-envelope "does this even make sense?" level calculation. And that's what I'm failing to see.
Nonetheless, Starbucks does not use these machines, and I don't see any reason that AI, on its current trajectory, will change that calculation any time soon.
They could serve us a plate of shit and we'd debate if pepper or salt is better to complement it
I mean, Yudkowsky has basically spent the last decade screaming into the void about how AI will with high probability literally kill everyone, and even people like me who think that danger is much less likely still look at the industrial revolution and how slow we were to react to the harms of climate change and think "speed-running another one of these may be unwise, we should probably be careful".
I'm still not convinced about that. All the """studies""" show 30-60% boost in productivity but clearly this doesn't translate to anything meaningful in real life because no industry laid off 30-60% of their workforce and no industry progressed anywhere close to 30% since chat gpt was released.
It's been released a whole 24 months ago, remember the talks about freeing us from work and curing cancer... Even investments funds which are the biggest suckers for anything profitable are more and more doubtful
The services that provide serious productivity boosts aren't being heavily used or marketed yet. They:
1. Attempt to do narrow tasks with high proficiency. 2. Replace specific job titles. 3. Are high-value enough to be slower to engage in layoffs.
What I'm suggesting is not a fungible solution, but it is one that will be highly profitable and productive.
I really wasn't interested in computer hardware anymore (they are fast enough!) until I discovered the world of running LLMs and other AI locally. Now I actually care about computer hardware again. It is weird, I wouldn't have even opened this HN thread a year ago.
It has zero cost, hardware is already there. I'm not captive to some remote company.
I can fiddle and integrate with other home sensors / automation as I want.
Hardware side, I just have a beefy server that acts as a router (mellanox card to provider fiber optic and local fiber network), firewall, wifi access point, zigbee coordinator, host to various services, camera video feed ingestion and processing, and so on...