Interesting that the profits of those bottom 490 companies of S&P 500 do not rise with the help of AI technology, which is supposedly sold to them at a reduced rate as AI vendors are bleeding money.
IMO this is an extremely scary situation in the stock market. The AI bubble burst is going to be more painful than the Dotcom bubble burst. Note that an "AI bubble burst" doesn't necessitate a belief that AI is "useless" -- the Internet wasn't useless and the Dotcom burst still happened. The market can crash when it froths up too early even though the optimistic hypotheses driving the froth actually do come true eventually.
Once users get hooked on AI and it becomes an indispensable companion for doing whatever, these companies will start charging the true cost of using these models.
It would not be surprising if the $20 plans of today are actually just introductory rate $70 plans.
So a big concern then? (Although not a death sentence)
Even today, Azure and AWS are not really cheaper or better - for most situations, they're more expensive, and less flexible than what can be done with OS infrastructure. For companies who are successful making software, Azure is more of a kneecap and a regret. Many switch away from cloud, despite that process being deliberately painful - a shocking mirror of how it was switching away from Microsoft infrastructure of the past.
Shouldn't something like Kubernetes or Android's flavor of open source be on the radar? Seems like there are plenty of large players that might turn their 4th place closed source API into a first place open ecosystem.
Distillation for specialisation can also raise the capacity of the local models if we need it for specific things.
So its chugging along nicely.
That’s not correct. Did you mean something else?
The benefits have just not been that wide ranging to the average person. Maybe I'm wrong but, I don't AI hype as a cornerstone of US jobs, so there's no jobs to suddenly dry up. The big companies are still flush with cash on hand, aren't they?
If/when the fad dies I'd think it would die with a wimper.
Self driving cars and intelligent robotics is the real goldmine. But we still don't seem to have the right architecture or methods.
I say that because self driving cars are entirely stagnant despite the boom AI interest and resources.
Personally i think we need a major breakthrough in reinforcement learning, computer vision (which are still mostly stuck at feed forward CNNs) and few shot learning. The tranformer is a major leap, but its not enough on its own.
In general I do not agree that the economy is overleveraged on AI just like it is not overleveraged on cyrpto currency. If the money dries up, I don't expect economy wide layoffs.
I think we're in a massive AI bubble, but its a bubble that doesn't affect normal consumers much, so it's not too dangerous or concerning.
As for my prediction of what is needed for truly useful AI automation... i suspect the current bubble will pop before we solve it.
I think you might be underestimating how many non-technical people are using LLM’s daily.
1. There profits could otherwise be down.
2. The plan might be to invest a bunch up front in severance and AI Integration that is supposed to pay off in the future.
3. In the future that may or may not happen, and it'll be hard to tell, because it may pay off at the same time an otherwise recession is hitting, which smoothes it out.
It's almost as if it's not that simple.