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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

To the people who are calling this evidence of a bubble: There is no credible indication that AI in general is a bubble, even if not all investments will make sense in retrospect. Quite the opposite, the progress in the field over the last few years is staggering. AI systems are becoming superhuman at more and more tasks. It's only a question of time till AI will outperform us at everything.

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> There is no credible indication that AI in general is a bubble, even if not all investments will make sense in retrospect.

If you add up all of the contracts that OpenAI is signing, it's buying something like $1 trillion/year worth of compute. To merely break even, it would have to make more money than literally every other company on the planet, fairly close to twice the current highest revenue company (Walmart, a retailer, which, yeah, there's a reason that has high revenue).

They are aiming at being the first to develop an AGI and eventually superintelligence. Something that can replace human workers. Walmart is small fish in comparison. OpenAI is currently in the lead, so their chances are decent.

This is an argument that OpenAI needs to achieve a supernatural outcome in order to be a financial success.

So you think superhuman intelligence is supernatural.

If you want to substitute "science fiction" that's fine too. We generally don't bank real investment expectations on science fiction outcomes. The positive expectation scenario you've provided is "OpenAI obsoletes workers, to the extent that Walmart is small fish". That's a sci-fi outcome, not a rational expectation.

You would have called ChatGPT or Dall-E science fiction just shortly before it actually came out.

Perhaps. Also time travel machines. But for different reasons.

There is no indication of being in a bubble when you're actually in one. Its only after the bubble pops do people recognize it in hindsight. Otherwise there would be no bubbles and we wouldn't see large institutions fall for this crap.

What is a credible indication? Who is credible? Its all subjective. Its possible to fool yourself endlessly when financial incentives are involved. The banks did it with mortgages.

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