Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

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> Waymo showed it's not a bubble.

Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely. Which is still really useful, but a far cry from the promise of everyone being able to buy a personal pod on wheels that takes you to and fro, no matter where you want to go, while you sleep that the bubble was premised on. In other words, Waymo has proven the bubble. It has been 20 years since Stanley, and I still have never seen a self-driving car in person. And I reside in an area that was officially designated by the government for self-driving car testing!

> I think the realistic answer is we don't actually know if it's a bubble.

While that is technically true, has there ever not been a bubble when people start dreaming about what could be? Even if AI heads towards being everything we hope it can become, it still seems highly likely that people have dreamed up uses for the potential of AI that aren't actually useful. The PetsGPT.com-types can still create a bubble even if the underlying technology is all that and more.

> Waymo showed that under tightly controlled conditions humans can successfully operate cars remotely.

My understanding was that Waymo’s are autonomous and don’t have a remote driver?

They are so-called "human in the loop". They don't have a remote driver in the sense of someone sitting in front of a screen playing what looks like a game of Truck Simulator. But they are operated by humans.

It's kind of like when cruse control was added to cars. No longer did you have to worry about directly controlling the pedal, but you still had to remain the operator. In some very narrow sense you might be able to make a case that cruise control is autonomy, but the autonomous car bubble imagined that humans would be taken out of the picture entirely.

This is absolutely false. In rare cases Waymo needs human intervention, but they do NOT have humans in the loop for the vast majority of their operations.

Cruise control also doesn't need human intervention for the vast marjory of its operation. Yet, the human remains the operator. But it seems we're just playing a silly game of semantics at this point, so let's return to the actual topic at hand.

There was a time where people believed that everyone would buy a new car with self-driving technology, which would be an enormous cash cow for anyone responsible for delivering the technology to facilitate that. So the race was on to become that responsible party. What we actually got, finally, decades after the bubble began, was a handful of taxis that can't leave a small, tightly controlled region — all while haemorrhage money like it is going out of style.

It is really interesting technology and it is wonderful that Alphabet is willing to heavily subsidize moving some people from point A to point B in a limited niche capacity, but the idea that you could buy in and turn that investment into vast riches was soon recognized as a dead end.

AI is still in the "maybe it will become something someday" phase. Clearly it has demonstrated niche uses already, but that isn't anywhere nearly sufficient to justify all the investment that has gone into it. It needs a "everyone around the world is going to buy a new car" moment for the financials to make sense and that hasn't happened yet. And people won't wait around forever. The window to get there is quickly closing. Much like self-driving cars, a "FAANG" might still be willing to offer subsidies to keep it alive in some kind of limited fashion, but most everyone else will start to pull out and then there will be nothing to keep the bubble inflated.

It isn't too late for AI yet. People remain optimistic at this juncture. But the odds are not good. As before, even if AI reaches a point where it does everything we could ever hope for, much of the dreams built on those hopes are likely to end up being pretty stupid in hindsight. The Dotcom bubble didn't pop because the internet was flawed. It popped because we started to realize that we didn't need it for the things we were trying to use it for. It is almost certain that future AI uses that have us all hyped up right now will go the same way. Such is life.

Ah, it’s the old “teleport the goalposts and then change the subject!” strategy.

Just like Waymo, LLMs are already wildly useful to me others, both technical and non-technical, and there’s no reason to think the progress is about to suddenly stop, so I don’t know what you’re even on about at this point.

> and there’s no reason to think the progress is about to suddenly stop

You seem a bit confused. Bubbles, and subsequent crashes, aren't dependent on progress, they're dependent on people's retained interest in investing. The AI bubble could crash even if everything was perfect executed, just because the people decided they'd rather invest in, as you suggest, teleportation — or something boring like housing — instead.

Progress alone isn't enough to retain interest. Just like the case before, the internet progressed fantastically through the last 90s — we almost couldn't have done it any better — but at the same time people were doing all kinds of stupid things like Pets.com with it. While the internet itself remained solid and one of the greatest inventions of all time, all the extra investment into the stupid things pulled out, and thus the big bubble pop.

You're going to be hard-pressed to convince anyone that we aren't equally doing stupid things with AI right now. Not everything needs a chatbot, and eventually investors are going to realize that too.

I ride waymos on the regular. It's not tightly controlled conditions. It's some of the hardest roads in the bay area.

>While that is technically true, has there ever not been a bubble when people start dreaming about what could be? Even if AI heads towards being everything we hope it can become, it still seems highly likely that people have dreamed up uses for the potential of AI that aren't actually useful. The PetsGPT.com-types can still create a bubble even if the underlying technology is all that and more.

What I see more of on HN is everyone calling everything a bubble. This is a bubble that is a bubble. It's all a bubble. Like literally, Sam Altman is the minority. Almost everyone thinks it's a bubble.

> It's some of the hardest roads in the bay area.

Hard is subjective. Multiplying large numbers is hard for humans, but easy for machines. I'd say something like the I-80 through Nebraska is one of the easiest drives imaginable, but good luck getting your Waymo ride down that route... You've not made a good case for it operating outside of tightly controlled bounds.

More importantly, per the topic of conversation, you've not made a good case for the investment. Even though it has found an apparent niche, Waymo continues to lose money like it is going out of style. It is nice of them to pay you to get yourself around and all, but the idea that someone could invest in self-driving cars to get rich from it is dead.

> What I see more of on HN is everyone calling everything a bubble.

Ultimately, a bubble occurs when people invest more into something than they can get back in return. Maybe HN is right — that everything is in a bubble? There aren't a lot of satisfactory answers for how the cost of things these days can be recouped. Perhaps there are not widely recognized variables that are being missed by the masses, however the sentiment is at least understandable.

But the current AI state of affairs especially looks a lot like the Dotcom bubble. Interesting technology that can be incredibly useful in the right hands, but is largely being used for pretty stupid purposes. It is almost certain that in the relatively near future we'll start to realize that we never needed many of those things to begin with, go through the trough of disillusionment, and, eventually, on the other side find its true purpose in life. The trouble is, from a financial perspective, that doesn't justify the spend.

This time could be different, but since we're talking about human behaviour that has never been different before, why would humans suddenly be different now? There has been no apparent change to the human.

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