Hacker News Reader

Comment by pseudosavant | Hacker News Reader

What is going on with AI right now could be a bubble just like there was the dotcom bubble. But it isn't like the internet went away after the dotcom burst. The largest companies in existence today are internet companies or have products that wouldn't make sense without the internet.

Sure, many of these "thin prompt wrapper around the OpenAI API" product "businesses" will all be gone within a few years. But AI? That is going to be here indefinitely.

View on HN

The bubble is in the valuations on the stock market, not in the technology.

And their promises.

The "it'll make all your devs 6x as productive by the end of the year" types of promises. But those probably explain the valuations

Yeah, Sam Altman’s recent one saying that his LLMs would “cure cancer” if they built enough data centres was also a winner.

And create a theory of quantum gravity.

i have to say I'm a little disgusted by these statements. LLMs are useful for many problems, but is there really a conceivable path of them making progress into fighting the countless cancers tormenting humanity?

My framing device: if you had LLMs in the 1500s, how would that help Copernicus determine the orbits of the planets? Maybe through dumb chance, but creating a well reasoned model of the universe required new observations and the ability to interpret the data from a different point of view.

All the 1500s and earlier data that such an LLM would have to have been trained on would lead to an LLM that wouldn’t ever suggest a heliocentric solar system. That LLM might even say he was heretical or refuse to give an answer to anything that led to it saying that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. So no help at all.

More likely the LLM would condescendingly tell him that he was wrong and that the earth was clearly at the centre of the universe.

Depending on the time of creation, it might be impossible for the LLM NOT to tell him he's wrong and the earth is the center of the universe.

Interesting framing. Although I assume all the observations had been done already. It was more about being bold enough to investigate a line of thought that wasn't obvious or popular at the time and proving it convincingly.

They already had many "explanations" and models for why the planets were seemingly moving back and forth in the sky during the year. Their models were more complicated than necessary simply because they didn't want to consider the different premise.

Without those sorts of revolutionary claims, would they still be receiving enough funding to keep the lights on?

Thats not true actually.

The technology - for what it is being used vs what is invested - does not match up at all. This is what happened to the dot-com bubble. Theres was a whole bunch of innovation that was needed to come to bring a delightful UX to bring swathes of people onto the internet.

So far this is true about LLMs. Could this change? Sure. Will it change meaningful? Personally I dont believe so.

The internet at its core was all about hooking up computers so they they could transform from just computational beasts to communication. There was a tremendous amount of potentitial that was very very real. It just so happens if computers can communicate we can do a whole bunch of stuff - as is going on today.

What are LLMS? Can someone please explain in a succint way...? Im yet to see something super crystal clear.

AI has been here well before transformers. Please, let's not pretend that AI started with LLM chatbots.

Things like recommendations, ads, and search will always be around because they were money printers before VCs found out about AI and they will continue to be long after.

This is always a bad take.

The dotcom bubble was not about "the internet" itself. The Internet was fine and pretty much already proven as a very useful communication tool. It was about business that made absolutely no sense getting extremely high valuations just because they operated - however vaguely - over the internet.

Generative AI have never reached the level of usability of the Internet itself, and likely never will.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com