For moving more wealth to the top
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
There’s a lot of money to be made so long as you’re not holding the bag when it all crashes down.
Comment on AI Is Slowing Down
trashboat@piefed.social 1 week ago
The people inflating the bubble have to know what they’re doing, right? It’s hard to come up with an economic scenario where the market doesn’t crash and burn as a result.
I can’t shake the feeling that two key motivations for bleeding all this cash are A. For moving more wealth to the top (which, y’know, is already happening in umpteen different ways beyond AI), and B. For quickly building surveillance infrastructure, seeing as how eager the Pentagon/DHS is about AI
oatscoop@midwest.social 1 week ago
r0ssar00@beehaw.org 1 week ago
I’ll add ©: drive the price of general-purpose and performant hardware to the moon so everyone outside of the upper-class doesn’t have a choice about whether to use cloud vs self-hosted anything, which is just another way of describing who has control over your experience and what you can do with the hardware you bought. I mean, Apple already makes it difficult to run whatever you want on your own system (and blocking certain things entirely), even before getting to the whole app store walled garden thing, so how long before Microsoft pulls the trigger on making TPM enablement mandatory for OEMs, with a very short list of allowed certificates? At that point, you’ll have to choose between “good-ish hardware, but app store apps only” and “meh hardware, full control, but no access to anything useful because everything requires hardware attestation of some kind”.
u_tamtam@programming.dev 1 week ago
That’ll work until they create for themselves new competitors that are good enough at previous (normal) market prices. And you don’t need incredible high foundry tech for that, so it’s closing up on them eventually.
r0ssar00@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Fair point! Counterpoint: Western countries tend to use national security to push back against effective competition (see also: EVs), so I don’t think it’s strictly a technical or knowledge issue, and that while eventually there will be competition, whether or not we can legally buy it might matter more.
(Whether security concerns are valid is a separate point outside the scope of my comment: on one hand, Wi-Fi cameras you buy are basically botnet members, on the other hand the allegations against (IIRC) supermicro were never (haven’t checked in a while, could have changed but I’d probably have heard already) substantiated so the whole “embedded surveillance hardware” theory is still a theory, meaning we should expect the quality of the firmware to be inconsistent. Not exactly something new: consumer BIOS/EFI tends to be buggy, manufacturers focus on the enterprise versions)
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Not “Western countries”, rather the “United States”.
If for example Europe was doing this, US Tech companies would have almost no market presence over here.
trashboat@piefed.social 1 week ago
I think that folds pretty well into both points A (reserving personal hardware for the wealthy) and point B (the ability to mandate software installations is a valuable mass surveillance touch-point)
r0ssar00@beehaw.org 1 week ago
I don’t disagree! I think it’s worth mentioning separately if only to show the mechanics of how it would play out, each step is too distant from any other step otherwise.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
The individual people leading those companies will be much better afterwards than when they started this shit, no matter how hard the whole thing blows up.
Who wouldn’t be willing to go through the years of founding and building, say, OpenAI, if after a decade or so you’ll at worst “just” end up a multi-millionaire, and if the Tech actually works or even if you just manage to swindle enough suckers before it all collapse, you’ll end up a billionaire.
If you consider those people as sociopath “what’s in it for me” grifters, the entire thing is totally logic because even the “market cataclysm” scenario still leaves them personally far better off than if they hadn’t done any of this.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 1 week ago
I suspect part of it is that every company wants to be the one to outlast the competition and become the de facto AI company everyone uses. They want to be the 90’s Microsoft of AI. To this end, they’re all setting fire to giant piles of money.
Maybe I’m wrong but even if one clear winner emerges, I don’t see AI becoming that big of a market. They’re trying the heroin dealer approach of giving away cheap or free product so they can get people hooked and then jack up the prices on a bunch of people who will lie, cheat, and steal to get their next fix. Except AI slop isn’t heroin, it’s just slop.
Slop that produces inaccurate results and then tells you it did no such thing.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I use Claude at work and local LLMs at home, and they all produce good code. The Kagi agents work pretty well at searching for information that would have taken me 30-60 minutes to find. Although, I generally favor thinking models because they are good at edge cases.
You have to know how to provide good context for the situation, like examples, prior art, documentation, etc. Many people have a hard time even expressing an idea to a group of humans. Imagine your (pointy-haired) boss shows your department a picture in the next meeting:
B: “Go make this thing!”
D: “What thing?”
B: “Here. This thing. Make something just like it for our company!”
D: “Well, we can’t just copy it outright. What color should it be? What do we want to improve on? How do we tie it to our existing software?”
B: “I don’t know. That’s your job to figure out, right?”
That’s how most people treat LLMs. Garbage in, garbage out.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 1 week ago
Well there you go. Another argument in support of AI being not nearly as big of a deal as the fanboys would have people believe.
If you blame the users (e.g. Steve Job’s “you’re holding it wrong”) it rarely ends well.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Depends on what you mean by “fanboys”. No, the hype isn’t as real as these rich assholes make it out to be. LLMs aren’t going to replace all human workforce everywhere ever, like some of these techbro dipshits quickly find out.
But, I’m still going to use technology that produce a tool in two minutes what would have normally taken me two hours to do. Sure, I have to code review it, but that doesn’t take nearly as long as the work itself.
chaos@beehaw.org 1 week ago
For about $2000, I picked up a Mac Studio with 96 gigs of RAM, which is effectively all VRAM thanks to Apple’s architecture. It doesn’t have the raw number-crunching power of the big GPUs but with all that space, you don’t need to worry much about the size of the model until they start getting really big, so it’s pretty easy and flexible.
I’m able to do basically everything that others are doing with AI, entirely locally. It generates text and writes code (it’s no Opus, but probably on par with the best of a year and a half ago), images, videos, songs, all that stuff (those last few are garbage but it’s basically the same level garbage that the cloud models are making). And I have total privacy, will never get a surprise price hike or lose access to a model I like, and know exactly how many bottles of water I’m using to cool it (zero).
It’s not heroin, it’s weed. There will be a market for it, but, like, you can also just make it yourself. 90% of what people want will just get done on device. I can’t see any way this turns into a trillion dollar industry.