There is a free link in the comments, and your concerns are addressed in the first 3 paragraphs.
Comment on Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?
thedevisinthedetails@programming.dev 2 months ago
Damn imagine paying to read an article to confirm your biases. If you’re going to claim something is a bubble you need to claim something more specific than “AI”.
The entire early modern web was a bubble in the early 00s and it’s still here. There’s not even many large companies yet to even start being bubbly. An actual AI bubble could be 10 years off.
I just love how so many educated and intelligent people can get stuck in knee jerk reactionary takes because some admittedly large aspects of a new technology (LLMs) are annoying as hell.
jarfil@beehaw.org 2 months ago
remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
This bubble is quite bubbly. There is an AI company for anything and everything now. The market is almost fully saturated with “AI” everything.
Just like the web bubble, all of the intsta-AI shops need to fail so the real tech can grow. AI is never going to go away, but most of the scam companies will fail in due time.
We might have one big consolidation, or several. The hype will die and the quick money will disappear. It’s the same story, every time. One the magic AI box stops shitting out dollar bills, we should be good.
aard@kyu.de 2 months ago
It surely is a bubble - so probably a bit different than many other bubbles.
I think OpenAI made the right call (for them) to commercialize when they did - as that pretty much was their only chance to do so. Things has moved fast over the last 1.5 years - and what used to take a decade in tech has happened within months: OpenAI is the dinosaur company grandfathered in, while for already about a year it’s been more sensible for anybody wanting to do something with LLM to selfhost (or buy hosting capacity, but put up own data) one of the more open language models, and possibly adjust or re-train it.
As a company owner I get a ridiculous amount of spam for a year already from all kinds of companies building products on top of OpenAI stack, or are trying to sell training or conferences. All those companies will be left with nothing once all the slower users realize technology has moved on. It’s like somebody trying to build all their product offerings based on VMWare stack nowadays.
If you as a company want to offer something around AI right now the safest option is probably offering hosting, or if you want to do more hands on, adjustment of open models. Both of those are very risky, and many will go bust in years to come - but not as suicidal as building on top of a closed dinosaur.
sonori@beehaw.org 2 months ago
A point the article makes rather well is that something is not a bobble because it doesn’t work, but because the investment going into it is fundamentally irrational in scale. The web still existing has nothing to do if investment or companies tripping over themselves to advertise as a dotcom in the dotcom bobble was rational, because it clearly wasn’t.
The question when it comes to LLM’s, the near exclusive subject of the marketing around AI, is if bunch of random companies paying for a mildly improved chat bot going to actually generate enough profit once the marketing hype has worn off and the legal questions are all settled is actually enough to generate the massive profits needed to justify the current investment.