To be fair, it doesn't look like he was far off on crypto.
Of course being able to call that doesn't at all automatically translate into also being right about AI.
There's lots of people that have successfully predicted one particular bubble, but all of their other predictions have completely failed to materialize (to say nothing of all the wrong ones they made before striking gold). That's just how selection/survivorship bias works.
In this particular case, I actually suspect that both things can be true at the same time: We're in the middle of an AI hype bubble and >90% of current startups will not survive the next 3 years, but AI will still profoundly change the way we work.
There's even a nice historical analogy: We once had the dot com bubble, in which lots of people lost lots of money, but ultimately, the Internet did turn out to be kind of a big deal. It's just hard to go from that general bet on vibes to one that identifies actual companies that are going to bring about all of that.
I think you're right, but I don't think "AI" as we see it today is really the thing we should be looking at when we come out of this bubble. What's really exciting is that we're building an enormous parallel computing infrastructure that's going to revolutionize scientific computing. We're already seeing some glimmers of this stuff like with what deepmind did with protein folding. Once the charletans die off I hope we see a massive acceleration in research in all kinds of fields.
author here. the key insight is that (a) the AI promotional nonsense is the same as crypto (b) the VCs are literally the same guys who just bombed out on Web3.
AI is not as blitheringly useless as crypto - ML is real and does things! - but those guys are zeroing in on the applications that really are that useless.
Also, the AI guys are making the same excuses for their ghastly power usage that the coiners used to.
I have yet to see a comment with a sarcastic "something bad" in it that provides an actual argument.
By the way, what positive effect has crypto had so far? Other than redistributing between some people and wasting enormous amounts of energy?
Personally I use AI all the time, but hallucinations are a problem, data is always a problem in all of machine learning, and it's always good to stay away from the cult-like behavior of people who can find absolutely nothing wrong with new technology.
lxgr|1 year ago
Of course being able to call that doesn't at all automatically translate into also being right about AI.
There's lots of people that have successfully predicted one particular bubble, but all of their other predictions have completely failed to materialize (to say nothing of all the wrong ones they made before striking gold). That's just how selection/survivorship bias works.
In this particular case, I actually suspect that both things can be true at the same time: We're in the middle of an AI hype bubble and >90% of current startups will not survive the next 3 years, but AI will still profoundly change the way we work.
There's even a nice historical analogy: We once had the dot com bubble, in which lots of people lost lots of money, but ultimately, the Internet did turn out to be kind of a big deal. It's just hard to go from that general bet on vibes to one that identifies actual companies that are going to bring about all of that.
__loam|1 year ago
davidgerard|1 year ago
AI is not as blitheringly useless as crypto - ML is real and does things! - but those guys are zeroing in on the applications that really are that useless.
Also, the AI guys are making the same excuses for their ghastly power usage that the coiners used to.
Netcob|1 year ago
By the way, what positive effect has crypto had so far? Other than redistributing between some people and wasting enormous amounts of energy?
Personally I use AI all the time, but hallucinations are a problem, data is always a problem in all of machine learning, and it's always good to stay away from the cult-like behavior of people who can find absolutely nothing wrong with new technology.
__loam|1 year ago
otabdeveloper4|1 year ago
davidgerard|1 year ago
t3hfl1pside|1 year ago
[deleted]