[scaredginger]

I think the AI bubble may have some interesting parallels with the dot com bubble ~25 years ago.

The internet was revolutionary and transformed the global economy. However, most of the internet companies at the time were garbage and were given money because people were blinded by the hype. At the end of the day, we were left with a handful of viable companies that went on to great things and a lot of embarrassed investors

[benreesman]

I think that’s a great analogy (and I was doing software then).

We know machine learning is a big deal, it’s been a big deal for many years, so of course recent breakthroughs are going to be likewise important.

The short term allocation of staggering amounts of money into one category of technology (Instruct-tuned language model chat bots) is clearly not the future of all technology, and the AGI thing is a weird religion at this point (or rather a radical splinter faction of a weird religion).

But there is huge value here and it’s only a matter of time until subsequent rounds of innovation realize that value in the form of systems that complete the recipe by adding customer-focused use cases to the technology.

Everyone knew the Internet was going to be big, but the Information Superhighway technology CEOs were talking about in the late 90s is just kind of funny now. We’re still glad they paid for all that fiber.

[wongarsu]

And a lot of the products that ended up mattering were founded in the decade after the dot com bubble: Facebook 2004, Youtube 2005, Twitter 2006, Spotify 2006, Whatsapp 2009, etc.

A hype bubble is great to pump money into experimentation and infrastructure, but the real fruits of that typically come later when everything had a chance to mature.

A similar thing happened with computer vision and CNNs. There was a big hype when "detect if there's an eagle in this image" turned from a multi-year research project to something your intern could code up on the weekend. But most of the useful/profitable industry applications only happened later when the dust was settled and the technology matured.

[39896880]

They were garbage in hindsight. Being "blinded by the hype" is what drives people to try new things and fail. And that's okay! It's okay that we ended up with a handful of viable companies. Those viable companies emerged because people tried new things, and failed. Investors lost money because investment has the risk of loss.

[alangibson]

From a business perspective this is right. Unless OpenAI creates AGI they'll probably never make a dime. Great products do not lead inevitably to great profits.

[loudmax]

I think the focus on AGI is misguided, at least in the short run. There's profit to be made in specialized intelligence, especially dull, boring stuff like understanding legal contracts or compliance auditing. These AI models have plenty of utility that can be profitably rented out, even if their understanding of the world is far short of general intelligence.

[halfcat]

And if they do create AGI, it will have the ability to say “no”, which is going to be quite a bummer for the investors.