Comment by ksec
5 days ago
I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist for AI. I would likely be called both by the opposite parties. But the fact that AI / LLM is still rapidly improving is impressive in itself and worth celebrating for. Is it perfect, AGI, ASI? No. Is it useless? Absolutely not.
I am just happy the prize is so big for AI that there are enough money involve to push for all the hardware advancement. Foundry, Packaging, Interconnect, Network etc, all the hardware research and tech improvements previously thought were too expensive are now in the "Shut up and take my money" scenario.
But unlike the trillion dollars invested in the broadband internet build out between 1998 and 2008, when this 10 year trillion dollar bubble pops, we won't be left with an enduring and useful piece of infrastructure adding a trillion dollars to the global economy annually.
It would leave a lots of general purpose GPU-based compute. That is useful and enduring infrastructure? These things are used for many scientific and engineering problems - including medicine, climate modeling, material science, neuroscience, etc
I think that "Query Engine" you can later distill is quite useful artefact. If I were to TP back in time I would take current LLM with me over wikipedia as it's more accessible
Holy shit, AIs just got a gold medal on the math olympiad and you guys are STILL spamming this shit in every thread. I don't even know how you can reach this level of inertia on a topic, did you short Nvidia stock or something?
>we won't be left with an enduring and useful piece of infrastructure adding a trillion dollars to the global economy annually.
Nearly all colleagues I know working inside a very large non-tech organisation are using Copilot for part of their work in the past 12 months. I have never seen tech adoption this quick for normal every day consumer. Not PC, Not Internet, Not Smartphone.
I actually had discussions with parents about our kids using ChartGPT. Every single one of them at school are using it. Honestly I didn't like it but they were actually the one who got used to it first and I quote "Who still uses Google?". That was when I learn there will be a tectonic shift in tech.
Does it actually add productivity? may be. Is it worth the trillion dollar investment? I have no idea. But are we going back? As someone who knows a lot about consumer behaviour I will say that is a definite no.
Note to myself. This feels another iPhone moment again. Except this time around lots of the tech people are skeptic of it, but consumer are adopting faster. When iPhone launch a lot of tech people knew it will be the future. But consumer took some time. Even MKBHD acknowledge his first Smartphone was in the iPhone 4s era.
> ... we won't be left with an enduring and useful piece of infrastructure adding a trillion dollars to the global economy annually.
I'm not drinking the AGI kool-aid but I use LLMs daily. We pay not one but two AI subscriptions at home (including Claude).
It's extremely useful. From translation to proof-reading to synthetizing to expanding on something to writing little dumb functions to helping with spreadsheet formulas to documenting code to writing commit messages to helping find movie names (when I only remember very partially the plot) etc.
How is this not already adding a trillion dollars to the economy?
It's not about the infrastructure: all that counts are the models. They're here to stay. They're not going away.
It's the single biggest time-saver I've ever seen for mundane tasks (and, no, it doesn't write good code: it write shitty pathetic underperforming insecure code... And yet it's still useful for proofs of concept / one-offs / throwaway).
"worth celebrating for"
The correlation between "companies make smarter AI" and "our lives get better" is still a rounding error.
Many people will say "don't worry, tech always makes our lives better eventually", they'll probably stop saying this once autonomous killer drone-swarms are a thing.