Comment by dgb23
1 day ago
From online discourse and talking to people in different sectors that are impacted by "AI", I feel like there is great uncertainty, incredible hype and doomerism at the same time.
My intuition is that we're in a huge tech bubble that will correct at some point. I don't know when that is or how severe it will be. But why should this tech hype cycle be qualitatively different from any of the others?
I mean which hype cycle?
We talk about the dotcom bubble, in which there were of course growing pains in figuring out what makes a viable internet-based business, but at the end of the day that era did produce multiple trillion-dollar companies.
Then you have the crypto bubble which really seems to be shaping up to be a nothing burger.
As for today, I think LLM’s are already pretty clearly useful, and they seem to be getting more capable with each passing year. In principle, these models are just the core foundations, while a wide variety of applications are in the process of being fleshed out. I think the jury is still out on how disruptive and effective these applications will be, both from a business/PMF perspective, but also in terms of the raw capabilities.
So take something like Harvey AI. They just raised a round at a $5B valuation, despite having an annualized revenue of just $75M as of April. So is that overinflated? Well, the total Legal Services market has a valuation of about $1T, and given how much legal work is incredibly laborious reading, analyzing, and writing text, (things which LLM’s are already pretty good at), it doesn’t seem ridiculous on the face of it that a Legal-focused LLM product couldn’t add 0.5% worth of efficiencies/value.