Comment by Waterluvian
10 days ago
Video game crash followed by video games taking off and eclipsing most other forms of digital entertainment.
Dot com crash followed by the web getting pretty popular and a bit central to business.
To all those betting big on AI before the crash:
Careful, Icarus.
Bad comparison.
The leap of faith necessary in LLMs to achieve the same feat is so large its very difficult to imagine it happening. Particularly due to the well known constraints on what the technology is capable of.
The whole investment thesis of LLMs is that it will be able to a) be intelligent b) produce new knowledge. If those two things that dont happen, what has been delivered is not commensurate to the risk in regards to the money invested.
Given they're referencing Icarus, they seem to agree with you.
Past bubbles leaving behind something of value is indeed no guarantee the current bubble will do so. For as many times as people post "but dotcom produced Amazon" to HN, people had posted that exact argument about the Blockchain, the NFT, or the "Metaverse" bubbles.
Many AI startups around LLMs are going to crash and burn.
This is because many people have mistaken LLMs for AI, when they’re just a small subset of the technology - and this has driven myopic focus in a lot of development, and has lead to naive investors placing bets on golden dog turds.
I disagree on AI as a whole, however - as unlike previous technologies this one can self-ratchet and bootstrap. ML designed chips, ML designed models, and around you go until god pops out the exit chute.
> Careful, Icarus.
What does that even mean?
pets.com was a fat loser only telling telling people that were going to fly.
Amazon was Icarus, they did something.
Vs weak commentators going on about the wax melting from their parents root cellar while Icarus was soaring.
Most of Y Combinator are not using AI they just say that and you're worried about the people who do things?
> commentators going on about the wax melting from their parents root cellar while Icarus was soaring.
Icarus drowned in the sea.
Even if you want to put the world into only two lumps of cellar dwellers and Icaruses it is still a group of living people on one side and a floating/semi-submerged pile of dead bodies that are literally only remembered for how stupid their deaths were on the other.