Comment by hakfoo
7 hours ago
The railroads provided something of enduring value. They did something materially better than previous competitors (horsecarts and canals) could. Even today, nothing beats freight rail for efficient, cheap modest-speed movement of goods.
If we consider "AI" to be the current LLM and ImageGen bubble, I'm not sure we can say that.
We were all wowed that we could write a brief prompt and get 5,000 lines of React code or an anatomically questionable deepfake of Legally Distinct Chris Hemsworth dancing in a tutu. But once we got past the initial wow, we had to look at the finished product and it's usually not that great. AI as a research tool will spit back complete garbage with a straight face. AI images/video require a lot of manual cleanup to hold up to anything but the most transient scrutiny. AI text has such distinct tones that it's become a joke. AI code isn't better than good human-developed code and is prone to its own unique fault patterns.
It can deliver a lot of mediocrity in a hurry, but how much of that do we really need? I'd hope some of the post-bubble reckoning comes in the form of "if we don't have AI to do it (vendor failures or pricing-to-actual-cost makes it unaffordable), did we really need it in the first place?" I don't need 25 chatbots summarizing things I already read or pleading to "help with my writing" when I know what I want to say.
You're absolutely correct! ( ;) )
The issue is that generation of error-prone content is indeed not very valuable. It can be useful in software engineering, but I'd put it way below the infamous 10x increase in productivity.
Summarizing stuff is probably useful, too, but its usefulness depends on you sitting between many different communication channels and being constantly swamped in input. (Is that why CEOs love it?)
Generally, LLMs are great translators with a (very) lossly compressed knowledge DB attached. I think they're great user Interfaces, and they can help streamline buerocracy (instead of getting rid of it) but they will not help getting down the cost of production of tangible items. They won't solve housing.
My best bet is in medicine. Here, all the areas that LLMs excell at meet. A slightly distopian future cuts the expensive personal doctors and replaces them with (few) nurses and many devices and medicine controlled by a medical agent.
I was really hoping, and with a different administration I think there was a real shot, for a huge influx of cash into clean energy infrastructure.
Imagine a trillion dollars (frankly it might be more, we'll see) shoved into clean energy generation and huge upgrades to our distribution.
With a bubble burst all we'd be left with is a modern grid and so much clean energy we could accelerate our move off fossil fuels.
Plus a lot of extra compute, that's less clear of a long term value.
Alas.