Comment by RuggedPineapple
7 days ago
The train is already derailing. The thing that no AI evangelists ever acknowledge is that the field has not solved its original questions. Minsky's work on neural networks is still relevant more then half a century later. What this looks like from the ground is that exponential growth of computing power fuels only linear growth of AI. That makes resources and costs spiral out incredibly fast. You can see that in the costs: every AI player out there has a 200 plus dollar tier and still loses money. That linear growth is why every couple decades theres a hype cycle as society checks back in to see how its going and is impressed by the gains, but that sustain just cant last because it can't keep up with the expected growth in capabilities.
Growth at a level it can't sustain and can't be backed by actual jumps in capabilities has a name: A bubble. What's coming is dot-com crash 2.0
And then? Back to ai less world? Can't imagine it will ever go back. People will find a way to reduce the costs of computing.
AI has been around for 60+ years. SAIL, the Stanford AI Laboratory is one of the most important centers of early hacker culture. Knuth spent his time there. Both Cisco and Sun were founded by SAIL alumni.
Unless you're wanting to rewind the clock to the Berlin airlift we aren't going back to a world before AI. But I do think this absurd bubble is going to pop. Generative AI is crap. It's code is crap. It's images are crap. I say this as someone who has been self-employed for 2 years now in AI. The fact that its so hard to get usable results from generative AI that I can just get over the line into six figures of yearly income because I can massage it into doing something just passable enough to work for people is probably its biggest indictment.