Comment by Aboutplants
17 days ago
Does AI end up being much closer to a Crypto style result late 2010’s-early 2020’s) or is it closer to the Web style late 90s landscape? Both had somewhat similar early outcomes for a lot of the initial front runners with some experiencing legal issues and others collapsing due to sketchy finances. Crypto ended up not being as earth shattering as most believers wanted it to be but there are still many billionaires and large companies that exist and continue to churn profit. Will a similar fate exist for AI companies? A few large winners, lots of large/medium/small losers (with some taking the legal and financial hits) but a decently large industry (not earth shattering) survives and establishes to simply be a small piece of the greater economy rather than the primary driver as most AI truthers believe?
If I had to guess, probably Web-style.
LLMs are actually useful, people are willing to pay for access to them, and they do genuinely enable things that were unrealistic or impossible before. The advances in image, video, and sound models since 2020 are also striking but likely won't be as transformative as LLMs.
That being said, I don't think it's unlikely that we'll see a plateauing of progress followed by a strong crash/correction in the market a-la dot com. The Allbirds situation absolutely has echoes of pets.com.
I also feel that commodification is coming for models, training/inference hardware, and software (e.g. CUDA), as it has for nearly everything else useful in tech. So I expect valuations driven by unique advantages here to be eroded over time (Think Sun and SCO after Linux on cheap x86 servers became the norm).
I think it will be like the 90's collapse but bigger. It must be noted that the financial markets have been awash in cash for some time since companies have been making huge profits since the 90's. So the money that will be lost will mostly be that of rich investors and large companies who were sitting on a bunch of capital they didn't know what to do with.