Comment by tim333
3 hours ago
An example of him in July 2024: https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/
>And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble I've been warning you about since March...
>How does GPT – a transformer-based model that generates answers probabilistically (as in what the next part of the generation is most likely to be the correct one) based entirely on training data – do anything more than generate paragraphs of occasionally-accurate text?
etc.
Basically the essence is he's skeptical of AI / LLMs being any good so thinks all the investment is down the drain. Meanwhile AI progresses such that Fable can probably beat most humans and IQ tests, maths and the like. And the 'bubble' didn't deflate yet.
My take is that as a PR guy, used to people hyping stuff and not that up on comp-sci he fundamentally doesn't get what's going on. He assumes it's all hype rather than the steady progress in computing reaching brain equivalent levels and beyond.
He's not wrong about the numbers, and you may be seeing what you want to see a little, here.
Fable scoring OK on some benchmarks does not the mean the investment has financially paid off, because that's not how ROI works.
You're right that no bubble has deflated, but I think we can all see that a) there seems to be a bubble - I'm old enough to remember the dot-com era bubble, and this definitely feels like that, b) the only company clearly making a profit on AI right now is NVIDIA, and c) the net economic value of the sector as a whole (i.e. money out > money in), is still unproven
It's not even obvious to me as somebody who is up on comp-sci, that this isn't all hype, that the progress is/will be steady, and that reaching brain equivalent levels and beyond using these architectures will be economically viable.
I can create a perfectly good human brain in 9 months, train it in ~20 years, and have it pay off economically in a more proven way than [waves hands] all of this.
For some reason we've decided paying a hyperscaler the equivalent of a year's salary to do a job in a a day that a similarly paid and skilled human could do in a month is value for money.
You could probably give everyone in the US free healthcare for life and a free ride through college for less money than has been pumped into AI in the last 5 years, and have a more proven economic model.
Sure, time value is a thing, but given the error rates, the energy issues... this direction is not exactly a slam dunk as a net benefit, and I think that's all he's called out in any of the writing I've seen of his.
I also happen to agree with his take on Oracle, as it happens - they're only going to survive if it turns out they're a part of critical national infrastructure deep in the bowels of the US government. They look totally over-leveraged otherwise.
I agree it's a bit like the dot com bubble and I don't think he's wrong about everything but he seems to think it's a bit more like the NFT craze with nothing there rather than dot coms where the web/internet was of real importance.