Comment by DonsDiscountGas
10 hours ago
Consider two propositions:
P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving
2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years
These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to take anybody seriously who says otherwise. P1a... Who knows, gotta hit a wall sometime. P2 I'm way more uncertain about (especially P2a) but it seems like people like Zitron reason backwards from hating AI.
I can certainly see one happening without the other, but I'd expect P1 and P2 to be correlated at least some of the time?
In my mind the most obvious scenario where AI gets used a lot but AI companies (exlc. NVIDIA / chip makers) aren't worth much is the hardware becomes capable of running the current state-of-the-art models locally, cheaply, and those models are basically "good enough" for 90% of tasks.
Sounds like the dot com bubble to me. many companies went bankrupt but the technology marched on.
The most successful use of AI has almost certainly been advertising, which companies were already doing before the recent AI hype.
If by AI we mean LLMs, the question looks a bit different.
Currently they don’t seem to be. At least OpenAI is haemorrhaging money left and right. Thing is, the compute for all this is far more expensive than anyone is willing or able to pay.