Ai is currently a bubble. But that is just a short term phenomenon. Ultimately what AI currently is and what the trend-line indicates what AI will become will change the economy in ways that will dwarf the current bubble.
But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely possibility given the last couple of years.
I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and therefore AI is completely bullshit. Remember: The internet was a bubble. It ended up changing world.
>I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying. I am enormously concerned about what will happen to the people whose jobs AI renders unnecessary, or who can’t find jobs because of it. The optimists argue that “new jobs have always materialized after past technological advances.” I hope that’ll hold true in the case of AI, but hope isn’t much to hang one’s hat on, and I have trouble figuring out where those jobs will come from. Of course, I’m not much of a futurist or a financial optimist, and that’s why it’s a good thing I shifted from equities to bonds in 1978.
It's no wonder that the "AI optimists", unless very tendentious, try to focus more on "not needing to work because you'll get free stuff" rather than "you'll be able to exchange your labor for goods".
Of course it's a bubble. Valuations are propped up by speculative spending and AI seems unable to make enough profit to make back the continued spending.
Now, that's not to say AI isn't useful and we won't have AGI in the future. But this feels alot like the AI winter. Valuations will crash, a bunch of players will disappear, but we'll keep using the tech for boring things and eventually we'll have another breakthrough.
"Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level". Once I hit that line, I stopped reading. This tells me this person didn't do proper research on this matter.
The problem is that people conflate the current wave of transformer based ANNs with AI (as a whole). AI certainly has the potential to disrupt employment of humans. Transformers as they exist today not so much.
AI's potential isn't defined by the potential of the current crop of transformers. However, many people seem to think otherwise and this will be incredibly damaging for AI as a whole once transformer tech investment all but dries out.
A lot of the debate here swings between extremes. Claims like “AI writes most of the code now” are obviously exaggerated especially coming from a nontechnical author but acting like any use of AI is a red flag is just as unrealistic. Early stage teams do lean on LLMs for scaffolding, tests and boilerplate, but the hard engineering work is still human. Is there a bubble? Sure, valuations look frothy. But like the dotcom era, a correction doesn’t invalidate the underlying shift it just clears out the noise. The hype is inflated, the technology is real.
I think some wires got crossed. My point wasn’t that LLMs can’t produce useful infra or complex code clearly they can, as many examples here show.
It’s just that neither extreme narrative AI writes everything now vs. you can’t trust it for anything serious reflects how teams actually work.
LLMs are great accelerators for boilerplate, declarative configs, and repetitive logic, but they don’t replace engineering judgement they shift where that judgement is applied.
That’s why I see AI as real, transformative tech inside an overhyped investment cycle, not as magic that removes humans from the loop.
The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll.
It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
I dunno, I might be getting old, but I think the idea that people absolutely need a job to stay sane betrays lack of imagination. Of course getting paid just enough for survival is pretty depressing, but if I can have healthy food, a spacious place to live, ability to travel and all the free time I can have, I'd be absolutely happy without a job. Maybe I'd be even writing code, just not commercially useful one.
This artificial creativity will only go so far, because it's a simulated semblance of human creativity, as much as could be gathered from training data. If not continually refueled by new training data, it will run out sooner or later. And then it will get boring really quickly.
I've enjoyed Howard Marks writing/thinking in the past, but this is clearly a person who thinks they understand the topic but doesn't have the slightest clue. Someone trying to be relevant/engaged before really thinking on what is fact vs. fiction.
One can see he knows little about AI and relies on the judgments of others. Yet, he knows a lot more about economics, finance, and history than most AI practitioners.
As a founder of an AI company, I actually agreed with most of the article and found it to be very close to my mental model of the world. Turns out you might actually not need to understand what's causing the hype if you know that history rhymes...!
I think this gives an excellent framework for how to think of this. Is it a bubble? Who knows is a perfectly valid answer.
I do think there’s something quite ironic that one of the frequent criticisms of LLMs are that they can’t really say “I don’t know”. Yet if someone says that they get criticised. No surprises that our tools are the same.
Impressive that you have have that many assets under management and still not show a clear understanding of an industry you're prognosticating on. The author doesn't talk at all about the hardware aspect of this stuff such as the surprisingly short lifetime of the GPUs that are being rolled out at a break-neck pace. The recommendation that you take a moderate investment position and not overdo it could be shared without as much needless thinking out loud, and doesn't bring anything new to the conversation. Kind of like every other AI offering out there, if you think about it -- participating in something you don't understand because of FOMO.
This thread is just full of people discussing why industrial looms are bad. The factory owners don’t think looms are bad. You can either learn how to be useful in the new factory or you can start throwing shoes.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadYes.
But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely possibility given the last couple of years.
I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and therefore AI is completely bullshit. Remember: The internet was a bubble. It ended up changing world.
It's no wonder that the "AI optimists", unless very tendentious, try to focus more on "not needing to work because you'll get free stuff" rather than "you'll be able to exchange your labor for goods".
What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?
Now, that's not to say AI isn't useful and we won't have AGI in the future. But this feels alot like the AI winter. Valuations will crash, a bunch of players will disappear, but we'll keep using the tech for boring things and eventually we'll have another breakthrough.
AI's potential isn't defined by the potential of the current crop of transformers. However, many people seem to think otherwise and this will be incredibly damaging for AI as a whole once transformer tech investment all but dries out.
It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
This artificial creativity will only go so far, because it's a simulated semblance of human creativity, as much as could be gathered from training data. If not continually refueled by new training data, it will run out sooner or later. And then it will get boring really quickly.
As a founder of an AI company, I actually agreed with most of the article and found it to be very close to my mental model of the world. Turns out you might actually not need to understand what's causing the hype if you know that history rhymes...!
I do think there’s something quite ironic that one of the frequent criticisms of LLMs are that they can’t really say “I don’t know”. Yet if someone says that they get criticised. No surprises that our tools are the same.
> during the internet bubble of 1998-2000, the p/e ratios were much higher
That is true, the current players are more profitable, but the weight in SPX percentages looks to be much higher today.
Off--topic: how many get overpaid for absolute bullshit?