> Whether it all falls apart suddenly, or gradually, I do not know. And LLMs will continue to exist.
This is one thing I don't get. Why will LLMs still exist if AI companies go bust? Will we have stagnant models that can't be improved anymore as a service? Isn't each query still a monumental computing task that they lose money on?
Take railroads, for instance. Back in the 1800s, too many were built. Many of them (almost all, I think) went bankrupt at one time or another. At that point, the creditors made a rational evaluation: Is this worth keeping, or not? If yes, then let's try to reorganize a business that can actually survive. If not, tear it up and sell the scrap. Some were kept, some were torn up.
But the post-bankruptcy railroads that were kept were able to operate without the burden of the construction costs, because that had been destroyed in the bankruptcy (along with the original owners).
So, AI: I suspect that the training costs (plus hardware costs) dominate the operating costs. If that is so, then a post-bankruptcy AI company could still be a profitable business. It wouldn't be able to grow its hardware very fast, or be able to re-train new models very often, but it could still be an ongoing business. The current owners would still get nothing, though.
Still the same flaw in his analysis. Humans are unreliable too and the entire damn economy runs on them. You just need good enough, and AI is getting better daily.
I have been asking myself the question of how useful an LLM would be that has perfect intelligence. Meaning that for any question you give it that can possibly be answered with the given information, you will get the right answer.
Obviously, it would be very useful, but still limited by it's context and prompt. For many tasks, coding models are getting close. It will do everything I ask generally correctly the first time. Around half the re-dos are because I under-specified the prompt. Soon that will be 100% of re-dos, and the programming aspect of my job will be mostly focused on writing good prompts, yet I will still be here identifying and translating real-world requirements into prompts.
We are quickly approaching a situation where LLMs can ace all benchmarks, and yet still not see the insane ROI that the frontier labs are predicting because humans are a bottleneck, and so is experiment.
For example that perfect LLM may be able to find the cure to cancer, but all the research in the world isn't enough information to answer that question, so we need to conduct experiments and learn more. Maybe that can speed up humanity's cancer discoveries by 10X, but not 1000X, purely because of the experiment bottleneck.
You could do a lot with perfect intelligence. Print out the formulas for cures to cancer and als. Print out the code for self improving AGI, meaning of life, why there's something rather than nothing and so on.
There was an interesting take on it on youtube today, Bill Gurley (VC) talking to Tim Ferris (interviewer) on if it's a bubble, based on some research:
> ...every time there's been a technology wave that leads to wealth
creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite
speculators, carpetbaggers, interlopers
that want to come take advantage of it.
Think of the gold rush, you know, and so
people want to make it a debate. Do you
believe in AI or is it a bubble? And if
you say you think it's a bubble, they
say, "Oh, you don't believe in AI." Like
this gotcha kind of thing. And if you
study Perez, and I I think this is
absolutely correct. If the wave is real,
then you're going to have bubble-like
behavior. like they come together as a
pair precisely because anytime there's
very quick wealth creation, you're going
to get a lot of people that want to come
try and take advantage of that.
Yeah but the thing that distinguishes the gold rush from mesmerism or whatever is actual gold. Most LLM promises are NFTs with extra steps.
The arguments here are totally bonkers. People didn't wonder what airplanes were for, or cars, or computers, or vaccines. They had immediate, obvious benefits and uses, but still none of them experienced this speed of investment. This is something else entirely.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] threadSurprising to simultaneously announce the end of the road yet point to the road ahead
This is one thing I don't get. Why will LLMs still exist if AI companies go bust? Will we have stagnant models that can't be improved anymore as a service? Isn't each query still a monumental computing task that they lose money on?
But the post-bankruptcy railroads that were kept were able to operate without the burden of the construction costs, because that had been destroyed in the bankruptcy (along with the original owners).
So, AI: I suspect that the training costs (plus hardware costs) dominate the operating costs. If that is so, then a post-bankruptcy AI company could still be a profitable business. It wouldn't be able to grow its hardware very fast, or be able to re-train new models very often, but it could still be an ongoing business. The current owners would still get nothing, though.
Obviously, it would be very useful, but still limited by it's context and prompt. For many tasks, coding models are getting close. It will do everything I ask generally correctly the first time. Around half the re-dos are because I under-specified the prompt. Soon that will be 100% of re-dos, and the programming aspect of my job will be mostly focused on writing good prompts, yet I will still be here identifying and translating real-world requirements into prompts.
We are quickly approaching a situation where LLMs can ace all benchmarks, and yet still not see the insane ROI that the frontier labs are predicting because humans are a bottleneck, and so is experiment.
For example that perfect LLM may be able to find the cure to cancer, but all the research in the world isn't enough information to answer that question, so we need to conduct experiments and learn more. Maybe that can speed up humanity's cancer discoveries by 10X, but not 1000X, purely because of the experiment bottleneck.
> ...every time there's been a technology wave that leads to wealth creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite speculators, carpetbaggers, interlopers that want to come take advantage of it. Think of the gold rush, you know, and so people want to make it a debate. Do you believe in AI or is it a bubble? And if you say you think it's a bubble, they say, "Oh, you don't believe in AI." Like this gotcha kind of thing. And if you study Perez, and I I think this is absolutely correct. If the wave is real, then you're going to have bubble-like behavior. like they come together as a pair precisely because anytime there's very quick wealth creation, you're going to get a lot of people that want to come try and take advantage of that.
Seems about right to me. https://youtu.be/D0230eZsRFw
The arguments here are totally bonkers. People didn't wonder what airplanes were for, or cars, or computers, or vaccines. They had immediate, obvious benefits and uses, but still none of them experienced this speed of investment. This is something else entirely.