Thank fucking god.
I got sick of the overhyped tech bros pumping AI into everything with no understanding of it…
But then I got way more sick of everyone else thinking they’re clowning on AI when in reality they’re just demonstrating an equal sized misunderstanding of the technology in a snarky pessimistic format.
I’m more annoyed that Nvidia is looked at like some sort of brilliant strategist. It’s a GPU company that was lucky enough to be around when two new massive industries found an alternative use for graphics hardware.
They happened to be making pick axes in California right before some prospectors found gold.
And they don’t even really make pick axes, TSMC does. They just design them.
They just design them.
It’s not trivial though. They also managed to lock dev with CUDA.
That being said I don’t think they were “just” lucky, I think they built their luck through practices the DoJ is currently investigating for potential abuse of monopoly.
Yeah CUDA, made a lot of this possible.
Once crypto mining was too hard nvidia needed a market beyond image modeling and college machine learning experiments.
A lot of the AI boom is like the DotCom boom of the Web era. The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.
AI feels a lot like that, it’s here to stay, maybe not in th ways investors are touting, but for voice, image, video synthesis/processing it’s an amazing tool. It also has lots of applications in biotech, targetting systems, logistics etc.
So I can see the bubble bursting and a lot of money being lost, but that is the point when actually useful applications of the technology will start becoming mainstream.
I’ve noticed people have been talking less and less about AI lately, particularly online and in the media, and absolutely nobody has been talking about it in real life.
The novelty has well and truly worn off, and most people are sick of hearing about it.
It’s like 3D TVs, for a lot of consumer applications tbh
Oh fuck that’s right, that was a thing.
Goddamn
3D has been a thing every 15 years or so
Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the “AI services” and what they actually cost?
I’m a writer. I’ve looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with “Just Another Streaming Service” pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don’t care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.
Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don’t want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.
As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they’re actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don’t leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you’re not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.
But I noticed right away that I couldn’t justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.
I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.
At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM’s versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM’s start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.
My only real hope out of this is that that copilot button on keyboards becomes the 486 turbo button of our time.
Meaning you unpress it, and computer gets 2x faster?
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Also bubbles don’t “leak”.
I mean, sometimes they kinda do? They either pop or slowly deflate, I’d say slow deflation could be argued to be caused by a leak.
We taking about bubbles or are we talking about balloons? Maybe we should change to using the word balloon instead, since these economic ‘bubbles’ can also deflate slowly.
The broader market did the same thing
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/
$560 to $510 to $560 to $540
So why did $NVDA have larger swings? It has to do with the concept called beta. High beta stocks go up faster when the market is up and go down lower when the market is done. Basically high variance risky investments.
Why did the market have these swings? Because of uncertainty about future interest rates. Interest rates not only matter vis-a-vis business loans but affect the interest-free rate for investors.
When investors invest into the stock market, they want to get back the risk free rate (how much they get from treasuries) + the risk premium (how much stocks outperform bonds long term)
If the risks of the stock market are the same, but the payoff of the treasuries changes, then you need a high return from stocks. To get a higher return you can only accept a lower price,
This is why stocks are down, NVDA is still making plenty of money in AI
There’s more to it as well, such as:
- investors coming back from vacation and selling off losses and whatnot
- investors expecting reduced spending between summer and holidays; we’re past the “back to school” retail bump and into a slower retail economy
- upcoming election, with polls shifting between Trump and Harris
September is pretty consistently more volatile than other months, and has net negative returns long-term. So it’s not just the Fed discussing rate cuts (that news was reported over the last couple months, so it should be factored in), but just normal sideways trading in September.
We already knew about back to school sales, they happen every year and they are priced in. If there was a real stock market dump every year in September, everyone would short September, making a drop in August and covering in September, making September a positive month again
It’s not every year, but it is more than half the time. Source:
History suggests September is the worst month of the year in terms of stock-market performance. The S&P 500 SPX has generated an average monthly decline of 1.2% and finished higher only 44.3% of the time dating back to 1928, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
S&P 500 up this September officially
Woo! We’re part of the 44% or so. :)
45% now since the data only goes back 100 years
It’s like the least popular opinion I have here on Lemmy, but I assure you, this is the begining.
Yes, we’ll see a dotcom style bust. But it’s not like the world today wasn’t literally invented in that time. Do you remember where image generation was 3 years ago? It was a complete joke compared to a year ago, and today, fuck no one here would know.
When code generation goes through that same cycle, you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just “does” it.
I have no idea what that means for the future of my humanity.
you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just “does” it
No you can’t. Simplifying it grossly:
They can’t do the most low-level, dumbest detail, splitting hairs, “there’s no spoon”, “this is just correct no matter how much you blabber in the opposite direction, this is just wrong no matter how much you blabber to support it” kind of solutions.
And that happens to be main requirement that makes a task worth software developer’s time.
We need software developers to write computer programs, because “a general idea” even in a formalized language is not sufficient, you need to address details of actual reality. That is the bottleneck.
That technology widens the passage in the places which were not the bottleneck in the first place.
I think you live in a nonsense world. I literally use it everyday and yes, sometimes it’s shit and it’s bad at anything that even requires a modicum of creativity. But 90% of shit doesn’t require a modicum of creativity. And my point isn’t about where we’re at, it’s about how far the same tech progressed on another domain adjacent task in three years.
Lemmy has a “dismiss AI” fetish and does so at its own peril.
Are you a software developer? Or a hardware engineer? EDIT: Or anyone credible in evaluating my nonsense world against yours?
Machine learning scientist.
That explains your optimism. Code generation is at a stage where it slaps together Stack Overflow answers and code ripped off from GitHub for you. While that is quite effective to get at least a crappy programmer to cobble together something that barely works, it is a far cry from having just anyone put out an idea in plain language and getting back code that just does it. A programmer is still needed in the loop.
I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you that AI development over the decades has often reached plateaus where the approach needed to be significantly changed in order for progress to be made, but it could certainly be the case where LLMs (at least as they are developed now) aren’t enough to accomplish what you describe.
Hopefully this means the haters will shut up and we can get on with using it for useful stuff
Shitty useless pictures each costing kilowatt hours.
I mean, machine learning and AI does have benefits especially in research in the medical field. The consumer AI products are just stupid though.
It’s help me learn coding, Spanish, and helped me build scripts of which I would never have been able to do by myself or with technical works alone.
If we’re talking specifically about the value I get out of what Gpt is right now, its priceless to me. Like my second, albeit braindead, systems administrator on my shoulder when I need something I don’t want to type out myself. And what ever mistakes it makes is within my abilities to repair on my own without fighting for it.
AI didn’t do that. It stole all the information for free on the internet from people who tried to help others and make money of it.
Have you ever used Google translate or apps that identify bugs/plants/songs? AI is used in products you most likely use every week.
You are also arguing for a closed garden system where companies like reddit and Getty get to dictate who can make models and at what price.
Individual are never getting a dime out of this. In a perfect world, governments would be fighting for copyleft licenses for anything using big data but every law being proposed is meant to create a soft monopoly owned by Microsoft and Google and kill open-source.
I can very much so assure you that chatGPT did all of those things for me.
“PIXAR DIDNT MAKE TOY STORY!! THE CHI ARTISTS DID!!!”
