Are we in a bubble that's going to pop and take a large part of the economy with it? Almost certainly. Does it mean that the AI is a scam? Not really. After all, the Internet did not disappear after the dotcom burst, and, actually, almost everything we were promised by the dotcoms became reality at some point.
"doing everything on the internet" definitely worked out, but I don't see why that implies "GPU accelerated LLMs will replace large swathes of human labor" will also be true
I disagree on the “doing everything on the internet”. Social network is something we definitely “do” on the internet nowadays but I wouldn’t say that this “worked out”, and we’re only now starting to grasp how badly it’s working.
But agreed on the overall meaning of the comment, LLMs promises are still exaggerated.
That's not what I'm saying. What dotcoms prove is that some technology can be a bubble and a real technological revolution at the same time, there is no contradiction here. "AI is a bubble and I probably shouldn't invest all my savings in NVDA" is a valid point, "AI is a bubble and therefore stupid and will never work" is not
If there's anything that can be reliably predicated to be true over multiple decades it's that capitalism will continually seek to reduce labour costs and automate everything.
You can bet that even if the specific forms attempted in this interval don't take hold, they will eventually.
You and I are too expensive, and have had too much power.
> If there's anything that can be reliably predicated to be true over multiple decades it's that capitalism will continually seek to reduce labour costs and automate everything.
what about improved life quality? what about an explosion of types of jobs?
> You and I are too expensive, and have had too much power.
do you think the average citizen (or the collective) have MORE power or LESS power than 100 years ago, than 200 years ago?
Than 100 years ago? Very much might be less, honestly, given modern police, media, and surveillance power and the decimation of labor unions since then.
Worth noting that the essay acknowledges that there are ways that people use this stuff and actually like it. Saying it's a scam is about those uses being orders of magnitude less valuable than the companies involved (and credulous media) claim, and even orders of magnitude less than the amount of money that they are actively investing in this stuff. Saying it's a bubble is not a claim that it will go away entirely and never be seen again, it's a claim that reality will eventually manifest and result in massive upheaval as companies go bankrupt, valuations plummet, and associated downstream effects.
See, the problem when making predictions is that the timeframe is effectively the prediction. I don't know what will happen. When I saw GPT-3 I thought it was hot garbage and never took it seriously. As a result I now have large error bars about what the future holds.
What we got from the Internet was some version of the original promises, on a significantly longer timescale, mostly enabled by technology that didn't exist at the time those promises were made. "Directionally correct" is a euphemism for "wrong".
> almost everything we were promised by the dotcoms became reality at some point.
remember the blockchain bubble? used much blockchain lately? are blockchains changing anything?
