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Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @12:24PM (#41896447)
I'm sure you are right. At some point, the bubble will crash.

The question remains is when the bubble will crash. We could be in the 1995 equivalent of the dotcom boom and not 1999. If so, we have 4 more years of high growth and even after the crash, the market will still be much bigger in 2029 than in 2024. Cisco was still 4x bigger in 2001 than in 1995.

One thing that is slightly different from past bubbles is that the more compute you have, the smarter and more capable AI.

One gauge I use to determine if we are still at the beginning of the boom is this: Does Slack sell an LLM chatbot solution that is able to give me reliable answers to business/technical decisions made over the last 2 years in chat? We don't have this yet - most likely because it's probably still too expensive to do this much inference with such high context window. We still need a lot more compute and better models.

Because of the above, I'm in the camp that believe we are actually closer to the beginning of the bubble than at the end.

Another thing I would watch closely to see when the bubble might pop is if LLM scaling laws are quickly breaking down and that more compute no longer yields more intelligence in an economical way. If so, I think the bubble would pop. All eyes are on GPT5-class models for signs.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by HarHarVeryFunny on Sunday October 20, 2024 @01:02PM (#41896790)
> the more compute you have, the smarter and more capable AI

Well, this is taken on faith by OpenAI/etc, but obviously the curve has to flatten at some point, and appears to already be doing so. OpenAI are now experimenting with scaling inference-time compute (GPT-O1), but have said that it takes exponential increases in compute to produce linear gains in performance, so it remains to be seen if customers find this a worthwhile value.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @01:16PM (#41896900)
GPT-o1 does demonstrate my point: the more compute you have, the smarter the AI.

If you run chain of thoughts on an 8B model, it becomes a lot smarter too.

GPT-o1 isn't GPT5 though. I think OpenAI will have a chain of thoughts model for GPT5-class models as well. They're separate from normal models.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by HarHarVeryFunny on Sunday October 20, 2024 @01:27PM (#41896980)
There is only so much that an approach like O1 can do, but anyways in terms of AI boom/bust the relevant question is whether this is a viable product. All sorts of consumer products could be improved by making them a lot more expensive, but there are cost/benefit limits to everything.

GPT-5 and Claude-4 will be interesting, assuming these are both pure transformer models (not COT), as they will be a measure how much benefit remains to be had from training set scaling. I'd expect gains will be more against narrow benchmarks, than in the overall feel of intelligence (LLM arena score?) one gets from the model.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @07:05PM (#41899221)
I think OpenAI has already proven that it's a viable product. Their gross margins must be decent. I doubt they're making a loss for every token they inference.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by HarHarVeryFunny on Sunday October 20, 2024 @07:41PM (#41899461)
I don't think they've broken out O1 revenue, but it must be very small at the moment since it was only just introduced. Their O1-preview pricing doesn't seem to reflect the exponential compute cost, so perhaps it is not currently priced to be profitable. Overall (across all models and revenue streams their revenue does exceed inference costs ($4B vs $2B), but they still are projected to lose $5B this year, $14B next year, and not make a profit until 2029 (and only then if they've increased revenue by 100x ...).

Training costs are killing them, and it's obviously not sustainable to keep spending more on research and training than the revenue generated. Training costs are expected to keep growing fast, while revenue per token in/out is plummeting - they need massive inference volume to turn this into a profitable business, and need to pray that this doesn't turn into a commodity business where they are not the low cost producer.

https://x.com/ayooshveda/status/1847352974831489321

https://x.com/Gloraaa_/status/1847872986260341224

Re:The AI Investment Boom by nl on Sunday October 20, 2024 @11:08PM (#41900349)
The thing is that OpenAI can choose to spend less on training at any time.

We've seen this before, with for example Amazon where they made a deliberate effort to avoid profitability by spending as much as possible on infrastructure until the revenue became some much they couldn't spend it.

Being in a position where you are highly cash-flow positive and it's strategic investment that is the cost seems like a good position.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by HarHarVeryFunny on Monday October 21, 2024 @07:54AM (#41903153)
I don't know how you can compare Amazon vs OpenAI on the fundamentals of the two businesses. It's the difference in fundamentals that made Amazon a buy at absurd P/Es, as well as some degree of luck in AWS becoming so profitable, while OpenAI IMO seems much more of a dodgy value proposition.

Amazon were reinvesting and building scale, breadth and efficiency that has become an effective moat. How do you compete with Amazon Prime free delivery without your own delivery fleet, and how do you build that without the scale of operations?

OpenAI don't appear to have any moat, don't own their own datacenters, and the datacenters they are using are running on expensive NVIDIA chips. Compare to Google with their own datacenters and TPUs, Amazon with own datacenters and chips (Graviton), Meta with own datacenters (providing value to their core business) and chips - and giving away the product for free despite spending billions on it ... If this turns into the commodity business that it appears it may (all frontier models converging in performance), then OpenAI would seem to be in trouble.

Of course OpenAI could stop training at any time, but to extent that there is further performance to be had from further scaling and training, then they will be left behind by the likes of Meta who have a thriving core business to fund continued investment and are not dependent on revenue directly from AI.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by vladgur on Sunday October 20, 2024 @12:36PM (#41896552)
Re: Slack chat:

Glean.com does it for the enterprise I work at: It consumes all of our knowledge sources including Slack, Google docs, wiki, source code and provides answers to complex specific questions in a way that’s downright magical.

I was converted into a believer when I described an issue to it, pointers to a source file in online git repo and it pointed me to another repository that my team did not own that controlled DNS configs that we were not aware about. These configs were the reason our code did not behave as we expected.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by _huayra_ on Sunday October 20, 2024 @12:47PM (#41896658)
This is the main "killer feature" I've personally experienced from GPT things: a much better contextual "search engine-ish" tool for combing through and correlating different internal data sources (slack, wiki, jira, github branches, etc).

AI code assistants have been a net neutral for me (they get enough idioms in C++ slightly incorrect that I have to spend a lot of time just reading the generated code thoroughly), but being able to say "tell me what the timeline for feature X is" and have it comb through a bunch of internal docs / tickets / git commit messages, etc, and give me a coherent answer with links is amazing.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @12:49PM (#41896682)
This is partly why I believe OS makers, Apple, Microsoft, Google, have a huge advantage in the future when it comes to LLMs.

They control the OS so they can combine and feed all your digital information to an LLM in a seamless way. However, in the very long term, I think their advantage will go away because at some point, LLMs could get so good that you don't need an OS like iOS anymore. An LLM could simply become standalone - and function without a traditional OS.

Therefore, I think the advantage for iOS, Android, Windows will increase in the next few years, but less powerful after that.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by thwarted on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:05PM (#41898863)
An LLM is an application that runs on an operating system like any other application. That the vendor of the operating system has tied it to the operating system is purely a marketing/force-it-onto-your-device/force-it-in-front-of-your-face play. It's forced bundling, just like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 20 years ago.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:52PM (#41899134)
I predict that OpenAI will try to circumvent iOS and Android by making their own device. I think it will be similar to Rabbit R1, but not a scam, and a lot more capable.

They recently hired Jony Ive on a project - it could be this.

I think it'll be a long term goal - maybe in 3-4 years, a device similar to the Rabbit R1 would be viable. It's far too early right now.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by marcus_holmes on Sunday October 20, 2024 @09:59PM (#41900088)
Even if this is true (and I'm not saying it's not), they probably won't create their own OS. They'd be smarter to do what Apple did and clone a BSD (or similar) rather than start afresh.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Monday October 21, 2024 @02:38AM (#41901274)
The LLM would become the OS.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by marcus_holmes on Monday October 21, 2024 @03:54AM (#41901726)
An LLM cannot "become" an OS. It can have an OS added to it, for sure, but that's a different thing. LLMs run on top of a software stack that runs on top of an OS. Incorporating that whole stack into a single binary does not mean it "becomes" an OS.

And the point stands: you would not write a new OS, even to incorporate it into your LLM. You'd clone a BSD (or similar) and start there.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Monday October 21, 2024 @06:01AM (#41902470)
I don't think you're getting the main point. The only application that this physical device would run is ChatGPT (or some successor). You won't be able to install other apps on it like a normal OS. Everything you do is inside this LLM.

Underneath, it can be Linux, BSD, Unix, or nothing at all, whatever. It doesn't matter. That's not important.

OS was just a convenient phrase to describe this idea.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by guitarlimeo on Monday October 21, 2024 @08:05AM (#41903237)
I got your main point from the first message, but still don't like redefining terminology like OS to mean what you did.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Monday October 21, 2024 @09:56AM (#41904202)
Think of iOS and everything that it does such as downloading apps, opening apps, etc. Replace all of that with ChatGPT.

No need to get to the technicals such as whether it's UNIX or Linux talking to the hardware.

Just from a pure user experience standpoint, OpenAI would become iOS.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by ogogmad on Monday October 21, 2024 @11:01AM (#41904933)
I don't think "OS" means anything definitive. It's not 1960. Nowadays, it's a thousand separate things stuck together.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by marcus_holmes on Monday October 21, 2024 @08:45PM (#41910102)
I think what you mean is "Desktop" not "OS". You're just replacing all the windows, menus and buttons with a chat interface.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by glimshe on Monday October 21, 2024 @06:17AM (#41902566)
The LLM can't abstract PCI, USB, SATA etc from itself.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by ogogmad on Monday October 21, 2024 @11:03AM (#41904964)
What counts as an OS is subjective. The concept has always been a growing snowball.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by whywhywhywhy on Monday October 21, 2024 @09:09AM (#41903781)
Would be extremely surprising if it were anything other than an Android fork. The differentiator is gonna be the LLM, always on listening and the physical interface to it.

You're just burning money bothering to rewrite the rest of the stack when off the shelf will save you years.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by tightbookkeeper on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:28AM (#41900926)
I’m not even sure if they can make a website that takes text input to an executable and dumps the output.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by vrighter on Monday October 21, 2024 @05:34AM (#41902275)
even then, the llm cannot possibly be a standalone os. For one thing, it cannot execute loops. So even something as simple as enumerating hardware at startup is impossible.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by simonh on Monday October 21, 2024 @08:12AM (#41903291)
This is a similar situation to the view that the web would replace operating systems. All we'd need is a browser.

I don't think AI is ultimately even an application, it's a feature we will use in applications.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by gpderetta on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:56AM (#41904880)
> This is a similar situation to the view that the web would replace operating systems. All we'd need is a browser.

well, that's not a false statement. As much as I might dislike it, the raise of the web and web applications have made the OS themselves irrelevant for a significant number for tasks.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by matthewdgreen on Monday October 21, 2024 @06:29AM (#41902626)
I cannot tell you how much this echoes what people were saying during the dot com days :) Of course back then it was browsers and not LLMs. Looking back, people were both correct about this, yet we’re still having the same conversation about replacing the OS cartel.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by dash2 on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:06AM (#41904320)
Good comment. From Apple's point of view, AI could be a disruptive innovation: they've spent billions making extremely user-friendly interfaces, but that could become irrelevant if I can just ask my device questions.

But I think there will be a long period when people want both the traditional UI with buttons and sliders, and the AI that can do what you ask. (Analogy with phone keyboards where you can either speech-to-text, or slide to type, or type individual letters, or mix all three.)

Re:The AI Investment Boom by aaronblohowiak on Sunday October 20, 2024 @04:47PM (#41898324)
>they get enough idioms in C++ slightly incorrect

this is part of why I stay in python when doing ai-assisted programming; there's so much training information out there for python and I _generally_ don't care about if its slightly off-idiom, its still probably fine.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by ryandrake on Sunday October 20, 2024 @10:00PM (#41900097)
Yea, I was thumbs-down on ai-assisted programming because when I tested it out, I tried it by adding things to my existing C and C++ projects, and its suggestions were... kind of wild. Then, a few months later I gave it another chance when I was writing some Python and was impressed. Finally, I used it on a new-from-blank-text-file Rust project and was pretty much blown away.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by ffujdefvjg on Sunday October 20, 2024 @10:48PM (#41900253)
As someone who doesn't generally program, it was pretty good at getting me an init.lua set up for nvim with a bunch of plugins and some functions that would have taken me ages to do by hand. That said...it still took a day or two of working with it and troubleshooting everything, and while it's been reliable so far, I worry that it's not exactly idiomatic. I don't know enough to really say.

What it's really good at is taking my description of something and pointing me in the right direction to do my own research.

(two things that helped me with getting decent code were to describe the problem and desired solution, followed by a "Does that make sense?". This seems to get it to restate the problem itself and produce better solutions. The other thing was to copy the output into a fresh session, ask for a description of what the code does and what improvements could be made)

Re:The AI Investment Boom by skydhash on Sunday October 20, 2024 @11:05PM (#41900331)
Not saying that it’s a better way, but I started with vim by copying someone conf (on Github), removing all extraneous stuff, then slowly familiarizing myself with the rest. Then it was a matter of reading the docs when I wanted some configuration. I believe the first part is faster than dealing with an LLM, especially when dealing with an unfamiliar software.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by ffujdefvjg on Sunday October 20, 2024 @11:54PM (#41900535)
I agree with this approach generally, but I needed to use some lua plugins to do something specific fairly quickly, and didn't feel like messing around with it for weeks on end to get it just right.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by komali2 on Sunday October 20, 2024 @11:27PM (#41900420)
The downside of this nvim solution is the same downside as both pasting big blobs of ai code into a repo, and, pasting big vim configs you find online into your vimrc: inability to explain the pasted code.

When you need something fast for whatever reason sure, but later when you want to tweak or add something, you'll have to finally sit down and learn basically the whole thing or at least a major part of it to do so anyway. Imo it's better to do that from the start but sometimes that's not always ideal.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by shwaj on Monday October 21, 2024 @03:09AM (#41901480)
When I’ve used AI for writing shell scripts it used a lot of syntax that I couldn’t understand. So then I took the time to ask it to walk me through the parts that I didn’t understand. This took longer than blindly pasting what it generated, but still less time than it would have using search to learn to write my own script. With search, a lot of time is spent guessing the right search term. With chat, assuming it generated a reasonable answer (I know: a big assumption!), my follow-up questions can directly reference aspects of the generated code.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by vrighter on Monday October 21, 2024 @05:38AM (#41902311)
having something explained to me has never helped me retain the information. That only happens if i spend the time actually figuring out stuff myself.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by rayxi271828 on Sunday October 20, 2024 @10:48PM (#41900255)
Wouldn't AI be worse at Rust than at C++ given the amount of code available in the respective languages?
Re:The AI Investment Boom by reverius42 on Sunday October 20, 2024 @11:44PM (#41900497)
Maybe this is a case where more training data isn’t better. There is probably a lot of bad/old C++ out there in addition to new/modern C++, compared to Rust which is relatively all modern.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by ryandrake on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:38AM (#41904660)
Yes, I think that's it. There is a lot of horrible C++ code out there, especially on StackOverflow where "this compiled for me" sometimes ends up being the accepted answer. There are also a lot of ways to use C++ poorly/wrong without even knowing it.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by _huayra_ on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:15AM (#41900878)
The best I have ever seen were obscure languages with very strong type safety. Some researcher at a sibling org to my own told me to try it with the Lean language, and it basically gave flawless suggestions.

I'm guessing this is because the only training material was blogs from uber-nerdy CS researchers on a language where "mistakes" are basically impossible to write, and not a bunch of people flailing on forums asking about hello world-ish stuff and segfaulting examples.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by fragmede on Monday October 21, 2024 @02:05AM (#41901107)
My data science friend tells me it's really good at writing bad pandas code because it's seen so much bad pandas code.

At the end of the day, it depends where you are in the hierarchy. Having it write code for me on a hobby project in react that's bad but works is one thing. I'm having a lot of fun with that. Having it write bad code for me professionally is another thing though. Either way, there's no going back to before ChatGPT, just like there's no going back to before Stack Overflow or Google. Or the Internet.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by SoftTalker on Monday October 21, 2024 @12:16PM (#41905687)
Companies are going to have to do a lot less gatekeeping and siloing of data for this to really work. The companies that are totally transparent even internally are few and far between in my experience.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @12:39PM (#41896575)
Thanks. I didn't know that existed. But does it scale? Would it still work if large companies with many millions of Slack messages?

I suppose one reason Slack doesn't have a solution yet is because they're having a hard time getting it to work for large companies.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by hn_throwaway_99 on Sunday October 20, 2024 @12:53PM (#41896714)
Yeah, Glean does this and there are a bunch of other competitors that do it as well.

I think you may be confused about the length of the context window. These tools don't pull all of your Slack history into the context window. They use a RAG approach to index all of your content into a vector DB, then when you make a query only the relevant document snippets are pulled into the context window. It's similar for example to how Cursor implements repository-wide AI queries.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @12:56PM (#41896734)
I'm aware that one can't feed millions of messages into an LLM all at once. The only way to do this now is to use a RAG approach. But RAG approach has pros and cons and can miss crucial information. I think context window still matters a lot. The bigger the window, the more information you can feed in and the quality of answer should increase.

The point I'm trying to make is that increase context window will require more compute. Hence, we could still just be in the beginning of the compute/AI boom.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by reissbaker on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:13PM (#41898924)
We might be even earlier — the 90s was a famous boom with a fast bust, but to me this feels closer to the dawn of the personal computer in the late 70s and early 80s: we can automate things now that were impossible to automate before. We might have a long time before seeing diminishing returns.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by mvdtnz on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:32PM (#41899040)
My workpalce uses Glean and since it was connected to Slack it has become significantly worse. It routinely gives incorrect or VERY incomplete information, misattributes work to developers who may have casually mentioned a project at some time and worst of all presents jokes or sarcastic responses as fact.

Not only is it an extremely poor source of information, it has ruined the company's Slack culture as people are no longer willing to (for lack of a better term) shitpost knowing that their goofy sarcasm will now be presented to Glean users as fact.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by dcsan on Sunday October 20, 2024 @07:39PM (#41899457)
Maybe have some off limits to glean shit posting channels?
Re:The AI Investment Boom by rendang on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:18PM (#41906216)
Interesting. I still find it to be a net positive, but it is amusing when I ask it about a project and the source cited is a Slack thread I wrote 2 days prior
Re:The AI Investment Boom by sofixa on Monday October 21, 2024 @03:06AM (#41901466)
> Glean.com does it for the enterprise I work at: It consumes all of our knowledge sources including Slack, Google docs, wiki, source code and provides answers to complex specific questions in a way that’s downright magical

There are a few other companies in this space (and it's not something that complex to DIY either); the issue is data quality. If your Google Docs and wikis contain obsolete information (because nobody updated them), it's just going to be shit in, shit out. Curating the input data is the challenging part.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by jackcosgrove on Sunday October 20, 2024 @05:40PM (#41898712)
> One gauge I use to determine if we are still at the beginning of the boom is this

Has your barber/hairdresser recommended you buy NVDA?

Re:The AI Investment Boom by arach on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:15PM (#41898939)
There was an NVDA earnings watch party in NY this summer and Jensen signed some boobs earlier this year. There are some signs but still room to run
Re:The AI Investment Boom by JKCalhoun on Monday October 21, 2024 @09:07AM (#41903766)
Doesn't that say more about Nvidia than it does about AI in general?

But I see your point. And yes, I think it has trickled down to the mainstream.

(By that metric, I guess Bitcoin crashed a few years ago.)

Re:The AI Investment Boom by tim333 on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:29PM (#41899018)
You can never really tell, though following some market tea leaf readers they seem to think a few months from now, after a bit of a run up in the market. Here's one random datapoint, on mentions of "soft landing" in Bloomberg https://x.com/bravosresearch/status/1848047330794385494
Re:The AI Investment Boom by aurareturn on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:45PM (#41899100)
I read through a few pages of tweets from this author and it looks just like another perpetual doomsday pundit akin to Zerohedge.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by tim333 on Sunday October 20, 2024 @06:58PM (#41899171)
Well yeah there may be a bit of that. I find them quite interesting for the data they bring up like the linked tweet but I don't really have an opinion as to whether they are any good at predicting things.

I was thinking re the data in the tweet, that there were a lot of mentions of "soft landing" before the dot com crash, before the 2006 property crash and now, it is quite likely there was an easy money policy preceding them and then government policy mostly focuses on consumer price inflation and unemployment, so they relax when those are both low and then hit the brakes when inflation goes up and then it moderates and things look good similar to now. But that ignores that easy money can also inflate asset prices, eg dot com stocks, houses in 06, or money losing AI companies like now. And then at some point that ends and the speculative asset prices go down rather than up, leaving people thinking oh dear we've borrowed to put loads of money into that dotcom/house/ai thing and now it's not worth much and we still have the debts...

At least that's my guess.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by throwaway2037 on Monday October 21, 2024 @02:57AM (#41901413)

    > 2006 property crash
Assuming you are talking about the US financial crisis, do you mean 2008, instead of 2006? As I recall, easy money (via mortgages) was still sloshing about, well into 2007.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by tim333 on Monday October 21, 2024 @03:39AM (#41901652)
Yeah that one.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by rsynnott on Monday October 21, 2024 @08:54AM (#41903649)
> I was thinking re the data in the tweet, that there were a lot of mentions of "soft landing" before the dot com crash, before the 2006 property crash and now

There's a confirmation bias there, though. Economists, particularly pop economists, have predicted all 20 of the last two recessions; if you just say "the world is going to end" every year, then occasionally it kinda will, and certain people will think you're a visionary.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by tim333 on Monday October 21, 2024 @04:57PM (#41908463)
True. Market/economic forecasting is quite unreliable, partly because you're trying to predict human behaviour which is changeable.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by Terr_ on Sunday October 20, 2024 @07:02PM (#41899201)
> Does Slack sell an LLM chatbot solution that is able to give me reliable answers to business/technical decisions made over the last 2 years in chat?

Note that the presence of such a feature isn't the same as whether it's secure enough for normal use.

In particular, anything anyone said in the last 2 years in chat could poison the LLM into exfiltrating your data or giving false results chosen by the attacker, because of the fundamental problems of LLMs.

https://promptarmor.substack.com/p/data-exfiltration-from-sl...

Re:The AI Investment Boom by rsynnott on Monday October 21, 2024 @08:42AM (#41903550)
> Does Slack sell an LLM chatbot solution that is able to give me reliable answers to business/technical decisions made over the last 2 years in chat? We don't have this yet - most likely because it's probably still too expensive to do this much inference with such high context window.

So, your problem there is 'reliable'. LLMs, fairly fundamentally, cannot do 'reliable'. If you're looking for reliable, you likely are looking at a different tech entirely.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by williamcotton on Monday October 21, 2024 @09:16AM (#41903843)
If an LLM is tasked with translating a full text to a summary of that text then it is very reliable.

This is akin to an analytic statement, eg, "all bachelors are married". The truth is completely within the definition of the statement. Compare this to a synthetic statement such as "it is raining outside". In this case the truth is contingent on facts outside of the statement itself.

When LLMs are faced with an analytic statement they are more reliable. When they are faced with a synthetic statement they are prone to confabulate and are unreliable.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by rsynnott on Monday October 21, 2024 @09:40AM (#41904075)
> If an LLM is tasked with translating a full text to a summary of that text then it is very reliable.

Hrm. I've found LLM summaries to be of... dubious reliability. When someone posts an article on this here orange website, these days someone will sometimes 'helpfully' post a summary generated by a magic robot. Have a look at these, sometime. They _often_ leave out key details, and sometimes outright make shit up.

Interesting article on someones' experiences with this recently: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu...

Re:The AI Investment Boom by williamcotton on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:28AM (#41904564)
Sure, anecdotal evidence. Here's another anecdote:

Original article: https://osa1.net/posts/2024-10-09-oop-good.html

LLM (ChatGPT o1-preview) results: https://chatgpt.com/share/67166301-00d8-8013-9cf5-e8a980aca7...

LGTM!

I'd like to know which model is used in the article you've referenced as well as the prompt. I also suspect that 50 pages is pushing up to the limits of the context window and has an impact on the results.

---

As for the article itself... Use a language like F# or OCaml and you get a functional-first language that also supports OOP!

Re:The AI Investment Boom by n_ary on Monday October 21, 2024 @10:48AM (#41904788)
I believe, what we will see in new few years is the complete(or nearly) abolision of all human friendly customer support and everything will be ChatBot or voice-chat-bot based support to reduce cost of service.

We will also get some nice things, like more intelligent IDE at affordable cost, think CursorAi costs $20/month(240/year), while whole JetBrain's package costs only 25/month(290/year).

However, I am a bit worried about all these data center and AI and energy use/scaling. While consumers are being pushed to more and more efficient energy usage and energy prices are definitely high(to what I would expect with massive renewable energy production), large corps and such will continue scaling energy usage higher and higher.

Also, the AI fad will eventually spook out a lot of free knowledge sharing on the open and everything will get behind paywall, so random poor kid in some poor country will no longer have access to some nice tutorial or documentations online to learn cool stuff because in some countries, what we call a price of "morning coffee" is actually could be a day's earning of an adult but not for non-privileged people. Without ability to pay for AI services, no more access to knowledge. Search engines will eventually drown in slop, I mean even google now frequently gives me "no resoult found" page and I need to use ddg/brave/bing to fish out some results still.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by sixhobbits on Monday October 21, 2024 @11:38AM (#41905320)
I've been calling a crash for far too long so take with a pinch of salt BUT I think another four years of this is very unlikely.

1996 - Cisco was 23.4B or 0.3% of US GDP

2000 - Cisco peaked at 536B or 5.2% of US GDP

2020 - Nvidia was 144B or 0.7% of US GDP

2024 - Nvidia is 3.4T or 11.9% of US GDP

Numbers very rough and from different sources, but I'd be surprised if Nvidia doesn't pop within 1-2 years at most.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by dragontamer on Monday October 21, 2024 @11:48AM (#41905411)
Rumor is that there just isn't enough power to turn on all those fancy AI accelerators or Datacenters.

There's a reason Microsoft just outright purchased the entire output of 3-mile island (a full sized nuclear power plant).

At some point, people will stop buying GPUs because we've simply run out of power.

My only hope is that we don't suffer some kind of ill effect (ex: double the cost of consumer electricity or something, or local municipalities going bankrupt due to rising energy costs). The AI boom has so much money in it we need to account for tail wags dog effects.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by shikon7 on Monday October 21, 2024 @12:07PM (#41905600)
In a working market, we won't run out of power, but power becomes so expensive that it's no longer viable to use most of the GPUs. The boom shifts to power generation instead, and we will have a similar article "The power investment boom", where people will debate that we will stop building power plants because we've simply run out of GPUs to use that power.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by SoftTalker on Monday October 21, 2024 @12:13PM (#41905650)
Fortunately we're also electrifying transportation so there will be no shortage of demand for electrical power generation.
Re:The AI Investment Boom by syndicatedjelly on Monday October 21, 2024 @12:38PM (#41905869)
Comparing a company’s market cap to the US GDP makes no sense to me. The former is the product of shares and stock price. The latter is total financial output of a country. What intuition is that supposed to provide?
Re:The AI Investment Boom by rendang on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:23PM (#41906259)
Comparing to total household wealth would be better (about $140T now, about $40T in 2000)
Re:The AI Investment Boom by pirate787 on Monday October 21, 2024 @12:47PM (#41905954)
This comparison is silly. First of all, Cisco's scale was assembled through acquisitions, and hardware is a commodity business. Nvidia has largely grown organically and has CUDA software as a unique differentiator.

More importantly, Cisco's margins and PE were much higher than Nvidia's today.

You should use actual financial measures and not GDP national accounts which have zero bearing on business valuation.

Re:The AI Investment Boom by TacticalCoder on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:08PM (#41906134)
I don't think GP's comparison is as silly as you think. People thinking about "money" take many different numbers, from a shitload of source, into account.

There's a relation between P/E and future actual revenues of a company.

Imagine that a similar comparison would imply that it's projected that in a few years NVidia's revenues shall represent 10% of the US's GDP: do we really believe that's going to happen?

The Mag 7 + Broadcom have a market cap that is now 60% of the US's GDP. I know you think it's silly but... Doesn't that say something about the expect revenues of these companies in a few years?

Do we really think the Mag 7 + Broadcom (just an example) are really to represent the % of the actual US's GDP that that implies?

Just to be clear: I'm not saying it implies the percentage of the US GDP of these 8 companies alone is going to be 60% but there is a relation between the P/E of a company and its expected revenues. And revenues of companies do participate in the GDP computation.

I don't think it's as silly as several here think.

I also don't think GP should be downvoted: if we disagree, we can discuss it.