“The economics are likely to be grim,” Marcus wrote on his Substack. “Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence.”
“As I have always warned,” he added, “that’s just a fantasy.”
Microsoft shit is a mega corp… AI is based on their revenue lol
Even Zuckerberg admits that trying to scale LLMs larger doesn’t work because the energy and compute requirements go up exponentially. There must exist a different architecture that is more efficient, since the meat computers in our skulls are hella efficient in comparison.
Once we figure that architecture out though, it’s very likely we will be able to surpass biological efficiency like we have in many industries.
That’s a bad analogy. We weren’t able to surpass biological efficiency in industry sector because we figured out human anatomy and how to improve it. It’s simply alternative ways to produce force like electricity and motors which had absolutely no relation to how muscles works.
I imagine it would be the same for computers, simply another, better method to achieve something but it’s so uncertain that it’s barely worth discussing about.
Of course! It’s not like animals have jet engines!
Human brains are merely the proof that such energy efficiencies are possible for intelligence. It’s likely we can match or go far beyond that, probably not by emulating biology directly. (Though we certainly may use it as inspiration while we figure out the underlying principles.)
With current stat prediction models?
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I think I’ve heard about enough of experts predicting the future lately.
I wish just once we could have some kind of tech innovation without a bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects while they get super rich off it.
Soooo… Without capitalism?
Pretty much.
… bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects…
one doesn’t imagine any of them even remotely thinks a technological panacaea is feasible.
… while they get super rich off it.
because they’re only focusing on this.
True, they just sell it to their investors as a panacea
Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.
Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.
Yeah my management was all gungho about exploiting AI to do all sorts of stuff.
Like read. Not generative AI crap, but read. They came to us and said quite literally: “how can we use something like ChatGPT and make it read.”
I don’t know who or how they convinced them to use something that wasn’t generative AI, but it did convince me that managers think someone being convincing and confident is correct all the time.
Being convincing and confident without actually knowing is how 9/10s of them make it to the C suite.
That’s probably why they don’t worry about confidently incorrect AI.
Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.
Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.
The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.
Yeah yours is a more thorough and less flippant description of what I meant.
We used to make fun of all the corporate word salad that the Managment would use at my last “real” job. But it really was weird salad all the way down [up].
No no, I disagree I think that shoving AI into all these apps is a solid plan on their behalf. People are going to stop recall and shut it off. So instead they put AI components into every app, It now has the right to overview everything you’re doing and every app collects data on you sending it home to update their personalized models for you so they can better sell you products.
That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.
Some are just opportunists, but there are certainly true believers — either in specific technologies, or pedal-to-the-metal growth as the only rational solution to the world’s problems.
Andreessen is pretty open about it: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
I think Andreessen is lying and the “techno optimist manifesto” is a ruse for PR.
a16z has been involved in various crypto pump and dumps. They are smart enough to know that something like “play to earn” is not sustainable and always devolves into a pyramid scheme. Doesn’t stop them from getting in early and dumping worthless tokens on the marks.
The manifesto honestly reads like it was written by a teenager. The style, the tone, the excessive quotes from economists. This is pretty typical stuff for American oligarch polemics, no?
Of course most don’t actually even believe it, that’s just the pitch to get that VC juice. It’s basically fraud all the way down.
Welcome to the top of the sigmoid curve.
If you were wondering what 1999 felt like WRT to the internet, well, here we are. The Matrix was still fresh in everyone’s mind and a lot of online tech innovation kinda plateaued, followed by some “market adjustments.”
I think it’s more likely a compound sigmoid (don’t Google that). LLMs are composed of distinct technologies working together. As we’ve reached the inflection point of the scaling for one, we’ve pivoted implementations to get back on track. Notably, context windows are no longer an issue. But the most recent pivot came just this week, allowing for a huge jump in performance. There are more promising stepping stones coming into view. Is the exponential curve just a series of sigmoids stacked too close together? In any case, the article’s correct - just adding more compute to the same exact implementation hasn’t enabled scaling exponentially.
I believe this about as much as I believed the “We’re about to experience the AI singularity” morons.
This is why you’re seeing news articles from Sam Altman saying that AGI will blow past us without any societal impact. He’s trying to lessen the blow of the bubble bursting for AI/ML.
Good. I look forward to all these idiots finally accepting that they drastically misunderstood what LLMs actually are and are not. I know their idiotic brains are only able to understand simple concepts like “line must go up” and follow them like religious tenants though so I’m sure they’ll waste everyone’s time and increase enshitification with some other new bullshit once they quietly remove their broken (and unprofitable) AI from stuff.
“LLMs such as they are, will become a commodity; price wars will keep revenue low. Given the cost of chips, profits will be elusive,” Marcus predicts. “When everyone realizes this, the financial bubble may burst quickly.”
Please let this happen
Market crash and third world war. What a time to be alive!
Well classic computers will always limited and power hungry. Quantum computer is the key to AI achieving next level
Quantum computers are only good at a very narrow subset of tasks. None of those tasks are related to Neural Networks, AGI, or the emulation of neurons.
The only people who say this know nothing about quantum or computers
I love the or in this sentence
Oh no!
Anyway…
I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.
This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.
With the right level of Government support, bubbles can seemingly go on for literal decades. Case in point, Australian housing since the late 90s has been on an uninterrupted tear (yes, even in ‘08 and ‘20).
But eventually, bubbles either deflate or pop, because eventually governments and investors will get tired of propping it up. It might take decades, but I think it’s inevitable.
I just want a portable self hosted LLM for specific tasks like programming or language learning.
You can install Ollama in a docker container and use that to install models to run locally. Some are really small and still pretty effective, like Llama 3.2 is only 3B and some are as little as 1B. It can be accessed through the terminal or you can use something like OpenWeb UI to have a more “ChatGPT” like interface.
Until Open AI announces a new 5t model or something and then the hype refreshes
Yay