this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024

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Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate (ash.harvard.edu)

submitted 1 day ago by sirboozebum@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] eleitl@lemm.ee 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Page doesn't render properly.

[–] Joker@sh.itjust.works 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

You can read it here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08778

[–] eleitl@lemm.ee 1 points 17 hours ago

Thanks -- it has been clear enough that an another AI winter is coming. Likely latest when the Global Financial Crisis 2 is here.

[–] einlander@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But the line must go up!

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The article does mention that when the AI bubble is going down, the big players will use the defunct AI infrastructure and add it to their cloud business to get more of the market that way and, in the end, make the line go up.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

That's not what the article says.

They're arguing that AI hype is being used as a way of driving customers towards cloud infrastructure over on-prem. Once a company makes that choice, it's very hard to get them to go back.

They're not saying that AI infrastructure specifically can be repurposed, just that in general these companies will get some extra cloud business out of the situation.

AI infrastructure is highly specialized, and much like ASICs for the blockchain nonsense, will be somewhere between "very hard" and "impossible" to repurpose.

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Assuming a large decline in demand for AI compute, what would be the use cases for renting out older AI compute hardware on the cloud? Where would the demand come from? Prices would also go down with a decrease in demand.

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Relaunching Stadia?

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Haha. I believe the AMD Instinct / Nvidia Datacentre GPUs aren't that great for gaming.

[–] walter_wiggles@lemmy.nz 8 points 1 day ago

Big tech is out of ideas and needs AI to work in order to drive growth.

[+] Novamdomum@fedia.io -6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

"Today’s hype will have lasting effects that constrain tomorrow’s possibilities."

Nope. No it won't. I'd love to have the patience to be more diplomatic but they're just wrong... and dumb.

I'm getting so sick of these anti AI cultists who seem to be made up of grumpy tech nerds behaving like "I was using AI before it was cool" hipsters and panicking artists and writers. Everyone needs to calm their tits right down. AI isn't going anywhere. It's giving creative and executive options to millions of people that just weren't there before.

We're in an adjustment phase right now and boundaries are being re-drawn around what constitutes creativity. My leading theory at the moment is that we'll all mostly eventually settle down to the idea that AI is just a tool. Once we're used to it and less starry eyed about it's output then individual creativity, possibly supported by AI tools, will flourish again. It's going to come down to the question of whether you prefer reading something cogitated, written, drawn or motion rendered by AI or you enjoy the perspective of a human being more. Both will be true in different scenarios I expect.

Honestly, I've had to nope out of quite a few forums and servers permanently now because all they do in there is circlejerk about the death of AI. Like this one theory that keeps popping up that image generating AI specifically is inevitably going to collapse in on itself and stop producing quality images. The reverse is so obviously true but they just don't want to see it. Otherwise smart people are just being so stubborn with this and it's, quite frankly, depressing to see.

Also, the tech nerds arguing that AI is just a fancy word and pixel regurgitating engine and that we'll never have an AGI are probably the same people that were really hoping Data would be classified as a sentient lifeform when Bruce Maddox wanted to dissassemble him in "The Measure of a Man".

How's that for whiplash?

[–] GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's fucking fantastic news, tbh.

Here's my take, let them dismiss it.

Let em! Remember Bitcoin at $15k after 2019?

Let em! And it's justified! If Ai isn't important right now, then why should its price be inflated to oblivion? Let it fall. Good! Lower prices for those of us that do see the value down the road.

That's how speculative investment works. In no way is this bad. Are sales bad? Sit back and enjoy the show.

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[+] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee -8 points 1 day ago (6 children)

I have no idea how people can consider this to be a hype bubble especially after the o3 release. It smashed the ARC AGI benchmark on the performance front. It ranks as the 175th best competitive coder in the world on Codeforces' leaderboard.

o3 proved that it is possible to have at least an expert AGI if not a Virtuoso AGI (according to Deep mind's definition of AGI). Sure, it's not economical yet. But it will get there very soon (just like how the earlier GPTs were a lot dumber and took a lot more energy than the newer, smaller parameter models).

Please remember - fight to seize the means of production. Do not fight the means of production themselves.

[–] Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

o3 made the high score on ARC through brute force, not by being good. To raise the score from 75% to 87% required 175 times more computing power, but exactly stunning returns.

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (4 children)

Why does it matter?

If it can through brute force, it can do it. That's the first step towards true agi, nobody said the first AGI would be economical, this feels like a major goalpost shift if you're acknowledging it can do it at all, isn't that insane?

A little bit ago, everyone would've been saying this will never happen, that there was a natural wall simply because all it does is predict the next token, it's been like, a few years of llm's and they're already getting this insane. We're going to have AGI soon, it might not be a transformer, but billions upon billions of dollars are being thrown at this problem, there are people smart enough in the world to make this work, and this is the earliest sign that it's coming.

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[–] r4venw@sh.itjust.works 6 points 21 hours ago

Where, in that position piece, do they mention o3? Who "proved" this?

Additionally, I'm pretty sure that this "ARC AGI" benchmark is not using the same definition of AGI that you linked to by DeepMind. Conflating them is misleading. There is already so much misinformation out there about "AI", don't add to it.

Lastly, I struggle to take at face value essays written by for-profit companies claiming they have AGI (that DeepMind paper links to OpenAI essays). They only stand to gain monetarily by claiming that their AI is an AGI (to be clear, this is an opinion; I do not have evidence to suggest that OpenAI is being disingenuous).

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Unless we invent cold fusion between the next 5 years, they will never be economical. They are the most energy inefficient thing ever invented by humanity and all prediction models state that it will cost more energy, not less, to keep making them better. They will never be energy efficient nor economical in their current state, and most companies are out of ideas on how to shake it up. Even the people who created generative models agree that they have just been brute forcing by making the models larger with more energy consumption. When you try to make them smaller or more energy efficient, they fall off the performance cliff and only produce garbage. I'm sure there are researchers doing cool stuff, but it is neither economical nor efficient.

[–] ricdeh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Untrue. There are small models that produce better output than the previous "flagships" like GPT-2. Also, you can achieve much more than we currently do with far less energy by working on novel, specialised hardware (neuromorphic computing).

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

Your example is strange because, as far as I know, GPTs aren't economical either.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why is it getting an AGI stamp now? I was under the impression humanity has not delivered a sentient AI? Which is what the AGI title was supposed to be used for...has that been pulled back again?

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

Agi has nothing to do with sentience, which cannot be measured, openai, I think validly, defines it as a system that can do all intellectual labor.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

So it's now, can it do anything a human can do?...sans emotional traits.

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

It was never about sentience, sentience is a meaningless, unmeasurable term.

It's a question of if it can replace humans in the workforce.

artificial general intelligence means it's able to generalize its intelligence, not sentience at all.

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