AI hype has echoes of the telecoms boom and bust
AI hype has echoes of the telecoms boom and bust
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fwiw telecoms (or i guess its direct predecessor in many cases?) is so ubiquitous that it's virtually an appliance. It's unlikely that you even know anyone who doesn't use telecommunications at least five times a day. probably a hot take but: AI sucks, but so did the steam engine three years after it's debut. It was a gimmick that broke all the time and, even when it was working in full, could barely be finagled into doing a very small array of specific tasks. And then it got better. Check back on AI in ten years.
The reason for this bubble-looking graph is that all of the capitalization of low-hanging fruit gets completed and then the company has to start operating with slimmer margins. Cisco has almost a hundred thousand employees and 57 billion dollars of revenue, they just aren't growing quite as fast any more.
A lot of the engine’s issues were able to be ironed out with time and many, many iterations. This is true of “AI”, too, but not in the case of it’s fundamental issues, like it’s inability to actually reason through and make a real answer to an issue or come up with something, as well as it’s various social effects. The mirror of this can be seen in the steam engine/combustion engine in general: climate change and environmental damage.
Plus, the market doesn’t wait that long, this is capitalism. There might be a burgeoning, actual AI industry in ten years, but it’s not going to look like it is now, with all the bullshit and hype. The current market doesn’t look sustainable. Open and free models have been released that are almost entirely in lockstep with proprietary ones as far as I know, and there isn’t really much of a consumer market for AI anyways. The only people buying and selling AI are tech companies, so it’s basically a hot potato of investment.
Open and free models have been released that are almost entirely in lockstep with proprietary ones as far as I know
What do you mean?
Like the competitiveness of open models versus Op*nAI and the like. I don't see a reason to pay myself. The few times I've asked something to spit out the husk of a program in a language I'll never learn or use again, the commercial options were just as competent as the open one that ran locally.
Image generators are pretty much on par whether proprietary or open from what I can tell. Haven't really messed with voice or anything else myself.