Feels like so many tech bubbles are about to burst
Feels like so many tech bubbles are about to burst
Hard to believe it's been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we've come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways
I'm a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don't want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.
Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we're not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn't caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don't have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That's at least a decade away
Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn't very widespread. We're again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance
Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It's so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they're just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that's copyrighted, but claim it's for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn't make any sense and just looks like they're going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty...
It just seems like there's a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don't see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?
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It's interesting how interconnected those points are.
Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.
Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on "our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it" and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.
Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?
I'm predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.
The backlash to this is going to be fun. Having lived through the .com boom/bust, which wasn't a scam, the web was actually the future and was undersold if anything, no one with the stink of computer on them outside of a tiny elite could get decent fulltime work for like 5 years. AI is a scam, full stop. It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don't reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do. People are going to go full Butlerian Jihad from Dune when this blows up the economy, and it's going to suck so much more for everyone in tech, scammer or no...
I mean I can list a lot of things AI (and I'll limit it to Transformers, the advancement that drives LLMs) has enabled:
- Audio Transcription
- Greatly improved language translation
- Improved computer vision, in some situations
- Combined with diffusion models has enabled targeted image generation, which we already know is being used in media and ads.
AI isn't a scam, but it's being oversold and it's limitations are being purposefully hidden. That being said, it is changing how things are done and that's not going to stop. We're still seeing impacts from CNNs, one of the major AI/ML breakthroughs from over a decade ago, make impacts.
The backlash to this is going to be fun.
In some cases it's already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.
It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.
It is not completely useless but it's oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a "trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!" A bike is still useful, even if they're building a scam around it.
Here's three practical examples:
- I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can't use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
- I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a "must check" pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I'd probably have missed them.
- [Note: reported use.] I've seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).
None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don't require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It's either things that you wouldn't use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say "yup, that's bullshit" (#1, #3).
I would argue all of these things were possible sans "AI" (although it would have been sold as AI in the 90's) via existing heuristics adequately developed if people knew that was the desired application
They probably could, indeed - but you'd need multiple different applications, each for one use case. In the meantime a LLM offers you a tool that won't hit all the nails, or screw all the screws, but does both decently enough in the lack of both a hammer and a screwdriver.