Column: The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble
www.latimes.com
Shares in AI companies have powered a huge runup in the stock market this year, but users are beginning to question whether the craze will fall flat.
  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    43·
    3 months ago

    As for the prospect that AI will enable business users to do more with fewer humans in the office or on the factory floor, the technology generates such frequent errors that users may need to add workers just to double-check the bots’ output.

    And here we were worrying about being out of work…

  • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    2 months ago

    I have so far seen two working AI applications that actually makes sense, both in a hospital setting:

    1. Assisting oncologists in reading cancer images. Still the oncologists that makes the call, but it seems to be of use to them.
    2. Creating a first draft when transcribing dictated notes. Listening and correcting is apparently faster for most people than listening and writing from scratch.

    These two are nifty, but it doesn’t make a multi billion dollar industry.

    In other words the bubble is bursting and the value / waste ratio looks extremely low.

    Say what you want about the Tulip bubble, but at least tulips are pretty.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      16·
      2 months ago

      This is why you should never allow the use of the marketing term “AI”, and instead always refer to the specific technologies.

      The use case for the term “AI” is to conflate things that work (ML) with things that don’t work (LLMs).

      • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Ok, point on language.

        But I thought LLMs were machine learning, or rather a particular application of it? Have I misunderstood that? Isn’t it all black boxed matrixes of statistical connections?

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      this is something I’ve been mulling over for a while now too. there are lots of little boring ways in which some of the ML stuff definitely does work, but none of them are in the shape of anything the hypemen have been shouting. and afaict none of them will be able to justify all the investment either (and only some will be able to justify the compute, even then)

      couple months back I speculated in one of the threads here that I believe one of the reasons there’s such a hard push to get the llms and shit into as much as possible now is because it’ll be harder to remove after the air starts going on - and thus allow to buy more time/runway/rent-extraction

  • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    The bill mandates safety testing of advanced AI models and the imposition of “guardrails” to ensure they can’t slip out of the control of their developers or users and can’t be employed to create “biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, as well as weapons with cyber-offensive capabilities.” It’s been endorsed by some AI developers but condemned by others who assert that its constraints will drive AI developers out of California.

    Man, if I can’t even build homemade nuclear weapons, what CAN I do? That’s it, I’m moving to Nevada!