“AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.”
Generative AI can indeed do impressive things from a technical standpoint, but not enough revenue has been generated so far to offset the enormous costs. Like for other technologies, It might just take time (remember how many billions Amazon burned before turning into a cash-generating machine? And Uber has also just started turning some profit) + a great deal of enshittification once more people and companies are dependent.
Or it might just be a bubble.
As humans we’re not great at predicting these things including of course me. My personal prediction? A few companies will make money, especially the ones that start selling AI as a service at increasingly high costs, many others will fail and both AI enthusiasts and detractors will claim they were right all along.
“The enormous costs” were optional, and driven by greed. This latest neural-network revolution happened thanks to consumer video game hardware. Then the big boys got involved and pushed unreasonably large models, partially because they figured that’s where the magic would happen… but partially to justify all the data they’d need to scoop up indiscriminately… and partially because going big limited competition.
Google themselves proved this was not necessary. Remember the AI that could beat any human at Go? Well, they built a smaller model as a blank slate, and just had it play games, and it quickly got better than the big news-worthy AI. Then they built an even smaller model, and made it do a bunch of games instead of just Go, and it still got better than either previous AI, at Go.
Goldman Sachs, quote from the article:
Generative AI can indeed do impressive things from a technical standpoint, but not enough revenue has been generated so far to offset the enormous costs. Like for other technologies, It might just take time (remember how many billions Amazon burned before turning into a cash-generating machine? And Uber has also just started turning some profit) + a great deal of enshittification once more people and companies are dependent. Or it might just be a bubble.
As humans we’re not great at predicting these things including of course me. My personal prediction? A few companies will make money, especially the ones that start selling AI as a service at increasingly high costs, many others will fail and both AI enthusiasts and detractors will claim they were right all along.
“The enormous costs” were optional, and driven by greed. This latest neural-network revolution happened thanks to consumer video game hardware. Then the big boys got involved and pushed unreasonably large models, partially because they figured that’s where the magic would happen… but partially to justify all the data they’d need to scoop up indiscriminately… and partially because going big limited competition.
Google themselves proved this was not necessary. Remember the AI that could beat any human at Go? Well, they built a smaller model as a blank slate, and just had it play games, and it quickly got better than the big news-worthy AI. Then they built an even smaller model, and made it do a bunch of games instead of just Go, and it still got better than either previous AI, at Go.