Technology

I'm far far more concerned about all the people who were deemed non essential so quickly after being "essential" for so long because AI will do so much work slaps employees with 2 weeks severance

Truth. I would say the actual time scales will be longer, but this is the harsh, soul-crushing reality that will make all the kids and mentally disturbed cultists on r/singularity scream in pain and throw stones at you. They're literally planning for what they're going to do once ASI changes the world to a star-trek, post-scarcity civilization... in five years. I wish I was kidding.

Do you have money and/or personal emotional validation tied up in the promise that AI will develop into a world-changing technology by 2027? With AGI in everyone's pocket giving them financial advice, advising them on their lives, and romancing them like a best friend with Scarlett Johansson's voice whispering reassurances in your ear all day?

If you are banking on any of these things, then yeah, you should probably be afraid.

As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they're actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don't leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you're not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.

But I noticed right away that I couldn't justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.

I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.

At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM's versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM's start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.

I work for an AI company that's dying out. We're trying to charge companies $30k a year and upwards for basically chatgpt plus a few shoddily built integrations. You can build the same things we're doing with Zapier, at around $35 a month. The management are baffled as to why we're not closing any of our deals, and it's SO obvious to me - we're too fucking expensive and there's nothing unique with our service.

That's a good point about the "AI as a service" model that is emerging.

I was reading that NaNoWriMo has had a significant turnover on their board die to the backlash against their pro-AI stance: https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/nanowrimo-ai-controversty-1.7314090

As in as soon as companies realise they won't be able to lay off everybody except executives and personal masseuses, nVidia will go back to having a normal stock price.

Rich people will become slightly less grotesquely wealthy, and everything must be done to prevent this.

The term "AI bubble" refers to the idea that the excitement, investment, and hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) may be growing at an unsustainable rate, much like historical financial or technological bubbles (e.g., the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s). Here are some key aspects of this concept:

1. Overvaluation and Speculation: Investors and companies are pouring significant amounts of money into AI technologies, sometimes without fully understanding the technology or its realistic potential. This could lead to overvaluation of AI companies and startups.

2. Hype vs. Reality: There is often a mismatch between what people believe AI can achieve in the short term and what it is currently capable of. Some claims about AI may be exaggerated, leading to inflated expectations that cannot be met.

3. Risk of Market Crash: Like previous bubbles in history, if AI does not deliver on its overhyped promises, there could be a significant drop in AI investments, stock prices, and general interest. This could result in a burst of the "AI bubble," causing financial losses and slowing down real progress.

4. Comparison to Previous Bubbles: The "AI bubble" is compared to the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble, where early optimism led to massive growth and investment, followed by a sudden collapse when the reality didn't meet expectations.

Not everyone believes an AI bubble is forming, but the term is often used as a cautionary reference, urging people to balance enthusiasm with realistic expectations about the technology’s development and adoption.