Some oddly defensive reactions here. Wall St losing faith doesn't mean the tech is bad, just that they're not happy with the returns they're seeing. Plus, AI seems particularly susceptible to these extreme hype cycles. If it's legit, then it will pan out eventually. If not, then it will lay the foundation for something bigger.
They're not odd. These reactions pop up to all criticism of the current tech hype bubble. Happened with metaverse, NFTs, blockchain, etc.
They know that the emperor has no clothes. That the moment people in power start asking "So... where's all the profit on this investment?" it's game over.
AI is supported by massive subsidies and R&D from the big tech giants. Wall Street demanding that Microsoft stop wasting tens of billions on investment in a product that does not generate a profit for Microsoft will kill AI as it exists right now. OpenAI will raise their prices significantly, killing most-to-all of the startups relying on them.
This is especially dire because there's copyright and regulatory changes going on. An AI winter now means there's substantial risk of the next "AI summer" being crippled by actually having to abide by copyright and being subject to regulations.
> OpenAI will raise their prices significantly, killing most to all of the startups relying on them.
Have you heard the good news? The price per million tokens has fallen from $36 to $0.25 in the past 18 months.
> actually having to abide by copyright
Copyright is being eroded, first by the internet and its copying capabilities, then by the social networks and sharing, and now by generative AI. You can't make a profit owning expression in this distributed and interactive system, copyright was invented in the age of passive consumption of content. When you do a simple search you can find many alternatives to choose from. Any new work has to compete against decades of accumulation.
On top of that, AI is not really infringing, or it's a bad infringement system - it's much slower and more imprecise than just copying, if infringement is what someone seeks. It's a guided remixing tool, there's a human shaping its output. How can a model 1000x smaller than its training set be really infringing, it has no space for all the exact details.
OpenAI accumulates trillions of tokens in chat logs, eliciting experience from its users, it is crawling the tacit knowledge reservoir of its user base. That means it collects better information than web scrapers, information that would be normally lost. They can just sit there and people will bring data, guidance and feedback to the model. Do you see the business value in collecting practical experience and repackaging it?
Same for me. I wear glasses and I have tinnitus, which means that I can download all the movies I want. As long as I do not fully enjoy them of course.
Honest question: did the crypto hype cycles “lay the foundation for something bigger”?
I suppose there is an argument to be made that it pushed Nvidia to ramp up GPU production and lean into the compute market rather than gaming. Maybe gave the world some extra experience with hosting large GPU farms that are needed for AI training.
I don’t think I’m sold on either of those, but would be curious to see others discussion.
