The AI boom has turned the standard profit margin model on its head, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok—and it’s making the industry’s growth unsustainable.
I dont believe it requires sapience; that is what the marketers are saying. The AI boom (and many historic boom cycles) is predicated on marketing and sentiment, not facts and data. That is why they always pop; the facts dont back up the hype.
I think there is some confusion. I do not believe AGI implies sapience, nor does Google, and now it seems that you don’t either. So who is discussing sapience?
If this is working, where’s the company with runaway success creating unimagined leaps in productivity and technology?
Hypothetically speaking, what do you think this would look like?
The marketers are not using the word “sapience”, as that word would require defining for the layman. They are claiming AI will usher in an era of human prosperity by taking over our work and big decisions to do them more efficiently–tasks that sound to almost everyone to require advanced decision-making and thought, the hallmarks of sapience and cognition. This is largely besides the point, though.
I think that if this were successful, you would see at least some early adopting companies coming up aces. Some company would have double the productivity with half the workforce, and use that to absolutely devour their market segment by undercutting everyone else on price because their operating costs are so much lower than the competition. I’d see a software company adopt breakneck software release cycles with substantial, material stability and performance improvements with each. I’d see some company anywhere suddenly begin to outperform their former selves and be able to convincingly point to AI as where their improvements came from. The only one like that I can think of is NVidia, who are rich strictly because they’re selling shovels in the gold rush.
What it would look like is layoffs from a company without a change in output/productivity. Notably, we’re not at AGI yet, so I wouldn’t expect sci-fi levels of change.
That is one thing it could look like which is captured in my examples. We dont see any company like that. Remember that stock valuation is not, in the present day, correlated to any business metric. There are companies with huge valuations that have never netted $1 (like these AI companies, for example). So, even in your narrower example, there are no companies I have heard of that meet its criteria.
There would necessarily be a lag time between layoffs and unchanged productivity. And even then, if we’re being fair, that’s not conclusive evidence of AI being useful; it could just be that they had more employees than they needed.
My point is more that I’m not sure we’d see an obvious sign that AI was changing the market yet.
Elon Musk, the apparent thought leader of the tech sector and mover of markets, claims we will be in a post-scarcity AI-fuelled utopia by 2036. Since his words move the market, clearly the market heeds his words.
In that context, it seems quite modest to expect obvious material gains from using AI by now. When the car was invented, you could prove its utility immediately by getting between to places faster than ever before. When space flight was invented, you could prove its utility by relaying messages around the planet. When insulin were invented, you could prove its utility by curing people bed-ridden awaiting death.
My point is, real paradigm-shifting inventions demonstrate how they’ll do that right away, in an undeniable way. So, AI is either not a paradigm shifting technology, or its not done yet and people are buying a half-baked product.
Elon Musk is an idiot, and you’ve already noted that the market doesn’t track reality.
The paradigm shifting invention was the transformer (the T in GPT). If you’ll forgive a shitty analogy, it’s like someone invented a microscope and you’re asking why we don’t yet have insulin. Not having insulin doesn’t make the microscope useless.
As far as these things go, AI is improving at a breakneck speed-- hence why so many people in the field are begging for a pause in development. We don’t really understand why this technology works as well as if does, and that has a lot of people worried that we’re going to do something dangerous without understanding what we did.
Your example is another one that illustrates my point. When they invented the microscope, they could instantly demonstrate its utility in it’s ability to observe previously invisibly tiny things. The following inventions that enabled are great, but the microscope itself was great, too, and all could see why.
AI is almost all hype. When anyone asks what it can do that was impossible or too difficult before, people point to what they think it will do, yourself included.
So, again, what previously intractable problem does AI solve? Please do not include answers of problems you think it might one day solve. Like the microscope can immediately let you see tiny things, what does the AI let you do that was impossible before? Bonus points if what it does is worth spending a planet’s worth of resources on.
When they invented the microscope, hey could instantly demonstrate its utility in it’s ability to observe previously invisibly tiny things.
I assure you that 400 some odd years ago, most people would not have grasped the utility in the microscope. Just like many people today don’t understand what the transformer has done for machine learning.
I think there is some confusion. I do not believe AGI implies sapience, nor does Google, and now it seems that you don’t either. So who is discussing sapience?
Hypothetically speaking, what do you think this would look like?
The marketers are not using the word “sapience”, as that word would require defining for the layman. They are claiming AI will usher in an era of human prosperity by taking over our work and big decisions to do them more efficiently–tasks that sound to almost everyone to require advanced decision-making and thought, the hallmarks of sapience and cognition. This is largely besides the point, though.
I think that if this were successful, you would see at least some early adopting companies coming up aces. Some company would have double the productivity with half the workforce, and use that to absolutely devour their market segment by undercutting everyone else on price because their operating costs are so much lower than the competition. I’d see a software company adopt breakneck software release cycles with substantial, material stability and performance improvements with each. I’d see some company anywhere suddenly begin to outperform their former selves and be able to convincingly point to AI as where their improvements came from. The only one like that I can think of is NVidia, who are rich strictly because they’re selling shovels in the gold rush.
What it would look like is layoffs from a company without a change in output/productivity. Notably, we’re not at AGI yet, so I wouldn’t expect sci-fi levels of change.
That is one thing it could look like which is captured in my examples. We dont see any company like that. Remember that stock valuation is not, in the present day, correlated to any business metric. There are companies with huge valuations that have never netted $1 (like these AI companies, for example). So, even in your narrower example, there are no companies I have heard of that meet its criteria.
There would necessarily be a lag time between layoffs and unchanged productivity. And even then, if we’re being fair, that’s not conclusive evidence of AI being useful; it could just be that they had more employees than they needed.
My point is more that I’m not sure we’d see an obvious sign that AI was changing the market yet.
Elon Musk, the apparent thought leader of the tech sector and mover of markets, claims we will be in a post-scarcity AI-fuelled utopia by 2036. Since his words move the market, clearly the market heeds his words.
In that context, it seems quite modest to expect obvious material gains from using AI by now. When the car was invented, you could prove its utility immediately by getting between to places faster than ever before. When space flight was invented, you could prove its utility by relaying messages around the planet. When insulin were invented, you could prove its utility by curing people bed-ridden awaiting death.
My point is, real paradigm-shifting inventions demonstrate how they’ll do that right away, in an undeniable way. So, AI is either not a paradigm shifting technology, or its not done yet and people are buying a half-baked product.
Elon Musk is an idiot, and you’ve already noted that the market doesn’t track reality.
The paradigm shifting invention was the transformer (the T in GPT). If you’ll forgive a shitty analogy, it’s like someone invented a microscope and you’re asking why we don’t yet have insulin. Not having insulin doesn’t make the microscope useless.
As far as these things go, AI is improving at a breakneck speed-- hence why so many people in the field are begging for a pause in development. We don’t really understand why this technology works as well as if does, and that has a lot of people worried that we’re going to do something dangerous without understanding what we did.
Your example is another one that illustrates my point. When they invented the microscope, they could instantly demonstrate its utility in it’s ability to observe previously invisibly tiny things. The following inventions that enabled are great, but the microscope itself was great, too, and all could see why.
AI is almost all hype. When anyone asks what it can do that was impossible or too difficult before, people point to what they think it will do, yourself included.
So, again, what previously intractable problem does AI solve? Please do not include answers of problems you think it might one day solve. Like the microscope can immediately let you see tiny things, what does the AI let you do that was impossible before? Bonus points if what it does is worth spending a planet’s worth of resources on.
I assure you that 400 some odd years ago, most people would not have grasped the utility in the microscope. Just like many people today don’t understand what the transformer has done for machine learning.