the writer Nina Illingworth, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and @[email protected]):
Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don’t care if AI doesn’t work.
They really don’t. They’re pot-committed; these dudes aren’t tech pioneers, they’re money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it’s literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it’s not real and they don’t care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.
The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don’t know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it’s total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.
Particularly in the media, it’s all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.
the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism
That’s the exact opposite of a bubble, then. A bubble is when the valuation of some thing grows much faster than the utility it provides.
Yea sure maybe we’re still in the early stages with this stuff. We have gotten quite a bit further from back when the funny neural network was seeing and generating dog noses everywhere.
The reason it’s a bubble is because hypemongers like yourself are treating this tech like a literal miracle and serial grifters shoehorning it into everything like it’s the new money. Who wants shoelaces when you can have AI shoelaces, the shoelaces with AI! Formerly known as the blockchain shoelaces.
There’s a difference between a technology being a bubble and companies trying to use buzzwords to market goods.
Yes, 90% of the companies trying to capitalize on AI are going to go bust within the decade. But that’s because 90% of all companies don’t last 10 years.
The underlying technology will continue to be advancing rapidly though, and in world changing ways.
In fact, one of the biggest reasons why most current AI companies are doomed is because the tech is going to be advancing so quickly that they are building themselves into obsolescence sitting atop such quickly changing foundations.
Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI - these guys aren’t going anywhere and are going to be continuing to make bank.
People repackaging up their products with a thin veneer of specialization are the ones that are screwed.
But this is again no different from pretty much every trend in history. Would you consider social media to have been a bubble because there were companies that entirely depended on theming your MySpace page or built upon Facebook marketplace that went out of business after short lived success?
Tulip mania overvalued something that didn’t have much underlying value. Just like blockchain cryptocurrencies.
AI isn’t that. The other month our company produced in a few weeks for less than a thousand bucks a project that kept being put off as it would have taken around a year of work at tens of thousands of dollars additional investment. And the end product was significantly better than we’d have expected from the manual process. There’s an inherent value in the core product of today’s generative AI even if the bottom feeders that circle every trend are similarly present trying to catch up scraps from unsuspecting marks.