Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and …

This guy’s one of the few and the brave actually saying publicly that AI is a bubble. I think most other public figures are scared to be proven wrong and made to look foolish. Doctorow’s not committing to the idea that AI will never have any use, but at least he’s countering a lot of the ridiculous claims the “AI Industry” is making lately.

  • @thantikEnglish
    -1•8 months ago

    The fact is, if you’re only looking at one type of AI in a bubble, sure.

    As it stands, AI has already provided a plethora of new opportunities. AI bone-rigging and animation makes these things super fast. AI audio is replicating voices, making audiobooks, games, etc that much more interesting, in places where professional voiceovers couldn’t be afforded; the vast majority of middle-management can probably now be replaced by a small (AI assisted) shell script.

    It’s not a bubble, and will drive a new future of tensor processors and optimizations in the silicon space.

    It will cool down, for sure - but it’s not a tech bubble like we’ve seen in things past.

    However: It will continue to drive separation between the haves and have-nots. There’s a new generation of people who will either adapt or die. If you can adapt, and roll AI generation into your workflow - you’re going to THRIVE. If not, you’re going to be left by the wayside.

    I’m running LLMs locally on my machine through a program called Jan. We’re not going to need warehouses worth of datacenters for this stuff. Just like we needed warehouses for a single computer back in the 70s, and have supercomputers in our pockets everywhere we go today; the same will happen with LLMs, Stable-Diffusors, etc.

    There were lots of people saying computers were “just a fad” back when I started this journey. AI is just the next thing. We don’t have AGI yet (Artificial Intelligence in the generalized sense) - but we may at some point during your lifetime.