>... NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich.
is not really how it works. They are invented by inventors / scientists who think hey this would be cool.
The amount of money then invested then depends a bit on markets / vcs / hucksters
but developing neural nets say was done in accademia without much thought of markets or VCs. I do think the amount of money now being invested now is kind of crazy and a bubble and should be scaled back somehow.
The chorus of people been calling for a pause has gotten louder. I'm ready to join them. Until recently, generative AI was more of a promising novelty than a useful tool. Work theater rather than work. Sometime over the last 6 months this changed. LLMs can do real work, enough that workers and companies and governments need time to catch up to the present state of things.
The rare voice of reason. Which means it will be drowned here in minutes, and probably get flagged.
> They are built to make VCs and companies rich.
That, and the concomitant terror of incessant breathless shilling and astroturfing. These wankers make so much noise, I can't hear myself think. Which of course is on purpose. Once I get to thinking, I might not buy what they want me to.
> This isn’t sustainable.
I so hope this is true. But the market can stay drowned in propaganda longer than my patience lasts.
Making companies rich is how society functions. It’s not zero sum. LLMs aren’t going anywhere.
In 5 years LLMs are here to stay and their usage will increase and not decrease. You aren’t able to face this fact and instead hide behind slurs like shills and astrotrufers.
Bitcoin "increased" over multiple five year horizons. That doesn't mean it solves a problem or actually has a concrete use case beyond gambling, which is precisely the point of the article - that you appear to have missed.
You're absolutely right it's volatile. But people are happy to kick some money into that asset and let it bounce up and down. Something is better than nothing for this use case. If they ever want to cash out under non-rushed circumstances, well it's volatile so just wait 6-12mo for a reasonable high.
Lots of economies and industries are volatile too, or subject to volatile politics.
Parking somme $$ in bitcoin in case you have government problems is no different than shoving money into land or gold in case you have stock market problems. The return is beside the point, it could be crap for all you care. The point is at least all your assets won't go to shit at the same time. It's damn near the opposite of gambling.
People who point out the immaturity of arguments like this and the simplicity of the worldview that espouses them aren’t “spin doctors”. The author has very clearly not thought deeply about what the real issues are: authoritarian governments w/surveillance (in 3-5 years a powerful LLM literally watching every single camera and signal feed on earth will be cheap enough that it will be done), alignment (the technical and non technical aspects of this), etc. you can choose from a huge list of real problems and do what adults do which is: see the writing on the wall, remember that the world doesn’t operate with the naïveté of an undergrad who has just stumbled upon a new topic and forms all of their opinions from poorly written newspaper headlines, roll up their sleeves, and contribute real solutions.
Anyone who thinks any force on earth can stop this train is just really out of touch. It’s coming so make the best of it and contribute to making this ship land as softly as we can.
> As Lopatto points out: “Normal people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to automate every single part of their lives.“ Their biggest exposure to AI is using a tool like ChatGPT as a more verbose Google, or perhaps occasionally formatting an event itinerary. This is cool, and even useful, but at the moment it is probably less positively impactful in their lives than, say, the arrival of the iPod in the early 2000s.
If this was written in 2022 it would be half coherent. To write that paragraph with a straight face today requires an impressive amount of ignorance
Naive children unless they are simply trying to push better regulations and/or pressuring the builders to meet certain criteria that right now the law may not enforce. Data center construction is far from some evil thing it’s just that done poorly it can really screw people over. Easily should be a win win
the tragedy in this is the people who control the money - VCs etc - and people who ask for money are all from the same backgrounds - typically white & Ivy educated. Groupthink.
hence it's a vicious self-deluding bubble that has massive reinforcement. likewise the talent/capital that could be going to useful impactful opportunities in society doesn't.
hence we get money & labor being pumped into non-problems and solutions seeking problems like LLMs and the massive propaganda going into it as if the propaganda is going to cause behavior change.
which is why diversity of thought, experiences, culture is very important.
This critique reads to me like "capitalists should have asked anti-capitalists about whether or not to do capitalism". This is either going to get resolved through the political process as is proper and good, or else our politics is broken and it will be resolved through older and less peaceful means.
This is just plain vapid anti-intellectualism. Apply that same mentality to literally any other field and people would be rightfully horrified or ridiculing him.
Here are other "Cal Newportisms" to prove a point.
- "Nobody cares about which bone is the hyoid bone."
- "Who cares what happens when you slam two atoms together at high speed? Nobody was asking for this."
- "Normal people aren't running around trying to prove things mathematically."
I think this and Lopatto's article are insightful and worth repeating... But they're missing the mark on genAI. GenAI is most certainly something wanted by the heavily-moneyed customers of the surveillance-spam-slop industry (aka Silicon Valley). It's not just governments who have the money to pay for it, rather businesses do as well. And this gets right back to the concept of "what normal people want" - not as a static thing, but rather as something that can be shaped and molded.
And of course anyone involved in fraud, whether legal or illegal - and by that token anyone selling services to help fight fraud. Infosec companies are loving this period.
> Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyper-scalers earn the right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to crash the economy .
I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market. Companies that invent product generally can not predict all the uses. That’s what the free market exists for - push your product and see how people use them, get feedback and improve. I find that beautiful.
Does the author want planned RCTs to understand how they might be useful and slowly release them only every dimension of utility is confirmed? This reeks of euopilled mindset - a perverse parental kind of mindset where the state decides how products may be used.
The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted. Who knew NVIDIA might be used for LLMs when they first started producing chips for gaming?
The author (I assume) is feeling some latent anxiety over the extreme speed in which things are progressing. They are grieving by finding reasons to stall this progress by falsely claiming that people don’t care about LLMs until there is confirmed proof that LLMs can help them improve their lives.
But this is fundamentally a childish mindset, and flat out wrong. People do care - there are always enthusiasts who are top of the game and who the broader public follow.
> I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market.
I don’t want to be snarky but your line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products should enter market.
> The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted.
Unpredictability is a very good argument for slowing down data center construction and AI deployments until the tech can pay for itself.
Now all "order effects" are heavily subsidized with no end in sight, and they needlessly drain too much precious capital out of the rest of the economy. When the "effects" come slower, we'll have a better chance of evaluating them without exposing the economy to the excessive drain and risk it's subjected now.
If you remove the hype and exaggerations, the whole show looks like just another market bubble for extracting money via losing ventures in a negative-sum game.
Yes. As if there is some dichotomy where the evil out of touch Silicon Valley are making a terrible misjudgement of what society “wants”. They have built a powerful technology with enormous economic and geopolitical implications and the author thinks they shouldn’t have because “people didn’t ask for this”. People don’t ask for anything they don’t understand: electricity, the internet, the steam engine — all of them were strange and new and scary and “no one” (in terms of people on the street) asked for them.
>... NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich.
is not really how it works. They are invented by inventors / scientists who think hey this would be cool.
The amount of money then invested then depends a bit on markets / vcs / hucksters but developing neural nets say was done in accademia without much thought of markets or VCs. I do think the amount of money now being invested now is kind of crazy and a bubble and should be scaled back somehow.
The chorus of people been calling for a pause has gotten louder. I'm ready to join them. Until recently, generative AI was more of a promising novelty than a useful tool. Work theater rather than work. Sometime over the last 6 months this changed. LLMs can do real work, enough that workers and companies and governments need time to catch up to the present state of things.
The rare voice of reason. Which means it will be drowned here in minutes, and probably get flagged.
> They are built to make VCs and companies rich.
That, and the concomitant terror of incessant breathless shilling and astroturfing. These wankers make so much noise, I can't hear myself think. Which of course is on purpose. Once I get to thinking, I might not buy what they want me to.
> This isn’t sustainable.
I so hope this is true. But the market can stay drowned in propaganda longer than my patience lasts.
Wishful thinking and you sound flat out scared.
Making companies rich is how society functions. It’s not zero sum. LLMs aren’t going anywhere.
In 5 years LLMs are here to stay and their usage will increase and not decrease. You aren’t able to face this fact and instead hide behind slurs like shills and astrotrufers.
> Wishful thinking and you sound flat out scared.
The spin doctor's favorite move: Make your opponents look like they're irrational.
If you think so: let’s have a bet. Do you think LLMs will increase or decrease in 5 years? You can make me look stupid in 5 years
Why wait?
Bitcoin "increased" over multiple five year horizons. That doesn't mean it solves a problem or actually has a concrete use case beyond gambling, which is precisely the point of the article - that you appear to have missed.
>That doesn't mean it solves a problem or actually has a concrete use case beyond gambling
The ability to move funds without government authorization serves as a valuable hedge to many.
The asset is too volatile to do that while guaranteeing preservation of value.
No matter. Miss me with these 3 month old LLM accounts shilling the latest tech snake oil.
You're absolutely right it's volatile. But people are happy to kick some money into that asset and let it bounce up and down. Something is better than nothing for this use case. If they ever want to cash out under non-rushed circumstances, well it's volatile so just wait 6-12mo for a reasonable high.
Lots of economies and industries are volatile too, or subject to volatile politics.
> You're absolutely right
This got a smirk out of me.
What you describe is paramount to gambling.
>What you describe is paramount to gambling.
Lolwut? What are you talking about?
Parking somme $$ in bitcoin in case you have government problems is no different than shoving money into land or gold in case you have stock market problems. The return is beside the point, it could be crap for all you care. The point is at least all your assets won't go to shit at the same time. It's damn near the opposite of gambling.
People who point out the immaturity of arguments like this and the simplicity of the worldview that espouses them aren’t “spin doctors”. The author has very clearly not thought deeply about what the real issues are: authoritarian governments w/surveillance (in 3-5 years a powerful LLM literally watching every single camera and signal feed on earth will be cheap enough that it will be done), alignment (the technical and non technical aspects of this), etc. you can choose from a huge list of real problems and do what adults do which is: see the writing on the wall, remember that the world doesn’t operate with the naïveté of an undergrad who has just stumbled upon a new topic and forms all of their opinions from poorly written newspaper headlines, roll up their sleeves, and contribute real solutions.
Anyone who thinks any force on earth can stop this train is just really out of touch. It’s coming so make the best of it and contribute to making this ship land as softly as we can.
> As Lopatto points out: “Normal people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to automate every single part of their lives.“ Their biggest exposure to AI is using a tool like ChatGPT as a more verbose Google, or perhaps occasionally formatting an event itinerary. This is cool, and even useful, but at the moment it is probably less positively impactful in their lives than, say, the arrival of the iPod in the early 2000s.
If this was written in 2022 it would be half coherent. To write that paragraph with a straight face today requires an impressive amount of ignorance
Is the movement to pause or halt datacenter construction filled with naïve children or sleeve-roller-uppers?
Naive children unless they are simply trying to push better regulations and/or pressuring the builders to meet certain criteria that right now the law may not enforce. Data center construction is far from some evil thing it’s just that done poorly it can really screw people over. Easily should be a win win
the tragedy in this is the people who control the money - VCs etc - and people who ask for money are all from the same backgrounds - typically white & Ivy educated. Groupthink.
hence it's a vicious self-deluding bubble that has massive reinforcement. likewise the talent/capital that could be going to useful impactful opportunities in society doesn't.
hence we get money & labor being pumped into non-problems and solutions seeking problems like LLMs and the massive propaganda going into it as if the propaganda is going to cause behavior change.
which is why diversity of thought, experiences, culture is very important.
This critique reads to me like "capitalists should have asked anti-capitalists about whether or not to do capitalism". This is either going to get resolved through the political process as is proper and good, or else our politics is broken and it will be resolved through older and less peaceful means.
This is quite solvable through the normal market process.
This is just plain vapid anti-intellectualism. Apply that same mentality to literally any other field and people would be rightfully horrified or ridiculing him.
Here are other "Cal Newportisms" to prove a point. - "Nobody cares about which bone is the hyoid bone." - "Who cares what happens when you slam two atoms together at high speed? Nobody was asking for this." - "Normal people aren't running around trying to prove things mathematically."
[dead]
I think this and Lopatto's article are insightful and worth repeating... But they're missing the mark on genAI. GenAI is most certainly something wanted by the heavily-moneyed customers of the surveillance-spam-slop industry (aka Silicon Valley). It's not just governments who have the money to pay for it, rather businesses do as well. And this gets right back to the concept of "what normal people want" - not as a static thing, but rather as something that can be shaped and molded.
And of course anyone involved in fraud, whether legal or illegal - and by that token anyone selling services to help fight fraud. Infosec companies are loving this period.
> Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyper-scalers earn the right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to crash the economy .
I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market. Companies that invent product generally can not predict all the uses. That’s what the free market exists for - push your product and see how people use them, get feedback and improve. I find that beautiful.
Does the author want planned RCTs to understand how they might be useful and slowly release them only every dimension of utility is confirmed? This reeks of euopilled mindset - a perverse parental kind of mindset where the state decides how products may be used.
The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted. Who knew NVIDIA might be used for LLMs when they first started producing chips for gaming?
The author (I assume) is feeling some latent anxiety over the extreme speed in which things are progressing. They are grieving by finding reasons to stall this progress by falsely claiming that people don’t care about LLMs until there is confirmed proof that LLMs can help them improve their lives.
But this is fundamentally a childish mindset, and flat out wrong. People do care - there are always enthusiasts who are top of the game and who the broader public follow.
> I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market.
I don’t want to be snarky but your line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products should enter market.
> The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted.
Unpredictability is a very good argument for slowing down data center construction and AI deployments until the tech can pay for itself.
Now all "order effects" are heavily subsidized with no end in sight, and they needlessly drain too much precious capital out of the rest of the economy. When the "effects" come slower, we'll have a better chance of evaluating them without exposing the economy to the excessive drain and risk it's subjected now.
If you remove the hype and exaggerations, the whole show looks like just another market bubble for extracting money via losing ventures in a negative-sum game.
Yes. As if there is some dichotomy where the evil out of touch Silicon Valley are making a terrible misjudgement of what society “wants”. They have built a powerful technology with enormous economic and geopolitical implications and the author thinks they shouldn’t have because “people didn’t ask for this”. People don’t ask for anything they don’t understand: electricity, the internet, the steam engine — all of them were strange and new and scary and “no one” (in terms of people on the street) asked for them.
[dead]