For better or worse, AI is here to stay. Unlike NFTs, it’s actually used by ordinary people - and there’s no sign of it stopping anytime soon.
ChatGPT loses money on every query their premium subscribers submit. They lose money when people use copilot, which they resell to Microsoft. And it’s not like they’re going to make it up on volume - heavy users are significantly more costly.
This isn’t unique to ChatGPT.
Yes, it has its uses; no, it cannot continue in the way it has so far. Is it worth more than $200/month to you? Microsoft is tearing up datacenter deals. I don’t know what the future is, but this ain’t it.
ETA I think that management gets the most benefit, by far, and that’s why there’s so much talk about it. I recently needed to lead a meeting and spent some time building the deck with a LLM; took me 20 min to do something otherwise would have taken over an hour. When that is your job alongside responding to emails, it’s easy to see the draw. Of course, many of these people are in Bullshit Jobs.
I do feel that, unlike Crypto, AI (or, to drop the buzzwords, LLMs and other machine-learning based language processors and parsers) will end up having a place in the world.
As it is NOW, the AI hype train is definitely an investment bubble and it will definitely explode in a glorious fashion eventually. Taking a lot of people down with it.
But unlike Crypto, AI does – It like does things, you know? Even if I personally feel like it’s mostly only good for a toy, all my attempts to use it for anything society would deem “valuable” were frustrated, but at least I can RP with it when my friends aren’t available. It is a thing that exists and can be used.
Crypto was funny because it was literally useless. Just an incredibly wasteful techno-fetishistic speculative vehicle with precisely zero shame about being that.
As for what’s next, I think Quantum Computing might be it. That is, assuming the Tech Industry even survives the bubble’s burst in its current form. Because everyone in the industry is putting all their eggs including theoretical eggs that haven’t even been laid, and in fact there’s not even a chicken in this AI hype train. And even with AI becoming part of people’s lives, as I predict it indeed will, when the bubble does burst it might end up hitting the reset button on who is truly in charge of things.
Drag hopes that Google and the other tech giants go bankrupt, and Ask Jeeves makes a comeback
LoL. Yeah, I’m sure this electricity hype train will die any day now, too. Are people still using wheels?
I don’t think it’s going to be like that :(
