[HN Gopher] AI Winter Is Coming
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       AI Winter Is Coming
        
       Author : fzliu
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2024-10-11 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (leehanchung.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (leehanchung.github.io)
        
       | bluesounddirect wrote:
       | Awesome.
        
       | hu3 wrote:
       | Similar phenomenon, on a smaller scale, is happening with what I
       | call meta-cloud PaaS, which facilitates web app
       | deployments/provisioning. They usually run on top of AWS or other
       | large clouds, hence meta-cloud.
       | 
       | It started with Heroku but now it has gained VC attention in the
       | form of Next/Vercel, Laravel Cloud, Void(0), Deno Deploy and Bun-
       | yet-to-be-announced solution. I'm probably forgetting one or two.
       | 
       | Don't get me wrong, they are legit solutions. But the VC money
       | currently being poured in on influencers to push these solutions
       | make them seem much more appealing than they would be otherwise.
        
         | grokkedit wrote:
         | Heroku has been around for almost 20 years, Vercel was Zeit ~10
         | years ago, and they both have always been widespread solutions,
         | I wouldn't say that that there is hype only now
         | 
         | I cannot vouch for laravel cloud or void, since I've never used
         | them, nor I will comment on Deno/Bun since they are far more
         | recent
        
       | hackable_sand wrote:
       | Here is the thesis at the end
       | 
       | > the real producers will keep moving forward, building a more
       | capable future for AI.
       | 
       | This is one of many signal flares going up.
       | 
       | Do something or cash out of the AI space. Engineers are tired.
        
       | incognito124 wrote:
       | > That leading edge research paper is most probably someone's
       | production code.
       | 
       | Very powerful, albeit sad, statement.
        
       | jerf wrote:
       | I don't know about "Winter". The original "AI Winter" was near-
       | total devastation. But it's probably reasonable to think that
       | after the hype train of the last year or two we're due to be
       | headed into the Trough of Disillusionment for LLM-based AI
       | technologies on the standard Gartner hype cycle:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
        
       | pajeets wrote:
       | chatgpt wrapper startups are ngmi
        
       | zcw100 wrote:
       | People warning about a coming AI winter are almost as annoying as
       | people doomsaying about AGI. It's going to be somewhere in
       | between. It can be disappointing and revolutionary at the same
       | time. We had the dot-com crash and yet out of that grew some of
       | the largest corporations the world. Microsoft, Facebook, Apple,
       | Amazon, etc
        
         | threeseed wrote:
         | Every one of those companies predates the dot com bomb by quite
         | some time.
         | 
         | And AGI is science fiction with no credible plan of how to get
         | there. If you can even get everyone to agree on the same
         | definition.
         | 
         | An AI winter is something that can be measured and is factual
         | eg. the lacklustre spending on AI products and the dry up in VC
         | funding.
        
           | archgoon wrote:
           | Microsoft and Apple preceded the dot com bomb by several
           | decades. (Microsoft 1975, Apple 1976)
           | 
           | Amazon was a company that was around and survived the dot com
           | bomb (founded in 1994, roughly around the time of the
           | beginning of the bubble) [though its stock took about 7 years
           | to recover]
           | 
           | Facebook was post dot com bomb. (founded 2004)
        
         | janalsncm wrote:
         | The article is less about a winter for the field than a winter
         | for AI boosters, who will soon move on to become "experts" in
         | The Next Big Thing.
         | 
         | For people working in the field, deep learning has already
         | proven itself to be self-funding. It's the main source of
         | Google's profits. It's TikTok's algorithm. Et cetera.
        
       | i-cjw wrote:
       | > Or take Ed Thorp, who invented the option pricing model and
       | quietly traded on it for years until Black-Scholes published a
       | similar formula and won a Nobel Prize
       | 
       | Hardly quietly. Thorpe published "Beat the Market" in 1967
       | detailing his formulae, six years before Black Scholes won the
       | Nobel.
        
       | janalsncm wrote:
       | I like the distinction between producers and promoters. This is
       | why I am naturally skeptical of polished demos and people posting
       | in their real name. If you post in your real name, you are at a
       | minimum promoting yourself (generally boils down to "I am a
       | smart, employable person").
       | 
       | I wish I had a better heuristic, but the best I've found on
       | Twitter is pseudonymous users with anime profile pics. These are
       | people who don't care about boosting a product. They're possibly
       | core contributors to a lesser-known but essential python library.
       | They deeply understand a single thing very well. They don't post
       | all day _because they are busy producing_.
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | our take on this from the industry pov:
       | https://www.latent.space/p/mar-jun-2024 (there is a podcast
       | version too if u click thru)
       | 
       | broadly agree but i think predicting ai winter isnt as useful as
       | handicapping how deep and still building useful things
       | regardless.
        
       | pinkmuffinere wrote:
       | > This is how we're headed for another AI winter, just as we saw
       | with the fall of data science, crypto, and the modern data stack.
       | 
       | The fall of data science??? When did that happen? I'm not
       | squarely in the field, but I thought I would have heard about it
        
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