[HN Gopher] Between the Booms: AI in Winter - Communications of ...
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Between the Booms: AI in Winter - Communications of the ACM
Author : rbanffy
Score : 42 points
Date : 2024-11-20 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cacm.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cacm.acm.org)
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's
| incredibly tedious and annoying.
|
| Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech
| knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly
| harping on about AI.
|
| Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle
| against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some
| form of moderation penalizing these shill posts that only glorify
| AI as being the future, ... the same way that not everything
| about crypto or the blockchain ended up on the FP. Seems with AI
| we're looking the other way and are OK with it?
|
| Or maybe it's me.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Nah, it's not just you.
|
| AI is really neat. I don't understand how a business model that
| makes money pops out on the other end.
|
| At least crypto cashed out on NFTs for a while.
| gopalv wrote:
| > I don't understand how a business model that makes money
| pops out on the other end
|
| Tractors and farming.
|
| By turning what is traditionally a labour intensive product
| into a capital intensive one.
|
| For now, the farmers who own tractors will beat the farmers
| who need to hire, house and retain workers (or half a dozen
| children).
|
| This goes well for quite some time, where you can have 3
| people handle acres & acres.
|
| I'll be around explaining how coffee beans can't be picked by
| a tractor or how vanilla can't be pollinated with it.
| dragontamer wrote:
| And I'll be around explaining why it's a bad idea to
| stockpile $X00,000,000 worth of Equipment in Columbia,
| where coffee grows readily.
|
| Capital intensive industries require low crime and
| geopolitical stability. Strongman politics means that
| investors who buy such equipment will simply be robbed at
| literal gunpoint by local gangs.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that,
| largely, farmers do not own their equipment. They lease it,
| and it costs a lot.
|
| Edit: Also, 3 people can handle 100 acres of land, given
| the crop. That happens today.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| depends on the crop. Strawberries? No. Wheat, yes.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Sure does. I agree. Crop-type wasn't specified.
|
| Edit: Crop-type was specified, I was incorrect.
| tartoran wrote:
| Crypto is coming back for another heist. Will probably die a
| bit once Trump finishes his term
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| good point about the business model. probably AI has more
| even the ones reaping the rewards are only 4 or 5 big corps.
|
| It seems with crypto the business "benefits" were mostly
| adversarial (winners were those doing crimes on the darknet,
| or to allow ransomware operators to get paid). The underlying
| blockchain Tech itself though failed to replace transactions
| in a database.
|
| The main value for AI today seems to be generative Tech to
| improve the quality of Deepfakes or to help everyone in
| Business write their communication with an even more
| "neutral" non-human like voice, free of any emotion, almost
| psychopathic. Like the dudes who are writing about their
| achievements on LinkedIn in 3rd person, ... Only now it's
| psychopathy enabled by the machine.
|
| Also I've seen people who, without AI are barely literate,
| are now sending emails that look like they've been penned by
| a post-doc in English literature. The result is it's becoming
| a lot harder to separate the morons, and knuckle-draggers
| from those who are worth reaching out and talking to.
|
| yes old man yelling at cloud.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I agree with you. I just don't see the AI "summer"
| happening.
| svara wrote:
| > I don't understand how a business model that makes money
| pops out on the other end.
|
| What issues do you see?
|
| I pay for ChatGPT and for cursor and to me that's money very
| well spent.
|
| I imagine tools like cursor will become common for other text
| intensive industries, like law, soon.
|
| Agreed that the hype can be over the top, but these are
| valuable productivity tools, so I have some trouble
| understanding where you're coming from.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I feel like the raw numbers kind of indicate that the
| amount of money spent on training, salary, and overhead
| doesn't add up. "We'll beat them in volume" keeps jumping
| out at me.
| tdeck wrote:
| What you're paying for ChatGPT is not likely covering their
| expenses, let alone making up their massive R&D investment.
| People paid for Sprig and Munchery too, but those companies
| went out of business. Obviously what they developed wasn't
| nearly as significant as what OpenAI has developed, but the
| question is: where will their pricing land once they need
| to turn a profit? It may well end up in a place where it's
| not worth paying ChatGPT to do most of the things it would
| be transformative for at its current price.
|
| [1]: https://www.fooddive.com/news/sprig-is-the-latest-
| meal-deliv...
|
| [2]:https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/munchery-shuts-
| down/?gucco...
| goatlover wrote:
| Question is whether these companies are profitable off the
| services they're providing, or still being propped up by
| all the VC money pouring in.
| auggierose wrote:
| It's a CACM article. Without having read this one, I'd say CACM
| articles on HN are absolutely appropriate.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| that's not really a justification in my view. The entire
| education industry is complicit in this circus. It's not just
| engineers hoping to get a payday it's academics too that are
| hoping to get funding and tenure.
|
| CACM was totally complicit in spreading the blockchain hype:
| https://cacm.acm.org/?s=blockchain
|
| That said, I'm not hating the player, people gotta eat. But I
| totally lack appreciation for the game.
| tomrod wrote:
| I've worked in the analytics space for over ten years
| building what today is called "AI" as a service or product.
| The hype seems more like pent up release for the valid
| stuff, and block chain for the tech marketer type stuff.
| swatcoder wrote:
| It's you.
|
| The AI discussions can indeed be repetitive and tiresome here,
| especially for regulars, but they already seem to be
| downweighted and clear off the front page quite fast.
|
| But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a
| genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts
| belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems
| expected.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > It's you.
|
| Not just him.
|
| > But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving
| a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the
| posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up
| seems expected.
|
| In your opinion (and admittedly others), but that doesn't
| make the overhype any less tiresome. Yes it is novel
| technology, but there's alway novel technology, and it isn't
| all in one area, but you wouldn't know it by what hits the
| front page these days.
|
| Anyway, it's useless to shake fists at the clouds. This hype
| will pass, just like all the others before it, and the
| discussion can again be proportional to the relevance of the
| topic.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I don't know about the professional professionals, but as a
| science professor, I have to wear a lot of hats, which has
| required me to gain skills in a multitude of areas outside
| my area of deep expertise.
|
| I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY.
|
| Those services help me run out scripts for data munging,
| etc etc very quickly. I don't use it for high expertise
| writing, as I find it takes more than I get back, but I do
| use it to put words on a page for more general things. If
| your deep expertise is programming, you may not use it much
| either for that. But man oh man has it magnified my output
| on the constellation of things I need to get done.
|
| What other innovation in the last decade has been this
| disruptive? Two years ago, I didn't use this. Now I do as
| part of my regular routine, and I am more valuable for it.
| So yes, there is hype, but man oh man, is the hype
| deserved. Even if AI winter started right now, the
| productivity boom from Claude level LLMs is nothing short
| of huge.
| goatlover wrote:
| Personal anecdotes on the benefits of using LLMs don't
| address complaints about tedious articles over-marketing
| AI tech. That LLMs provide benefits is well known at this
| point, it doesn't mean we can't recognize the latest hype
| cycle for what it is. There's a long list of previous
| technologies that were going to "change everything".
| exe34 wrote:
| surely it's not hype if it works?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Yes, of course, but they almost always did too. Internet.
| Mobile Phones.
|
| I think the issue is whether you think that HN posts on
| AI are basically marketing, or about sharing new advances
| with a community that needs to be kept on top of new
| advances. Some posts are from a small startup trying
| something, or from a person sharing a tool. I think these
| are generally valuable. I might benefit from a RAG, but
| won't build one from scratch. In terms of this crowd, I
| can't think of advances that in other areas that are as
| impactful as machine learning lately. Its not like
| crypto. Crypto was an interesting innovation, but one in
| which mostly sought a market instead of the a market
| seeking an innovation. There is no solid "just use a
| database" analogical response here like was the well used
| refrain to attempt at practical uses of cryptocurrency
| tech. Sure, AI companies built on selling something silly
| like "the perfect algorithm to find you a perfect date!"
| is pure hackery, but even at the current level of llm, I
| don't think we are any where near understanding its full
| potential/application. So even if we are on the brink of
| an AI winter, its in the Bahamas.
|
| Also, looking at the most popular stories with AI in the
| title over the last month show quite a varied array of
| topics. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=
| 0&prefix=fa...
|
| If HN readers feel that AI-related articles are showing
| up too much, then I'd say it would be on them to find
| articles on topics that interest them and post them to
| HN.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY.
|
| We use several tools derived from "AI research" every
| single day in our lives.
|
| They are tools and, at every cycle, we gain new tools.
| They hype is the issue.
| jchw wrote:
| > It's you.
|
| I disagree.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| My problem is the abuse of the term AI to a point where it has
| lost all meaning. I'd be all for a ban on the term in favour of
| the specific method driving the 'intelligence' as I would rule
| out some of qualifying simple because they are not capable of
| making intelligent decisions, even if they can make complex
| ones (looking at you random forest).
| jekude wrote:
| > Artificial life fizzled as a meta discipline
|
| I've wondered for a while if Artificial Life is in its own
| winter, waiting for someone to apply the lessons of scale we
| learned from neural nets.
| Animats wrote:
| We're seeing artificial life come back as non-player characters
| in video games.
| Animats wrote:
| The 1980s AI "boom" was tiny.
|
| In the 1980s, AI was a few people at Stanford, a few people at
| CMU, a few people at MIT, and a scattering of people elsewhere.
| There were maybe a half dozen startups and none of them got very
| big.
| nyrikki wrote:
| Quite incorrect, even smaller colleges like in Greeley Colorado
| had Symbolics machines and there are threads of Expert Systems
| all throughout the industry.
|
| The industry as a whole was smaller though.
|
| The word sense disambiguation problem did kill a lot of it
| pretty quickly though.
| Animats wrote:
| Threads, yes. We had one Symbolics 3600, the infamous
| refrigerator-sized personal computer, at the aerospace
| company. But it wasn't worth the trouble. Real work was done
| with Franz LISP on a VAX and then on Sun workstations.
|
| There were a lot of places that tried a bit of '80s "AI", but
| didn't accomplish much.
| nyrikki wrote:
| 2/3 of the fortune 100 companies used Expert Systems in
| their daily operations and knowledge bases survived.
|
| I don't know how that can be dismissed as nothing.
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