Ed Zitron takes an axe to the AI bubble hype:
"ChatGPT is a very successful growth product and an absolutely horrifying business. OpenAI is a banana republic that cannot function on its own, it does not resemble Uber, Amazon Web Services, or any other business in the past other than WeWork, the other company that SoftBank spent way too much money on.
"And outside of ChatGPT, there really isn't anything else."
LONG (and detailed) evisceration of the hype mongering here: wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui…
The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
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DeManiak 🇿🇦
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •the snipes are pure pleasure, BUT look at the *numbers* - there lies the Deep Magic.
How are heads not rolling for gross incompetence/neglicence??
Guess I'm not Smart MBA Man, so I can't understand 🤷♂️
(Zitron explains it nicely tho- it's all about that share price on the stock market - to keep that where it is, everybody involved has to convince everybody involved that they can keep on growing foreva - which means going balls deep in fantasies like genAI)
SysAdmin1138
in reply to DeManiak 🇿🇦 • • •The thing that gets me is there are 70ish people on the boards + CEOs of the Mag7 who are driving all of this. They're the ones in charge of the market monsters afraid of another monster immanentizing, so they have to get there first and own the market.
"This is an iPhone moment" was mentioned A LOT in the early throes of this, with the implication of not getting in on the LLM craze meant you'd be a candy-bar phone seller in an era of smartphones. That emotional message sells HARD to the people calling the shots.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to SysAdmin1138 • • •I really can't understate how much FOMO dominates in big tech leadership. The history of information technology is full of disruptive technologies.
The PC made IBM a niche player and established Microsoft's dominance.
Microsoft missed out on the web (Gates famously called the Internet a passing fad) and let Google become one of the largest tech companies.
Smartphones made Apple from a distant second place in the PC race and a company worth a fraction of Microsoft to one of the largest companies in the world.
Each one of these (and a few others, such as virtualisation / cloud) caused a big company to lose market share to a new player. Sometime catastrophically, sometimes they recovered.
The thing that absolutely terrifies the senior leadership at these companies is that there will be a new thing that will cause a big shift in the industry and they will be in the position Microsoft was on the web or smartphones, or that IBM was on commodity desktops.
These people are typically the living embodiment of the Peter Principle.
Normally, they can do a completely mediocre job and watch the line go up a bit. As long as they don't do too many really stupid things, they're fine. They're in charge of a money fountain and they just need to not spill too much. But occasionally, once or twice a decade, something comes along where they need to actually do something or the money fountain might stop working.
The problem is that they're really bad at identifying these moments. And so they leap on everything that looks as if it plausibly might be such a thing. Normally they only waste a billion or so, and wasting a billion every few years is not a problem for a company making tens of billions in profit every year.
This time, they got into an exciting echo chamber where everyone else was jumping on the same bandwagon and so the personal risk if they were the one who didn't jump and was wrong was very high. The risk (again, to the individuals, not the company) of being wrong in the same way as everyone else is much lower (who could possibly predict that pissing away all of your money on a buggy bullshit generator is a bad idea? Everyone else is doing it! It wasn't my poor management that tanked the value of the company, it was an 'industry downturn', you can tell because all of our major competitors also lost 50% of their share price overnight. Oh, and actually it isn't really a tech industry problem, it's a global recession [caused by a liquidity crunch caused by wiping out $2T in the stock market overnight]).
The last few things that were not actually disruptive technologies (mixed reality / AR / metaverse, Web 3) were similar. One company jumped so all of the others did. No one looked bad when it turned out to be mostly nonsense because no one was the outlier, they were just tracking industry trends.
The weird thing this time is quite how much people are willing to throw money at it without any revenue. It's like a massive game of chicken, except it's the economy not a car that they're going to crash.