BTW (and now this has nothing to do with posting content), have you seen NVidia’s stock price / market capitalisation? I think that’s a strong point supporting the ‘hype’ point of view.
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I may be missing something, but market capitalisation = share price * number of shares, so why do you think this ratio is indicative of anything? It literally is just the inverse of the number of shares.
If I understand it correctly, it shows how much ‘the market / the world’ values Nvidia. Is it realistic that its value suddenly grew to > 20 times that of Intel, or about 15 times that of AMD? Did its profits grow so much (and are we reasonably certain that they will remain high) that if I buy a share now, I can expect income from owning a piece of Nvidia to pay back my investment in ‘reasonable time’ (say, 20 years)?
Sure, they have what seems to be the most sophisticated currently available hardware for AI purposes, but is their dominance likely to be long-lasting?
Oh, sorry for the misunderstanding - as you rightly noted that below, I did not mean that as division 
‘stock price slash market capitalsation’
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Sorry, I misunderstood your comment then. I thought the / in “stock price / market capitalisation” was the division operator.
Of course you cannot predict these things with certainty for stocks, but the market expectation seems to be in alignment with a reasonable chance of this happening. Note that when it comes to most indicators (eg various forms of P/E), it is not an outlier among tech companies. Hard to say.
In general, bubbles are almost impossible to identify when they are happening. A couple of people will always claim that something is a bubble and they will be right ex post, but the problem is that there are always some people saying things like this so it has little empirical content without some underlying methodology.
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Just an example…
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From what I understand (nothing) the above may not be true. There are suggestions that it’s very, very difficult to take the next step with “ai”. Superficially it may improve but the usefulness may not improve very quickly into the areas people are projecting it.
I have a lot of images self hosted online and have also (via goaccess) noticed the increase in crawlers. I have also just recently started using Instagram… honestly shocked by how crap it is. Mainly to connect with people interested in the stuff I do, they have asked so many times why I’m not there. It’s been nice to get in touch with people, instagram is more ‘social’ than the cold dark web
Feeding the machines is not something that worries me. I am interested in wrecking them and wrestling all power from those that operate them. It’s not very straightforward how that can/should be done though. I’m pretty certain that my actions when acting as an individual will have no impact.
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Facebook just invested 30 billion dollars in AI accelerators. In today’s dollars, that’s roughly equivalent to one Manhattan project. They are surely expecting a commensurate return on investment. They are expecting a market disruption.
The current AI tech is sure cool and useful, but I fail to foresee a market disruption. It’s no smartphone, no broadband, and no personal computer. To me, that says “bubble” like nothing else.
Nvidia is doing well, though. When there’s a goldrush, sell shovels.
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To be fair we have no idea what facebook has behind doors, same thing for OpenAI and all the other companies, we can only see what they show us. The investment might not be a waste given the info they currently have.
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You make a valid point, but betting on new technologies is an inherently risky undertaking until the outcome is realized. Even with all the data, reasonable people can disagree on the outcome — we just don’t know. Neither does Facebook, OpenAI, etc. They are just betting. It is fine as long as it’s the shareholders’ money, that’s how innovation works.
It is evident at this point that LLMs will have some benefit, but its scope and cost/benefit ratios are yet unclear. But large players (and their shareholders) consider it more risky to miss out on LLMs, the market sentiment is so much in favor of them that not entering this market would be business suicide.
As an economist, I consider myself fortunate to witness bubbles (or what I consider to be suspiciously like bubbles) as they are happening. It is one thing to read about the Dutch Tulip Mania from textbooks, and another thing to see it happen. I especially find it interesting to see how short the horizon of most people is: skeptical voices are ignored after phenomena persist for a few years, because 6 months is an eternity now and if we had something for that long then now we live in the Age of Something.
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https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
“And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us . Look at us , resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle , but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.”
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That was an entertaining read! I tad hyperbolic perhaps…
Quality rant
Here’s a good one: " …the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can’t actually deliver is highly transferable".
Wow. How many (dozens) of times did I watch that take place. Mostly in upper management and sales. All the while we had to keep things working.
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Indeed. I liked it! Good find, Tony – another one for my travel reading list.
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Oh yes
I will just keep doing my own Al thing and AI will do its (pun intended).
This kind of thing makes me want to kick the user. Do they seriously think the person on the other can’t tell it’s a bloody AI they’ve handed over to? It’s honestly insulting.
And yes, I do have to temper my views and suck it up at increasingly regular intervals… 
To get back to the actual topic, I’m pretty much disregarding the crawling, creeping and scraping going on. I upload to FB, Flickr, my website regularly without much thought for who’s looking at it/
Because I don’t really care. It’s the human connection that counts, whether it’s in person or online or over HF radio bouncing off the ionosphere with grand disregard for the Internet.
If ‘they’ use my photos to train the AI, yep, they’ve stolen a bit of my creative output, but anything the AI produces is automatically worthless anyway.
I also take pride in my photos not being ‘perfect’ - if you can see a bit of weird lens artifacts, distractions in the frame, etc, it’s all the better because AI generations don’t (often, yet) do that.
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@hatsnp Is your colleague a real person to begin with? 
I mean it in a punny manner, viz.:
- Are you working with bots? Have you met in person?
- Is this person superficial?
Speaking of puns, did anyone catch my pun? Hint: it is related to @123sg view.
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Yeah definitely a real person, although I haven’t met him in person. Some other people on my team have 
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