alt Hacker NewsThey need to be more worried about creating a viable economic model for the present AI craze. Right now there’s no clear path to making any of the present insanity a profitable endeavor. Yes NVIDIA is killing it, but with money pumped in from highly upside down sources.
Things will regulate themselves pretty quickly when the financial music stops.
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Do you mean that they need to find better ways to create value by using AI, or that they need better ways to extract value from end-users of AI?
I'd argue that "value creation" is already at a decent position considering generative AI and the usecase as "interactive search engine" alone.
Regarding "value extraction": Advertising should always be an option here, just like it was for radio, television and online content in general in the past.
Preventing smaller entities (or private persons even) from just doing their own thing and making their own models seems like the biggest difficulty long term to me (from the perspective of the "rent seeking" tech giant).
The music is just getting started. The way it is going, AI will be inevitable. Companies are CONVINCED it’s adopt AI or die, whether it is effective or not.
It's already starting to replace Google searching for many people. This is why Google (and other big tech firms) started investing in it immediately.
All they need to do is start adding in sponsored results (and the ability to purchase keywords), and AI becomes insanely profitable.
The race is to be the first to make a self-improving model (and have the infrastructure it will demand).
This is a winner-takes-all game, that stands a real chance of being the last winner-takes-all game humans will ever play. Given that, the only two choices are either throw everything you can at becoming the winner, or to sit out and hope no one wins.
The labs know that substantial losses will be had, they aren't investing in this to get a return, they are investing in it to be the winner. The losers will all be financially obliterated (and whoever sat out will be irrelevant).
I doubt they are sweating to hard though, because it seems overwhelmingly likely that most people would pay >$75/mo for LLM inference monthly (similar to cell phone costs), and at that rate without going hard on training, the models are absolute money printers.
Nvidia's biggest mistake is investing money selling shovels into prospecting firms. If not for that they'd be fine.