alt Hacker NewsI think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a piece of cake.
I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined. The people who are entering at this point are woefully unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune, when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.
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California gold rush is practically the textbook example of a mania.
Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic..
We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different".
"AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immortality or cause mass human genocide.
It is all completely rational this time.
And everyone but tech company is leveraged to the moon on selling shovels
The easy gold ran out. AI will keep developing.
Gold rush comparison is an interesting one. Much of Seattle's early economy was based on "mining the miners", especially gold rushes in the Yukon. In addition to profits to local merchants, it would distort the labor pool as people abandoned logging and left the woods to work mining claims instead.