alt Hacker NewsAI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. The only reading on the crystal ball is if US companies fail, China will take the lead by leaps and bounds, so the only solution is to keep pushing the cart until the wheels come off or we all cross the finish line, together.
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> absolutely no way to stop it.
Unless if they take down the flat rate subs and you have to pay api prices, usage will drop a lot. Right now I freelance using gpt, if I had to pay api prices I'd probably lose 50% of the income, if not more, with the ~40% tax on top I might as well spend my time doing something else
it's a bit unfair to say this is the only thing that can happen. we can just as easily assume in like over a few years, US leadership identifies that AI is an arms race, and continuing down this path leads is going to lead to a zero-sum-game. and so instead of just mindlessly pushing the cart forever, we see government intervention
Just like every AI cycle that came before. At every cycle, we get a new tool. But we also get an extended "AI Winter" where investment dries up. This has been happening since the 1980s, we just keep redefining what "AI" is. At every cycle we move the line a bit; at one point voice recognition was firmly in the AI camp(and before that, science fiction). Now we have a machine that can do that in our pockets and nobody cares.
Does anyone remember expert systems?
Yup. If there is a crash, those with cash and understanding will clean up. AI is eating the world, period.
There is "absolutely no way to stop" the thing that requires hundreds of billions of dollars of cash injected every year just to avoid falling over?
I didn't know there is a finish line.
However, who will pay for the very expensive training if the ROI isn't there? Absent government subsidization, then likely the frontier models will be sold off to the hyperscalers by the bankruptcy administrators to wring a few more dollars out of them as they become out of date and more and more irrelevant - assuming that inference alone is profitable at a price the market is willing to pay of course, if not then yes the lights will indeed be turned off.
> AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it.
No, there's is a way to stop it. As obvious counterexample: go all Butlerian Jihad: death sentence for anyone caught "making a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's doable with a few laws and treaties. I'm not saying that's the only way it could be stopped, it's just a way it could.
I'm fucking sick of TINA, especially with arguments from vigorous assertion.
It can't 'learn' on its own. Models only get better with mountains of RnD for data, training, and lots of fine tuning.
So the moment investment dries up, models stop improving.
However, it's likely we'll get good 80/20 solutions where you get most of the performance of the then-unsustainable high end models for significantly less compute.