it's real in much the same way the railroad boom was real (rather than tulip mania, say).

But LLMs are also not remotely worth the level of valuations and investment we're seeing, and that is a bubble that will pop. "Useful" and "a bubble" can both be true.

Many other types of AI systems have been in production use for years but command nothing like this kind of manic investment.

“I can cite several dozen very specific examples in the last 2-3 weeks where it saved me, or my team, quite a bit of time.”

Please do, if you can. Because most time I’ve tried to use LLMs for work the error rate ends up costing me MORE time than I would have spent without, and most AI boosters are short on specifics. We just had a presentation at my job on how we all need to be using AI with no case studies of how it’s actually been useful so far.

I'll tag you in a few days with this project I'm working on. VERY much not a big deal. But way beyond my capabilities. I've been using Cgpt to help build my new portfolio site. During this, I have found it is grossly object blind to its own errors. First drafts are always cool, way beyond anything I could do or even afford to pay someone for. But I'll find a glitch and then spend 10hrs trying to get it to track it down. It just pushes the error further down the line, but still there. The only fix was to dump that chat window and start fresh, completely rephrasing the issue and the desired resolution.

Ironically, this is more like a human than anything else. Humans are invariably unable to see their inherent personality and thinking flaws. No matter how well pointed out, how hard they are worked on, invariably they spend more time pushing the problem around and not actually solving it. We have entire industries built on this very issue, therapists, pop culture self-improvement, religions... For the last 19 days I've run into this same issue with it every single day. And spent way more time not fixing minor issues it generated than actually moving forward.

5 times it even gave me code to drop in that had spelling errors. We track the bug down and it blamed me. I copied and pasted that very code and fed it back to it to find the issue and then deny it wrote that error. Talk about a freakishly human thing to do.

I've used it now for 2yrs to help with art projects. It's far better for that than almost every human I know. With the correct personality framework, it ends up being incredibly useful as a sort of partner in the project.

I do think there's a lot it cannot do, yet. For specific tasks it is better than many humans can be. And I think, given the resources being tossed at it, this is going to rework most all of human culture/industry/interaction. But if it already has human flaws built into it, I suspect that those will grow in a similar way.

I'm right there with you. The increased productivity is staggering when you know how to write the prompts.
1. Pretend you're writing a legal document or contract - say the things that seem obvious and be painfully precise.
2. use the LLM to eliminate tedious tasks entirely.
3. treat it like a smart junior team member you're collaborating with - give it the shape of what you expect the result to be.

Using these rules, what used to take 3 days can be accomplished in 3 hours.

Nobody is questioning the practical utility, the problems are all fundamentally about economics. Unless someone makes breakthroughs that can at scale generate ROI, you're going to reach a threshold where there's not enough capital in the market to sustain the ongoing investment while also simultaneously starving investment in other industries.

Obviously the investors know what they're doing right, that's probably what everyone assumes at this stage 😀

interesting anedoctal evidence!

Now, how about we get serious and publish/wait for some (at least potentially) unbiased study/research on that?

Because I haven't seen any. All I've seen are the likes of this one, negative about Centaur:

circumstances.run/@davidgerard…

David Gerard (@davidgerard@circumstances.run)

Attached: 1 image We simulated the human mind with a chatbot. It didn’t work not advocating data fraud! technically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlW-jTjhGXo&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video https://pivottoai.libsyn.

^{GSV Sleeper Service}

largely agreed, but given the literal trillions we’re spending I feel the bar for this not being a financial bubble is much higher than mere existence of utility.

After the dust settles, will we have useful LLMs? Yes. Will most AI investors have lost their shirts? Also yes.

Bad news "subprime housing bubble doomers". I've found homes incredibly useful and reduce life on street (and/or make people much happier of their conditions).

This is NOTHING like previous overleveraged financing and not REMOTELY like a true bubble because people live in houses and banks won't yank them.

If you find this to be uncomfortable, sorry, but lessons have to be learned.
@codinghorror

I heard a podcast recently (ProfG I think) predicting the $$$ bubble will pop, but the utility will remain.

A good analogy is PCs. Originally the 1980s PC built many fortunes (remember Gateway 2000?) but it eventually became a low-margin commodity.

I'll stop calling it a bubble when core functionality stops being neglected for shoehorning into everything no matter how hard one tries to actively avoid it as justification for circular investments.

As much as I'm sceptical of anyone saying it actually improves their ability to do X task with Y amount of people, websites didn't die when the dotcom bubble burst and neither did cryptocurrencies. They just got relegated to the tasks they were actually useful for after enough blood was spilled to write the regulations with it. All of my complaints with using LLMs for things can be resolved without killing it off entirely.

Lately my issue is more with the zero sum game nature of it. it'd be difficult now, but I could've easily got along without internet when that bubble burst. I got along just fine each time cryotocurrencies went bust. With what people are reducing a the two-letter marketing phrase of half a century ago is something I'm constantly having to actively avoid at basically every step, and even then there's very likely personal data of mine that I cannot prevent from being fed into training data no mater how loudly and how explicitly I state that I DO NOT consent.

If it's so useful, I don't need to be cautious about my operating system, the tools I use, where I host my projects, what configuration I have set for everything down that pipeline, and risk remaining in a perpetual state of unemployment if I don't change the workflow I've had for over a decade so that at every one of those steps my hand is forced further and further away from the vision I as the creator of said projects had in mind and more towards tweaking a system I never asked to become the entirety of my work. If it's so useful, its own merits will have me curious and I'll actually take the plunge of my own volition.

But how it's done now, how pervasive and inescapable it's becoming, how stigmatised wanting to perfect a craft with your own two hands at every step of the way is becoming, it's less reminiscent of a revolutionary paradigm shift and more reminiscent of the cult I left when I entered adulthood.

there is a bubble because there is no way these AI companies will be profitable. The dotcom bubble burst bot because the internet wasn't useful (it was) but because all the dotcom companies were unprofitable.

Investors expect exponential growth, but there is no way for openAI to grow any further, and it's difficult for them to charge any more money from customers. AI models are too easy to replicate by competitors, so there is no lockin, costomers can go to competitors any time.