Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups?

• Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  “Mary-Beth… gets down on one knee will you marinade me?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know…I used AI to write this proposal. I wanted you to marry me, but lets hear the AI out. Lets submerge my body in juices, and see how tender I get.”

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• chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  My wife uses AI to write complex Excel spreadsheet formulas saving hours. She still has to double check them but it saves enormous time. My friend uses it to write proposals. Again it needs to be checked and again it saves hours of time.

  AI doesn’t replace people. It provides a productivity boost and it has been doing it for 2 years now.

  To me it’s obvious that AI is and will be really useful, but one of the great things about it is that it looks like a lot of that won’t be possible to gatekeep. Which seems like it would also mean that efforts to monetize it will fail.

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  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    People can easily self host email, file backup, etc but pay for service anyway. AI will be prohibitively expensive to self host for a very very long time.

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    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      People can easily self host email, file backup, etc but pay for service anyway

      Who pays for email? Who pays subscriptions for file backup? Why would you when you can just use another companies service that is free? Self hosting AI is increasingly viable, but that isn’t even the problem for companies hoping to make billions on it, the problem is that as soon as they try to put the squeeze on their customers they will just go somewhere else that offers the same thing. Look at what happened with Deepseek; OpenAI can’t maintain dominance.

      AI will be prohibitively expensive to self host for a very very long time.

      It already isn’t, there are tiny models that are practical for some things that will run on basically anything, and there is a lot you can do with a mid to high end graphics card. Nvidia is artificially limiting vram but that’s not going to remain the limitation for long. But even if AI running on datacenter hardware maintains a big advantage, that’s not enough for these companies to make huge profits.

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      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Who pays for email?

        That you don’t pay for gmail doesn’t mean it isn’t monetized. Google makes $220 Billion a year from ads.

        Who pays subscriptions for file backup?

        Google drive, Onedrive, and iCloud are forced down all users throats. Millions pay. A quick google says Apple makes $96 Billion a year from iCloud alone.

        the problem is that as soon as they try to put the squeeze on their customers they will just go somewhere else that offers the same thing

        If it were that easy Google wouldn’t make $350B a year. Google is just a search index and not very good.

        Look at what happened with Deepseek; OpenAI can’t maintain dominance.

        Yes, and Google displaced Yahoo. That doesn’t mean search stopped being monetized.

        Nvidia is artificially limiting vram but that’s not going to remain the limitation for long.

        It’s not VRAM, it’s ram in general. Deepseek needs ~700GB. Ram prices have been dropping about 30% every 5 years (and that’s ideal numbers. Moore’s law is dead. Current improvements are smaller than looking back 5 years). It’s about $6k to build your own Epyc for 6 tokens/sec. No average person is going to spend $6k when a service does it for $10 a month and is 10x faster. Do the math for how long it will be until $6k of ram costs $600.

        But the real killer that will keep AI out of consumer hands for forever is that it is reliant on new models to include updated information that was scraped from the Internet. If you ask Deep Seek about anything that’s happened in the past year, it can’t give any answers because the model was built with older data. So Google, Apple, Microsoft and anyone capable of indexing the entire web will always have an AI model that is updated with the latest information. Home users will be lucky to get models with information that is several years out of date. Building models requires 100x the resources as running the trained model and you need the data to train it.

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• yarr@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Asking what AI is going to do for the average person in 1-3 years is like asking what is the PC going to do for the average person in 1980.

  If you were a PC startup in 1980, this was very a relevant question, since PCs at home really didn’t take off in a big way until the web which was almost 20 years later. Look at how many PC manufacturers went out of business between 1980-2000. This is kind of my point, AI is so over-invested right now that if there are not HUGE returns in a short timeframe, there’s going to be some serious blood out there.

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  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Oh yeah, as others said many startups will fail. But you wrote as if AI does nothing like blockchain.

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    • yarr@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I won’t say AI does nothing. I’d say they do a similar amount right now. In the same way that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do a few million transactions a day, AI helps with some tasks here and there. The similarity for me is that initially both technologies were hyped as something far larger than they are right now.

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      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Extremely few people hold Bitcoin or will ever want to. Every office worker will use AI. It’s like googling on steroids.

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