They remember it too. It’s why they try to keep the bubble going by jumping to the next shiny investor lure. Just a few years it was all Blockchain and NFT. One guess is that they’ll go for humanoid robots next.
Comment on Big tech has spent $155 billion on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more
athairmor@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Anyone remember the dot-com bubble?
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 3 weeks ago
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is no revelation. THEY KNOW. The play is obvious.
Not one these investors wants to risk missing out on being the next Google or FaceBook or Twitter or Amazon. They know damned well the vast majority will fail. They’re gambling on not being the one left holding the bag.
AI is here to stay, will continue to improve, and there will be a killer app, probably a dozen. My money is on life sciences, particularly medicine.
JealousJail@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
At least they‘ve wasted their money for research of what doesn‘t work instead of just building silly products as for the .com bubble.
Humanity will gain insights to the kind of AI approaches that won‘t work at least; mich faster than without all the money
Feyd@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Not really. None of what has been going on with diffusion models has been anything but hyper scaling. It’s not really making fundamental advances in technology it’s that they decided what they had at the scale they had makes convincing enough demos that the scam could start.
JealousJail@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
It has been more than just hyperscaling. First of all, the invention of transformers would likely be significantly delayed without the hype around CNNs in the first AI wave in 2014. OpenAI wouldn‘t have been founded and their early contributions (like Soft Actor-Critic RL) could have taken longer to be explored.
While I agree that the transformer architecture itself hasn‘t advanced far since 2018 apart from scaling, its success has significantly contributed to self-learning policies.
RLHF, Direct Policy Optimization, and in particular DeepSeek‘s GRPO are huge milestones for Reinforcement Learning which arguably is the most promising trajectory for actual intelligence
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Every time you think of something and don’t understand why it happens, it does good to ask about every neighboring assumption “what if not”.
Why am I saying this?
Because AGI created this way is impractical and economically useless, that’s fundamental. One can even say “elementary”.
What if they are not trying to create AGI?
What if they are not trying to make money?
What if they want a bubble burst, not fear it, and want it to be as big as the sky, so that Western economies would crumble and their surveillance systems were the only thing standing, together with other functioning machines?
From the answers depends the optimal strategy for other parties, suppose, maybe turning their Big Beautiful Bubble Burst into just another dot-com bubble, via adoption of this technology for actually useful applications, is something we should strive towards.
MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This makes the dot-com bubble look like a kiddie pool - at least those companies were trying to build actual products, while today’s AI spending is burning through more money than the GDP of most countries just to have the biggest model with no clear path to profitability beyond “trust us bro”.
wewbull@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
They’re different, and I think this one has the capability of being more devastating.
The dot-com bubble was really broad. Hundreds or thousands of companies, all without vowels in their names trying to break new ground. A wild west style gold rush. When it popped a lot of small companies went bankrupt.
This is a handful of companies with billions of capital buying GPUs from NVidia to be make the largest hungriest machine they can. All in the pursuit of being first to create “AGI”. If one of them succeeds, the others are toast and multiple 500+B dollar companies will collapse in on themselves. If none of it works, the same thing happens and it takes a large chunk out of $4T Nvidia too.
PleaseLetMeOut@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I’m honestly hoping for a repeat. Hopefully Microsoft goes down this time too, since they’re heavily into AI. Twitter, Meta and Amazon too. It’s really just the worst of the worst.