posted in Technology
AI Bubble Teetering on the Brink as OpenAI Admits to Massive Financial Failure: A $20 billion setback.
futurism.com/future-society/ai-financial-bubble-openai-billions-failure
Replying to @eicker@lemmy.world
After the initial dot com boom and bust (remenber pets.com?) I remember being told laptops and desktops were dead and we’d all be using tablets. Metaverse, google glass, self driving vehicles real soon, theranos will transform health care, NFTs, crypto. And now AI. Its all just a repeating toilet bowl swirl of empty speculation, exactly like a casino. And not a single one of those things came to much. I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes. Maybe this time itll be different?
Replying to @kreskin@lemmy.world
The funniest part is that the dot com crash didn’t kill the internet. It killed a lot of terrible business plans. AI may follow the same script: useful tools survive, investors discover that a chatbot isn’t worth infinite money, and taxpayers get stuck with the data center power bill. The technology can be real while the valuation is pure casino. - PS: You didn’t mention the smartphone. And that’s exactly what people mainly use these days.
Replying to @eicker@lemmy.world
The thing with this bubble is that it’s all terrible business plans. We’re 4 years in and no great leap. No productivity gain. No company that’s been able to turn the tech into something that makes a profit.
Yes, the tech will survive but if nobody is prepared to pay the actual compute costs, it’s going to get abandoned.
Replying to @wewbull@feddit.uk
Exactly. And cheap open weight AI is the wildcard. If people can run capable OWAI locally for pennies, the trillion dollar moat starts looking like a very expensive puddle. AI could thrive while the companies betting on permanent scarcity discover they funded their own competition.
Replying to @eicker@lemmy.world
I’m not sure how much distillation and building on top of each others results is going on. I could see all the models freeze in development when the money leaves the segment.
A model frozen in the past has limited usefulness.
Replying to @wewbull@feddit.uk
Personally, I use older, smaller models, provided they are adequate for the task at hand. My theory is that at least 80% of companies are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Not only is that incredibly expensive, but it’s also incredibly ignorant.