Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts

Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.

the housing bubble.

ai is probably close second though.

Maybe real estate?

I think all the crypto scams, all the shitcoins, NFTs and other blockchain bullshit were much worse. At least AI companies usually don't require you to give them large sums of money, they're only after your data and absolutely fuck the environment by wasting absurd amounts of power, but they don't try to take away your life savings

Try Venice Ai, free to use, won't try to censor your topics. Still just a chat bot though (although I think it does image generation too).

If bitnet takes off, that’s very good news for everyone.

The problem isn’t AI, it’s AI that’s so intensive to host that only corporations with big datacenters can do it.

Crypto is still just as awful as it ever was IMO. Still plenty of assholes gambling investing in crypto.

Well put.

Soon, it won't be this idiotic hype cycle, but it'll be some other idiotic hype cycle. Short term investors love hype cycles.

We just don’t have to listen to the hype about it anymore.

True, it’s now in most circles just been mixed in as a commodity to trade on. Though I wish everyone would get that. There’s still plenty of idiots with .eth usernames who think there’s some new boon to be made. The only “apps” built on crypto networks were and are purely for trading crypto, I’ve never seen any real tangible benefit to society come out of it. It’s still used plenty for money laundering, but regulators are (slowly) catching up. And it’s still by far the easiest way to demonstrate what happens to unregulated markets.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

Crypto has been turned into gold by wallstreet, they bought up enough of it to jot be completely exposed, it's supply is extremely limited and will run out. Putting your money into it is no different than putting it into gold, you might catch a good moment and buy in low and get some return, but most wont.

I went to a AI conference and you can just sense how bogus it all feels. Like "Our patent pending AI system references billions of crowd-sourced data points to identify what you are craving for breakfast! Never think about breakfast again!"

And as a engineer speaking with other engineers, we all collectively shrug and just keep taking the money. I'll AI your toaster for enough money IDGAF.

That's why Nvidia is making bank right now

I'll be gone, you'll be gone.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=IBGYBG

We need to stop viewing it as artificial intelligence. The parts that are worth money are just more advanced versions of machine learning.

Being able to assimilate a few dozen textbooks and pass a bar exam is a neat parlor trick, but it is still just a parlor trick.

Unfortunately probably the biggest thing to come out of it will be the marketing aspect. If they spend enough money to train small models on our wants and likes it will give them tremendous amounts of return.

The key to using it in a financially successful manner is finding problems that fit the bill. Training costs are fairly high, quality content generation is also rather expensive. There are sticky problems around training it from non-free data. Whatever you're going to use it for either needs to have a significant enough advantage to make the cost of training /data worth it.

I still think we're eventually going to see education rise. The existing tools for small content generation adobe's use of it to fill in small areas is leaps and bounds better than the old content aware patches. We've been using it for ages for speech recognition and speech generation. From there it's relatively good at helper roles. Minor application development, copy editing, maybe some VFX generation eventually. Things where you still need a talented individual to oversee it but it can help lessen the workload.

There are lots of places where it's being used where I think it's a particularly poor fit. AI help desk chatbots, IVR scenarios, It says brain dead as the original phone trees and flow charts that we've been following for decades.

We're hitting logarithmic scaling with the model trainings. GPT-5 is going to cost 10x more than GPT-4 to train, but are people going to pay $200 / month for the gpt-5 subscription?

Not an expert so I might be wrong, but as far as I understand it, those specialised tools you describe are not even AI. It is all machine learning. Maybe to the end user it doesn't matter, but people have this idea of an intelligent machine when its more like brute force information feeding into a model system.

AI in health and medtech has been around and in the field for ages. However, two persistent challenges make roll out slow-- and they're not going anywhere because of the stakes at hand.

The first is just straight regulatory. Regulators don't have a very good or very consistent working framework to apply to to these technologies, but that's in part due to how vast the field is in terms of application. The second is somewhat related to the first but really is also very market driven, and that is the issue of explainability of outputs. Regulators generally want it of course, but also customers (i.e., doctors) don't just want predictions/detections, but want and need to understand why a model "thinks" what it does. Doing that in a way that does not itself require significant training in the data and computer science underlying the particular model and architecture is often pretty damned hard.

I think it's an enormous oversimplification to say modern AI is just "fancy signal processing" unless all inference, including that done by humans, is also just signal processing. Modern AI applies rules it is given, explicitly or by virtue of complex pattern identification, to inputs to produce outputs according to those "given" rules. Now, what no current AI can really do is synthesize new rules uncoupled from the act of pattern matching. Effectively, a priori reasoning is still out of scope for the most part, but the reality is that that simply is not necessary for an enormous portion of the value proposition of "AI" to be realized.

LLM's are not the only type of AI out there. ChatGPT appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Whose to say the next AI system wont do that as well?

The tech bros are selling, but it's the VCs that are fueling this whole thing. They're grasping for the next big thing. Mostly they don't care if any of it actually works, as long as they can pump share value and then sell before it collapses.

Techbros are the modern day equivalent to snake oil salesmen.

They they have been trying to repeat big tech rise...

But each generation is more limp dick

Uber/airbnb > crypto > ai

Set stop loss at 100%, got it 👍

What are the AI rising stocks?

Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.

Fun fact: the first online store still exists. It's Pizza Hut. They launched an experiment for online ordering in 1994. The first company to ever sell a product on the web.

'Member nfts?

I doubt anyone is downplaying that. People are just discussing how all companies are pushing A.I into products that don't need it. Idk about you but I'm tired seeing A.I advertised as a feature on every app/site when it's just a gpt wrapper.

.com websites didn't disappear after the dotcom bubble burst either. AI is definitely in a massive bubble right now, but something being in a bubble doesn't mean it's going to vanish completely. The AI companies with some substance backing them will weather the upcoming storm.

Full disclosure: I don't hate AI, but I hate that management-types are fellating themselves to the idea of it or the things than it can potentially do, rather than something that is providing them some kind of concrete benefit right now. I'm also mad at consumers for being stupid little sheep and paying a premium for anything that companies just happen to slap an "AI-powered" sticker on. It's like organic produce 2.0 - you have to have it, but we can't explain why, nor can we elaborate on what it does better than it's contemporary.

Sure, but the difference here was that all those companies were offering something different. Some had better results than others, a better ui, more accuracy in certain niches, etc. But 99% of AI companies now are all effectively reselling the OpenAI API. They aren’t making an effort to differentiate themselves at all. It’s as if Google was the only shop in town, and everyone bought all their search data an algorithms to slap their logo on. That’s just simply not sustainable at anywhere near the scale it is now. This won’t be a 3-5 year decline, it’ll be a 2 month crash.

Wrong audience for this message. Most on lemmy are still running with their fingers in their ears yelling la-la-la really loud.

Same thing happened to the Dot Com bubble. The fundamental technology has valid uses, but we're in the stage where some people are convinced it can be used for literally anything.

It will burst because no one is going to pay subscription fee for every AI gizmo every app puts in your phone. The way they make any money now is just funneling more and more vc money in exchange of AGI promise (coming soon)

The web didn't die after the dot com bubble burst. The AI bubble will burst, but a smaller niche of companies will continue to exist.

bubble after bubble after bubble after...

problem is, the amount of soap(money) that goes around to make the bubbles keeps shrinking because the bubbles are siphoning it away from the consumers.

I wonder what happens when there's no more soap left to go around?

If even 1% of their companies pay off, they make a profit.

I suspect they make a profit even when 0% pan out. They just need to find someone gullible enough to buy in at the peak, and there's a new sucker born every minute.

There is so much wrong with this...

AI is a range of technologies. So yes, you can make surveillance with it, just like you can with a computer program like a virus. But obviously not all computer programs are viruses nor exist for surveillance. What a weird generalization. AI is used extensively in medical research, so your life might literally be saved by it one day.

You're most likely talking about "Chat Control", which is a controversial EU proposal to scan either on people's devices or from provider's ends for dangerous and illegal content like CSAM. This is obviously a dystopian way to achieve that as it sacrifices literally everyone's privacy to do it, and there is plenty to be said about that without randomly dragging AI into that. You can do this scanning without AI as well, and it doesn't change anything about how dystopian it would be.

You should be using end to end regardless, and a VPN is a good investment for making your traffic harder to discern, but if Chat Control is passed to operate on the device level you are kind of boned without circumventing this software, which would potentially be outlawed or made very difficult. It's clear on it's own that Chat Control is a bad thing, you don't need some kind of conspiracy theory about 'the true purpose of AI' to see that.

Crossing fingers it bursts soon

To trust a computer it has to be correct 100% of the time, because it can't say "I don't know".

“probably 1% of the companies will stand out and become huge and will create a lot of value, or will create tremendous value for the people, for society. And I think we are just going through this kind of process.”

Baidu is huge. Sounds like good news for Baidu!

Edit>> Though if Baidu is investing in AI like all the rest, then maybe they just think they’ll be immune — in which case I’m sad again that I haven’t yet come across a CEO who calls bullshit on this nonsense.

They may just have kept their AI investments responsible—that is, not put more money into it than they can afford to lose. Keep in mind, Baidu is the Chinese equivalent of Google. They have a large, diversified business with many income streams. I expect they'll still be around after the bubble bursts.

Copium.

Probably because we'll all be dead, which also happens to be a solution to climate change.