<email from my mentor>

Looks like wild times all over again.  Everyone has an AI play, nine out of ten are just bullshit.  and a  dot-com-like bubble followed by a crash seems inevitable.

But I am a little bit excited about what comes  afterwards.

I heard a stock guy saying he can just tell the AI  something like "pull up the leadership bios on the top five trucking companies in Canada"  and it will just do it.

SOmeone with a working brain could really leverage a tool like that.

I think they will work out the plagiarism and the accuracy issues soon enough.
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My reply:

AI brings existential crisis for Apple, Salesforce and tech's old guard: Partner or perish - MarketWatch

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-older-tech-companies-are-playing-catch-up-in-genai-adfb2835

On am individual level, I have been using AI like mad for small tasks and it has really made me much more productive.  I've used Bing's image AI for web art and use  ChatGPT to help out with small scripts. 

As far as the economy goes, sure, there's going to be a boom and bust, yet I think there is money to be made right now.  Jen bought into a server company that has gone up 10x since we put the money in.

Right now, iPhones provide slightly more privacy than Google Android phones.  But if Apple starts using Google AI I expect that to change.  Everything Google makes contains spy-ware.

>> bubble... crash

I think this is worth a read
Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

QuoteTech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind.

QuoteBut the most important residue after the [dotcom] bubble popped was the mil­lions of young people who'd been lured into dropping out of university in order to take dotcom jobs where they got all-expenses paid crash courses in HTML, Perl, and Python. This army of technologists was unique in that they were drawn from all sorts of backgrounds – art-school dropouts, hu­manities dropouts, dropouts from earth science and bioscience programs and other disciplines that had historically been consumers of technology, not producers of it.

QuoteContrast that bubble with, say, cryptocurrency/NFTs, or the complex financial derivatives that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. These crises left behind very little reusable residue. The expensively retrained physicists whom the finance sector taught to generate wildly defective risk-hedging algorithms were not able to apply that knowledge to create successor algo­rithms that were useful. The fraud of the cryptocurrency bubble was far more pervasive than the fraud in the dotcom bubble, so much so that without the fraud, there's almost nothing left.

Followup commentary covers most of the same ground, but is also worth a read
Pluralistic: What kind of bubble is AI? (19 Dec 2023)
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/

He says he doesn't know which way AI will go, but one big difference is that the server cost of each query is very high. So even if all the IP and skilled technicians are up for grabs after the bubble pops, like in the dotcom bubble, you still need lots of VC money to just get it up and running again and serve up basic queries and eventually it has to turn a profit.

The challenge there is that AI is very good at risk-tolerant tasks (create cover art for my e-book), but that is very low-value. On the other hand, it is not very good at risk-intolerant tasks like driving cars and interpreting medical imaging on its own. Those are high value, but they require a "human in the loop" and have so far not delivered. An obvious use case would be to have a radiologist read the images and then corroborate with an AI, but that makes the process MORE expensive, not less.

So we'll see. But I think the big AI revolutions have already happened, but we just haven't seen the effects yet. I do not believe it is ChatGPT and LLMs in general, but everything that is going to come out of the AI-driven proteinomics and drug discovery and materials science.

I'm not contending that other, bigger applications of AI won't come along. I'm just saying that all the talk about ChatGPT hallucinating and the Google AI being criminally woke is a distraction. Away from the public eye, AI is making huge advances, but those advances will take time to manifest, like Marie Curie's experiments that laid the ground for a nuclear revolution that she did not live to see.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/ai-hype-invades-taco-bell-and-pizza-hut/

AI hype invades Taco Bell and Pizza Hut | Ars Technica

https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2024/07/30/using-the-term-artificial-intelligence-in-product-descriptions-reduces-purchase-intentions/

Using the term 'artificial intelligence' in product descriptions reduces purchase intentions | Washington State University

Subjectively, that seems completely true. "Lowers emotional trust" is polite speak for "Lights up hype/BS detectors"

Is AI going to pay its way? Wall Street wants tech world to show it the money

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/01/is_ai_going_to_pay/

Finally somebody is asking the question.