Technology

It's really hard to know how this will play out. The models only have to improve a bit at this point to be reliably better than humans, as which time it probably makes sense to replace humans. It seems they will probably still hallucinate but do it little enough that it's still a net gain to use them. Compute power needed to run them will surely come down.

I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but I do think they will have uses, especially in examples like radiology which he he uses as a negative case. However I'm pretty sure it will eventually be able to do the initial screening to find the 95% of cases with nothing at a rate similar to existing medical diagnostic testing and then return the other 5% back to a human to review and decide further treatment. Based on my experience with speech language models, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to tweak the models to produce mostly false positives rather than false negatives and then run it through further layers of review afterwards.

the electricity bill for each query – to power the servers and their chillers – would still make running these giant models very expensive.

This assumes there won't be radical advances in cost-effective hardware to run the queries.

AI proponents work precisely towards such advances: hardware tailored to running the best performing models, at far lower costs than current GPUs and GPU derivates.

Something like "execute in RAM" neural network accelerators, could reduce query costs by several orders of magnitude.

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.

Ironically, what the crypto bubble left behind, was a surplus of GPUs, which got repurposed for AI... and just like crypto left GPUs to move onto purpose-built ASICs and other models like PoS instead of PoW, so does AI need to leave GPUs and move onto purpose-built hardware with better models (quantized NNs are a good example).

As a tangent, we could talk about how the gaming industry has enabled a GPU industry that in turn has enabled these off-shots.

A very dumb bubble that will pop and leave companies scrambling to be certified "AI Free" to gain customers and employees

Not one of his better articles. A lot of prevaricating with very little substance or conclusions. While AI investment is most certainly a bubble, few are taking into account the technology improving. This is a bone the tech dogs aren't going to give up easily. They have a whiff of the possibility of AIG becoming a reality. Like all promising tech, the potential for long term damage is as, if not more so, catastrophic for society as the World Wide Web and social media. He's looking at this as an echo of past Silicone Valley bubbles. It so much more than that.