Th AI/LLM race is absolutely insane
Posted by No-Underscore_s@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 141 comments
Just look at the past 3 months. We’ve had so many ups and downs in various areas of the field. The research, the business side, consumer side etc.
Now 6 months: Qwen coder, GLM models, new grok models, then recently nanobanana, with gpt 5 before it, then they dropped an improved codex, meanwhile across the board independent services are providing api access to some models too heavy to be hosted locally. Every day a new deal about ai is being made. Where is this all even heading to? Are we just waiting to watch the bubble blow up? Or are LLMs just going to be another thing before the next thing ?
Companies pooring billions up billions into this whole race,
Every other day something new drop, new model, new techniques, new way lf increasing tps, etc.
We’re really witnessing something crazy.
What part of this whole picture are you? Trying to make a business out of it ? Personal usage ?
RRO-19@reddit
It's wild how fast things are moving. Models that were SOTA 6 months ago are now considered basic. Makes it hard to plan anything long-term when the landscape shifts this quickly.
No-Underscore_s@reddit (OP)
Yep. Started building aN ETL with a colleague 4-5 months ago and by the time we were done the models we had been using to test were kinda obsolete, new models came out and even cheaper.
Catching up even for industry insiders must be hell
atineiatte@reddit
The market is still fixated on chatbots when the real magic is in vision-language modeling. Every firm with security cameras attached to a DVR should be taking notes
No-Underscore_s@reddit (OP)
Interesting take. Chat bots are the most natural exchange interface
beedunc@reddit
These ARE the good old days.
Enjoy it while it lasts. 😊
Downtown-Pear-6509@reddit
i agree. i tell my subordinates to enjoy ai coding. these are the golden days. in 5yrs time it'll be too different to be the golden days of ai.
whomever has the best ai wins the world. period
jikilan_@reddit
No, u r wrong , whichever country has the best AI will get its own country destroyed /s
PykeAtBanquet@reddit
Well I can see it becoming the rods weapon test grounds
ParamedicAble225@reddit
i remember when I was a kid and my mom and dad would talk about how things were so much different when they were younger before phones and computers.
im 26 and ive already watched the world change drastically (2006 is when it seemed to really start). it went from phone and computers being a cool thing to the expected appendage.
The next era is serious AI influence/control, and everyone is going to become a piece. We will have more freedom in virtual ways to distract from what we lost, but way less animal freedom. Individuality is being reframed. You don't need to control people when they think what they think is them.
Instead of being something you carve out for yourself, it’s something you’re “given” through curated options and identity packages. It’s like mass customization of personality.
The scary part is people won’t resist because the system works best when they feel free. Its already started.
llmentry@reddit
Pffft ... you've mostly only lived the boring bits :) The rise of personal computers, programming languages, Moore's law in action, the mouse and GUIs, the internet and email, GPS, mobile telephony ... wow. It was a heck of a technological ride, and all of that happened pre 2006. Since then, there's been the iPhone* and now LLMs, and everything else has been evolutionary, not revolutionary.
LLMs are big, though, which is why I and probably a whole lot of fellow Gen X'ers feel like we're kids in a candy shop. We've not seen anything this revolutionary for a very long time.
*Honestly, my Palm Pilot did a lot that the iPhone did interface-wise back in the late 90s. But, hey, gotta give you something other than LLMs :)
a_beautiful_rhind@reddit
Faster internet and everyone getting phones was the big change. Also social media along side it.
I'm still doing the same stuff as in 99-2000, albeit faster. Beyond this, there was the relatively recent un-freeing of the internet and pervasive surveillance. They seem to think it's serious business now.
The "smartphone" is just a better PDA with calls. Literally just a shrunken laptop from, as you said, evolution. The slower/bulkier gear from that time essentially did most of what modern stuff does.
Getting access to videos and normies living online was the part that made me go; "ok, things are different now". LLMs still don't feel like that, maybe once it hits mass adoption and get incorporated into everything I'll sing a different tune.
llmentry@reddit
I guess everyone's experience is different, but LLMs have made so much more possible for me. Needing to write some custom software urgently, and being able to vibe code, bugfix and test a 1500 line app in an afternoon -- that's mind-blowing to me. And that's just one example. Working with an LLM, I can do so much more, so much more quickly, than ever before -- and I'm still learning. It feels like a whole new world.
(Also, it's freaking nuts that I can have a deep philosophical conversation with a computer. I cannot get over that. It's something I dreamt of as a kid, was still the realm of sci-fi only five years go, and now I can do that with a model I run locally.)
PykeAtBanquet@reddit
Also ruined a generation of graduates who are going to go through the most of the exams by outsourcing the thought process to LLMs.
unrulywind@reddit
I had a serial cable for my 1997 startac phone that connected it to the Casio pocket PC that ran Windows CE. It had the full MS office including Outlook and Excel.
I lived through the changes from putting automation in factories. I remember adding actuators to valves and being asked what will the operator do? I would say over half of factory labor disappeared. AI will be similar to that, but with higher level operators and knowledge workers. Think drivers, equipment operators, but also accountants, graphic designers, doctors, lawyers, anyone who just knows things. A huge bunch of other jobs will be created for people who can run these systems, and are creative. It is just another wave of the same automation.
lemondrops9@reddit
omg this brings me back to making parallel cables to network my computers.
AlwaysLateToThaParty@reddit
this screams ai, right?
Blizado@reddit
You need to touch more grass instead of your keyboard keys for LLM input. ;)
ParamedicAble225@reddit
the line blurs everyday
RemarkableGuidance44@reddit
Cant even use your brain. lol
ParamedicAble225@reddit
if you understood my point, it would make sense.
Beestinge@reddit
Structured words and code online doesn't give you more freedom. You are watched and turned into data more efficiently, and having less and less freedom online. You can do more stuff virtually, but that might as well be me cursing the lord while I get what I want in heaven.
ChristmasTreez@reddit
The entertainment and news feed algorithms learn what users like and then recommend more of the same, keeping them in their own bubble
alex_bit_@reddit
It is not going to be free forever.
squareOfTwo@reddit
"boom"
LongRelativeOfYours@reddit
Anticipiate extinction of life on earth as we know it before our lifetime.
lemondrops9@reddit
The bubble will burst one day, its not a if but when.
-p-e-w-@reddit
UBS forecasts that half a trillion dollars will be invested in AI in 2026 alone, with projected growth of 60% per year.
If this is a hype, it sure is a big one.
No-Underscore_s@reddit (OP)
What’s even the end goal? To have the best models? More marketshare? More data or power ?
Every single company is heavily affected by this, independently or not. Even the small company i work for has started pivoting towards implementing of automation tools and ai.
I lurk and read a lot here to learn a lot from you guys. We’d all love to have a small portion of the half trillion
-p-e-w-@reddit
The end goal is saving money by replacing people. They all claim otherwise, but that is obviously the goal, just like it always has been with automation technologies.
Photoperiod@reddit
Yep. Displacing labor is the end goal. They wouldn't pour this much money in otherwise.
Kuarto@reddit
No one knows the goal. Just another rat race
-p-e-w-@reddit
When hundreds of billions of dollars flow into a technology, I can guarantee that investors DO know what their goal is, and I can guarantee that the goal is making even more money.
Kuarto@reddit
Same was for .com bubble . Try to recall to compare
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
There is more co-ordination than people think.
Kuarto@reddit
No at all. Another .com like bubble. If you smart enough you can return your investment but a lot of investors will fail
NeverLookBothWays@reddit
Displacing labor and blocking UBI. Those who embrace AI will remain valuable until AGI is achieved, then things get a bit dicey for the future of humanity. But that said, we’re still a ways off…people will still be needed to “build and maintain these robots” for some time still
Neex@reddit
The goal is increasing the output per person. People, yourself included, always portray this as a situation where current output stays the same.
xxtherealgbhxx@reddit
They're the same thing. 10 units of work done by 10 humans or 10 units of work done by 5 humans. Units of work remains the same but output per person increases two fold.
The overarching intent being to remove the number of humans from the process and thus reduce the cost of labour, preferably to zero.
The dirty "secret" of capitalism, despite its benefits, is it relies on infinite demand to fuel infinite growth. We all know that's impossible so when demand slows or even stops, reducing cost is the only way to increase profit. That's where we are in many industries as populations start to contract and demand wanes.
So this drive for AI isn't so much about increasing productivity per se, it's about reducing or eliminating staff. The practical outcome is the same bur you're only focusing on the mechanism while others are focused on the final goal or purpose.
Neex@reddit
No, you completely missed my point.
I like the analogy you built, let’s continue to use that.
You think society is moving towards 10 units of work done by 5 instead of 10 people.
That’s not how technological advancements represent themselves in the economy.
Instead, we now expect 20 units of work done by 10 people.
We don’t sit at a constant output and think “that’s good enough, we can hire less people”. That’s not how humans work.
We want MORE.
This is how technology and the economy has interacted for over a century.
No-Underscore_s@reddit (OP)
But we need money to consume lol, how tf do we get to pay for stuff if we don’t work?
I can imagine the wage gap getting gotsed even more than it already is
HandlePrize@reddit
I am a part time AI skeptic and a part time AI evangelist and I think this is an overly reductive argument. At the end of the day the current generation of LLMs have not proven that they are THE final prophetic technology that will bring paradigmatic change and singularities. Some believe that will come, and some don't, and I'm not here to argue either side. But unless or until that has been demonstrated AI is just another technology. And the history of technology tells us if it is impactful and we learn to use it, productivity will increase. History also tells us that productivity increases can lead to disruptions to the labor market, but that human ingenuity prevails.
-p-e-w-@reddit
You’re missing the point. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world whose job is some variation of filling out forms and spreadsheets. You don’t need a “singularity” to make 99% of them obsolete.
Investors are funneling billions of dollars into AI not because they are trying to create an artificial god, but because they don’t like paying salaries.
dukesb89@reddit
There aren't though, if there were they would have been automated already
-p-e-w-@reddit
It takes time to do that. Not because LLMs aren’t good enough yet (they are), but because the industries are slow to change.
dukesb89@reddit
I'm disagreeing with your statement that there are hundreds of millions of jobs that are just form filling or spreadsheets.
SkyFeistyLlama8@reddit
This is going to backfire so badly. Those hundreds of millions of people, maybe a billion will be unemployed. What will their contribution to the economy be then?
How do billionaires expect their portfolios to grow when companies have fewer customers because there are fewer consumers in the economy? You can't have an economy of robots and AIs serving each other.
A hundred million middle class folks with nothing to lose is a terrifying force.
llmentry@reddit
Yes, some jobs become obsolete ... and then those people end up doing something else. At least, that's been the story of history so far. I mean, how many weavers do you know? Milkmen? Milkmaids? Typesetters? Lamplighters? Ice cutters? Town criers? Telegraph operators? Laundresses? Cinema projectionists?
The world is always finding ways to automate repetitive manual tasks. But, good news! We always find new repetitive and manual things for people to do instead.
-p-e-w-@reddit
That’s not how things work. LLMs will take the jobs that were invented to compensate for the loss of manual jobs. There’s no replacement coming this time. Humans will be economically worthless in the future. It won’t make sense to continue employing them even as a pretense.
llmentry@reddit
Hey, bring it on. I'm more than happy to live a life of leisure off the robots' hard work. It's not like we need jobs if everything is provided for us :)
(Ok, since you're obviously very concerned about this: there are vast arrays of jobs which cannot be replaced by LLMs. You want an LLM to fix your plumbing? Not sure that's going to end well. And there are plenty of white collar jobs that will need a human driving the LLM, even if an LLM got to the point of being remotely competent to do most of the work. Finally, unless you're envisioning some "machines take over the world and kill the humans!" nonsense, then rest assured that healthy economies require employment, and governments tend to adopt Keynesian policies when the system starts to crash (e.g. the recent pandemic). The world simply can't deal with mass-unemployment, so if LLMs really do lead to large scale job losses then we'll find things for those people to do and pay them, regardless.)
no-adz@reddit
So hypercharge your democracy, organise & activate, and make sure laws are introduced forcing the holders of the means of production to care properly for the people, not only for the god of profit.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
In econometrics it is considered that the majority of GDP-raising technology growth is due to technology that replaces workers.
freecodeio@reddit
lol the end goal is to raise the stock price and everything else is theater
Subjectobserver@reddit
Yes, humans demand yearly pay increase (amongst other things) which compounds over time, whereas ai/robots is a one time investment and can be depreciated as an asset over time. Maintenance costs might still be there but that might be peanuts. Tax deductions over these assets and reducing the maintenance expense from the income just means increase in the bottom line.
So...replacement of meat and bones with clankers.
tinycurses@reddit
Even the minimum wage workers that don't get pay increases are a target. If someone could just push a button (enter a prompt) to get a continuous stream of money, they would. Who wouldn't?
kmouratidis@reddit
Also speed. Something that takes 3+ months for a human to complete can now take minutes/hours (maybe days if you include human review, edits, etc) with AI.
mana_hoarder@reddit
I know this is the internet and everyone is cynical, but that's just not true. End goal is to save money? How boring. You think everyone with money just wants to save more money? No. There are many end goals, but I think what's driving a lot of this is simply curiosity. We have already seen that AI can do wonderful things and we want to see what more it can do. We want to see unimaginable things and the world transformed. For the better, we hope.
blazesquall@reddit
...to route all human discovery through a conversational AI, creating an impenetrable walled garden that keeps users within its ecosystem instead of sending them out to the open web. By becoming the ultimate content gatekeeper, the platform can then monetize this unprecedented control by seamlessly integrating sponsored responses and questions, transforming the very fabric of information retrieval into the most valuable advertising real estate ever conceived.
Suspicious_Demand_26@reddit
this was google search too but anyways
blazesquall@reddit
Yes, they'd been chipping away at it.. but this can be a great reset for users. What if instead of Gemini, it's ChatGPT as the front door?
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
The stated goals of the big players is more like agents than chatbots. The chatbots are a temporary thing.
blazesquall@reddit
I didn't say they wouldn't have agentic capabilities.. It's about facilitating the entire transaction and taking a percentage of the sale (Cost-Per-Acquisition or Revenue Share). The agent becomes the ultimate concierge, broker, and personal shopper, and the owner of the platform becomes the indispensable middleman for a vast portion of the digital economy.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Okay yeah we agree in that case. The reason I made that point is that I think there is too much focus on the chatbots, because agents are still pretty janky. Even the weekly SOTA agents straight from arxiv fall off a cliff a lot. But good agents are definitely coming.
keijikage@reddit
The end goal is to be able to condense the 18-65 years of time and investment it takes to "grow" a worker with specific skillsets/knowledge and condense it into the span of a few years, where the incremental cost for an additional "worker" is pennies on the dollar to the old regime and can be stood up in a year.
If you view ai in this context, then it's almost like pulling forward a portion of the next few decades of labor into today.
AnotherFuckingSheep@reddit
With AI there is no single end goal. A good AI might be able to do surprising things. It could replace labor, it could generate novel products or it might be sold for profit to consumers or governments. There has never been a product that could do ANYTHING before it was created.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
To have the best models.
Marketshare is a zero sum game and so cannot be a goal of the industry.
Data or power are literally costs not goals, the goal related to them is to have less data and power needs, not more.
YouDontSeemRight@reddit
Replace the brains Profit
anobfuscator@reddit
The goal is ASI.
wellomello@reddit
To build the technogod, to be the first to reach self improvement, to define the era, who knows.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
This is still only around 1% of global gross capital formation annually. 99% of annual investment is not AI related still.
I think it is important to make that point as I sometimes see people thinking a very substantial percentage of global investment is AI now and this is not the case.
-p-e-w-@reddit
1% of total capital IS a “very substantial” percentage, when you consider how unimaginably diverse the world economy is. It dwarfs investments into many highly visible and essential industries like automotive or aviation.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
It is not an apples to apples comparison to compare AI to cars or planes.
If you compare AI to manufacturing as a whole, AI has 1% of gross capital formation and manufacturing has more like 25% or more.
JazzlikeLeave5530@reddit
The peak of the dotcom bubble was about the same amount in today's money so that's not a very good argument...
SamBell53@reddit
What does this have to do with localllama. Please take this to r/singularity
Correct-Economist401@reddit
This sub has become the defacto LLM discussion board for the whole internet, really, top AI researchers, CTOs, etc monitor this sub.
entsnack@reddit
They monitor it for marketing opportunities not for valuable insights.
Here is a case in point. These posts are by the same person shilling their YCombinator-backed benchmark, check out how they successfully baited the geniuses in this sub by pretending "china no. 1":
• On Design Arena (a frontend coding benchmark), GPT-5 is neck-and-neck with Opus 4.1, but 10X cheaper on r/OpenAI • All of the top 15 OS models on Design Arena come from China. The best non-Chinese model is GPT OSS 120B, ranked at 16th on r/LocalLLaMA • Mistral Medium 3.1 is looking quite good. Is this why Apple wants to buy Mistral? on r/MistralAI
Correct-Economist401@reddit
I think they just monitor it for fun. Of course there's marketing and bots.
ThisGonBHard@reddit
A LOT of that were open models.
Even closed models are relevant, as points of reference and state of the industry.
This is without the rules.
No-Underscore_s@reddit (OP)
Isn’t this sub about all things llms ? I’m sure the wiki says so. Otherwise i can delete.
The aim was just to spark a discussion and get y’alls opinions.
I can delete if the post is out of place
LuozhuZhang@reddit
Haha, I really think that's the case. Remember how you used to check ai.news every day?
ZhopaRazzi@reddit
As a hobby/amateur coder who is now able to bring some of his ideas to life with 1/10th of the time thanks to LLMs, personally i think people need to learn how to use the llm tools that currently exist as it is possible we are reaching a state of diminishing returns vs. compute, unless architectures change. Extending LLM function with agents will likely provide greater impact than improving LLMs on their own in the short term.
toothpastespiders@reddit
I strongly disagree. Some of the growth is real, and impressive. But there's a huge amount of marketing, manufactured hype, and an illusion of progress at play.
There's one thing I think most people who made their own benchmarks can agree on. That the progress in theory doesn't hold up in practice.
I don't want to seem like I'm shitting on what really is some pretty amazing advances. But we're not seeing the leaps we did in the early days. A lot of what seems like progress is really just companies trying to seize the market by burning money long enough before they push up prices to earn it back.
We see tons of papers and theories on how things are going to change amazingly overnight. And they 'seem' amazing. But it's an active field. You never, ever, take a single study at face value. Even more so with fields that are working with fairly new things. You look at the early days of any field and the studies are equal parts horrifying and hilarious in how people just skipped over what we think of as obvious limitations or concerns. Because it wasn't obvious at the time. Not until people took the premise of an initial study and tried testing the individual components.
A lot of what seems like progress is just marketing. And while this subreddit isn't as bad as many of them in that sense, I've noticed it's VERY susceptible to social media marketing. I swear my eyes are going to bleed if I see "SOTA" used seriously, as if it was an objective metric or even really meant anything, one more time today.
I come off so pessimistic that I debated just deleting this. Because in the end I 'do' think that this is an amazing field, hobby, and more. But just not to the extent that you and many others feel it is.
NoleMercy05@reddit
I mean who cares about studies?
I know personally I'm producing 5x as a 30+ YOE dev.
pab_guy@reddit
It’s motivated reasoning. These people are emotionally invested in the idea that AI is a scam. There IS a bubble but it’s because of everyone building data centers at the same time, not because AI doesn’t have a shit ton of value.
RemarkableGuidance44@reddit
Only 5x.... mate I do 500x... Get Good
Defiant_Training2644@reddit
I've noticed it come down as in the tutorials and examples don't make sense or don't work 🫢
Not_your_guy_buddy42@reddit
More interesting is the currently building backlash on subs like /betteroffline e.g. how to argue with an AI booster
FullOf_Bad_Ideas@reddit
There was some backlash on it for years now, but I don't think it's necessarily building.
Ed Zitron is a doomer on AI, he can't be convinced the other way around. And it's fine to keep some haters to keep things more grounded. But he'll be hating on it in 20 years too.
Not_your_guy_buddy42@reddit
I also feel it's important to read up on the haters for the groundedness. Hoo boy nudging the algorithm of sites like reddit towards giving you a balanced diet of boosters and haters, is like spinning plates though. Never mind that. All I'm saying is I've been ~~terminally online~~ following closely for a couple years and purely anecdotally it felt like a noticeable uptick a few weeks ago.
AppealThink1733@reddit
I really want to use a glm mini and a Kimi 2v mini, I want it so much...
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Yes it would be nice to see what those companies could do if they maximised their effort at a smaller scale for a while as well as doing the big ones. The performance would drop back down as the size dropped though. Google Gemma is literally Gemini, they always say they use the same methods for both LLM product lines. However the tiny Gemma models don’t perform at Gemini Pro level. Still good though.
AppealThink1733@reddit
Well, I saw that glm and Kimi are well trained in agentic mode, that is, they follow the instructions very well.
This would be great for those with weak PCs if they made a mini Top version available to us.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Yeah this is a good point actually I didn’t think about that. These are models that have been trained extra on agentic data.
ortegaalfredo@reddit
You know what is better than glm mini? glm.
AppealThink1733@reddit
It's only good for those who have a good PC that supports it. I don't have one.😔😭
JazzlikeWorth2195@reddit
The dotcom boom all over again except its GPUs and context windows
Beestinge@reddit
Dark fiber was the last remnants. It will be nuclear power plants, other power plants, dry lakes and less freshwater.
Funny how AI saved nuclear.
marisaandherthings@reddit
Good, I wanna see nuclear be on the rise and have more people accept it
FullOf_Bad_Ideas@reddit
It's just the small quickly deployable ones that wasn't yet proven. Proper nuclear plant takes decades to build and US is short on time here.
marisaandherthings@reddit
Yea....:/
luncheroo@reddit
I often think about the last couple of years, and the local models that I started tinkering with, which were comically bad, up to today and how Qwen3 30b a3b 2507 runs on my old hardware and is better than GPT 3.5 and versions of 4.
YearnMar10@reddit
Yes it’s insane, and in the end one or two big players will survive, leading to a nice ROI for those early investors. But the majority will go bankrupt and lose all their money. Welcome to capitalism.
MSPlive@reddit
And there Prof. Lecunn :)
UnionCounty22@reddit
Saying it’s a bubble that’s going to blow up, burst, pop, what have you is just copium or some neurological tick some people seem to have. It’s like saying automobiles and airplanes are just a big hooplah. I have my horse and the state has their air balloon program. These fancy autos and airplane contraptions are just a fad! A waste of time. They won’t amount to nothing. It’s just… bizarre that people are dismissing this tech branch. As the industry says “the cat is out of the bag.”
fallingdowndizzyvr@reddit
It is a bubble that's going to pop. That's how it works. That's how every new technology comes on the scene. Airplanes was a bubble that popped. Cars was a bubble that popped. Computers was a bubble that popped. The internet was a bubble that popped.
Being a bubble and popping is part of the process. It's the consolidation afterwards that makes it a viable business long term.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Yes a lot of tech did come with a bubble because of market surprise and confused enthusiasm. A lot of tech, the majority, did not come with a bubble. It is a nuanced picture historically.
fallingdowndizzyvr@reddit
What breakthrough tech didn't come with a bubble? Not just a rev of a rev of a rev. But something truly innovative.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
The reason a lot of the media gets confused about bubbles is that they don’t make a separation between industrial cycles, which are natural cycles resulting from credit supply, capital expenditure and physical resource constraints, and actual speculative bubbles where financial valuations rose far beyond fundamental values due to speculation alone.
Because the media does not make this distinction they think that literally every cycle is a bubble.
A great example of what I mean is early semiconductors as in IC chips and transistors. They had industrial cycles but not speculative bubbles.
fallingdowndizzyvr@reddit
There absolutely was a bubble in semiconductors. There absolutely was speculation. Unless you are an old fart like me, it just all happened before you were born.
"Over the decade of the 1960s, more than 30 startup companies emerged on the southern San Francisco Peninsula..."
https://computerhistory.org/stories/spinoff-fairchild/
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
How would you separate out whether this is an industrial cycle or a speculative bubble? Bear in mind the mainstream media will call it a bubble in every case.
A significant number or startups starting and then closing is not enough because this can happen in regular industrial cycles due to regular supply and demand dynamics, as well as credit market and CAPEX changes.
fallingdowndizzyvr@reddit
That is exactly what determines a bubble. That there are a significant number of startups and then consolidation. That does not happen during regular industrial cycles. We've gone through 2 major industrial cycles in GPUs in the last few years. Before there was Nvidia and AMD. Now there is Nvidia and AMD. That's an industrial cycle.
The bubble in GPUs happened 30 years ago. Nvidia and AMD(ATI) were the survivors. Matrox, S3, 3DFX, Radius and that's all I can remember off the top of my head..... failed.
I think you might be the one confusing industrial cycles with bubbles. They are distinctly different.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
The way I see it an industrial cycle can have changes in startup numbers. Industrial cycles are not necessarily small in magnitude they can be very large. The startup numbers are a part of the dynamic system as is credit, capex etc as mentioned. For me a bubble is a speculation issue and so it is down to the activities and beliefs of speculators along with how much valuations depart from fundamental value.
I think I understand where our definitions differ now it is a semantic disagreement. This is okay because different fields use terms slightly differently.
fallingdowndizzyvr@reddit
To me it's simple. An industrial cycle is just that. A standard business cycle in a known quantity. This happens all the time. It's the standard swing of supply and demand. The number of companies involved are pretty constant. They've seen it all before and they'll see it again.
A bubble is the unknown. It's not knowing whether an opportunity is even viable let alone how big it is. That's why there's an explosion of companies. Since it's off to the races to gain market share. Which is very different from an industrial cycle. This happens when a new technology is introduced and people are still trying to figure out what to do with it. Which is distinctly different from a industrial cycle. Where people already know what to do with it, it's just that demand naturally ebbs and flows.
The introduction of a new technology leads to a bubble as what to do with that new technology is explored. Then there are subsequent industrial cycles that are just the ins and outs of business.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
There are elements of this I agree with but from my perspective looking at numbers of companies is difficult because this cannot separate out the different types of drivers of large rises in numbers and valuations of companies. I would also rather have investor expectations quantified which we can do with various financial metrics.
you_rang@reddit
Financial media generally already separates these out. Granted, the judgment calls are often subjective and vibes based but you can usually find a consensus in financial media distinguishing between cyclical and growth stocks.
Using the baseline consensus of your average financial media or institutional investor, you would then find that most (but not all) technology related speculative bubbles involve too much money chasing growth stocks with unjustifiable valuations. Oftentimes during a bubble cyclical stocks fail to benefit from this surge in valuations.
UnionCounty22@reddit
Interesting. Akin to a stock after a pop. Nice analogy.
Bite_It_You_Scum@reddit
It's pretty clear that you don't understand the process of a bubble.
What makes something a bubble isn't that it's a fad that isn't going to amount to anything. What makes it a bubble is that there's a ton of wild investment going on. It's like investors are playing a game of musical chairs where they want to be one of the last ones with a seat at the table, and so they're throwing money around at everything. The hope is that either they manage to back the right horse that turns into a new tech giant in its own right, or to have an interest in smaller innovations that get bought up by other tech giants in the consolidation that will inevitably follow the bubble.
This isn't some new thing, it's a cycle and it happens almost every time an emerging technology comes on to the scene. Just using your example, when airplanes came around, there were dozens upon dozens of manufacturers all vying for their slice of the market pie, and a lot of investors backing these companies hoping to get paid. Over the years these manufacturers merged or got bought out by bigger companies or ended up folding, which is why now there's only a handful of big companies.
Same thing happened with cars, with social media, with internet service, with cellular service. It's how these things go.
beedunc@reddit
Spot on.
People are NOT ready for what our AI world will become.
This is the first technology on earth that can actually replicate itself.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Yes although it is pretty tough even getting the most basic neural network training code from top LLMs bug-free
Beestinge@reddit
How does ChatGPT reconstitute itself?
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Almost all technology booms don’t have a bubble that bursts. The ones that do are the famous ones that get taught. So the numbers are not really there for a boom and bust to be absolutely certain as many think.
pipjoh@reddit
You can have transformative tech and bubbles. Many such cases throughout history.
gapingweasel@reddit
tbh....the fun part for me isn’t the billion-dollar model race....it’s all the random stuff people are hacking together. so interesting and weird apps, weird art projects, tools for super specific niches. feels like there is so much room for so many things...while the big guys are too busy flexing benchmarks...
FutureIsMine@reddit
The capabilities of models is getting not only better at available in smaller models. I remember when I got into AI in 2013, it was something where you could run it on a local computer and had to hand design every part of the algorithm, than in late 2021 w/GPT3 it was a game changer where you suddenly have a single model, but it was API only for a good reason and that was there was just no way to run it unless you had a whole data center. Now lets fast-forward to today and my Macbook-M1 is running so many LLMs and I demo so many LLM based projects on all these smaller LLMs do WAY more than ChatGPT ever did on launch and I remember how much of a game changer that was on launch
BearOk1647@reddit
I'm just wondering if Im being naive to be thinking this way that if societies and communities around the world all just took it upon themselves to learn about AI, and internalises the very basic concept that a chatbot is an all in one package: a digital worker, a really able secretary, a teacher of most topics, a sparring unit for ideas when your surroundings don't have the capacity, a researcher, and so much more.
I mean if everyone followed these 4 steps then in my opinion there'd be much more calmness surrounding the topic of what's going to happen:
I call it the R.I.D.E. framework (those who don't know research, identify, develop and execute...and that these procedures can be observed and practiced literally with everything in the whole universe in it's onion layers of dimensions.
Here's a few examples (Extreme generalisation)
Biology - what do our bodies do first when it contracts an illness? It researches and identifies whether it's a virus or a bacterial infection. Based on the identification the body starts to develop antibodies and eventually they execute (become active and they run the whole process again until they are able to remove the illness).
Geography - what do we do first when we move or travel to a completely new and foreign place in order to ensure our "survival"? We research and identify where can we get our basic needs (food, clothes, medicine, transportation, etc.). Once we have done so, we begin to develop our routines, paths and general life in that area (regardless are you on holidays or moved permanently), and that simultaneously is execution.
Relationships - what do we do when we crave for a partner in our lives (love, business, leisure, etc.)? We research and try to identify where we can interact with the desired types of people we are looking for. Once potential locations are identified (open offices, city library, a tapas bar, etc.) we approach and try to develop interactions with the people present. Once we have a connection with someone you can say that phase one is complete. Then it starts all over again and you get to know eachother and so on.
So, now imagine if these who are causing the majority of the population to panic didn't assume or try and predict the future based on sci-fi books and movies - what kind of a landscape would we be dealing with then?
Would it be that we all end up creating our own Conglomerates that are run by AI (with minimal human intervention), that these AI kingkongs would free us from the slavery of having to work, in order to have money, in order to be able to live and experience and interact with the surroundings as we were originally meant to?
sexytimeforwife@reddit
AI is not dot-com.
And even then...dot-com wasn't wrong, it was just faster than the economy could handle.
The difference with AI...is that it genuinely is better for the economy, because it produces economic work in itself.
I'm not talking chatbots...I'm talking agentic. That represents functional replacement of labour. This is what Robotic Process Automation has been doing for...~20 years now? I've been using that to replace labour for years...and now I don't even have to do a fraction that I used to.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Yeah the dot com crash as a recession was famously mild
ortegaalfredo@reddit
Nothing is going to pop. The Tulip fever was a bubble. Monkeys NFT were a bubble. AI is not a bubble, its more like a miracle, it works, it's here, can't pop because it's solid, just like the Internet was a false bubble, it popped just to inflate way more because it is real.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Yeah forward price to earnings ratios are key and Tulip fever etc was in another level.
ionlycreate42@reddit
This is the premise of the singularity. My personal take on it is based on the conflicting view of “power”. On one hand you have closed source providers, and open source (mostly from China. Quickly you’ll see how geopolitics mixes deeply in with the development of AI. The desire for control and power is natural in humans, and AI is the one technology that fundamentally has deep implications on who gets to reign control.
This is why you see rare earth metals, lithography, robotics, energy, all being pushed to its absolute limit, it’s all for control and power.
In my opinion, everyone here knows LLMs are unlikely to be the only technology for AI… it’s quite obvious that text is just information, when you apply vision, especially in humanoids, it’s pretty intuitive to see.
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Power is a big part of it but political analysis that focuses too much on power can under-emphasise collective growth and progress. In great power conflicts, across history, the countries take part in mutually beneficial activities all the time. Technology growth is the best example of this, but also trade (sometimes) and intellectual/academic information sharing (sometimes.)
KKuettes@reddit
Llms have still room for improvements beyond what's thinkable. For example reinforcement learning alone on llms improved their capacity from powerfully auto complete to autonomous swe (with some limits) the proof is swe bench that show improvements on that particular field. We just started optimizing workflows for llms also improving their training.
jferments@reddit
I think the next big step is big data firms and the news/entertainment industry continuing to pretend to be adversaries until they can get open source models banned under copyright law, censor and surveil the Internet in the name of "safety", and permanently consolidate control of AI in the hands of big tech and government.
LuozhuZhang@reddit
The big breakthroughs haven’t landed yet. But we’re watching AI slowly shift from infra → apps, with most of the gains now in user experience.
Spiderboyz1@reddit
We are heading towards a cyberpunk world where men coexist with machines and AI, there will also be transhumanism but all of this will be controlled by governments and corporations, it will not be possible to know what is real and what is false, this reminds me of many prophecies that I have seen in Parravicini, Baba Banga, the Bible, etc. The future of humanity does not look good
Is my opinión 💖
No_Efficiency_1144@reddit
Not sure how to explain that prophecies or people with psychic abilities are not an effective way to predict what will happen in machine learning 🤔
ortegaalfredo@reddit
The future of typewriters also do not look good. That part of humanity that insist on remain in the past will get steamrolled.
BTW +1 on Parravicini.
golmgirl@reddit
agree until the last sentence :p
Beestinge@reddit
Amusing ourselves to death.
beedunc@reddit
You understand.
Kuarto@reddit
Another bubble.
whichkey45@reddit
It seems to me that the real breakthrough is in the broad ability to interact with the computer using natural language. Combine this with available data repositories, many of which can be accessed over the network, and you have the opportunity for a wide range of potential applications. General intelligence in any human form? Not so much. We don't know how the brain works, so how are computer scientists going to replicate it with maths?