This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho should be viewed as an R&D race amongst private actors.
> The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress
There hasn't been much R&D progress, though. Sure, as another commenter pointed out, context lengths have gotten longer and chat models can interpret images now, but the industry figureheads have been pushing agents, and we're not much closer to those than we were two years ago when GPT-4 came out. Current models simply are not consistent enough to do the kind of agentic stuff that AI valuations are predicated upon, nor is there any sign that a significantly smarter GPT-5 is just around the corner. Multi-modal chat is cute, but OpenAI is burning money. They're all burning money, and they don't have a product. They imply and imply that there's something big on the horizon, but it's been years, and there just isn't a killer app yet. Their platform isn't good enough, and it's not improving in the ways it would need to in order for Godot to arrive and for agents to be feasible.
Recent results are showing exponential improvement in reasoning and dramatic decreases in the time and cost to train models. O3 now ranks 50th on code forces according to openai staff. Are you aware of all of this and still say R&D hasn’t progressed?
You can invest in building bigger and more complicated pipe structures, but until you show the field that is supposed to be irrigated, you can't say you're disrupting farming business.
In the context of Moore's law exponential growth was measured in the number of transistors per integrated circuit. This seems vigorous and straightforward.
With AI the improvements have certainly been impressive but it isn't straightforward how you can define "reasoning" to measure whether or not the reasoning is exponentially "improving".
Again: Those are incremental improvements. The valuations are based on the promise that agents are just around the corner, and we just haven't seen the kind of categorical shift in intelligence that agents would require.
I think you can simultaneously think that there is some real value being made with LLMs and also look at OpenAI losing $5B a year or thereabouts and really wonder how they're not going to run out of money.
That said, I'm learning a new sdk and I've moved 500-1k searches a month from kagi and google to llms.
By this I mean it’s a bet on what R&D might yield, current progress being some kind of signal. No one has certainty here. It’s an emergent technology and no one knows for certain how far it can be pushed.
The writer is a journalist, runs a media firm and podcasts. His job is to get attention. You get attention by being outrageous. The “AI will kill us all” take is covered by too many people, so he’s taking the “AI is doomed” path. No one is going to engage with a reasonable middle-of-the-road article. He’s got no credibility on this subject, but he knows how to turn attention into dollars. Everyone here keeps falling for it.
> a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick
because profit of this can not cover the investment in this industry
adoption of iphone/smartphone/internet brought new products, including those for reproduction and those for consumption
but generative AI is totally different with iPhone, consumers maybe willing to buy a new ai-powered iphone __just like how they bought new iPhones for every 2years before__
> The current landscape imho should be viewed as an R&D race amongst private actors
in fact, it's a CapEx race, you don't need to R&D anything (ofc you must pretent you do)
that's why it's a con
> The AI Bubble will burst “any day now”
"The canary in the coal mine to look at is when Satya Nadella or Sundar or Zuckerberg say, ‘You know that $80bn of capex I said I was going to do? I think I’m going to cut that by two-thirds.’ That’s what you need to look for."
I can’t help but be reminded of Greenspan’s remarks on the housing market in 2006 while reading this comment:
While he was chairman of the central bank through January 2006, Greenspan always denied there was a
bubble in the nationwide U.S. real estate market,
saying only that a certain number of metropolitan real estate markets could
see declines in home values because of a localized run-up in prices. That view of any real estate bubble as
a merely a local phenomenon is a condition he
termed as "froth" in congressional testimony in 2005, as well as in subsequent comments.
> This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read.
He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person.
> I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence.
> I am so very bored of having this conversation
> I don't care about this number!
> Shut the fuck up!
> This isn't the early days of shit.
> Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine.
> $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic.
> This isn’t real business! Sorry!
> He said in one of his stupid and boring blogs that
> This man is full of shit! Hey, tech media people reading this — your readers hate this shit! Stop printing it! Stop it!
> It's here where I'm going to choose to scream.
> Dario Amodei — much like Sam Altman — is a liar, a crook, a carnival barker and a charlatan, and the things he promises are equal parts ridiculous and offensive.
> Why are we humoring these oafs?
> Despite Newton's fawning praise
> Nobody talks like this! This isn’t how human beings sound! I don’t like reading it!
> Ewww.
> I'm sorry, I know I sound like a hater, and perhaps I am, but this shit doesn't impress me even a little.
> I know, I know, I'm a hater, I'm a pessimist, a cynic, but I need you to fucking listen to me: everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous
> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product
> I know this has been a rant-filled newsletter, but I'm so tired of being told to be excited about this warmed-up dogshit.
> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
> I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously.
When I read this kind of thing, it’s very apparent that this is being driven entirely by spite not insight. He’s just so angry about everything. There are 57 exclamation marks in this article!
There’s substance under the brashness, though. He’s just upset that his reason is contradicting what everyone around him is saying, struggling to cope with the dissonance. Like being gaslighted. It’s a natural reaction, but I agree, annoying to read.
Spotting bubbles and predicting they will burst at some point is not a particularly useful skill. Housing in Amsterdam was in a bubble for 37 years in the 1700s; identifying the bubble early on would have been completely pointless.
