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

[–] bamfic@lemmy.world 21 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

I am old enough to remember when the CEO of Nortel Networks got crucified by Wall Street for saying in a press conference that the telecom/internet/carrier boom was a bubble, and the fundamentals weren't there (who is going to pay for long distance anymore when calls are free over the internet? where are the carriers-- Nortel's customers-- going to get their income from?). And 4 years later Nortel ceased to exist. Cisco crashed too, though had enough TCP/IP router biz and enterprise sales to keep them alive even until today.

This all reminds me of the late 1990s internet bubble rather than the more recent crypto bubble. We'll all still be using ML models for all kinds of things more or less forever from now on, but it won't be this idiotic hype cycle and overvaluation anymore after the crash.

Shit, crypto isn't going anywhere either, it's a permanent fixture now, Wall Street bought into it and you can buy crypto ETFs from your stockbroker. We just don't have to listen to hype about it anymore.

[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 1 points 49 minutes ago

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.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

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/

[–] ulkesh@lemmy.world 1 points 42 minutes ago* (last edited 39 minutes ago)

Wow, a CEO who doesn’t buy into the hype? That’s astonishing.

I, for one, cannot wait for the bubble to burst so we can get back to some sense of sanity.

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.

AI will have its uses, and it has practical use cases such as helping people to walk or to speak or to translate in real time, etc. But we’re decades away from what all these CEOs seem to think they’re going to cash in on now. And it’ll be fun on some level watching them all be wrong.

[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 21 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

10 to 30? Yeah I think it might be a lot longer than that.

Somehow everyone keeps glossing over the fact that you have to have enormous amounts of highly curated data to feed the trainer in order to develop a model.

Curating data for general purposes is incredibly difficult. The big medical research universities have been working on it for at least a decade, and the tools they have developed, while cool, are only useful as tools too a doctor that has learned how to use them. They can speed diagnostics up, they can improve patient outcome. But they cannot replace anything in the medical setting.

The AI we have is like fancy signal processing at best

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Don't say AI when you mean AGI.

By definition AI (artificial intelligence) is any algorithm by which a computer system automatically adapts to and learns from its input. That definition also covers conventional algorithms that aren't even based on neural nets. Machine learning is a subset of that.

AGI (artifical general intelligence) is the thing you see in movies, people project into their LLM responses and what's driving this bubble. It is the final goal, and means a system being able to perform everything a human can on at least human level. Pretty much all the actual experts agree we're a far shot from such a system.

[–] BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world -1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It may be too late on this front, but don't say AI when there isn't any I to it.

Of course it could be successfully argued that humans (or at least a large amount of them) are also missing the I, and are just spitting out the words that are expected of them based on the words that have been ingrained in them.

[–] celliern@lemmy.world 4 points 56 minutes ago

This is not up to you or me : AI is an area of expertise / a scientific field with a precise definition. Large, but well defined.

[–] ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] vritrahan@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Anything can happen. We can discover time travel tomorrow. The economy cannot run on wishful thinking.

[–] lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It can! For a while. Isn't that the nature of speculation and speculative bubbles? Sure, they may pop some day, because we don't know for sure what's a bubble and what is a promising market disruption. But a bunch of people make a bunch of money until then, and that's all that matters.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 2 points 1 hour ago

Tulips all the way down..

[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago

And they will ALL deserve it.

[–] poo@lemmy.world 151 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 118 points 10 hours ago (8 children)

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

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 40 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I'm glad you didn't say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!

[–] protist@mander.xyz 4 points 4 hours ago

Bro the GME short squeeze is going to hit any day now. We're going to be millionaires bro, you just wait

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 47 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you're right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.

[–] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 21 points 7 hours ago

Yes! "AI" defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 49 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Crypto has a legitimate value, you can buy drugs with it.

[–] Graphy@lemmy.world 15 points 8 hours ago

Honestly kinda miss when the drugs I did were illegal. I used to buy weed from this online seller that was really into designer drugs. The amount of time I used to spend on Erowid just to figure out wtf I was about to take.

[–] _bcron_@lemmy.world 11 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

I'm not even understanding what AI is at this point because there's no delineation between moderately sophisticated algorithms and things that are orders of magnitude more complex.

I mean, if something like multisampling came out today we'd all know how it'd be marketed

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 8 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

AI is a ridiculous broad term these days. Everybody had been slapping the label on anything. It's kinda like saying "transportation" and it means anything between babies crawling up to wrap drive and teleportation.

[–] RarePossum@programming.dev 1 points 2 hours ago

Because most of them are AI

It's just once AI becomes useful (and not magical), we tend to stop calling it AI unless AI gets more VC money.

It's called the AI effect

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 hours ago

Technically speaking how I differentiate it is:

clever algorithm is a good heuristic
statistics on steroids is machine learning
using a transformer model is AI (for now)

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[–] confusedbytheBasics@lemm.ee 7 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Blockchain has many valuable uses. A distributed zero trust ledger is useful. Sadly the finance scammers and the digital beanie baby collectors attracted all the marketing money.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 35 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain ... which is probably the major reason corporations and politicians don't want anything to do with it.

It'd be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, secret police slush funds, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and cryptographically verifiable.

EDIT: NOTE I'm not talking about everyones transactions being in a public ledger (bad). Only enhancing the current system between businesses and orgs so it's exceptionally difficult for any of them to falsify data without the others knowing, as well as having near instant visibility and analytics of the entire market (great for regulators, academics, etc).

A supply-chain wide blockchain could enable individuals to view every raw material that went into every product they consume, down to the location, date — even the exact time in many cases — each was mined, refined, harvested, transported, picked, traded, etc. in a way that no individual corp could hide or falsify dramatically. Each corp and individuals true (embodied energy consumption would be visible to every buyer; developed world politicians and corporations couldn't simply blame China and other developing countries for their own consumption.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 15 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

The reason major businesses haven't bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.

At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.

Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind... What happens if that person lies?

Like, you've built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store... But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate of bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that? What happens if the company growing your bananas claims to use only ethical practices but in reality their workers are effectively slaves? How does a blockchain help fix that?

The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It's the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.

[–] Thrashy@lemmy.world 10 points 8 hours ago

The idea has merit, in theory -- but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the "code is law" status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it'd be preferable if they didn't need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.

If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that's insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.

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[–] Pulptastic@midwest.social 10 points 6 hours ago

Aw, only 99%?

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 48 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I'd wager it's even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.

What I'm kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts... Who's gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs running on multi-kilowatt servers?

And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 17 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 10 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

The fuck is bitnet

[–] Starbuncle@lemmy.ca 16 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/bitnet-scaling-1-bit-transformers-for-large-language-models/ use 1 bit instead of 8 or 16, yay performance gainz

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 1 points 57 minutes ago

So will the return of the flag conclude the adventures of ressource usage in computers?

[–] MyOpinion@lemm.ee 21 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

Not shocked. It seems the tech bros like to troll us every few years.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 29 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 9 hours ago

Techbros are the modern day equivalent to snake oil salesmen.

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[–] LemmyBe@lemmy.world 8 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Checks to see if Baidu is doing AI…yes, they are. How shocking.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 6 hours ago

“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!

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 10 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

As someone who follows the startup space (and is thinking of starting their own, non-AI driven startup), the issue is all of the easily solvable problems have already been solved. The only thing that shakes up the tree is when new tech comes along and makes some of the old problems easy to solve.

So take a look at crypto - If you wanted to make a tip bot on Telegram, before crypto that was really hard. You needed to register with something like PayPal, have the recipient register with PayPal, etc etc etc. After crypto it was "Hey this person sent you 5$, use this private key if you want to recover it" (btw I made this service and it was used a lot).

Now look at AI - Imagine making a service that detects CSAM before AI took off. As an aside, I did NOT make this service, but I know a group of people who did. Imagine trying to make this without the AI boom - you'd need millions of images for training data, a PhD in machine learning, and so much more. Now, anyone can make it in their basement.

The point is, investors KNOW the bubble is a bubble and that it will pop. It doesn't matter though. They're looking for people who will solve problems that previously cost 1bln to solve with only 1mln of funding. If even 1% of their companies pay off, they make a profit.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 6 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 8 points 9 hours ago

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?

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 points 10 hours ago

YUP

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago

Tech makes bubbles because people think it’s magic.

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