It’s not snark, our industry is run on fear. If there is the tiniest flicker of potential, we will spend piles of money out of fear of being left behind. As you age, it becomes harder to deny.. 10 years ago, I was starting to believe that my kids would never learn to drive or possibly buy a car, here we are ten years later and not that much has changed, I know you can take a robotaxi in some cities but nearly all interstate trucking has someone driving.
Coding AI assistants have done some impressive things, I’ve been amazed at how they sniffed out some repetitive tasks I was hacking on and I just tab completed pages of code that was pretty much correct. There is use. I pay for the feature. I don’t know if it’s worth 35% of the world’s energy consumption and all new fabrication resources over the next handful of years being dedicated to ‘ai chips.’ We arent looking for a better 2.0, we are expecting an exponentially better “2.0” and those are very rare.
That doesn't mean this is a bad investment for VCs. GPT is being directly integrated in iOS and is a top app on both markets. We've also barely scrapped the surface for potential niche applications that go beyond just a generalist chatbox interface. API use will likely continue to explode as the mountain of startups building off it come online. Voice stuff will probably kill off Alexa/Google Home.
I don't think the bulk of this VC money is predicated on AGI being around the corner.
But the general trend hopping nature of big VC money is real. Still, VCs manage to continue to make a profit despite this, otherwise the industry would have died off or shrunk the 10 other years HN critiqued this behaviour, so on the whole they must be doing something right.
VCs mostly make money by selling a narrative about investing in the next big thing and then collecting management fees, not by beating the market. If the public sours on AI we need a new hype to replace it and keep tech money flowing at the same rate. A lot of funding seems to follow fads and be disproportionate to value generated (I remember when there were a bazillion people building social networks because that was hot).
There is a tremendous opportunity in bridging the gap between Can be automated and Isn't automated due to technical/cost/time limitation. GPT's are perfect for this.
There are so many things that can be automated out there that currently aren't. Other industries are extremely manual and process driven still. Many here tend to underestimate this.
Some programmers here will argue it's error prone or creating technical debt but most people don't care, if it works it works, one can worry about it breaking in 5 years time after its saved you considerably time and money.
Don’t get me wrong, there is some very cool and useful stuff there. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to even talk about AGI at this point though and when you look at the power requirements and the need for $7trillion in investment just to build chips, I really don’t know. Underdeliver and AI loses some of the hype again, and like the parent post said, it will be a long winter. Are gpts worth more than Apple, MS, Alphabet and Amazon all together?
Coding AI assistants have done some impressive things, I’ve been amazed at how they sniffed out some repetitive tasks I was hacking on and I just tab completed pages of code that was pretty much correct. There is use. I pay for the feature. I don’t know if it’s worth 35% of the world’s energy consumption and all new fabrication resources over the next handful of years being dedicated to ‘ai chips.’ We arent looking for a better 2.0, we are expecting an exponentially better “2.0” and those are very rare.