Is the AI Boom Real?

Notes:
7:50 - TPUs are in their fifth iteration. Messed up.

Links:

[necrospencer]

all this technology and the finality of it : ads

[Joe-xqzu]

I hate how companies will spend obscenely huge sums of money to build a better add campaign, but they won't spend a penny more than they have to when it comes to delivering an actual quality product and will cut every corner they can get away with in production rather than just making a better product.

[mattiasl]

Great video, as always. Nvidia is selling a lot of pickaxes today but that doesn't mean everyone will find Californian gold

[hugodesrosiers-plaisance]

When working on outlining a writing project, I thought I'd give GTP4 a try as a writing assistant and sounding board.
It was very impressive at first. I essentially just gave it all the outline material I'd worked on so far, and then I was able to have it give me summaries as I worked to connect all my points together. It was essentially remembering everything I'd come up with for me, completely uncluttering my mind and allowing me to focus on specific points with a lot more ease. And then I could ask it to take what I'd just done and suggest connections with the rest of the outline. It made working almost obsessingly easy.
Then I tried to ask it for suggestions of points to add, way to tackle certain questions, etc. I could ask for historical references (which I would double-check), point out possible logical fallacies, etc. I was very impressed.
And then I I started to realize how all of it was turning out to be an echo chamber of my own thoughts, and while some material GPT provided me with was indeed very useful, much of it was also just my own thoughts rehashed in a way that made it a bit harder to spot, especially in the middle of a creative momentum.
So yeah, super interesting, but major caveats. Whoever uses such tools should remain wary.

[jairo]

You said it, AI will be a new tool for the rich to become richer, by just removing the expense of hiring people.

[stuartclifton]

It's so annoying to hear "AI powered this" AI powered that" in every new device and service

[krismicinski]

I love your work, John. I am a computer scientist who works on running symbolic AI (as opposed to just ML, which is generally dense rather than sparse) on GPU clusters. If you ever visit Syracuse, let me know, they say they’re building a memory fab here down the line.

[ECTCalvin]

The acquired podcast mentioned/praised the Asianometry channel in one of their Nvidia episodes. Now Asianometry mentioning acquired, is making it full circle

[CraftyFX]

If our best use case for AI technologies reamain ads, we have already achieved the dreaded misalignment...

[eliskwire]

I'm impressed by the power of LLMs, which I had underestimated a lot a decade ago, but as long as it can't question and learn on the fly, it's not intelligent. Right now I notice that "AI" is used mainly by opportunists to make money in ways that I find detrimental to society. More ads is certainly not what we need moving forward.

[sigmundhoenigsberg]

Each time that i have used an LLMs for work --as opposed to as a gimmick-- I have been disappointed: The accuracy just isn't there, have to re-do the whole thing by foot to be sure of the results.

[dziban]

AI has been pretty useless to me so far aside from saving some time coding, but it has definitely caused the quality of a *lot* of the internet to plummet to new lows. It's so easy to spot AI generated text and images, and its just so lazy, that I will deliberately avoid buying whatever is being hawked with it.

[rocketman]

I can see you're travelling on Boeing Max, you're a very brave man

[tweezerman]

2:36 Fyi, gist is pronounced like 'jist'

[scotturner]

Maybe a dumb question, but to produce output Ai require a massive network of inputs. The output AI produces becomes part of the input for future AI. Is this going to have a feedback effect?

[Hmework]

Thanks for suggesting the substack article from dwarkesh patel, it also includes audio for anyone interested. With the 1x robotics using a low 10Hz and a single GPU and a neural network to run several robots the boom may not be in LLMs.

[djblackprincecdn]

Like the late 90s, you'd buy a computer and literally a week later it was superseded by something better which was obsolete a week after that.

[mannaggiacristo]

It’s mind boggling to me how OpenAI literally wrote “more power implies more performance” in LaTeX and somehow this gets treated as some groundbreaking news. Like, I’m well aware that the level of scientific research is at an all time low and pretty much anything can be passed as some big step forward in tech and science, but this shit is too much for me…

[sg]

Its funny how everyone says they hate rehashes and then leans into a technology that is literally a rehash mill

[maverickstclare]

ChatGPT is a year old but AI Dungeon, which used GPT2, was launched in 2019