At this point it appears that the AI bubble is well on the way to popping. Altman has backed away from his video-sucking Sora because it simply wasn’t making any money. After six months its net income was only about two million. You can’t sustain a multi-trillion bubble with the same revenue stream as ONE Safeway store. Other big users and venture capitalists are backing away after looking more closely at expenditure vs revenue.
In some online areas you hear nothing but Altman cultists. In other extremely hi-tech circles where you’d expect to hear boosting, there’s nothing but mockery.
Gamers are the techiest bunch of all. I don’t see any neutral comments let alone positive.
My own attitude has always been negative but nuanced. I won’t use it myself because I’m an analog type. I learned One Big Thing from my dying engineer grandpa. Keep it simple, stick with things you can understand and control. His lesson is especially important as I get older. Mental independence is non-rechargeable at this age. Use it or lose it permanently.
I also recognize that neural networks and Big Data are very old. For thousands of years all sophisticated math has been predictive, not simple calculation. Analog and digital computers were developed FOR prediction, not for adding and subtracting. In the 80s I wrote a neural network for a published project, so I know how such things work.
LLMs are just a higher level of predictive math, not a new kind of life force.
Machines and programs are NOT the source of evil. The stock market is the sum of all evils and sins. The stock market has been sucking life from the world for hundreds of years, except for the blessed sane period granted us by the New Deal. As long as the stock market is allowed to exist, it will continue finding new ways to suck even more life. Previous vampires killed manufacturing and medicine. This year’s vampire kills copyrighted creation. The next vampire will kill something else, though frankly there isn’t much left to kill.
Polistra's Mill 