Many people are hoping—nay, praying—that the potential AI bubble will burst soon.
But to hear Google tell it, generative AI is the future, and the company’s products have to change to keep up with the technical reality. As a result, Gemini is seeping into every nook and cranny of the Google ecosystem. Generative AI feeds on data, and Google has a lot of your data in products like Gmail and Drive. What does that mean for your privacy, and what happens if you don’t want Gemini peeking over your shoulder? Well, it’s kind of a mess.
The amount of data Gemini retains depends on how you access the AI, and opting out of data collection can mean running straight into so-called “dark patterns,” UI elements that work against the user’s interest.
This is the future?
That difference doesn’t matter to my point.
They were still transformative technologies that started as bubbles.
It matters a great deal if you want to argue AI is more than a bubble by actually saying anything concrete, anything more than implications.
You can’t just say “look at these other bubbles, ignore the glaring differences, and assume this will be the same” without having a damn good reason why. Let alone implying something is transformative (or to be concrete: transformative in a way that remotely justifies money wasted so far).
AI companies like NVIDIA look more like Enron than the Web writ large.
But implications are all I need.
It’s either transformative or a fad.
It’s already transformed media, education, advertising, politics, and more.
Do you think once the bubble pops, AI will just disappear like Pogs?
Even when the datacenters go dark, the tech will still be here, still be used. Eventually it will find its natural place in a new world.
I’m not saying it’s not a bubble. It absolutely is. Everything you’re saying is true. It will fall, and hard. I’ve put 10s of thousands of dollars on it being soon. But after the dust clears AI will still be used, and has already changed the world. How much more it’ll change is the only question.
You appear to have missed the part where I asked you to be concrete and justify whether it’s worth the investment.
Vague talk of “change” and “transformation” mean nothing. Sure, it “changed” the level of poison in the atmosphere over communities in Tennessee.
It’s not worth this level of investment. That’s what a bubble is. We agree on that.
But long after the bubble pops. 20 years from now. Will AI disappear? Will it be a joke people tell? Or will it be as important to the world as the internet is today?
I’m saying it’s both a bubble, and an important lasting technology. It’s not a binary choice.
I see you saying it’s important, but you haven’t provided one reason why.
Well I use AI every day in Photoshop and Lightroom. AI tools are common and extremely useful in all sorts of media production already.
Science is using it on modeling of protein folding, and large dataset analysis. I personally know one person using AI tools to analyze fMRI data in a study.
News media uses it in formulaic articles in finance and sports. They’ve been doing that with specialized software for a decade or more already.
Those are just a few places where it is a useful productive tool. I’m sure there are many more. Is that what you’re asking for?
Photoshop used AI long before generative AI took off. Specialized models have existed for various domains for decades. This is unrelated to the current bubble.
Science used AI long before generative AI took off. Specialized models have existed for various domains for decades. This is unrelated to the current bubble.
News media is also dying. It’s saturated with low quality clickbait, and most major news sites are barely worth a mention anymore. Not only are the writers losing their jobs, but the businesses themselves are being bought out by larger investment companies and being turned into tabloid clickbait, propaganda tools, and listicles. I wouldn’t expect most of them to survive past the bubble, and that even has very little to do with generative AI anyway and more to do with a cultural shift in how people receive and consume news.
Sorry… It got busy at work. I don’t care anymore
I thought we were talking about the article, Google’s generative AI (thread topic). The thing that needs the data centers (my very first post). Protein folding and fill tools existed before the bubble started inflating, and are not what we were talking about…
Go back to my first comment.
That was never what we were talking about.