I think there'll be a "financial" winter - or another way a bubble burst - the investment right now is simply unsustainable, how are these products going to be monetized?
Nvidia had a revenue of $27billion in 2023 - that's about $160 per person per year [0] for every working age person in the USA. And it's predicted to more than double in 2024. If you reduce that to office workers (you know, the people who might actually get some benefit, as no AI is going to milk a cow or serve you starbucks) that's more like $1450/year. Or again more than double that for 2024.
How much value add is the current set of AI products going to give us? It's still mostly promise too.
Sure, like most bubbles there'll probably still be some winners, but there's no way the current market as a whole is sustainable.
The only way the "maximal AI" dream income is actually going to happen is if they functionally replace a significant proportion of the working population completely. And that probably would have large enough impacts to society that things like "Dollars In A Bank" or similar may not be so important.
While I'd agree monetisation seems to be a challenge in the long term (analogy: spreadsheets are used everywhere, but are so easy to make they're not themselves a revenue stream, only as part of a bigger package)…
> Nvidia had a revenue of $27billion in 2023 - that's about $160 per person per year [0] for every working age person in the USA
As a non-American, I'd like to point out we also earn money.
> as no AI is going to milk a cow or serve you starbucks
Some of the malls around here have food courts where robots bring out the meals. I assume they're no more sophisticated than robot vacuum cleaners, but they get the job done.
Transformer models seem to be generally pretty good at high-level robot control, though IIRC a different architecture is needed down at the level of actuators and stepper motors.
Sure, robotics help many jobs, and some level of the current deep learning boom seems to have crossover in improving that - but how many of them are running LLMs that affect Nvidia's bottom line right now? There's some interesting research in that area, but it's certainly not the primary driving force. And then is the control system the limiting factor for many systems - it's probably relatively easy to get a machine today that makes a Starbucks coffee "as good as" a decently trained human. But the market doesn't seem to want that.
And I know restricting it to the US is a simplification, but so is restricting it to Nvidia, it's just to give a ballpark back-of-the-envelope "does this even make sense?" level calculation. And that's what I'm failing to see.
Machines that will make espresso, automatically, that I personally like better than what Starbucks serves are widely available. No AI needed, and they aren't even "robotic". They can use ordinary coffee beans, and you can get them for home use or for commercial use. You can also go to a mall and get a robot to make you coffee.
Nonetheless, Starbucks does not use these machines, and I don't see any reason that AI, on its current trajectory, will change that calculation any time soon.
It's pretty often discussed, it's just hard to put everything into a single comment (or thread).
I mean, Yudkowsky has basically spent the last decade screaming into the void about how AI will with high probability literally kill everyone, and even people like me who think that danger is much less likely still look at the industrial revolution and how slow we were to react to the harms of climate change and think "speed-running another one of these may be unwise, we should probably be careful".
Yeah, but automated milking robots like that have been in the market for more than a decade now IIRC?
Seems like a lot of CV solutions have seen fairly steady but small incremental advances over the past 10-15 years, quite unrelated to the current AI hype.
I use one in the kitchen, because it's easier than the ads and prose on most recipe websites, and it can adapt to whatever ingredients I actually have rather than being a fixed list.
Used them in the garden while weeding and in the garden store while planning what to plant, in both cases to identify plants by image and tell me about them — though I'd say image capable AI are no longer mere "large language models".
Used ChatGPT while shopping to help me locate products in the store I was in, when I couldn't find just by wandering the isles, by uploading a photo of the aisle I happened to be in at the point I gave up.
Nvidia had a revenue of $27billion in 2023 - that's about $160 per person per year [0] for every working age person in the USA. And it's predicted to more than double in 2024. If you reduce that to office workers (you know, the people who might actually get some benefit, as no AI is going to milk a cow or serve you starbucks) that's more like $1450/year. Or again more than double that for 2024.
How much value add is the current set of AI products going to give us? It's still mostly promise too.
Sure, like most bubbles there'll probably still be some winners, but there's no way the current market as a whole is sustainable.
The only way the "maximal AI" dream income is actually going to happen is if they functionally replace a significant proportion of the working population completely. And that probably would have large enough impacts to society that things like "Dollars In A Bank" or similar may not be so important.
[0] Using the stat of "169.8 million people worked at some point in 2022" https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/work.pdf
[1] 18.5 million office workers according to https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.nr0.htm