'Clown Computing' Businesses Are Waning and the Same Will Happen to 'G.A.I.' Businesses (the 'Hey Hi' Fame)
Comment from Christmas Day on "What Kind of Bubble is AI?"
HAVE you too noticed the decrease in "HEY HI" (AI) hype? As judged by the media? Well, we have, and it is numerically measurable, too (just a question of what one chooses to measure as several terms refer to the same thing)...
Remember when 'Clown Computing' was 'all the rage'? Before Microsoft and Amazon started openly admitting decreases? Yes, they admitted that. Now they just change the marketing vocabulary.
Harsh reality be explained, a lot of that was a passing fad all along (Amazon lost money on AWS for many years) and a lot of its adoption was due to bribes* ("subsidies"). Google lost endless piles of money and barely extracted anything out of this 'Clown Computing' thing (billions in losses per quarter). Now Google is busy rebranding and rebranding and reannouncing and reannouncing again all sorts of chatbot nonsense. The rebranding means that the first time around the reception was underwhelming, so they must pretend to have something "new" (the only new thing is the name though; that's what rebranding is).
The clown computing bubble actually started bursting years ago. There were media/press articles about that. Web3/blockchain... remember those? They try to reinvigorate the momentum with terms like "NFTs" and how about Vision Pro? You hardly even hear about it anymore. 6 days ago Michigan Daily published "The Apple Vision Pro isn’t as innovative as you think" (correct!).
We now have an industry led by delusional crackpots.
Chatbots aren't new. Sure, they got more capable when companies burned billions of kilograms (many tons) of fossil fuel analysing texts they had acquired without permission. This isn't "Hey Hi" (AI), those are "Stochastic Parrots" reading back to you portions of what was fed into them (the training set). Plagiarism? Yes, very likely. In order for them to spew out more accurate sentences they need to grab portions of the training sets verbatim, as the New York Times now demonstrates to a court in a growing lawsuit (more participants join). That's not AI, this is cheating. Instead of using 'true' GPT Microsoft has begun just spewing out (ripping off) sentences from the New York Times and many others.
Do not be blinded by buzzwords. They're made to mislead. There is no such thing as clown computing. It's a conceptual abstraction anyway. It always was. "Serverless" as a term is nearly dead now. Same with FaaS - just another misnomer. No site was ever served by anything other than a computing device. Everything capable of UDP and TCP/IP transmission is a computing device with an implementation of networking. Nothing "in nature" does TCP/IP. There is no "CLOUD" so people who say "CLOUD COMPUTING" are on ONE HECK of an ACID TRIP.
Reject these terms. Richard Stallman refuses to even answer questions that say "CLOUD COMPUTING" or merely "CLOUD" (this happened months ago).
By the way, G.A.I. pertaining to voice and imagery isn't new either. The images are merely fusion of artists' work (to fake 'fair use'), 'blurring out' attribution. The same happens in code (GitHub) and speech synthesis isn't new at all. Companies did all this more than a decade ago, they just didn't ride this utterly ridiculous hype wave. █
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* As Doctorow put it: "Like Uber, the massive investor subsidies for AI have produced a sugar high of temporarily satisfied users. Fooling around feeding prompts to an image generator or a large language model can be fun, and playful communities have sprung up around these subsidized, free-to-use tools (less savory communities have also come together to produce nonconsensual pornography, fraud materials, and hoaxes)."
He further explained: "The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They’re expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run. Even if a bankrupt AI company’s model and servers could be acquired for pennies on the dollar, even if the new owners could be shorn of any overhanging legal liability from looming copyright cases, even if the eye-watering salaries commanded by AI engineers collapsed, the electricity bill for each query – to power the servers and their chillers – would still make running these giant models very expensive."