P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving
2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years
These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to take anybody seriously who says otherwise. P1a... Who knows, gotta hit a wall sometime. P2 I'm way more uncertain about (especially P2a) but it seems like people like Zitron reason backwards from hating AI.
I can imagine an Ed Zitron in 1840 arguing that trains and steam engines are useless - or even a scam - because railroad investment was a bubble (which it was).
In my mind the most obvious scenario where AI gets used a lot but AI companies (exlc. NVIDIA / chip makers) aren't worth much is the hardware becomes capable of running the current state-of-the-art models locally, cheaply, and those models are basically "good enough" for 90% of tasks.
P1 is probably necessary but not sufficient for P2, which would show up as a correlation of a sorts. Maybe I should've specified even further, if the tech works (P1 and P1a) then yeah somebody is going to make a lot of money but not necessarily OpenAI/Anthropic. They could go the way of AOL/Time Warner (probably not but again who knows). Microsoft and Amazon survived the dotcom bubble and thrived, Meta came after it.
Currently they don’t seem to be. At least OpenAI is haemorrhaging money left and right. Thing is, the compute for all this is far more expensive than anyone is willing or able to pay.
For someone who falls in the middle of this a really good read is Quoth the Raven[1]. He essentially makes the argument that proposition 1 is probably true, but that before proposition 2 happens there'll be a massive bubble burst. Analogous to the dotcom boom where yes, eventually Amazon became Amazon, but before that there was a massive collapse. And he does this in a way that Dan Luu would really like because he's giving a very clear and specific time line for his prediction. I haven't been reading him long so I can't guarantee there's not going to be some goal post moving 6 months down the line though.
P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving
2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years
These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to take anybody seriously who says otherwise. P1a... Who knows, gotta hit a wall sometime. P2 I'm way more uncertain about (especially P2a) but it seems like people like Zitron reason backwards from hating AI.