The answer is that it’s all about “growth”. The fetishization of shareholders has reached its logical conclusion, and now the only value companies have is in growth. Not profit, not stability, not a reliable customer base or a product people will want. The only thing that matters is if you can make your share price increase faster than the interest on a bond (which is pretty high right now).
To make share price go up like that, you have to do one of two things; show that you’re bringing in new customers, or show that you can make your existing customers pay more.
For the big tech companies, there are no new customers left. The whole planet is online. Everyone who wants to use their services is using their services. So they have to find new things to sell instead.
And that’s what “AI” looked like it was going to be. LLMs burst onto the scene promising to replace entire industries, entire workforces. Huge new opportunities for growth. Lacking anything else, big tech went in HARD on this, throwing untold billions at partnerships, acquisitions, and infrastructure.
And now they have to show investors that it was worth it. Which means they have to produce metrics that show people are paying for, or might pay for, AI flavoured products. That’s why they’re shoving it into everything they can. If they put AI in notepad then they can claim that every time you open notepad you’re “engaging” with one of their AI products. If they put Recall on your PC, every Windows user becomes an AI user. Google can now claim that every search is an AI interaction because of the bad summary that no one reads. The point is to show “engagement”, “interest”, which they can then use to promise that down the line huge piles of money will fall out of this pinata.
The hype is all artificial. They need to hype these products so that people will pay attention to them, because they need to keep pretending that their massive investments got them in on the ground floor of a trillion dollar industry, and weren’t just them setting huge piles of money on fire.
The answer is that it’s all about “growth”. The fetishization of shareholders has reached its logical conclusion, and now the only value companies have is in growth. Not profit, not stability, not a reliable customer base or a product people will want. The only thing that matters is if you can make your share price increase faster than the interest on a bond (which is pretty high right now).
As you can see, this can’t go on indefinitely. And also such unpleasantries are well known after every huge technological revolution. Every time eventually resolved, and not in favor of those on the quick buck train.
It’s still not a dead end. The cycle of birth, growth, old age, death, rebirth from the ashes and so on still works. It’s only the competitive, evolutionary, “fast” model has been killed - temporarily.
These corporations will still die unless they make themselves effectively part of the state.
BTW, that’s what happened in Germany described by Marx, so despite my distaste for marxism, some of its core ideas may be locally applicable with the process we observe.
It’s like a worldwide gold rush IMHO, but not even really worldwide. There are plenty of solutions to be developed and sold in developing countries in place of what fits Americans and Europeans and Chinese and so on, but doesn’t fit the rest. Markets are not exhausted for everyone. Just for these corporations because they are unable to evolve.
Lacking anything else, big tech went in HARD on this, throwing untold billions at partnerships, acquisitions, and infrastructure.
If only Sun survived till now, I feel they would have good days. What made them fail then would make them more profitable now. They were planning too far ahead probably, and were too careless with actually keeping the company afloat.
My point is that Sun could, unlike these corporations, function as some kind of “the phone company”, or “the construction company”, etc. Basically what Microsoft pretended to be in the 00s. They were bad with choosing the right kind of hype, but good with having a comprehensive vision of computing. Except that vision and its relation to finances had schizoaffective traits.
Same with DEC.
The point is to show “engagement”, “interest”, which they can then use to promise that down the line huge piles of money will fall out of this pinata.
Well. It’s not unprecedented for business opportunities to dry out. It’s actually normal. What’s more important, the investors supporting that are the dumber kind, and the investors investing in more real things are the smarter kind. So when these crash (for a few years hunger will probably become a real issue not just in developing countries when that happens), those preserving power will tend to be rather insightful people.
If only Sun survived till now, I feel they would have good days
The problem is a lot of what Sun brought to the industry is now in the Linux arena. If Sun survived, would Linux have happened? With such a huge development infrastructure around Linux, would Sun really add value?
I was a huge fan of Sun also, they revolutionized the industry far above their footprint. However their approach seemed more research or academic at times, and didn’t really work with their business model. Red Hat figured out a balance where they could develop opensource while making enough to support their business. The Linux world figured out a different balance where the industry is above and beyond individual companies and doesn’t require profit
The problem is a lot of what Sun brought to the industry is now in the Linux arena. If Sun survived, would Linux have happened? With such a huge development infrastructure around Linux, would Sun really add value?
Linux is not better than Solaris. It was, however, circumstantially more affordable, more attractive, and more exciting than Solaris at the same time. They’ve made a lot of strategic mistakes, but those were in the context of having some vision.
I mean this to say that the “huge development infrastructure around Linux” is bigger, but much less efficient than that of any of BSDs, and than that of Solaris in the past. Linux people back then would take pride in ability to assemble bigger resources, albeit with smaller efficiency, and call that “the cathedral vs the bazaar”, where Linux is the bazaar. Well, by now one can see that the bazaar approach make development costs bigger long-term.
IMHO if Sun didn’t make those mistakes, Solaris would be the most prestigious Unix and Unix-like system, but those systems would be targeted by developers similarly. So Linux would be alive, but not much more or less popular than FreeBSD. I don’t think they’d need Solaris to defeat all other Unix systems. After all, in early 00s FreeBSD had SVR4 binary compatibility code, similarly to its Linux compatibility code, which is still there and widely used. Probably commercial software distributed in binaries would be compiled for that, but would run on all of them. Or maybe not.
It’s hard to say.
But this
The Linux world figured out a different balance where the industry is above and beyond individual companies and doesn’t require profit
is wrong, everything about Linux that keeps going now is very commercial. Maybe 10 years ago one could say it’s not all about profit.
I know I’m an enthusiast, but can I just say I’m excited about NotebookLLM? I think it will be great for documenting application development. Having a shared notebook that knows the environment and configuration and architecture and standards for an application and can answer specific questions about it could be really useful.
“AI Notepad” is really underselling it. I’m trying to load up massive Markdown documents to feed into NotebookLLM to try it out. I don’t know if it’ll work as well as I’m hoping because it takes time to put together enough information to be worthwhile in a format the AI can easily digest. But I’m hopeful.
That’s not to take away from your point: the average person probably has little use for this, and wouldn’t want to put in the effort to make it worthwhile. But spending way too much time obsessing about nerd things is my calling.
From a nerdy perspective, LLMs are actually very cool. The problem is that they’re grotesquely inefficient. That means that, practically speaking, whatever cool use you come up with for them has to work in one of two ways; either a user runs it themselves, typically very slowly or on a pretty powerful computer, or it runs as a cloud service, in which case that cloud service has to figure out how to be profitable.
Right now we’re not being exposed to the true cost of these models. Everyone is in the “give it out cheap / free to get people hooked” stage. Once the bill comes due, very few of these projects will be cool enough to justify their costs.
Like, would you pay $50/month for NotebookLM? However good it is, I’m guessing it’s probably not that good. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s a reasonable price to you. It’s probably not a reasonable price to enough people to sustain serious development on it.
That’s the problem. LLMs are cool, but mostly in a “Hey this is kind of neat” way. They do things that are useful, but not essential, but they do so at an operating cost that only works for things that are essential. You can’t run them on fun money, but you can’t make a convincing case for selling them at serious money.
Totally agree. It comes down to how often is this thing efficient for me if I pay the true cost. At work, yes it would save over $50/mo if it works well. At home it would be difficult to justify that cost, but I’d also use it less so the cost could be lower. I currently pay $50/mo between ChatGPT and NovelAI (and the latter doen’t operate at a loss) so it’s worth a bit to me just to nerd out over it. It certainly doesn’t save me money except in the sense that it’s time and money I don’t spend on some other endeavor.
My old video card is painfully slow for local LLM, but I dream of spending for a big card that runs closer to cloud speeds even if the quality is lower, for easier tasks.
I’ll pay a bit more for the next model of my phone that promises on device ai, or actually already did. We’ll see if that turns into something useful.
So far the bits and pieces I’ve played with are not generative ai, but natural language processing and inferencing. The improved features definitely make my phone a more useful piece of hardware, but not revolutionary
Being able to summarize and answer questions about a specific corpus of text was a use case I was excited for even knowing that LLMs can’t really answer general questions or logically reason.
But if Google search summaries are any indication they can’t even do that. And I’m not just talking about the screenshots people post, this is my own experience with it.
Maybe if you could run the LLM in an entirely different way such that you could enter a question and then it tells you which part of the source text statistically correlates the most with the words you typed; instead of trying to generate new text. That way in a worse case scenario it just points you to a part of the source text that’s irrelevant instead of giving you answers that are subtly wrong or misleading.
Even then I’m not sure the huge computational requirements make it worth it over ctrl-f or a slightly more sophisticated search algorithm.
you could enter a question and then it tells you which part of the source text statistically correlates the most with the words you typed; instead of trying to generate new text. That way in a worse case scenario it just points you to a part of the source text that’s irrelevant instead of giving you answers that are subtly wrong or misleading.
Isn’t this what the best search engines were doing before the AI summaries?
The main problem now is the proliferation of AI “sources” that are really just keyword stuffed junk websites that take over the first page of search results. And that’s apparently a difficult or unprofitable problem for the search algorithms to solve.
Well an example of something I think it could solve would be: “I’m trying to set this application up to run locally. I’m getting this error message. Here’s my configuration files. What is not set up correctly, or if that’s not clear, what steps can I take to provide more helpful information?”
ChatGPT is always okay at that as long as you have everything set up according to the most common scenarios, but it tells you a lot of things that don’t apply or are wrong in the specific case. I would like to get answers that are informed by our specific setup instructions, security policies, design standards, etc. I don’t want to have to repeat “this is a Java spring boot application running on GCP integrating with redis on docker… blah blah blah”.
I can’t say whether it’s worth it yet, but I’m hopeful. I might do the same with ChatGPT and custom GPTs, but since I use my personal account for that, it’s on very shaky ground to upload company files to something like that, and I couldn’t share with the team anyway. It’s great to ask questions that don’t require specific knowledge, but I think I’d be violating company policy to upload anything.
We are encouraged to use NotebookLLM, however.
You’re using the wrong tool.
Hell, notepad is the wrong tool for every use case, it exists in case you’ve broken things so thoroughly on windows that you need to edit a file to fix it. It’s the text editor of last resort, a dumb simple file editor always there when you need it.
Adding any feature (except possibly a hex editor) makes it worse at its only job.
… I don’t use Notepad. For anything. Hell, I don’t even use Windows.
Not sure where the wires got crossed here.
