Big Tech Outspends Venture Capital Firms in AI Investment Frenzy - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  that means those who understand risk are clear of those who have cash to spend from their near-monopolies. Peak AI is here, boys, just like peak dot-com was in '99.

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    If an AI can't deliver a tub of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia like Kozmo.com could, I'm not interested.

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      But what if they can deliver an CRYPTO layer to a currency like beenz or flooz? And what if it has AI BLOCKCHAIN?

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        I reckon the days of vi vs. emacs are long over.

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          Come on, in the realm of off-the shelf ice cream Norgen Waaz rules.

  • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Wednesday December 27, 2023 @05:28AM (#64108559)

    In actual reality on the other hand, the problem is supply of money. VCs are funded from wealthy middle and upper class funds when they want to take additional risk for a chance of much higher return in half a decade than they would otherwise get.

    Boomer generation is almost finished retiring, which means their risk profile has changed from "maximum profit" to "maximum stability". So VC funding base has crashed, and so has the amount of money they have to lend out.

    As opposed to big tech companies that are funded via massive corporate credit lines backed by the company assets.

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      You mean "In actual AI reality".

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      aka the general population. Central banks print money to fund too-big-to fail corporations without any limits

• It basically can only work by accident. That is not going to happen here. Anybody sane _knows_ that the AI of the current AI hype is not anywhere as good or capable as claimed and can only deliver some small incremental improvements in a few areas. Nothing at all that would justify the level of investment. Completely irrational "fear of missing out" seems to be the main driver.

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    I think someone needs to be well-informed and a critical thinker, in addition to sane. The world is full of people eager to Make Money Fa$t on the basis of hype and highly diluted information.

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      Yes, probably. I am still getting used to most people not being able to fact-check for shit. Or as Charles Stross put it in a story "The average person understands nothing".

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    I agree that the public face of AI seems unsustainable, i.e. it costs too much for what it can that is actually monetisable. That's the very expensive GenAI marketing hype & it's a great way to attract attention & investment.

    
    
    However, I suspect that less grandiose models can be used to perform more mundane & unimpressive tasks that'd fail to get journalists to write about it in any positive & publicly appealing ways, & that those are the applications that are more efficient, sustainabl

• Remember the late 90s? The dot.com time? When you'd yell "TCP/IP" into a bank and the reply was "how many millions do you need?"

  Everyone knew that we're just fleecing the dupes and that the shit ain't going anywhere anytime soon, but hey, if you throw money at me, who am I to say no?

  Now the thing to yell into a bank is "AI". Same spiel.

  Wonder if there's gonna be Superbowl ads this time around that will crash it. Or whether some spoilsport comes up with something new.

• I wonder when the patent wars start, where AI companies stake out claims on various things, perhaps the equivalent of "do this on a phone" claim, and then go at each other with IP violation lawsuits. Assuming patents follow the same path as cellphone technology, which went forward for a while, turned into a patent battle royale, and now little, if any real significant development gets done.

  From what I can tell, it seems the AI craze is sort of losing its luster. It has promise, but we have had AI for decades, although not with the evolving LLMs, so for most tasks it is just changing a backend API from what is used right now to someone's LLM and calling it done. Of course, there will be some innovation, perhaps something like what Ives is working on, but this seems lot like the Linux or blockchain days, and with interest rates high, VC capital is a lot hard to come by. Big companies may embrace it, but those are not the place innovation comes from these days, generally, as their DNA is revenue streams and "optimization", not breaking new ground.

  • Just don't pull *us* into your money orgy

    As long as they don't take down the entire economy if and when AI Bubble 2.0 crashes, spend away. (AI bubble 1.0 was in the 80's.)

    > where AI companies stake out claims on various things, perhaps the equivalent of "do this on a phone" claim

    Seems when a new implementation technique comes out, everyone rushes to convert the prior generation into the next and patent it, as the patent examiners find it "novel" simply because it uses the latest implementation technique, not because it's revolutionary.

    Do X by h

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    The AI patent race is already well underway, with around 20K AI patents already filed.

    https://arapackelaw.com/patent... [arapackelaw.com].

    I have no doubt that 95% of those patents are...hogwash.