As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    AI is bringing us functional things though.

    .Com was about making webtech to sell companies to venture capitalists who would then sell to a company to a bigger company. It was literally about window dressing garbage to make a business proposition.

    Of course there’s some of that going on in AI, but there’s also a hell of a lot of deeper opportunity being made.

    What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that’s both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn’t need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don’t need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?

    What if secondary education is simply one-on-one tutoring with an AI? How far could we get as a species if this was given to the world freely? What if everyone could advance as far as their interest let them? What if AI translation gets good enough that language is no longer a concern?

    AI has a lot of the same hallmarks and a lot of the same investors as crypto and half a dozen other partially or completely failed ideas. But there’s an awful lot of new things that can be done that could never be done before. To me that signifies there’s real value here.

    *dictation fixes

    • hark@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      .com brought us functional things. This bubble is filled with companies dressing up the algorithms they were already using as “AI” and making fanciful claims about their potential use cases, just like you’re doing with your AI example. In practice, that’s not going to work out as well as you think it will, for a number of reasons.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Gentlemans bet, There will be AI teaching college level courses augmenting video classes withing 10 years. It’s a video class that already exists, coupled with a helpdesk bot that already exists trained against tagged text material that already exists. They just need more purpose built non-AI structure to guide it all along the rails and oversee the process.

        • Ragnell@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          @linearchaos How can a predictive text model grade papers effectively?

          What you’re describing isn’t teaching, it’s a teacher using an LLM to generate lesson material.

          • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            Absolutely not, the system guides them through the material and makes sure they understand the material, how is that not teaching?

    • CaptainProton@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      There are two kinds of companies in tech: hard tech companies who invent it, and tech-enabled companies who apply it to real world use cases.

      With every new technology you have everyone come out of the woodwork and try the novel invention (web, mobile, crypto, ai) in the domain they know with a new tech-enabled venture.

      Then there’s an inevitable pruning period when some critical mass of mismatches between new tool and application run out of money and go under. (The beauty of the free market)

      AI is not good for everything, at least not yet.

      So now it’s AI’s time to simmer down and be used for what it’s actually good at, or continue as niche hard-tech ventures focused on making it better at those things it’s not good at.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        I absolutely love how cypto (blockchain) works but have yet to see a good use case that’s not a pyramid scheme. :)

        LLM/AI I’ll never be good for everything. But it’s damn good a few things now and it’ll probably transform a few more things before it runs out of tricks or actually becomes AI (if we ever find a way to make a neural network that big before we boil ourselves alive).

        The whole quantum computing thing will get more interesting shortly, as long as we keep finding math tricks it’s good at.

        I was around and active for dotcom, I think right now, the tech is a hell of lot more interesting and promising.

        • thbb@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Crypto is very useful in defective economies such as South America to compensate the flaws of a crumbling financial system. It’s also, sadly, useful for money laundering.

          Fir these 2 uses, it should stay functional.