TIL About AI

This is a set of notes I’ve been chewing over for a while - so not a ‘today I learned!’

Anyhoo: onwards

There’s a lot of hype and hidden motivations and forces behind the AI boom. The first is the astonishing financials behind it all. The financial accounting tricks; the double counting; the monstrous amounts of money committed to data centres. (dwarfing the Manahattan project + the Apollo program combined) There’s such an over committment and over supply of data centres it’s a looming catastrophe. Ed Zitron is likely to be proven right and it’ll be hilarious.

So what’s going to happen? Well the AI booster companies are unsustainable. They’ll go bust. It’s all a bubble. (example: The space X is an AI company with a rocket side hussle! When there’s this kind of bandwagon jumping - it’s a bubble) That means the players in it are selling a narrative; it’s overhyped and overvalued; and it’s not what it seems. There’s something valuable in the centre of the bubble - but not enough to justify the hype.

So what’s next? The AI companies are massively subsidising costs. This will go away and customers will not want to pay the real price. Users will turn to local LLM AI . The data centres will be sold off and the AI companies will go bust. Facebook will collapse (yay)

What will the data centre be then used for? Perhaps we can ramp up bio-informatics; protein folding research; all kinds of modelling (aeronautics and fluid dynamics); 3D World games will be awesome too..

Is AI useful? I use it daily and I’m regularly astonished by the mind-reading ability. It’s uncannny. And intoxicating having a fast, willing, and capable assistant. I’m a team leader and it’s just like having a smart junior developer: for both I need precise instructions and goals; oversight; a plan.. because they both have a tendency to go off on tangents.

This is great for me but frankly I don’t need to hire a junior developer to do the grunt work anymore. Terrible for the long-term. Similarly if I have a side-hussle, I don’t need to collaborate: The rise of the one-person tech company is inevitable. tbh: If I wanted to launch a start up I’d look for a marketing expert - I can do everything else technical myself. Of course, the marketing expert thinks they can use AI to do marketing and the tech stuff themselves too!

Actually that touches on another aspect: AI isn’t great in a team context; each AI goes off on a tangent; the AI is all disconnected from the discussion and context. It can get a bit distracting and siloed. It’s like having a bunch of disconnected experts working in silos, rather than a cohesive team.