Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts
Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts
The tech mogul claims it will take 10 to 30 years before AI displaces human jobs.
As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I'd wager it's even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.
What I'm kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts... Who's gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs?
And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.
I am old enough to remember when the CEO of Nortel Networks got crucified by Wall Street for saying in a press conference that the telecom/internet/carrier boom was a bubble, and the fundamentals weren't there (who is going to pay for long distance anymore when calls are free over the internet? where are the carriers-- Nortel's customers-- going to get their income from?). And 4 years later Nortel ceased to exist. Cisco crashed too, though had enough TCP/IP router biz and enterprise sales to keep them alive even until today.
This all reminds me of the late 1990s internet bubble rather than the more recent crypto bubble. We'll all still be using ML models for all kinds of things more or less forever from now on, but it won't be this idiotic hype cycle and overvaluation anymore after the crash.
Shit, crypto isn't going anywhere either, it's a permanent fixture now, Wall Street bought into it and you can buy crypto ETFs from your stockbroker. We just don't have to listen to hype about it anymore.
No shit.
Like all new technologies, there is a time when bunches of companies jump on the band wagon to get in on the action. You can see it all throughout the history of the industrial revolution.
They mostly know that there will come a great weeding out of those that can't handle the technology or just fail from poor management. But they are betting they will be among the 1% that wins the race and remain to dominate the market.
The rest will just bide their time until the next Big Thing comes along. And the process starts over again.
10 to 30? Yeah I think it might be a lot longer than that.
Somehow everyone keeps glossing over the fact that you have to have enormous amounts of highly curated data to feed the trainer in order to develop a model.
Curating data for general purposes is incredibly difficult. The big medical research universities have been working on it for at least a decade, and the tools they have developed, while cool, are only useful as tools too a doctor that has learned how to use them. They can speed diagnostics up, they can improve patient outcome. But they cannot replace anything in the medical setting.
The AI we have is like fancy signal processing at best
Yeah, but the 0.1% remaining will take over the world.
Does anyone remember the era when there were a million search engines? Google didn't spawn alone.
Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.
People are trying to vindicate their dislike of AI, pointing to trends like this as if it were supporting evidence. But saying "AI is going to be a big flop because 99% of companies today will end up failing" is as stupid as saying "online shopping will never work because 99% of online stores will close by the year 2010"
Please please please please please please please please
No shit
They couldn’t keep their heads on fucking straight during the .com bubble, and here they are doing it all over again.
People look at the advertising for this shit (and future tech-bro shit) and wonder, "who is this for"? Remember E.L.O.N. Exaggerated Lies Overlooked Narratives
Think of every manager and boss you've ever had. They don't think, they just do. Salesmen convince them using issues that don't exist, to sell solutions that don't really work, to people that don't understand how to use them. Repeat over 70 years and you have the modern American education system.
Now things are different. Money is scarce, things are getting tight. Tech-Bros have changed from a mildly infuriating strategy, to a downright abusive one. These simple minded managers think everything is under attack, and the only solution is what they already have, but heavily monetized and completely unusable.
AI companies specializing in spreading bullshit all across the internet have a bright future however
Aw, only 99%?
As someone who follows the startup space (and is thinking of starting their own, non-AI driven startup), the issue is all of the easily solvable problems have already been solved. The only thing that shakes up the tree is when new tech comes along and makes some of the old problems easy to solve.
So take a look at crypto - If you wanted to make a tip bot on Telegram, before crypto that was really hard. You needed to register with something like PayPal, have the recipient register with PayPal, etc etc etc. After crypto it was "Hey this person sent you 5$, use this private key if you want to recover it" (btw I made this service and it was used a lot).
Now look at AI - Imagine making a service that detects CSAM before AI took off. As an aside, I did NOT make this service, but I know a group of people who did. Imagine trying to make this without the AI boom - you'd need millions of images for training data, a PhD in machine learning, and so much more. Now, anyone can make it in their basement.
The point is, investors KNOW the bubble is a bubble and that it will pop. It doesn't matter though. They're looking for people who will solve problems that previously cost 1bln to solve with only 1mln of funding. If even 1% of their companies pay off, they make a profit.
Eh... "Robin Li says increased accuracy is one of the largest improvements we've seen in Artificial Intelligence. "I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved—meaning when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer," the CEO added."
That's plain wrong. Even STOA black box chatbots give wrong answer to the simplest of questions sometimes. That's precisely what NOT being able to trust mean.
How can one believe anything this person is saying?
And they will ALL deserve it.
YUP
Tech makes bubbles because people think it’s magic.
Wow, a CEO who doesn’t buy into the hype? That’s astonishing.
I, for one, cannot wait for the bubble to burst so we can get back to some sense of sanity.
Edit>> Though if Baidu is investing in AI like all the rest, then maybe they just think they’ll be immune — in which case I’m sad again that I haven’t yet come across a CEO who calls bullshit on this nonsense.
AI will have its uses, and it has practical use cases such as helping people to walk or to speak or to translate in real time, etc. But we’re decades away from what all these CEOs seem to think they’re going to cash in on now. And it’ll be fun on some level watching them all be wrong.
Good.
It's a lead bubble
idk why baidu requires a account to download from it.
I think less restrictive AI that are free, like Venice AI (you can ask it pretty much anything and it will not stop you) will be around for longer than ones that went with restrictive subscription models, and that eventually those other ones will become niche.
New technology always propagates further the freer it is to use and experiment with, and ChatGPT and OpenAI are quite restrictive and money hungry.