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Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

(cacm.acm.org)
68 points rbanffy | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 17:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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DyslexicAtheist ◴[20 Nov 24 19:35 UTC] No.42197320[source]▶
every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's incredibly tedious and annoying.

Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly harping on about AI.

Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some form of moderation penalizing these shill posts that only glorify AI as being the future, ... the same way that not everything about crypto or the blockchain ended up on the FP. Seems with AI we're looking the other way and are OK with it?

Or maybe it's me.

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dgfitz ◴[20 Nov 24 19:38 UTC] No.42197353[source]▶
Nah, it’s not just you.

AI is really neat. I don’t understand how a business model that makes money pops out on the other end.

At least crypto cashed out on NFTs for a while.

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svara ◴[20 Nov 24 21:32 UTC] No.42198330[source]▶
> I don’t understand how a business model that makes money pops out on the other end.

What issues do you see?

I pay for ChatGPT and for cursor and to me that's money very well spent.

I imagine tools like cursor will become common for other text intensive industries, like law, soon.

Agreed that the hype can be over the top, but these are valuable productivity tools, so I have some trouble understanding where you're coming from.

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1. tdeck ◴[20 Nov 24 21:42 UTC] No.42198406[source]▶
What you're paying for ChatGPT is not likely covering their expenses, let alone making up their massive R&D investment. People paid for Sprig and Munchery too, but those companies went out of business. Obviously what they developed wasn't nearly as significant as what OpenAI has developed, but the question is: where will their pricing land once they need to turn a profit? It may well end up in a place where it's not worth paying ChatGPT to do most of the things it would be transformative for at its current price.

[1]: https://www.fooddive.com/news/sprig-is-the-latest-meal-deliv...

[2]:https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/munchery-shuts-down/?gucco...

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2. ssl-3 ◴[21 Nov 24 04:21 UTC] No.42201083[source]▶
I paid money to Amazon for most of a decade before they had a profitable year.
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3. dgfitz ◴[21 Nov 24 04:49 UTC] No.42201229[source]▶
You realize they had razor thing margins on purpose, right?
4. n_ary ◴[21 Nov 24 06:21 UTC] No.42201642[source]▶
Looking at history, anything in its first few iterations costs insane and stay as luxury or is sold at massive loss. Once the research goes on for several years, the costs keep coming down first very slowly and then in avalanche . The question always remains to which one can continue “selling at a loss” long enough to last the point until the costs continue going down while people are used to paying standard price(see smartphones), or the product is so market dominant that competition does not have resources to compete and cost can be raised(see Netflix).