I do feel like there are WAY too many people that don't take the tech seriously. I don't know if it is ignorance, hubris, or something else. Even though the stocks are hot, I don't feel like there's a bubble on the basis of bogus tech. The dot com bubble was a bubble because investors got into a frenzy, and invested in every novel idea out there - but the current AI/ML wave feels much more focused, like there's a clear path how people want to use the models.
I'm not saying that the models will make workers obsolete right now, but there are many white-collar jobs/tasks that will be seriously affected the next 5-10 years, all while the workers themselves envision a 20-30 year career doing the same stuff they do today.
If someone had asked me 5 years ago, if these things were possible, I'd react the same way - and say "Yeah, maybe 10-20 years from now", but for me that timespan has effectively been halved after all the progress of 2023.
Anyone working in anything remotely tech adjacent is fooling themselves if they thought their career would somehow be static for 30 years. Let's look backwards and think about the drastic paradigm shifts in tech however you want to slice it whether deployment models, monetization models, languages, etc. Server/desktop/web/mobile OR paid-apps/e-commerce/subcription-apps/microtransactions/saas OR C/Java/HTML&CSS/JS/Python/Rust/.. etc. Remember when we were all going to be out of a job when Dotcom imploded, or because of India outsourcing boom?
LLMs give me a similar feeling to some of the car ADAS or Voice Assistant stuff. The first time you interact with the state of the art it is startling and impressive, going to change everything. The rate of change however is not that dramatic on an annual time scale, the rough edges become more obvious and you understand the product is actually quite limited, interest fades.
So, I think a lot of the 1-3 year time frame forecasts are extremely optimistic. However in a 10 year time frame I think we'll have some very interesting viable products. We probably have no idea today what those viable products will look like.
People that think brains are fueled by magic tend to assume AI will never fully take off.
> The dot com bubble was a bubble
There is not a 1:1 relationship between how big an impact AI will have in the coming years and how it will impact the valuation of "AI companies". Even if the progress slows down, it's possible that some companies will find ways to monetize it in ways that generate immense profit, if they can create some moat.
On the other hand, even if AI development takes off beyond expectation, it may be hard for companies like OpenAI or even Nvidia to continue to extract profit if they lose their moat.
In fact, AI itself can potentially cause this, as a sufficiently strong AI may be able to remove most of the costs associated with developing new chips or AI models, to the point where the marginal value of intelligence and compute becomes really low.
I'm not saying that the models will make workers obsolete right now, but there are many white-collar jobs/tasks that will be seriously affected the next 5-10 years, all while the workers themselves envision a 20-30 year career doing the same stuff they do today.
If someone had asked me 5 years ago, if these things were possible, I'd react the same way - and say "Yeah, maybe 10-20 years from now", but for me that timespan has effectively been halved after all the progress of 2023.