[ncallaway]

> I suspect it is an intentional result of deceptive marketing

I mean, certainly people like Sam Altman was pushing it hard, so it’s easy to understand how an outside observer would be confused.

But it also feels like a lot of VCs and AI companies have staked several hundreds of billions of dollars on that bet, and I’m still… I just don’t see why the inside players—that should (and probably do!) have more knowledge than me—see. Why are they dumping so much money into this bet?

The market for LLMs doesn’t seem to support the investment, so it feels like they must be trying to win a “first to AGI” race.

Dunno, maybe the upside of the pretty unlikely scenario is enough to justify the risk?

[alsetmusic]

> still… I just don’t see why the inside players—that should (and probably do!) have more knowledge than me—see.

Sam Altman is a very good hype man. I don’t think anyone on the inside genuinely thinks LLMs will lead to AGI. Ed Zitron has been looking at the costs vs the revenue in his newsletter and podcast and he’s got me convinced that the whole field is a house of cards financially. I already considered it much overblown, but it’s actually one of the biggest financial cons of our time, like NFTs but with actual utility.

[colonial]

Re: Ed Zitron - here is his recent piece that the parent is referencing: https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

If you find yourself agreeing, I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

You overestimate the intelligence of venture capital funds. One look at most of these popular VC funds like A16z and Sequoia and you will see how little they really know.

[notjulianjaynes]

If the bar for AGI is "as smart as a human being," and humans do not-very-smart things like invest obscene amounts of money into developing AGI then maybe it's actually not as high of a bar as we assume it is.

[ncallaway]

What’s the quote?

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

If AGI wants to hit human level intelligence, I think it’s got a long way to go. But if it’s aiming for our collective intelligence, maybe it’s pretty close after all…

[risyachka]

The thing is it has 0 intelligence. It has only knowledge

[Intralexical]

It has pattern-matching. It doesn't have knowledge in the way a human has knowledge, through building an internal model of the world where different facts are integrated together. And it doesn't have knowledge in the way a book has knowledge either, as immutable declarative statements.

It is still interesting tech. I wish it were being used more for search and compression.

[serviceberry]

Venture capital bets on returns. It's not about some objective and eternal value. A successful investment is just something that another person will buy from you for more.

So yep, a lot of time, they bet on trends. Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, several waves of AI. The question is just the acquisition or IPO price.

I don't doubt that some VCs genuinely bought into the AGI argument, but let's be frank, it wasn't hard to make that leap in 2023. It was (and is) some mind-blowing, magical tech, seemingly capable of far more than common sense would dictate. When intuition fails, we revert to beliefs, and the AGI church was handing out brochures...

[ncallaway]

> it wasn't hard to make that leap in 2023

It...does seem hard to make that leap to me. I mean, again, to a casual and uncritical outside observer who is just listening to and (in my mind naively) trusting someone like Sam Altman, then it's easy, sure.

But I think for those thinking critically about it... it was just as unjustified a leap in 2023 as it is today. I guess maybe you're right, and I'm just really overestimating the number of people that were thinking critically vs uncritically about it.

[namaria]

They also learned a long time ago to not evaluate the underlying product. Some products that were passed on by big players went on to become huge. So they learned to evaluate the founders. They go by social proof and that's how they were conned into the massive bets done on LLMs.

[re-thc]

> But it also feels like a lot of VCs

They only need to last until the exit (potentially next round).

> The market for LLMs doesn’t seem to support the investment

i.e. it doesn't matter as long as they find someone else to dump it to (for profit).

[tehjoker]

At least part of the reason is strategic economic planning. They are trying to build a 21st century moat between the US and BRICS since everything else is eroding quickly. They were hoping AI would be the thing that places the US far out of reach of other countries, but it's looking like it won't be.

[lumost]

Alternately everyone is just trying to ensure they have a dominant position in the next wave. The history of tech is that you either win the next wave or become effectively irrelevant and worthless.

[notahacker]

And you can win the next wave by holding stocks in AI companies which aren't AGI but do have a lot of customers, or an interesting story about AGI in two years to tell IPO bagholders...

[rsynnott]

> But it also feels like a lot of VCs and AI companies have staked several hundreds of billions of dollars on that bet, and I’m still… I just don’t see why the inside players—that should (and probably do!) have more knowledge than me—see. Why are they dumping so much money into this bet?

I mean, see also, AR/VR/Metaverse. My suspicion is that, for the like of Google and Facebook, they have _so much money_ that the risk of being wrong on LLMs exceeds the risk of wasting a few hundred billion on LLMs. Even if Google et al don’t really think there’s anything much to LLMs, it’s arguably rational for them to pump the money in, in case they’re wrong.

That said, obviously this only works if you’re Google or similar, and you can take this line of reasoning too far (see Softbank).