[9rx]

They are so-called "human in the loop". They don't have a remote driver in the sense of someone sitting in front of a screen playing what looks like a game of Truck Simulator. But they are operated by humans.

It's kind of like when cruse control was added to cars. No longer did you have to worry about directly controlling the pedal, but you still had to remain the operator. In some very narrow sense you might be able to make a case that cruise control is autonomy, but the autonomous car bubble imagined that humans would be taken out of the picture entirely.

[senordevnyc]

This is absolutely false. In rare cases Waymo needs human intervention, but they do NOT have humans in the loop for the vast majority of their operations.

[9rx]

Cruise control also doesn't need human intervention for the vast marjory of its operation. Yet, the human remains the operator. But it seems we're just playing a silly game of semantics at this point, so let's return to the actual topic at hand.

There was a time where people believed that everyone would buy a new car with self-driving technology, which would be an enormous cash cow for anyone responsible for delivering the technology to facilitate that. So the race was on to become that responsible party. What we actually got, finally, decades after the bubble began, was a handful of taxis that can't leave a small, tightly controlled region — all while haemorrhage money like it is going out of style.

It is really interesting technology and it is wonderful that Alphabet is willing to heavily subsidize moving some people from point A to point B in a limited niche capacity, but the idea that you could buy in and turn that investment into vast riches was soon recognized as a dead end.

AI is still in the "maybe it will become something someday" phase. Clearly it has demonstrated niche uses already, but that isn't anywhere nearly sufficient to justify all the investment that has gone into it. It needs a "everyone around the world is going to buy a new car" moment for the financials to make sense and that hasn't happened yet. And people won't wait around forever. The window to get there is quickly closing. Much like self-driving cars, a "FAANG" might still be willing to offer subsidies to keep it alive in some kind of limited fashion, but most everyone else will start to pull out and then there will be nothing to keep the bubble inflated.

It isn't too late for AI yet. People remain optimistic at this juncture. But the odds are not good. As before, even if AI reaches a point where it does everything we could ever hope for, much of the dreams built on those hopes are likely to end up being pretty stupid in hindsight. The Dotcom bubble didn't pop because the internet was flawed. It popped because we started to realize that we didn't need it for the things we were trying to use it for. It is almost certain that future AI uses that have us all hyped up right now will go the same way. Such is life.

[senordevnyc]

Ah, it’s the old “teleport the goalposts and then change the subject!” strategy.

Just like Waymo, LLMs are already wildly useful to me others, both technical and non-technical, and there’s no reason to think the progress is about to suddenly stop, so I don’t know what you’re even on about at this point.

[9rx]

> and there’s no reason to think the progress is about to suddenly stop

You seem a bit confused. Bubbles, and subsequent crashes, aren't dependent on progress, they're dependent on people's retained interest in investing. The AI bubble could crash even if everything was perfect executed, just because the people decided they'd rather invest in, as you suggest, teleportation — or something boring like housing — instead.

Progress alone isn't enough to retain interest. Just like the case before, the internet progressed fantastically through the last 90s — we almost couldn't have done it any better — but at the same time people were doing all kinds of stupid things like Pets.com with it. While the internet itself remained solid and one of the greatest inventions of all time, all the extra investment into the stupid things pulled out, and thus the big bubble pop.

You're going to be hard-pressed to convince anyone that we aren't equally doing stupid things with AI right now. Not everything needs a chatbot, and eventually investors are going to realize that too.