As much as people on the Fediverse or Reddit or whatever other social media bubble we might be in like to insist “nobody wants this” or that AI is useless, it actually is useful and a lot of people do want it. I’m already starting to see the hard-line AI hate softening, more people are going “well maybe this application of AI is okay.” This will increase as AI becomes more useful and ubiquitous.
There’s likely a lot of AI companies and products starting up right now that aren’t going to make it. That’s normal when there’s a brand new technology, nobody knows what the “winning” applications are going to be yet so they’re throwing investment at everything to see what sticks. Some stuff will indeed stick, AI isn’t going to go away. Like how the Internet stuck around after the Dot Com bust cleared out the chaff. But I’d be rather careful about what I invest in myself.
I’m not a fan of big centralized services and subscriptions, which unfortunately a lot of the American AI companies are driving for. But fortunately an unlikely champion of AI freedom has arisen in the form of… China? Of all places. They’ve been putting out a lot of really great open-weight models, focusing hard on getting them to train and run well on more modest hardware, and releasing the research behind it all as well. Partly that’s because they’re a lot more compute-starved than Western companies and have no choice but to do it that way, but partly just to stick their thumb in those companies’ eyes and prevent them from establishing dominance. I know it’s self-interest, of course. Everything is self-interest. But I’ll take it because it’s good for my interests too.
As for how far the technology improves? Hard to say. But I’ve been paying attention to the cutting edge models coming out, and general adoption is still way behind what those things are capable of. So even if models abruptly stopped improving tomorrow there’s still years of new developments that’ll roll out just from making full use of what we’ve got now. Interesting times ahead.
As much as people on the Fediverse or Reddit or whatever other social media bubble we might be in like to insist “nobody wants this” or that AI is useless, it actually is useful and a lot of people do want it. I’m already starting to see the hard-line AI hate softening, more people are going “well maybe this application of AI is okay.” This will increase as AI becomes more useful and ubiquitous.
There’s likely a lot of AI companies and products starting up right now that aren’t going to make it. That’s normal when there’s a brand new technology, nobody knows what the “winning” applications are going to be yet so they’re throwing investment at everything to see what sticks. Some stuff will indeed stick, AI isn’t going to go away. Like how the Internet stuck around after the Dot Com bust cleared out the chaff. But I’d be rather careful about what I invest in myself.
I’m not a fan of big centralized services and subscriptions, which unfortunately a lot of the American AI companies are driving for. But fortunately an unlikely champion of AI freedom has arisen in the form of… China? Of all places. They’ve been putting out a lot of really great open-weight models, focusing hard on getting them to train and run well on more modest hardware, and releasing the research behind it all as well. Partly that’s because they’re a lot more compute-starved than Western companies and have no choice but to do it that way, but partly just to stick their thumb in those companies’ eyes and prevent them from establishing dominance. I know it’s self-interest, of course. Everything is self-interest. But I’ll take it because it’s good for my interests too.
As for how far the technology improves? Hard to say. But I’ve been paying attention to the cutting edge models coming out, and general adoption is still way behind what those things are capable of. So even if models abruptly stopped improving tomorrow there’s still years of new developments that’ll roll out just from making full use of what we’ve got now. Interesting times ahead.