LLM’s have their use, there is no doubt about that. I’m in the middle of creating a home brew campaign for my D&D group and unfortunately I’m a lousy artist and I wanted a few things visualized. Well, I used a photo generating AI to create something that had the visual I wanted. I’m going to use it for my campaign and it will probably just sit on my hard drive after I’m done.
My employer is rolling out AI and is asking us to find places to insert it into our workflows. I am doing that with my team, but none of us are really sure if it will be of any benefit.
The problem right now is we’re at the stage where idiots are convinced it is something that it is not and they have literally thrown 10’s of billions of dollars at it. Now… They are staring at the wide abyss that is the amount of money they invested vs the amount of money people are willing to pay for it.
I’ve seen arguments for and against the presence of an AI bubble… Personally, I think it’s a bubble that’s so large that it will take down several long established computer industry manufacturers when if pops. Those that are arguing its absence probably have large investments that they do not want to see fail.
The only AI companies that will exist in 10 years will be those started by a large company that has other unrelated profit streams. Such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc. All others will fail. Some will be bought by the big players if they develop a unique technology. Otherwise they all go broke.
If I had to guess, there will be only two major AI/LLM companies in existence. The nature of LLM’s discounts that small companies and organizations can scale one to be profitable.
Micron comes back to the consumer market, but has to rebrand due to the ire of consumers for them being assholes. Same with Western Digital, although they have not “technically” left the consumer market.
The next 5 years will be spent by people trying to find SOMETHING for AI to do. Some very high end uses in research, or academics will be found. However, those will cost massive amounts of money and only available to governments, large corporations and academic institutions. Consumers will be left with creating images, music and a few other parlor tricks, but there will be nothing of any true value offered. In the mean time AI images and videos will be used to exacerbate the societal/ cultural issues across the globe, until the population becomes so jaded and cynical that this media looses efficacy. By that time enormous damage will have been done.
Consumers will also be left paying for the electricity, water, and other resources that the remaining data centers will consume.
I’m currently looking heavily into installing solar on my home, with a battery backup just because of these stupid data centers. It’s just a matter of time that these things start causing issues on the grid.