/lounge/ - Lounge

I don't think AI will be around for long, and not for the reason people think.

AI is very old technology, the LLMs utilized are from the 1950s. When computers were first invented they tried using artificial neurons that learnt (the Perceptron). The problem was back then memory and scaling, you could get one node to learn but by the time it went to the next it started to forget. The hardware wasn't there. Because of this AI bots relied on binary tree if/else statements and weren't programmed to learn for decades.

All that happened in the 2010s was that hardware became available to stack LLMs on top of each other. The technology behind AI is veeeeery old, it's a hardware problem. If you're some nerd that reads into tech innovations you'll find the same is true for most inventions. Wood pulp paper wasn't suddenly eureka invented in the 19th century, it's that the steam engine made the processing of wood through mulching possible. The automatic threshing machine wasn't eureka invented, it's that there were dozens of invisible small innovations that fed into it that went unthanked, like the complex mathematic epicycloid calculations that went into the gear functions that some mathematics nerds and clockmakers perfected decades ago.

Anyways, the actual supply chains that are currently feeding the current top of the line GPUs and chips are unsustainable. They're spread across so many countries and it's like a precarious inverted pyramid, each part of the chip fabrication is a monopoly because it's stretching human ingenuity and ability to its absolute limit. And for every part of the input (the lenses, the robotic arms, the chemical acids, the light diodes for the lasers, etc) there's like another 5,000+ companies making bespoke tools for specialists. It's quite literally not cost effective or arguably even possible to scale production further. Like the Concorde and other supersonic jets, the rising costs are not due to economic constraints, but human. The concorde went out of service, and likewise AI will too.

The AI bubble will burst once they try to recuperate costs, once they find out that businesses don't want to pay $100,000 for the slop, they'll get a government bail out. The government will bail it out thinking they're getting a palatinr tier surveillance engine. This will turn out to be a white elephant because the AI data centers built will require replacing every 3 years due to the GPUs burning out, costing hundreds of billions annually, further feeding into the debt crisis. There will be too much nosiy smog of irrelevant data for it to do palantir tier Klaus Schwab surveillance, so that will eventually be abandoned after governments realize they were swindled into an unproductive asset. The chip market will then crash, and with it the ability to make expensive top of the line chips at a reasonable price as the market isn't there.

Eventually people will realize the GPU/CPU price problem isn't going anywhere and the high costs are here to stay, and start shifting to older, cheaper nodes. Smartphones will largely begin to become a luxury $3,000+ product, bricklike smartphones will become the common option. AI will become too energy expensive to host on computers and become a luxury product, as tech will regress to about 2012 level hardware.

An economic recession will set in and the advertising revenue will dry up as nobody is buying shit, and all the accumulated tech data on everyone will become regarded as too expensive to host and be deleted. It was only ever hoarded as a speculative asset. Big tech's business model will collapse and videos/pictures on social media older than 6 months will either get deleted or get lowered in quality.

It will be like the Concorde, a supersonic jet launched in the 1970s that flew significantly faster than all passenger planes today. It got retired after it was seen as too uneconomical after decades of service. AI will be like that, it will start to be regarded as a luxury product using chips we can no longer manufacture, then after 2 decades it'll disappear.