The term “populist demagoguery” always calls to mind Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work...

"Yes, peasant associations are necessary, but they are going rather too far."

Is it a bubble? Maybe it’s just the landlords up to the old tricks again.

So is it a bubble or not?

Yes. It is a bubble. Also a useful tool...but 100% a bubble. There's going to unfortunately be a bunch of folks caught by it.

“It’s a bet on A.G.I. or bust,” Dr. Korinek said.

What you make of this memo really depends on who you are and how you're positioned. The dot-com era was absolutely a bubble. Tons of companies died, but the internet itself didn't go away, and the people who backed the right companies did extremely well. The 2007 housing bubble, on the other hand, was a totally different kind of event: broad, systemic, long lasting, and painful for almost everyone.

AI looks a lot more like the former. Some companies will fail, valuations will swing, but the underlying technology isn't going anywhere. In fact, many of the AI firms that will end up mattering are probably still undervalued because we're early in what will likely be another decade long technology expansion.

If you're managing a portfolio that needs quick returns and can't tolerate a correction, then sure, it probably feels like a bubble, because at some point people will take profits and the market will reset.

But if you're an entrepreneur or a long-term builder, that framing is almost irrelevant. This is where the next wave of value gets created. It's never smooth and it's never easy, but the long-term opportunity is enormous.

Author states that he’s neither an investor or a techie. Why is this on the front page?

There’s not much serious debate on IF there’s a bubble. There is and it’s a big one.

The debate is more on what happens from here and how does that bubble deflate. Gradually and controlled where weaker companies shut down and the strong thrive, or a massive implosion that wipes most everyone in the sector out in a hard reset.

> To build it requires companies to invest a sum of money unlike anything in living memory.

Do we know this? Smaller more carefully curated training sets are proving to be valuable and gaining traction. It seems like the strategy of throwing huge amounts of data at LLMs is specific to companies that are attempting to dominate this space regardless of cost. It may turn out that more modest and better optimized methodologies will end up winning this race, much like WebVan flamed out taking huge amounts of investment money with them but now Instacart serves the same sector in a way that actually works robustly and profitably.

Ai is currently a bubble. But that is just a short term phenomenon. Ultimately what AI currently is and what the trend-line indicates what AI will become will change the economy in ways that will dwarf the current bubble.

But this is only if the trend-line keeps going, which is a likely possibility given the last couple of years.

I think people are making the mistake that AI is a bubble and therefore AI is completely bullshit. Remember: The internet was a bubble. It ended up changing world.

The problem is that people conflate the current wave of transformer based ANNs with AI (as a whole). AI certainly has the potential to disrupt employment of humans. Transformers as they exist today not so much.

AI's potential isn't defined by the potential of the current crop of transformers. However, many people seem to think otherwise and this will be incredibly damaging for AI as a whole once transformer tech investment all but dries out.