this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
371 points (89.2% liked)

Technology

59148 readers
2266 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Reuters reports that AI-related companies lost $190 billion in stock market value on Tuesday following disappointing earnings reports.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 164 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Thank god the bubbles finally starting to burst. I am tired of hearing about ‘AI’.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Right??? I swear every damn app is trying to shoehorn in some sort of AI nonsense just to hop on the bandwagon.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

A lot of them aren't actually implementing anything, they're just changing words on their product description.

Like a spell checking addon suddenly rebranding itself as "AI".

From the very start of all this, it never made sense to call any of this "artificial intelligence", but that marketing stuck, and now we're trying to retroactively apply it to very basic things like text suggestion, further diluting the meaning of the term.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I agree with the first part of your comment, AI is the new buzzword.

But AI is the correct term for LLMs and other technologies using neural networks. That's what computer scientists have been calling them for decades. The sentient AI concept that we have comes from SciFi. I'd argue that the correct term is what experts have been calling it for years.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

You're not going to stop hearing about AI. Perhaps AI companies won't be so high-profile, but AI itself is being integrated into lots of things and it's not going to go away. The only thing that's happened here is that it's proving to be not quite so profitable as expected being an AI-specific company.

Edit: Perhaps not even that, the article appears to be neglecting to mention that this is part of a trend across the whole stock market rather than something AI-specific.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nobody thinks generative ai will die, but when the bubble bursts maybe we wont get it shoehorned into places it really doesn't belong.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Personally I cheer for employees such as myself. The artificial pressure to compete with LLMs just got a lot softer.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

AI isn't new. Algorithms "are" ai. All apps always used it. But it's changed from algorithms to AI.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

AI is just a specific subset of algorithms, also not that new - first concept are from 1960 or so (from memory don't quote me) with perceptron. New is parallel computing power of modern chips - that allows for far better performance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Absolutely is. It's fucking outstanding how big corps are eating it up.

Alrogithm corp = nothing new, boring low evaluation

Change it's name to:

AI corp= 1 BILLION DOLLARS!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

The current state of AI development is going to cost a ton of money until its maturity. Any company that is in “AI” right now is either intentionally spending billions of dollars to solve AGI, which will ultimately open up trillions in marketplace solutions, or is using the press to market fledgling AI “solutions” or “integrations” with fancier versions of narrow AI.

AGI is in its infancy and is progressing on an exponential curve. The first time anyone heard of ChatGPT was 14 months ago and , with proper prompting, it’s already easy to use to write college level essays and is passing higher education tests like SAT, GRE, medical exams, CPA certifications, and the bar. Think of what will happen when it hits its toddler stage, let alone adolescence or maturity.

Any way you look at it, the days of hearing about AI are just starting and it will dominate the press in the next decade.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Any company that is in “AI” right now is either intentionally spending billions of dollars to solve AGI

Lol, no, that's another field entirely. They make the tools an AGI could use someday.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Of course its a hype right now. But at the same time AI improved my daily working live in the past year so much! I can outsource a lot of annoying tasks to AI and focus on the more creative tasks and everything strategic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Can you expand on how AI improved your workflow? The only positive experience I've had with AI has been Githib's copilot in my VS Code instance. All the other ai interactions I have are pretty terrible.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
  1. Githubs Copilot

  2. ChatGPT for larger coding tasks (its better at explaining what it does)

  3. Deepl.com/write for proofreading and better texts.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 104 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

That's a weird take given the actual numbers and relative results per company, but ok.

Microsoft's price didn't change much at all and is still trading at a 35 P/E ratio (17% higher than Apple's) despite being neck and neck in the race for the largest company in the market and allegedly not having its AI efforts actually change product usage. Clearly the market is still pricing it as if it's going to grow more somehow.

AMD is down, but since when is AMD an "AI company"? That's Nvidia through and through, who is still double digit percentage points up from a month ago, and trading at a 81 P/E ratio. The market losing faith in Nvidia's competition seems more like the opposite of this headline, given it's the key area where Nvidia has a market advantage over AMD.

Google, whose revenue is 90% ads, is down in response to falling short on ad sales. Which if anything may be a result of increased chatbot usage reducing search volume and Google's chat offering being the Bing of AI chatbots.

This is clickbait analysis.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

not having its AI efforts actually change product usage

Are you ignoring Github Copilot?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Microsoft's performance was actually strongest in their Azure services in their earnings report, and I can't think of any AI products tied directly to that part of their business

Although to be fair, their big push now is baking copilot directly into Windows 12, so it would be fair to think their long term outlook is tied to that service

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 48 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

What a clickbait "article". The whole stock market is correcting insane growth of last year and in fact the company with the biggest AI investments (Microsoft) crashed the least!

It's rewording the real article from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-market-cap-after-alphabet-microsoft-report-2024-01-31/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

growth

Swelling, more like

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

All scams come to an end when they run out of marks to steal from.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Look at the reuters article cited: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-market-cap-after-alphabet-microsoft-report-2024-01-31/

Jan 30 (Reuters) - AI-related companies lost $190 billion in stock market value late on Tuesday after Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab delivered quarterly results that failed to impress investors who had sent their stocks soaring. The selloff following the tech giants' reports after the bell underscored investors' elevated expectations following an AI-fueled stock market rally in recent months that propelled their shares to record highs with the promise of incorporating the technology across the corporate landscape.

I don't know that I would say this has anything inherently to do with AI...

The reuters article for AMD specifically: https://www.reuters.com/technology/high-flying-chipmakers-hit-after-amds-forecast-falls-short-2024-01-31/

Jan 31 (Reuters) - High-flying semiconductor stocks slipped on Wednesday after Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD.O) disappointing current-quarter revenue forecast added to investor worries over sluggish demand for non-AI chips

...

That overshadowed the company near doubling its AI processor projections to $3.5 billion for 2024.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

No shit that was a bubble. Fun for all of two seconds but application in its current form is niche/sketchy at best. There is lots of promise for the future of AI but right now it just makes things more complicated and end results are unreliable.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

The companies didn't lose that money. Their investors didn't even lose that money. A number went down temporarily, that's all.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Maybe they should try making products that work instead of trying to shove ads down our throats? How's that for a business model: give the customer what they want?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Many of their customers want them to produce ads.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fair - but I would hope for a functional product supported by delivery of ads, rather than ads that exist for the purpose of ads so that there can be more ads delivered along with the ads (oh yeah, and somewhere in there, a product... which itself is little more than merely another thinly-disguised advertisement).

Google is the perfect example: it made its name bc it WORKED, then it started to be supported by ads - okay fine so far - then the ads took over and now very often, it merely passes on SEO "ads" (except crucially: remember that was supposed to be the product) rather than show actual results. Plus on top of that, it also shows the ads. The latter are fine but the former are most definitely not, especially when it pushes out real results so that like even on page 5 you can't find what you were looking for, which might still be the very top result of DuckDuckGo hence cannot be that hard to produce. It exemplifies the process of enshittification for us all.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Those products exist. There are plenty of AI products that don't involve ads at all, you pay for a service that uses AI to help do whatever it is the service is about (for example GitHub Copilot). There are open source products that give you those services for free, even.

Some people use those services to create advertising, but it's not like advertising is the only field that this stuff is useful for.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I remember YouTube videos or podcasts where presenters said that we'd have very advanced AI by GPT-5 and singularity is just around the corner. Marketing stuff of these companies pushing language models made us all fools (including me). Now finances are catching up to all this bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The same thing was said about self-driving. I recall arguing with people on reddit back in like 2018 who called me an idiot because I didn't believe we'd have full autonomous driving within the next few years. I swear these people jump from one fad to the next and dive into each one head first.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Uh yes, they do. It's the same group of people falling for this stuff over and over. Crypto, NFTs, Self Driving, AI now. What's important to them is being able to point at this stuff and make a wojack face

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

“AI Winter is coming”

-Ned Stark

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I’ll never forgive D&D for what they did to that show. It was omnipresent in public consciousness for like a decade, and they fucked the last couple seasons so badly it’s now all but forgotten. It’s almost impressive in a depressing kind of way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I was a huge fan. Watched it from season one on. Even had a House Stark banner. Now I don’t even think about it unless I see it mentioned on social media. Married with Children and Aqua Teen Hunger Force spontaneously pop into my mind 10 times more often than Game of Thrones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Tbf, I don't think we as a society think about Aqua Teen Hunger Force nearly enough.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

If / then / switch / while

All of these are examples of what executives are calling AI there are many scams its hilarious.

Grifters gunna grift they face no clawbacks from lying to investors.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

If the last 40 years has taught us anything, it's that the time is always right to short ai companies

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Does that have anything to do with the IP power grab that is apparently under way? I've seen the propaganda and the mood seems to be that AI should be monopolized by the few super rich.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Artificial Intelligence at this stage is Artificial Ignorance. It's not ready to be unleashed onto anyone who blindly trusts anything they read.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

ChatGPT says:

Investing in AI, like any other sector, carries risks that could potentially lead to financial challenges or even bankruptcy for companies. Some factors include:

  1. High Initial Costs: Developing AI technologies often requires significant upfront investments in research, development, and infrastructure. If these costs are not managed well or if the technology doesn't gain traction, it can strain a company's financial resources.

  2. Market Uncertainty: The AI market is rapidly evolving, and success depends on staying ahead of technological advancements. If a company fails to adapt or faces competition with superior innovations, it may struggle to maintain market relevance.

  3. Regulatory Challenges: The AI industry is subject to evolving regulations, and changes in legal frameworks can impact operations. Non-compliance or unexpected regulatory hurdles can lead to financial setbacks.

  4. Cybersecurity Risks: As AI systems become more integrated into various sectors, the risk of cyber threats increases. A significant cybersecurity breach could result in financial losses, reputational damage, and legal consequences.

  5. Limited Adoption: If the adoption of AI technologies is slower than anticipated, companies heavily invested in AI may struggle to generate expected returns on their investments, potentially leading to financial distress.

It's important to note that while AI presents significant opportunities, prudent management, market understanding, and strategic planning are crucial to mitigate risks associated with investing in this dynamic and evolving field.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The irony of using ChatGPT for this of all articles.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›