Wasn't it always seen as a "winner takes all" business?
No. It was always a pyramid scheme marketed as a "winner takes all" business. But there's no winning. The only winners are those who cash out before it collapses. This is literally Web3 2.0.
It is the same business model, just at a grander scale. There is no sustainable growth business underneath it, only vibes and hype, and the "future promise" of some miraculous breakthrough. It's becoming clearer by the minute that no such miracle is forthcoming.
[edit] one small difference from web3 is that AI does seem to be at least marginally useful in some narrow verticals (devtools, infosec). That's pretty inconsequential, though. Those verticals can't supply the capital needed to sustain the industry. So on a macro scale that isn't relevant.
When the dust settles I hope we end up in a place where we no longer accept lies and grift as pitchdecks and product briefs. If you have a technology, you demonstrate it, and only after a successful demonstration do you expect funding. We don't need to throw money at vaporware anymore, that's proven itself to be idiotic behavior over and over again.
I'd say there's more. AI has been a staple of sci-fi and movies, a major field of academic research since Turing in the 1950s, predicted to be a big deal by major thinkers like John von Neumann, taken as a big deal by all the largest companies.
Web3 on the other hand, none of that. I think it was some sort of crypto scam spinoff.
Re. economics, I think AI will develop a bit like in the movies but hopefully not Terminator 2.
I don't believe there's anything physically preventing the invention of AI. But nobody has done it. Until someone does it, it's some far off future thing. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al. have not done it yet. They've done some interesting things with language models, but so far there's no sustainable business there. At least at nothing like the scale they've promised the markets.
So the whole thing hinges on, at some point in the near future--before the music stops--one of these institutions making a huge breakthrough and discovering AI. But there's no indication we're any closer to that breakthrough now than we were 10, 20, 30, or 50 years ago. They sure do have a lot of compute at their disposal, but there's no clear engineering plan to use it to scale up AI.
If this was a proven technology, there would be a clear path towards making it work. Advancing its industrial applications would be an engineering problem, not a science problem. AI is still science fiction (or at best a speculative theoretical research topic). That's not something sensible people throw money at, unless they've been scammed.
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No. It was always a pyramid scheme marketed as a "winner takes all" business. But there's no winning. The only winners are those who cash out before it collapses. This is literally Web3 2.0.
AI isn't Web3.
It is the same business model, just at a grander scale. There is no sustainable growth business underneath it, only vibes and hype, and the "future promise" of some miraculous breakthrough. It's becoming clearer by the minute that no such miracle is forthcoming.
[edit] one small difference from web3 is that AI does seem to be at least marginally useful in some narrow verticals (devtools, infosec). That's pretty inconsequential, though. Those verticals can't supply the capital needed to sustain the industry. So on a macro scale that isn't relevant.
When the dust settles I hope we end up in a place where we no longer accept lies and grift as pitchdecks and product briefs. If you have a technology, you demonstrate it, and only after a successful demonstration do you expect funding. We don't need to throw money at vaporware anymore, that's proven itself to be idiotic behavior over and over again.
I'd say there's more. AI has been a staple of sci-fi and movies, a major field of academic research since Turing in the 1950s, predicted to be a big deal by major thinkers like John von Neumann, taken as a big deal by all the largest companies.
Web3 on the other hand, none of that. I think it was some sort of crypto scam spinoff.
Re. economics, I think AI will develop a bit like in the movies but hopefully not Terminator 2.
I don't believe there's anything physically preventing the invention of AI. But nobody has done it. Until someone does it, it's some far off future thing. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al. have not done it yet. They've done some interesting things with language models, but so far there's no sustainable business there. At least at nothing like the scale they've promised the markets.
So the whole thing hinges on, at some point in the near future--before the music stops--one of these institutions making a huge breakthrough and discovering AI. But there's no indication we're any closer to that breakthrough now than we were 10, 20, 30, or 50 years ago. They sure do have a lot of compute at their disposal, but there's no clear engineering plan to use it to scale up AI.
If this was a proven technology, there would be a clear path towards making it work. Advancing its industrial applications would be an engineering problem, not a science problem. AI is still science fiction (or at best a speculative theoretical research topic). That's not something sensible people throw money at, unless they've been scammed.