What’s up people,
Hope everyone is good. Posting this in hopes of getting some discussion about AI and possible investments going.
For context, with all the talk about AI going on, I've been trying to learn what I can about it. I don’t have any relevant background or expertise, but I’ve increasingly felt compelled to learn about it so I'm at least not totally ignorant. At this point, I’ve mostly been watching YouTube interviews of Altman/Zuckerberg/Gates types, along with lectures that Stanford makes available.
In the midst of this, I watched two videos in which separate AI researchers mentioned a 2019 blog post titled “The Bitter Lesson.” Apparently, this blog post was written by a computer scientist and is really influential in the field. One of the main takeaways, as I understand it, is that all that really matters for improving AI is providing more computing power.
Given how much the tech community seems to believe this, I decided to make a few plays in the space, buying literally just a few shares of NVDA, AMD, and GOOGL earlier this week. NVDA and GOOGL are obviously some of the biggest names in the space, albeit in different aspects. I took a chance on AMD, even though people seem to say their tech isn't as good, just because I still feel like it could rise with the rest of the field as long as people keep thinking AI is the future.
To be candid, I’m cynical about about how AI will be used and, more broadly, I don’t really think this is a great time to just now be getting into the market- from my perspective, it still seems like a lot of people are burnt out from work/life, and the companies that are making more money seem to be doing so largely by raising prices. I’m not sure how sustainable it all is without some sort of correction. Still, I wanted to get a little skin in the game so that I’m motivated to keep learning.
If anyone finds any of this worth talking about, I have two ongoing questions at this point:
1) What really excites people in the field about generative AI/large language models from a technological/computer science perspective? For example, when blockchain was blowing up, I heard it said that Blockchain was exciting because it made it possible to transfer a digital file such that the original sender no longer possessed the file after sending. Regardless of my personal opinions on the technology, that explanation at least made sense to me, and I could imagine possible applications and why people might be excited. What is it about AI that likewise has tech experts so excited really? What specifically does it allow them to do that they could never do before, and why is that valuable?
2) Outside of the people running tech companies, who is really positioned to benefit from AI? In nearly every video I see of Sam Altman talking, he says something like, “I believe AI will have a positive net benefit on society overall.” I wonder, though, how he would measure this. It seems to me like AI will help any company or user that can leverage it to make money, but could end up harming a lot of employees and end consumers. I feel like it could just accelerate trends of companies extracting more and more money from the rest of the population. I'm really not trying to make this political or turn it into a debate on capitalism. That’s just my honest gut feeling about it from an economic perspective at this point. I see it providing a lot of benefit to a relatively small segment of the population.
Would be interested to hear what other people think and if/how you are investing in the space. I'd even like to know if people here actually use AI in their personal lives. And if anyone has resources that they feel have helped deepen their knowledge about AI, I’d really appreciate you sharing. I feel like I’ve kind of hit a wall trying to get beyond surface-level discussions about the field.
Cheers.
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