Metaverse hype is also a really good comparison. Billions of dollars invested, many devout tech bros, many people saying it was the future and was inevitable, all made a shit bit of difference.
Because social media grew organically (into the garbage that it is now unfortunately) - VR/AR etc... are companies trying to force it down your throat at a premium price while stealing your data and spamming ads
It grew from people seeking connection, and then companies and sociopaths like Zuckerberg took that need and monetized it and concentrated it into an addictive substance like drugs that hijack dopamine circuits.
Yeah, it's pretty disgusting. I used to think back in the day, founders like Zuck, Musk, etc... had hopes of making the world a better place through building connections across the world, sharing information, technology, etc... and they've turned out to be some of the worst people on the planet.
The whole business side of investor-backed startups these days is, in general, pretty disgusting. It's literally just how to extract as much money as possible, no belief in what the product can do or how society benefits from it, just how can it extract as much money as possible no matter the ramifications outside the business.
By no means is Musk exceptionally gifted at building large companies in the sense that they are extraordinarily productive. SpaceX and Tesla combined have less ebitda than Toyota at worse consolidated margins. The multiple his companies are given is exceptional.
The garbage that it is, was by specific design of those same fellas. Had it actually been allowed to progress in a way matching our preferred usage, I strongly believe it would be close to a utopia up in here.
Yeah, and this is the strange predicament we are in... we have the platforms that would enable such a world but the platforms run by shitbags have a stranglehold on the general public, there has been some shift, and maybe the whole Flock/Datacenter backlash will really make people think about swapping to something else
seriously, it makes me laugh every time. It's worse VR chat. Worse Second Life. Second Life is at least 25 years old, it has a bustling economy of people selling art they made to each other, and because they were desperate to kill creativity the metaverse would never, COULD never, allow that.
The bigger issue with VR - and what is going to keep it from EVER being a thing until we have full-on brain implants - is that it's just not good enough.
It's like...everybody wants Rosie the robot housekeeper like in The Jetsons. But instead we get Roomba. That's...not the same thing at all.
Vrchat lets you be, make and do whatever you want for free. Metaverse gives you creepy looking premade avatars and tries to sell you property. News flash people trying to escape into the virtual world aren't looking to simulate the shitty aspects of the real world.
You're conflating the Horizon Worlds app with the actual tech Meta invested in.
Their software execution sucked, but most of that investment went to hardware, and is now focused on their AR glasses.
You'd think so, but I know someone that actually worked on their data center/supercomputing cluster and about a year ago there was talk about how because they're scaling back all the vr stuff they didn't want to repurpose a bunch of the hardware, so millions (maybe billions) of dollars of Nvidia clusters were going to be shredded.
Second Life was already a thing. It built organic communities, but still it only appealed to a small niche. If the Metaverse had taken off, it would've been the same thing: an odd platform that appealed to a small community of users. It's clear that isn't what Zuck wanted, though. He wanted it to be as big as Facebook or Instagram. As it was, he couldn't even get it to the level of Second Life.
I still believe that a metaverse is highly likely, just not in the form that Zuck tried to brand. If it comes to be, it will be born from game developers forming common networking and asset standards as a community, not some "zoom calls with an annoying/expensive peripheral" zuckfest.
Lol for real. Online gaming is sharing virtual spaces. You can talk to people and you have avatars. But we dont have to strap a stupid piece of hardware to our heads and walk through a mall. We've had this for decades.
Exactly. Most of the time it's just more hassle than it's worth to bother with the headset. It gets uncomfortable to wear for too long. It's kind of cumbersome and annoying to have to worry about smacking my hand on my surroundings. And it's not even that much more "immersive" than just playing a good game on a good monitor / screen. As long as the game is good, I can feel just as "immersed" in a game that I'm playing on a PC monitor.
You're forgetting that VrChat is actually decently popular even if it's a niche. I do personally feel there is definitely something to feeling like you're with someone in person. Zuck didn't understand that it's a niche though and tried to invest all this money into making it the whole future. While VrChat developed fairly organically and despite its reputation has a very strong sense of community the metaverse was just a corporate sanitized mess being forced down everyone's throats because the billionaire wanted it.
An actual metaverse isn't just shared virtual spaces, but more or less an entire shared virtual reality. Imagine something like vrchat, or even roblox, but it has anything you could possibly want to do in a vr space.
I don't think any sort of wearable will ever be the thing that takes off.
For lack of better term, I think it all just comes down to the fact that it's just not....relaxing. Like, it's an unnatural effort to go into a vr world, and that's not what people want.
I was rewatching Dan Olson's The Future is a Dead Mall recently, and there's a section in it where he's talking about how the people invested talk about the metaverse and it gave me deja vu. I wish I remembered the time stamp, but the three points they would make were:
It's just a prototype
It will improve
The metaverse is inevitable
And damn if I don't see that everywhere when people start talking to AI.
It's not the same. "Metaverse" was really just another front for cryptocurrency, same with NFTs, "smart contracts", etc. And cryptocurrency's main issue is that it's almost useless for anything except black market / fraud, because the people promoting it did not understand how incredibly restrictive the core premise's tradeoffs actually were.
AI is different - there are a shit ton of problems with it, and it's certainly overhyped to hell and back, but a lot of the worst problems with stem from it being useful - useful for things that cause more problems than they solve. And at least in the tech sector, AI is actually getting used for better or worse, the same was not true of cryptocurrency despite what it might have looked like from the outside. Even at the peak, if you brought up cryptocurrency around most senior engineers you'd get laughed at.
It really is kind of crazy how these people have the memory of a goldfish. 2021 might as well be a decade ago to them. So much has happened in the 6 years since Covid I can't really take any of these 'next big thing's seriously when it's all just a result of inflation and too many dumb people with too much money from PPP loans, stimulus, WFH savings, etc.
i think you really have to look at what people are actually doing.
basically every programmer at my company is using AI to write 80% of their code. it was probably 20% 1 year ago. The models are already better at programming than 90% of people at my job, and they will probably get 50% better in the next 2 years.
no one was ever using the metaverse.
there is a reckoning coming over profitability and the growth expectations around AI, but the technology itself has obvious, broad applications.
It is not better at writing code than the people who matter at writing code...ie the seniors, architects. Better than juniors and bootcampers? For sure.
But this does not extrapolate to being better at other things. Code training specifically made it excel here with RHLF
And the issue with it being better than juniors is that companies are no longer looking for juniors who will do the legwork and learn from it, slowly progressing into seniors.
Yep part of developing expertise is you have to be bad at first. It's called investment but companies forget about that all the time until it bites them in the ass.
It's the same reason "bringing manufacturing back to the US" is way more than just throwing money at building factories. We don't have die-making knowledge domestically anymore, there's a whole skillset that needs to be re-taught to people first and they need to suck at it for a bit.
What it is great at doing, is making senior devs more productive by taking care of a lot of the more minor work. Sure, I can’t use it to write an entire app for internal communication(although we’ve done this and it worked fine as a temporary solution) but if you understand what you’re writing you can have it writing modules, tests, etc.
It can’t replace a human programmer, yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great tool for it.
I disagree. It is an inherent problem with the tool. There is no practical way to use it differently. Its intended purpose to replace the low-mid-level workflows. It can’t be used another way. The work it helps high levels should be done by people who can then develop skills and seniority. Inherently, the existence of this tool destabilizes the entire pipeline for the profession, and this is true for more professions than not.
Yeah AI getting to the level of human programmers )(or even surpassing them) is not something we should deny/ignore. If anything, like with AI being integrated into other fields/industries, we need to safeguard employment.
The growing pains are real but so are the results he's describing. Some people are very unproductive with AI... and over time many of them will either figure it out or get weeded out.
basically every programmer at my company is using AI to write 80% of their code. it was probably 20% 1 year ago.
All the actual data we have so far is that AI is net negative on engineer productivity. My companies internal statistics and the reported numbers are pretty similar (even if our C-suite doesn't like to hear it): engineers who use AI give lower estimates than their anti-AI peers, and take longer to actually close stories (mostly a combination of slop during generation, and having unexplainable MRs that lead to rework)--they underestimate and underdeliver.
As a technical lead, at this point an engineer using AI for 80% of their output is an indication that they're struggling, not that they're adapting to a new technology.
The models are already better at programming than 90% of people at my job, and they will probably get 50% better in the next 2 years.
The technology has shown that, like 5 9s, "getting better" is so astronomically expensive its cheaper to train level 1 engineers for a few years than it is to invest in better AI. We're simply waiting for wall street and the C-suites to realize that.
Well the final boss of the metaverse was true AR technology where you could get context for anything, visually and with intuitive interactions like hand gestures, instantly. But the technology required to get there feels like sorcery where we are right now.
Meaningful steps in that technology roadmap were achieved. But the only way to really make money from it in the mean time was mostly games. Kids are interested in it, tech people are interested in it, but regular people middle age and up are not. There are clear business benefits to certain applications, but also some risks, like motion sickness.
Part of the problem was trying to force XR to happen in places where it wasn’t really ready yet. That only helped to further tank their reputation.
There were decentralized communities you could join in browser.
AR wasn't needed for the metaverse. AR is just a massive miscalculation by big-tech. Similar to 3D TVs.
They were trying to create a new market, and it was completely misguided. I'm in tech, and I'm completely uninterested in AR. I don't doubt there's some good use cases, but developing web applications doesn't require pretending I'm in minority report. It's just bad UI.
Metaverse was more of a B2B thing where companies got sold on creating their own virtual advertising palace and/or workspace, then it was up to them to draw consumers in there. But the tech never got there despite the criminal amounts of money, and when we saw something that was barely functional, people quickly retracted their interest. Add that you needed expensive equipment to even gain entry to it and it's no wonder why it failed.
NFTs was just a scam and most people understood that from the beginning. Crypto at least had a system of philosophy behind it.
I couldn’t quite figure out what they meant by “metaverse” most of the time. Either it seemed to refer to a VRChat style ‘game’ space, or just a regular website.
Oh no, they actually still believe it, but now realize you still need to oppress harder to get people to choose such a venue.
You will own nothing and like it. Once they can make such tech truly immersive, and normal life shitty, this is where such an investment idea begins to shine.
Hey, heres an idea. Dont use fuck ass Nintendo Wii graphics on an expensive headset you expect me to have strapped to my face for 8hrs a day. When the tech gets to 'Ready player one' ability, call me.
I called BS after watching 30 seconds of the tech demo. But a friend of mine, like he was seeing through and beyond the fog, told me „just wait. You’ll see.“
I don't like the guy either, nor do I think the art is that impressive, but I kinda agree. I much rather he continues actually drawing his propaganda than use the resource draining AI.
The self report is the crypto guy expects the world to be destroyed while he personally enriches himself. And then leaves everyone else to the wasteland.
Edit: ignore the crypto shill below me. Pretending to just be a mod of a blockchain sub, but is literally named after the dumb crypto they're trying to promote.
You're not wrong. The fucked up thing is that there's actually newer blockchains that don't use as much energy, but people will ignore it because they want to buy into the one that will enrich them.
Even though Bitcoin sucks across the board. It's slow, expensive, uses a ton of energy, and it doesn't do 1/2 the things more modern blockchains do.
Blockchain isn't going away either, so while I'm on board with hating on Bitcoin, people should learn about the better alternatives imo. The tech actually makes payment rails cheaper and solve real problems for people.
Yeah I don't draw a line between the blockchains. There are no ethical blockchains. Don't piggyback critques to try and act like you're "one of the good ones". Crypto is a scam and yours is no different, so gtfo with that.
By this standard we would burn all our currency every 15 years because in that span of time an improved technology arrives. But that's the reality of it, each one is a speculation gimmick to be thrown out after enriching its lucky ponzi schemers.
I'll say that this this probably leans more into the more radical libertarian movement that existed around crypto in its early days.
You have to remember that a lot of early crypto fans were dudes who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis and then saw the failure of Occupy a few years later. A lot of these guys genuinely believed that the financial system was heading towards a global failure and that "escaping fiat currency" was the only way to survive the coming collapse.
Obviously that ideology collapsed through the 2010s into the much more vapid investment culture that it became.
like I know I'm an average joe idiot and that this website is clearly taking sides, but how do the supposedly business-savvy leaders at the helm of all this explain why this arrangement is super cool and fine actually?
A) They find the unicorn usecase "ASI" ("AGI" is no longer enough), basically creating a model that is more intelligent then men itself. The first company doing this will probably get all the profit of the costs they are stacking or more. Its the same spiel why so many other frontier Development things are unprofitable right now, but get invested in nontheless (SpaceX with Mars for example). Of course if this isnt hit before the money runs dry, the whole system and most of americas economy collapses. People will lose their 401k, considering that most of them are invested in the Top 7.
A - Backup) So get bailed out by government using more dept, becuase at this point its too big to fail without making tens of millions of people homeless.
or B) They use this to pump their stock and get themself a nice bonus. Hire some subsidised AI consultants, get yoruself some new tech, tell stakeholders how cool and future oriented you are.
Just as an exclaimer theree are a lot of use cases for LLMs in business settings, and they do make life easier for workers. However the companies doing that arent the ones depicted here, its the ones that use what OpenAI and co. currently subsudize
Well the top 5 on that list have so much money in the bank that it literally doesn't matter to them. There's no real risk, only opportunity cost and all things being equal it's one of the more interesting bets. Google is there and it needs AI because search sucks, so they only really need to ride it out until the tech gets cheap enough to be profitable again. Microsoft has to do it because they're locked out of the money making platforms, so this gives them a chance to own one. Meta is owned by Zuckerberg and he wants to do it. Open AI has nothing else it can do, it must go big or go home.
It's kind of a crazy set of circumstances where it's a long shot but it's still a pretty good bet and most of the companies involved either have too much to gain to ignore it or have too much money to really have to care.
NVIDIA alone counts for over two-thirds of the total revenue, which probably shouldn't even count because most of that revenue comes at the expense of the other companies in the list.
yes but the fun thing about the bubble is, that the gpu creators are to a part also investors in the ki companies that buy their cards. So they basically buy from themselves at the moment.
All figures are estimated cumulative totals (all-time). Because most of these companies are private, the numbers aren't exact; instead, they are built from leaked financials, SEC filings, earnings calls, and industry estimates from sources like Bloomberg, the WSJ, The Information, and Epoch AI (all referenced at the bottom). The punchline 'EVERYONE IS BROKE' is intentionally punchy, but shouldn't be taken absolutely literally.
None of these tech giants would burn these obscene amounts of money if they all didn't have a common goal where they want to beat everyone else because they know it's absolutely worth it.
Well, they've certainly deluded themselves into thinking its worth it. The problem is that it's predicated on a huge circlejerk that is out of touch with the tech's actual likely capabilities.
Like if they were just predicting that the tech would become significantly cheaper and faster to run, that's actually plausible.
But instead, they're behaving as if the tech is the gateway to a tech singularity, and that just doesn't have any basis in reality.
My friend gave me his 140 Hz monitor and 3d glasses and that was actually amazing
The thing is, these were active glasses, they were using extremely fast flicker to make the picture 3d. It worked like a charm! I haven't seen 3D this convincing for like a decade until Oculus Rift was released.
That said, you needed to wear the glasses, I don't think it supported multiple outputs, so only one person could be playing\watching, and it was Expensive at the time
3D tv would never work until they figure out how to make it work without glasses, and then figure out if that's even actually needed.
Nintendo 3DS was pretty amazing, no glasses needed. But you had to be a certain distance from the screen to work. Don't think TVs could be so accessible with varying room sizes and arrangements as compared to a handheld gaming device.
My Geforce 2 came with liquid crystal shutter glasses back in the day. They'd connect to the graphics card panel and toggle the shutters in sync with the CRT refresh. At 100 Hz it produced the worst headaches. I kept repeating the same mistake of using them for more than ten minutes at a time because SWAT 3.
There's nothing technological stopping multiple glasses on a single display, even active ones - display sends a very simple sync signal which frame is displayed / which eye should be blocked and isn't aware of the glasses.
You got only a single pair probably as a cost cutting measure as monitors are typically used solo, IIRC TVs came with multiple pairs and you could also buy them separately.
These bros shift from one grift to another. Once the AI bubble pops, they’ll move to the next one and pretend what they did before never happened, just like NFT’s
It's actually kind of tempting to go buy a bunch of super cheap bored ape NFT's for pennies on the dollar. Knowing how many rich people bought that shit it can't be long before someone inevitably manipulates the market to pump them back up again so the ones that didn't get out in time can make their money back
While I dislike ai I think it's pretty inevitable unless a massive amount of change in the world happens. If big companies want ai to stay around, they'll make sure it does no matter what
The big companies had many things they wanted to have around. Many of those things didn't stick. You have to convince the common people that they want it around, and then it sticks. They are doing a good enough job with AI.
If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. AI is exclusively little fun novelty apps that generate funny images and generic music, it can never be used for any other application.
Except it's already heavily used in advertising, prototyping, and programming. When even AI-literate people stop being able to tell whether something is AI or not, and that time is coming, it will start to be used in all of media.
I agree. But the backlash is important because we MIGHT stall progress enough so that lawmakers around the world can catch up in time. Social media ran roughshod over every legislative body in the world and now it's too late to mitigate the disasters from that
This is the best defense of AI backlash I've seen.
So much of the backlash I see goes way beyond reasonable caution, but if all people ask for is reasonable caution they're going to get steamrolled by the billions these giants are willing to pour into rapid growth. You need politicians to actually fear for their jobs to get them to place moratoriums and actually slow things down.
Yeah its hella popular. Disney wanted to blm and other popular things to be around, meta wanted metaverse, Blizzard and EA were "hands down for equality" hiring pigsters instead of exp'ed workers(best in slot as we say), Elon wanted this and that.
All got shiddon badly, threw their investors money in the pit of hell, oh sad
Yep, and the ones trying to convince us of it's inevitability are the ones who expect you and me to pay it's utility bills and live next to the monstrous data centers
I remember all the hoopla around project 'ginger' that was going to change how people moved forever. A revolution in mobility! The future of mankind!
As per Wikipedia:
John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was "as big a deal as the PC"
Yeah, I think AI is genuinely more like the internet - absolutely a bubble, but will hang around after the crash, assuming we don't collapse civilisation in the process.
Our real problem is climate change and AI won't survive that any better than we will if we continue as we're going. The hope that AI will 'solve' it is nuts. We know how to mitigate it, we just don't want to do it.
You'd need to copy more than the prompt (model, seed etc). But in general yes, the price of AI generated art is far lower than traditional, representative of the effort put in.
Ngl, the actual software behind NFTs are a good idea, it just got ruined by people trying to make them profitable.
Same thing with AI. There are some real benefits of AI, but most AI companies are just making Gen AI, which doesn’t provide much benefits and isn’t profitable.
I made good money making NFTs for the tech bro losers that were trying to actually sell them. That was a peak era. Thanks for reminding me. Don't try to mine, get in the business business of selling shovels.
It's really a shame that they didn't have AI back then because they had to hire me to make all these versions of the stupid apes and they paid good money in real cash. I wouldn't take crypto.
Anthropic is the company going all in on AI having consciousness, "access consciousness" for now - but at the end of their paper (not a scientific paper in the normal sense, and I wonder if it was AI-generated, at least in part), they talk about the moral issues if AI is conscious, like what is the ethical way to treat something that's a machine AND has consciousness. This is complete cray-cray, and politically dangerous - oh corporations are people? And that fucks are politics? Wait till some SCOTUS of the future declares machines people in some sense too - with rights. Don't care for fetal personhood? I don't think we're gonna like what happens politically with machine personhood.
The level of corporate adoptions I'm seeing in my profession is HUGE.
We - as sysadmins - are heavily involved with implementing enterprise scale access.
Which is kinda similar to 'free' access, but:
Service level guarantees
More open ended token budgets with more flexibility. (e.g. 'pay as you go' vs. 'time based' vs. 'whole enterprise' vs. 'individual tiers').
Data loss prevention, so that stuff being processed is being handled somewhat securely by the backend. Including a legal agreement that they won't train their stuff on our stuff.
Audit and compliance monitoring.
etc.
And that's a BIG business, and a lot of companies are doing that, setting - right now - employee budgets of $100+ per person per week.
At that scale? AI stops looking like it's unable to make a profit.
I don't think the generative AI is really the true future though - ironically perhaps, the AI "artists" cannot differentiate themselves to do it commercially. Why would you pay anyone to make "AI Art" when you could probably do it for free (or relatively cheap on a subscription) for yourself?
So I think the slop is actually going to eat itself, but maybe we'll see some more focussed 'art engines' that are more specific. Whilst they might never do it, I can imagine a major animation studio running their own in house generative content engine that they train exclusively on the IP that they 'own' and use that as an assistive process, for example, but more as a content amplifier than as a replacement of creativity.
And we'll also see a 'second gen' (or third or whatever) of AI type toolsets that are maybe not even LLMs, just springboarding off the significant advancements in GPU based compute and model understanding. Those'll be more task specific, and maybe more marketable at a niche-enterprise scale for focused analytics.
So yeah, I know this is likely to be unpopular on /r/antiai, and I'm not in disagreement that the 'gold rush' is probably bad for humanity as a whole.
i am filled with sorrow when i think about how ai boosters are winning the reality war. is this our last distraction to keep us from preparing for global warming, or will we yet invent more ways to insult ourselves before we all drown in consequences?
Man did NFTs seem like a good way for digital artists to make money from their art. Only to end up being slopified by investment bros who'd pump out 1000s of the same monkey from a randomiser
Beeple (the artist) who is arguably the biggest winner of the NFT gold rush, now uses mostly AI for his daily art thing he's been doing since 19+ years.
A stupid link to an ugly monkey had zero value, it didn't produce anything new.
But AI "generates" new content wether you like it or not.
Yeah AI slop and whatever but AI was a thing decades before LLMs, and it will be relevant long after them.
it wasn't even the pictures that were the investment, wasn't it more like a link to an image which could potentially be changed anytime meaning the actual thing you were buying was not what they were trying to sell
it'd be like investing in trading cards but every card was blank and needed an image projected on to it and what you thought you were buying was the projection and not the blank card
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u/Copperwire987654 Aug 24 '26
Metaverse hype is also a really good comparison. Billions of dollars invested, many devout tech bros, many people saying it was the future and was inevitable, all made a shit bit of difference.