You can tell who’s going to grow up into the current generations tech illiterate elderly based on how people talk about AI today.

When AI is actually invented I’ll call it AI. Right now we have a steroid juiced parrot that’s based on old school machine learning. Its great at summarizing simple data, but terrible at real tasks. This is more people who aren’t dumb telling the marketing teams to stop hyping something that doesn’t exist. The dot com boom is echoing. The profit will never materialize.

But the profit absolutely can materialize because it is useful. Right now the problem is hardware / data center costs, but those can come down at a per user level. They just need to make it useful enough within those cost constants which is 100%wl without a doubt possible, it’s just a matter of can they do it before they run out of money.

It is unlikely to turn a profit because the returns need to be greater than the investment for there to be any profit. The trends show that very few want to pay for this service. I mean, why would you pay for something that’s the equivalent of asking someone online or in person for free or very little cost by comparison? Furthermore, it’s a corporation that steals from you and doesn’t want to be held accountable for anything. For example, the chat bot suicides and the fact that their business model would fall over if they actually had to pay for the data that they use to train their models. The whole thing is extremely inefficient and makes us more dumb via atrophy. Why would anyone want to third party their thinking process? It’s like thinking everyone wants mobility scooters.

These companies have BILLIONS in revenue and millions of customers, and you’re saying very few want to pay… The money is there, they just need to optimize the LLMs to run more efficiently (this is continually progressing), and the hardware side work on reducing hardware costs as well (including electricity usage / heat generation). If OpenAI can build a datacenter that re-uses all it’s heat for example to heat a hospital nearby, that’s another step towards reaching profitability.

It’s not easy to solve because its not possible to solve. ML has been around since before computers, it’s not magically going to get efficient. The models are already optimized. Revenue isn’t profit. These companies are the biggest cost sinks ever. Heating a single building is a joke marketing tactic compared to the actual energy impact these LLM energy sinks have. I’m an automation engineer, LLMs suck at anything cutting edge. Its basically a mainstream knowledge reproducer with no original outputs. Meaning it can’t do anything that isnt already done.

Why on earth do you think things can’t be optimized on the LLM level? There are constant improvements being made there, they are not in any way shape or form fully optimized yet. Go follow the /r/LocalLlama sub for example and there’s constant breakthroughs happening, and then a few months later you see a LLM utilizing them come out, and they’re suddenly smaller, or you can run a large model on smaller memory footprint, or you can get a larger context on the same hardware etc. This is all so fucking early, to be so naive to think that they’re as optimized as they can get is hilarious.

I’ll take a step back. These LLM models are interesting. They are being trained in interesting new ways. They are becoming more ‘accurate’, I guess. ‘Accuracy’ is very subjective and can be manipulated. Machine learning is still the same though. LLMs still will never expand beyond their inputs. My point is it’s not early anymore. We are near or past the peak of LLM development. The extreme amount of resources being thrown at it is the sign that we are near the end. That sub should not be used to justify anything, just like any subreddit at any point in time.