AI - Biggest Hype Bubble of all time?
An interview with Emad Mostaque (Founder & CEO of Stability AI = company behind generative AI tool Stable Diffusion) got me thinking. Will the AI hype create the biggest bubble ever?
This is MadeMeThink.xyz – A weekly publication with thoughts on disruptive Technologies (e.g. AI | Web3 | Metaverse), their Applications, Opportunities, and Impact. Written by Prof. Thomas Metzler, Ph.D.
This MadeMeThink last week…
AI - Biggest Hype Bubble of all time?
An interview with Emad Mostaque (Founder & CEO of Stability AI = company behind generative AI tool Stable Diffusion) got me thinking. Will the AI hype create the biggest bubble ever?
"I call it the 'dot AI' bubble, and it hasn't even started yet (...) I think this will be the biggest bubble of all time" - Emad Mostaque (Source)
I suspect there will be some disillusionment after some time, as usual with hype technologies, but unlike other hypes of the past, I see direct benefits already being unleashed with many AI applications, so Gartners Hype Cycle could look somehow different this time (allthough I am pretty sure we will walk through an AI Trough of Disillusionment). Casado and Wang from A16z wrote an interesting article on the economic case for generative AI and foundation models and touched the hype bubble topic:
“So, are we just fueling another hype bubble that fails to deliver? We don’t think so. Just like the microchip brought the marginal cost of compute to zero, and the Internet brought the marginal cost of distribution to zero, generative AI promises to bring the marginal cost of creation to zero.” - Casado & Wang (2023)
AI: Hallucination vs. Creativity
Marc Andreessen expressed some interesting thoughts in an interview on the Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI. I would like to highlight two of them. First, he talked about hallucinating AI and how it can be bad or great depending on your perspective:
“Hallucination is what we call it when we don't like it. Creativity is what we call it when we do like it. And so when the engineers talk about it, they're like, this is terrible. It's hallucinating. Right. If you have artistic inclinations, you're like, oh my God, we've invented creative machines for the first time in human history, this is amazing.” - Marc Andreessen (Minute 19:00 in the video)
Second, he talked about probabilistic correctness (as opposed to deterministic correctness) in the context of generative AI. I like the term probabilistic correctness very much and Andreessen draws a good analogy:
"Wikipedia today is still not deterministically correct, right? So you cannot take to the bank every single thing on every single page, but it is probabilistically correct, right. And specifically the way I describe Wikipedia to people, it is more likely that Wikipedia is right than any other source you're gonna find. It's this old question, are we looking for perfection?” - Marc Andreessen (Minute 21:50 in the video)
Ralph Lauren virtual walk-in store
Ralph Lauren has launched a virtual walk-in store on its website, called the "888 House." I walked around a bit in it (see comments for link). The experience is okay, nothing new, but I was quite surprised by the prices that Ralph Lauren calls up (have never dealt with RL before). 2500 dollars for a black handbag, 3790 dollars for a leather jacket. This made me think a bit about how unequally wealth is distributed in the world. The average salary in Sudan is $40 monthly. And technological developments in the field of AI will lead to an even greater concentration of wealth, as I also described in one of my last articles...
Personal update…
Here's what else has been going on for me since the last MadeMeThink issue…
Berlin Blockchain Week
I am looking forward to giving a keynote at the Berlin Blockchain Week. In my talk I will take a critical constructive perspective on the NFT Space. If you're in Berlin on the evening of September 14, stop by at the SAP Data Space. Attendance is free, but registration is required. Thanks for the invitation to Chris Hortsch from nftlab.berlin 😎 🙌 Signup here.
LIT Manga Night
NFTs are often tickets into community of interests. One NFT community I am active in is LIT. I recently attended an LIT Movie Night at the specially created LIT OnCyber Museum. There was a manga in original Japanese language to see. That's what I enjoy about NFT communities. I live here at Lake Constance in Austria and watch a manga in a virtual museum with people spread all over the world ❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
Disclaimer: The thoughts published in this publication are my personal opinions and should not be viewed as investment advice. I am not a financial expert. My specialty is entrepreneurship, marketing & innovation. Readers should always do their own research.