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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

This does rather remind me of how in the 80s we had a big boom in AI research, fueled in part by the development of new & expensive tools that everyone just had to have. And then it dissipated just as quickly when the companies who were pouring money into it started expecting to see a return on their investment.

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Feels different now when the value of AI isn't just theoretical. Anthropic has like $80B ARR, and AI has really only transformed tech and a few limited spaces so far.

Companies selling AI kit in the 80s also had revenue and great expectations.

But, then as now, what they didn’t have was profits.

Show me the pure AI company in the 80s that even approaches Anthropic in terms of revenue and profit excl R&D spend.

Not sure what job you're in, but I don't really understand where such takes come from. As someone who works in software/ IT, this stuff is pure gold- it's multiplying by a substantial factor not just the productivity but the abilities and intelligence of my entire team. This has a very measurable value in money, and what the company pays for it now is just a small fraction of the value it gets, measured in terms of the salaries you'd need to pay to get the same level of performance. Anthropic could easily charge 5 times as much and still be convenient.

The technology people were developing in the 80s was also gold, in terms of its usefulness. Heck, much of it forms an essential part of the coding harnesses we all rely on nowadays.

But that didn’t stop the AI winter from coming. Because a technology being transformative does not protect it from over-investment. History perhaps suggests the opposite is true.

Nor did it prevent the AI companies of the 80s from going bankrupt when they got undercut by the commoditization that naturally came with the maturation of the technology.

What specific technology are you referring to?

For the 80s, the symbolic AI techniques that went into expert systems.

Ah, so you mean all the AI hardware companies that went bust when the software could operate on common workstation hardware (and couldn't or didn't pivot investment to software in that time)? I guess it is partially analogous - a couple trillion dollars invested in either hardware companies that require the more valuable frontier tools to remain computationally expensive, or require the intellectual property behind those tools to remain extremely valuable, for a solid 5-10 years in order to service their debts while turning profit.

Given how "cost per capability " is still exponentially decreasing and only needs to stay on trend for a few months longer before nobody needs to pay anyone more than a few cents a month for something close to general intelligence - I am with you there.

I just hope it isn't the USA's Darien Scheme. If the entire world basically gets what is now frontier AI capability for very little cost, at the US private equity and taxpayer's expense, and given the state of the US current account right now, then that is pretty much it for the Pax Americana.

>Feels different now when the value of AI isn't just theoretical.

We're coming up on four years since ChatGPT launched, and the only thing LLMs seem to excel at is the movement of imaginary little green pieces of paper.

I don't think AGI is inevitable from this point on but I don't understand this sentiment. There are a number of knowledge work sectors where LLMs are clearly here to stay and have truly fulfilled some of the core promises.

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