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Huge AI Funding Leads To Hype and 'Grifting,' Warns DeepMind's Demis Hassabis (ft.com) 30

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The surge of money flooding into AI has resulted in some crypto-like hype that is obscuring the incredible scientific progress in the field, according to Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. From a report: The chief executive of Google's AI research division told the Financial Times that the billions of dollars being poured into generative AI start-ups and products "brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever."

"Some of that has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate. And it clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal," he added. "In a way, AI's not hyped enough but in some senses it's too hyped. We're talking about all sorts of things that are just not real." The launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022 sparked an investor frenzy as start-ups raced to develop and deploy generative AI and attract venture capital funding. VC groups invested $42.5bn in 2,500 AI start-up equity rounds last year, according to market analysts CB Insights. Public market investors have also rushed into the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia, that are spearheading the AI revolution. Their rise has helped to propel global stock markets to their strongest first-quarter performance in five years.
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Huge AI Funding Leads To Hype and 'Grifting,' Warns DeepMind's Demis Hassabis More

Huge AI Funding Leads To Hype and 'Grifting,' Warns DeepMind's Demis Hassabis

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  • Bound to happen. (Score:3)

    by Finallyjoined!!! ( 1158431 ) on Monday April 01, 2024 @12:30PM (#64361502)

    As soon as someone sniffs the possibility of making money for nothing..

  • oh no (Score:3)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Monday April 01, 2024 @12:39PM (#64361526)

    Oh no, tell me it ain't so. Hype and grifting? Surely that has never happened before.

  • Grifting is a perfectly good word, and has been around for a long time.

    And AI - artificial idiocy - is all grift.

    • Don't ask us, we didn't write the headline. Ask the Financial Times.

      Of course it could have been edited before hitting the main page but you didn't ask about that.

    • Any word that has a chance to get a news site sued, but another person said the word first, they'll quote it even in the headline. Effectively shifting the blame for using the word to the person who originally said it. It's another form of "allegedly."

  • Well... duh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday April 01, 2024 @01:03PM (#64361612)

    Did you expect something else to replace Dunning Krugerrands as the new hot thing for investment? Of course it's a grift. What else would it be?

    Investors are desperate enough to throw money at anything in the vain hope that finally something sticks because there simply isn't any worthwhile investment on the horizon anymore. Anything you could invest in usually requires someone else to buy that shit, and consumers are fucking broke and CANNOT buy anything but what they need for survival.

    And survival is pretty much cornered by now, there ain't a lot of investment opportunities here.

    So they grasp any straw you hand them, and I'm even sure that even they know it's a grift, they just hope they find the bigger fool before the shit hits the fan.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Investors are desperate enough to throw money at anything in the vain hope that finally something sticks because there simply isn't any worthwhile investment on the horizon anymore.

      Which is good, because it means we finally are slowly getting out of the mindless hype drives and can start fixing the mountains of technological debt that cretins like MS and others have created and continue to create. Will probably take a century or longer, but if we do not start soon, a lot of technology will become unusable and we will need to start from scratch in many areas. Not that other engineering disciplines did any better before they managed to become providers of reliable and dependable technol

      • Sorry, but nope.

        The eternal growth gospel MUST be true. Else, the quarter bonuses may suffer. So we have to cannibalize more. We have exploited the foreign markets 'til they didn't budge anymore and suddenly start to build their own crap without us, so we went and squeezed our domestic workers to the point where they no longer have any more to buy our crap. We have to find some other way to keep the perpetual growth going. The hype will tide us over another year or two with fake growth and investment in mor

  • But since he has "Sir" in front of his name, obviously he's a superior human and his opinions should matter more than my own!

    However there's a twist - there's a paywall in front of "Sir"'s thoughts! I guess I'll never know what he thinks after all! ... or should I give them money, since after all he's a "Sir" and he talked to them?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      At least UK bestowed "Sir" on a Beatle instead of say Ted Nugent. It shows they have some standards.

  • There is some progress, mainly in the natural language interface. Apart from that, some is some small, incremental progress and the training data sets have gotten larger, mainly by criminal commercial copyright infringement being done to get that data. As a consequence, answer quality is low and hallucinations are frequent.

    Same as previous AI hypes, this one is 95% hype and 5% (generously estimated) substance.

  • Incredible
    adjective
    So implausible as to elicit disbelief; unbelievable.

  • "Some of that has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate. And it clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal," he added. "In a way, AI's not hyped enough but in some senses it's too hyped. We're talking about all sorts of things that are just not real."

    For some reason, that wording is hilarious to me. "AI's not hyped enough but in some senses it's too hyped." Do these dudes get their irony detectors disabled before spewing their stupid? WTF?

    • That text was possibly AI generated.

      At least I hope that no human would be stupid enough to write crap like that unironically.

  • ..."brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype..."

    I guess a good example of the hype he's talking about is Google's own assertion that AI is going to make their search engine better.

  • the 1%ers will just write the losses off on their taxes, which they can do for years and years and years.

    Hell, There's an entire finished Wile E Coyote movie sitting around unreleased because the tax write off is worth more than the movie.
  • For the low-low price of infinitely more than it's worth, you can talk to my AI. I developed this brilliant product through the magic of Guatemalan day laborers typing on the internet and pretending to be software.

    Satisfaction guaranteed, and it's entirely possible that some of it might even be yours.

  • It never ceases to amaze me how there is always piles of dollars to funnel into this stuff. Does no one ever demand a return? Are the tax advantages of carry over losses so great that they would rather have that than millions upon millions in cash???

    Bitcoin and NFTs I get. There is at least a possibility for a return and NFTs are a great way to launder money so there's still a benefit of some kind there. But with scams like this, blockchain, etc there is no return. The money is just gone.

    Please someone

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