> how is it possible that we see such incredible investments in LLMs?
Because somehow LLMs became the next "big thing" that nobody can explain but everyone wants to be involved in. It's like audio streaming, the most ineffective form of audio distribution, but for a while it seemed like a good idea.
> What are the c-suite execs and specifically CTOs seeing that is worth adoption and investment? These are very smart people.
The are idiots following the herd. They climb the greasy ladder of corporate career and fear getting fired. Their smarts are in corporate politics not in tech. And even if they were smart enough to tell that LLMs are an example of a research project that has received way too much funding, they need to appease the gods of Wall St who will judge them and punish them with a downgrade of the stock price if they cannot answer one question "What is your AI strategy?" It doesn't matter that the Wall St guys need help getting out of a strip bar, they have the power to ruin stockholders. This is why Apple, Google, and Salesforce are spending money of AI projects as a form of defence, not as a way to build new products or services. It's to show that they are relevant and can innovate.
Voice assistants were the same thing, so were chatbots, and audio and video streaming services (remember Groove Music Pass), touchscreens, pocket audio players (remember Zune?), etc. Fortunately for all involved, investors are already wondering if an AI correction is coming? I think we may see a wipeout of a lot of investments in AI soon.
> It's like audio streaming, the most ineffective form of audio distribution, but for a while it seemed like a good idea.
You dismissed it a bit too fast, didn't you? People are listening to streaming music everywhere - it is the new default. Even traditional radios stream over the internet. Is it efficient? Hell no. Is it popular? Extremely, even though a part of the population (including me!) prefers alternatives.
You are ignoring one important factor, streaming services can only stream what they are allowed to and if the artists and their labels decide to use a different distribution channel, streaming will become a thing of the past. Spotify has reached the point where they no longer know what to do and will soon be replaced by a competitor, not necessarily one that's streaming audio.
I agree, but im curious what you mean by it not being efficient? Is it not entirely dependent on how we interact with audio? Like you said its extremely popular, but its popular because its the most efficient way to listen to audio in the way people want too... discovering stuff, playing that track you heard at a party but don't know what its called... etc
I worked for a project that was a kind of mix of Netflix and Audible, just a few orders of magnitude smaller. Earlier, we were selling these multimedia products as digital downloads. That was simple for both sides, but with increased numbers of products and their weights customers started to complain their iPads etc. don't have enough storage to keep them (basically they would delete them and then request a new download link...).
But the amount of things you need to deal with in the subscription model is huge. Everybody expects Netflix-like experience, instantaneous playback and searching etc. We can do that for N simultaneous streams; for more we need to add a slight delay - and that is noticeable. In any case, the same file is streamed multiple times, sometimes dozens of times a day for the same client. This is what I mean terribly inefficient. And although you can probably cache a few audio files, it doesn't work well for videos. From my point of view someone just wastes the bandwidth for not having to store a file locally. Yes I know this is how it is supposed to work, but still.
> Because somehow LLMs became the next "big thing" that nobody can explain but everyone wants to be involved in. It's like audio streaming, the most ineffective form of audio distribution, but for a while it seemed like a good idea.
I know it's slightly off topic, but could you elaborate on the "audio streaming" part?
Sure. Compared to traditional broadcast over airwaves or even a download to a device that can play audio without having to stream it from the server, audio streaming is the least efficient and the least convenient form of audio delivery. When you have a transmitter, people adding a thousand new radio receivers in the area does not increase your cost as a broadcaster, adding a thousand clients requires more bandwidth, and more infrastructure. I never understood why audio streaming became as popular as it did when better forms of distribution were available.
But how many people really stream the same content at the exact same time anymore these days?
Large sports events are probably the only remaining application where broadcast would still see much advantage over individual streams.
In the case of a few simultaneous viewers, unicast can sometimes still use bandwidth more efficiently in case of a(since the transmitter precisely knows the receiver’s SNR and doesn’t need to waste any energy transmitting at the wrong coding rate or the wrong direction/place). That’s how modern 802.11 (Wi-Fi) often does reliable multicast, these days.
A seamless transition from unicast to multicast once the critical ratio of listeners per base station is reached would be very cool, but require pretty deep levels of integration between broadcasters and ISPs that are probably not worth it.
FYI, I work for a big sports streaming company and we are doing "mABR" or multicast adaptive bitrate with some ISPs because it really is worth it. You get a significant improvement in playback stats and the ISP gets massive traffic offload from their network. We started with one big ISP in Italy, then other ISPs saw what we were doing and asked to join in.
That being said, it really is a pain in the arse to build. It's also largely proprietary solutions (yes it's multicast but getting the player to find the content isn't a standard) and it's hard for the ISP to update ALL their routers to support it (even when they want it).
They mean "audio streaming" ala "video streaming" not like audio downloading to your device streaming. The stream means live download not just download through the net.
thank you, that makes sense in terms of efficiency! I am not familiar with the subject, but aren't the amount of radio frequencies available rather limited?
Yes, that's a different type of limitation imposed on the broadcaster. My point was that AI has not got a business model except capturing whatever value remains after it destroys existing models, just like audio streaming. Recent backlash against Daniel Ek's musing on X and the general behaviour of Spotify towards artists shows signs of reaching the end of the line for this idea. Same fate awaits AI. If you see how little of substance can be found in answers given by AI luminaries in their numerous interviews you can see for yourself that those guys have no idea and no plan. The best antidote for this bullshit is to display the transcripts on YT videos and read what they are saying. It's pure nothing.
I understand where you are coming from, but I’m not sure I completely agree.
Streaming music was popular even before it became legal, so I believe it's largely driven by people's desire to listen to whatever they want, whenever they want.
Regarding AI, it’s true that the current results might not always be the highest quality. However, there is no theoretical limit to AI's capabilities as far as I know. With this many people working to improve it, I would personally be surprised if significant advancements aren’t made. Maybe not just next year though...
Ultimately, I guess we will have to wait and see. Who knows, maybe you will be right in the end :)
The number of people working on improving AI is relatively small compared to the number of people reselling OpenAI APIs so I don't expect huge improvements in the next 5-10 years. The real value of AI is in ML, but with human supervision and interpretation of results. GenAI is the worst thing that happened to AI, because its coming rejection will reflect badly on the rest of the advances broadly labelled as AI.
> Streaming music was popular even before it became legal
Downloading music was popular. You download once, you listen many times. On Napster, it could take hours until a song was downloaded. No way you'd delete it and download again next time you want to listen to it.
Because somehow LLMs became the next "big thing" that nobody can explain but everyone wants to be involved in. It's like audio streaming, the most ineffective form of audio distribution, but for a while it seemed like a good idea.
> What are the c-suite execs and specifically CTOs seeing that is worth adoption and investment? These are very smart people.
The are idiots following the herd. They climb the greasy ladder of corporate career and fear getting fired. Their smarts are in corporate politics not in tech. And even if they were smart enough to tell that LLMs are an example of a research project that has received way too much funding, they need to appease the gods of Wall St who will judge them and punish them with a downgrade of the stock price if they cannot answer one question "What is your AI strategy?" It doesn't matter that the Wall St guys need help getting out of a strip bar, they have the power to ruin stockholders. This is why Apple, Google, and Salesforce are spending money of AI projects as a form of defence, not as a way to build new products or services. It's to show that they are relevant and can innovate.
Voice assistants were the same thing, so were chatbots, and audio and video streaming services (remember Groove Music Pass), touchscreens, pocket audio players (remember Zune?), etc. Fortunately for all involved, investors are already wondering if an AI correction is coming? I think we may see a wipeout of a lot of investments in AI soon.