Discussion
@skjeggtroll Of course it will. It's the consequence of the taper-off of Moore's Law rippling through the consequential supply chain it propped up for 50 years, ie. semiconductor products reliably doubling in performance every 18 months. That's now slowed to a trickle and they're squeezing the last drops out of the toothpaste tube of optimistic investors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication#Feature_size
@cstross Valve is the only privately held large gaming platform out there so they can afford not to mention it. No stockholders to cheer up with a quick share price boost. For the rest of us the bubble is still quite in effect… for now.
While I agree that the next AI Winter is likely just around the corner, I'm not sure Valve not talking about AI means much in that regards. Valve as a company has always been rather unexciteable. A bit like Nintendo, Valve seem perfectly at ease with just doing their own thing and ignoring whatever mechanical hare the rest of the industry is chasing after at the moment.
@skjeggtroll @cstross This is true, but on the other hand:
- Valve absolutely does take interest in "Next Big Things", e.g. they did their own experiments with AR back in the day, and there was even some minor drama when they gave up on those
- I haven't seen industry people be this excited about something Valve did since they launched Steam, which is a sign of its own
@skjeggtroll I'm using the term not only in the context of it's 1980s meaning but to refer to the investment bubble (investment in AI was notoriously slack during the first AI winter).
When the current bubble bursts, investment in anything with AI in the pitch is going to be as popular as herpes at a swingers' club.
It's difficult to divine, and in particular about the future, but I suspect the AI bubble popping might spell the end of cheap money for the tech industry in general and Silicon Valley in particular even _outside_ of AI.
For Academia, the Winter might be Nuclear when it comes to anything AI related. For the tech industry my guess is it'll be status quo ante bellum, where developers will just quetly use established AI techniques where they make sense -- like they have for 30 years.
@skjeggtroll Of course it will. It's the consequence of the taper-off of Moore's Law rippling through the consequential supply chain it propped up for 50 years, ie. semiconductor products reliably doubling in performance every 18 months. That's now slowed to a trickle and they're squeezing the last drops out of the toothpaste tube of optimistic investors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication#Feature_size
@cstross @skjeggtroll Moore’s Law is dead for now. I did a study a few years ago to look at what is happening and will happen in microprocessors. Short story is that traditional processor architecture is hitting end of life. Feature sizes are so small now that quantum effects are a significant factor. High speed and small size also means we are up against a thermal barrier as well. Clever approaches with System-On-a-Chip ( #SOA), 3D stacking, maybe Processor-In-Memory ( #PIM) and distributed multiprocessing will squeeze out more progress for maybe a decade. After that comes the next computing revolution — a shift to non-Von Neumann #computing. #Quantum has the spotlight because that’s the really big win, but there are other approaches that are likely to be commercially viable before quantum is mature. I’m optimistic about the tech, less so about the rate of adoption and change that will be required, especially if the most talented early- career computer scientists and engineers keep chasing the associative/statistical methods that include LLMs.
@meltedcheese @cstross @skjeggtroll Quantum. Heh.
Every period of exponential growth in history has been an s-curve because you eventually run out of atoms in the planet.
Every capitalist contemplating the end of an s-curve has always fervently believed, deep in their wallets, that there would immediately be a next bandwagon to jump on that looks just like the previous one. Cars->flying cars. Containerization->suborbital shipment. Antibiotics->immortality drugs. Their religion demands it.
@meltedcheese @cstross @skjeggtroll Would it really be so bad if none of the other approaches pan out, and this is as good as it gets?
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
