• OpticalMoose@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      The number one app for companies right now is “we can replace a lot of people and save a ton of money”, specifically look at the chatbot assistants you see on websites. Once they get the kinks worked out there, I guarantee they’ll have a talking version that will replace call center workers. And that’s only the beginning.

      They’ve already run the numbers and figured the upfront costs are worth it. Occasional maintenance/cooling/upgrades/tech support is still going to be cheaper than FICA/Medicare/401K matching/PTO/maternity leave/overtime/workman’s comp/running a huge HR department/family day barbecues, etc.

      Just trading one type of equipment for another, in their eyes.

        • OpticalMoose@discuss.tchncs.de
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          9 months ago

          It’s just the start though. It’s going to spread to any and every thing they can think of. When’s the last time a corporation said “Naw, that’s off limits. We can’t in good conscience monetize that.”

            • 520@kbin.social
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              9 months ago

              It has already spread to image and audio generation and manipulation. It has also spread to automated decision making in financial firms.

                • zaphod@lemmy.ca
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                  9 months ago

                  You don’t see a financial opportunity in delivering tools to dramatically speed up the creation of emails, reports, presentations, boilerplate graphics, etc?

                  Tell me you’ve never held a corporate job without telling me you’ve never held a corporate job.

                  There are people who literally live in Word and Excel every day. For them these tools could be life changing.

                  And that’s just one obvious userbase.

    • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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      9 months ago

      When a gold rush happens, the people getting rich are the ones selling shovels. That’s what NVIDIA is doing, and it was what they were doing with the crypto gold rush. It makes them a decent short term investment. When AI crashes, they will probably lose some value if they can’t find a new technology gold rush. But even when the gold rush ends, AI will be here and be wanted, so NVIDIA has a place, has profit potential. Just like the .com bust of the early 2000s. Most of those companies bankrupted, but it wasn’t like we abandoned the Internet.

        • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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          9 months ago

          They and Microsoft are a smart investment for now. They could end up like a lot of company post COVID bump, but both are old companies that hopefully have the smarts to project and plan to so they don’t collapse when the cash stops flowing as well.

            • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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              9 months ago

              I agree that these customer service bots are a poor use of the tech. In the corporate world, it is very useful for both writing and summarizing, that’s where Microsoft comes in. Outside of LLMs, though, NVIDIA is well staged for most AI stuff. That’s why I say they will outlast the craze. It doesn’t matter what the AI is used for, NVIDIA wins. Voice to text, text to voice, sentiment analyses, object and image recognition, anomaly detection. All of which have gotten significantly better in the last few years due to modern AI tech. Hell, even video game up-scaling and ray tracing have both benefited from these technologies.

              All of that is to say, the LLMs and image generation stuff has taken all the press and attention, but there are a lot more uses than those two, and clever people are finding new uses constantly.

        • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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          9 months ago

          Ha, there are certainly plenty of companies that didn’t survive, and it possible someone comes along with eats NVIDIA’s lunch. AMD is certainly giving them a run for their money on the graphics side.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Problem is that nvidia has the brand strength now. AMD has to be significantly better than nvidia now to overcome the disadvantage.

            AMD knows all too well. By every objective measure their server CPUs are the best right now and Intel still has a bigger market share anyway. Every time you think AMD should have easily grabbed the lions share of the market, they somehow don’t. People are stuck in their ways.

            On the GPU side, they have to face an even stronger version of this and also have to contend with the reality that nVidia’s software stack and game developer partnerships are still stronger than AMD even it AMD GPU is technically strong.

    • 520@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      Oh there are practical applications if you know where to look. For instance I’m training a trading AI to spot patterns in numbers and indicators that aren’t necessarily common knowledge.

        • 520@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          For what purpose?

          The short version: making trading decisions based on technical data.

          The long version: there are traders out there that do their operations using statistical formulas called indicators.

          There are lots of such indicators out there, and hey, it’s pretty easy when they all point one direction, but what happens if they don’t? What happens if you only get a few conclusive indicators and the rest are inconclusive? What if you were to combine specific indicators to get a more conclusive answer?

          If there is one thing AI is good at, it is exploiting numbers and patterns in service of a very specific and easily measurable goal. Mine is trading profits.

            • jj4211@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Also, stock prediction can change the thing being predicted. Once a critucal mass of people believe in a certain prediction strategy, then their own actions screw up the prediction. It’s not like predicting some natural or external thing.

            • 520@kbin.social
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              9 months ago

              Oh yeah, this thing will never be able to predict events like GME or that kind of thing.

              The thing is though, I don’t have to beat the first couple or even the first 50 trades. I just have to beat the babdwagoning masses by detecting upticks and downward trends, something my software can do and act upon faster than any human.