Hacker Remix

Baidu CEO: AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players

52 points by teleforce 2 days ago | 48 comments

maeil 2 days ago

> I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved – meaning when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer

Yes, I'm sure if we ask a question about The Party to your (Baidu) model, we can trust the answer.

xk_id 2 days ago

Can’t believe people still treat this kind of messaging about AI as expert opinion and not as advertising in its purest form. I guess those are the same people who see something profoundly meaningful in machine generated strings.

sfmz 2 days ago

It takes so much money to be a player in this space; the ante went from ~$100k (GOOG, FB) to like $4B or 100k H100s. That's how I arrive at the statement as 99% don't have the cash.

n_ary 2 days ago

The barrier to entry has always been the winning factor for lot of rapid growth businesses. In previous era, it was ability to afford massive cloud infra and army of expensive SWE to build global scale distributed systems. AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Paypal, Google, Netflix and all the “internet” tech had many competitors but only these could afford the cloud scale growth and overtake the market.

In LLM era, it is the compute cost of the hardware that is differentiating the barrier to entry for winners and anything that do not have massive budget for both training and marketing are never heard of unless they are in self-hype narrow field(Cursor).

It is also sad that, AI is hyped to progress environmental and medical research and there were some impressive feats, but all the hype and money is literally going to chatbot shops, hence marketing budget is also another barrier to entry.

dmix 2 days ago

There's a lot of people making AI companies outside LLM model development

hn_throwaway_99 2 days ago

There are, but then the question really becomes "what is the moat"? I.e. lots of these companies are essentially just providing wrappers around the best models coupled with some type of RAG approach.

FWIW, I believe there is a defendable moat for the players that have really good UI and are really focused on end-user solutions. E.g. I pay for Cursor.sh because I believe it is an easy net win for my productivity. But I do really wonder if these "AI application" companies can support their lofty valuations. I feel like most of them will have limited pricing power because if they try to price too high it's easy for someone to say "OK, we'll just go to a competitor, or even pull it in house."

Ekaros 2 days ago

I am not sure if there is too many moats.

But I am starting to wonder do you always need one. You won't win startup lottery to trillion. But you can still have solid business that generates profit and sells real working reasonable solutions to real customers.

Then again this is obviously wrong site for that...

red-iron-pine 2 days ago

"if it can't be a unicorn why even live?"

BillLucky 2 days ago

Truly combine technology with the needs of industry customers and try new value gains. This is the moat.

wkat4242 2 days ago

Hallucinations exist because people are using LLMs as knowledge oracles which they are not. I doubt it'll ever be solved unless a new type of model is invented for this.

anonzzzies 2 days ago

With current models it cannot be solved. Maybe it cannot be solved at all; humans lie/make up things (as in; they might not know they are telling a non truth) all the time and that's the best example of intelligence we have.