August 5, 2024, a big day in tech?

Big day. A lot of news, much to some degree anticipated in earlier, still-relevant essays here [some of which I link to in brackets].

• Nvidia dropped 6%, 20% over the last month [see Saturday’s Why the collapse of the Generative AI bubble may be imminent for recent discussion]. Most stocks were down, but Nvidia was among the hardest hit. This could pertain to production delays, but also to growing market concerns about whether NVidia’s big GenAI customers could make money deploying the chips.

• OpenAI tempered expectations for its next event, and said we wouldn’t see GPT-5 then. [See my June essay, “The Great AI Retrenchment has begun”, “It was always going to happen; the ludicrously high expectations from last 18 ChatGPT-drenched months were never going to be met. LLMs are not AGI, and (on their own) never will be; scaling alone was never going to be enough. The only mystery was what would happen when the big players realized that the jig was up, and that scaling was not in fact “All You Need”. ]

• Elon sued OpenAI again [see also my discussion of his earlier lawsuit]. The most interesting thing is that the suit could force a discussion of what AGI means – in court.

• Five states suggested that Musk's AI chatbot has spread election misinformation.[See my essay An Epistemic Clusterfuck in the Making, “Social media was bad. Adding AI into the mix could easily [make things] a lot worse”.]

• Google lost its antitrust case. [I never wrote anything about that one, but Jason Kint, who has covered it quite regularly on X, is working on thread on what it means here, and notes that it could have implications for Google’s storehouse of AI training data.]

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Hell of a day.

Still, I won’t declare victory on my predictions of the deflation of GenAI bubble yet. All kinds of things can drive the market, and it ain’t over yet.

But it is also not out of the question that today could end someday end up being seen as a turning point.

Gary Marcus can barely keep up with this news.