AI-driven productivity increases will be massive, and it will be a huge geopolitical disadvantage to not have any home-grown model development. Maybe the strategy is to let the big players burn all the money now and come in later when the costs of training go way down (taking a bet that they will...)
alganet · 8h ago
Maybe they're tired of "will be" statements that don't materialize.
There's two ways of seeing this:
- LLMs are a scam. The marketing did well, as scammers usually do. They lost SAP, but there's plenty of others to scam.
- LLMs are not a scam. The marketing did terribly. They lost SAP for being too pushy.
What I know for sure, is that the marketing of these LLMs is a big business. Maybe bigger than LLMs themselves.
jasonthorsness · 7h ago
The marketing is annoying because IMO the tools that actually work don’t need marketing; they spread through word-of-mouth. So most of the marketing is on the “scammy” side.
alganet · 7h ago
But word-of-mouth _is_ a marketing strategy.
Companies can distribute freebies to make people talk good about them, even when their product sucks. It has been done for decades.
A particularly pathetic and scammy LLM company could deploy thousands of bots to forums like Hacker News or reddit just posting stuff like "It works for me", or generating simplistic blog posts that praise their latest scam. Just to pretend word of mouth exists.
These bots don't even need to be intelligent. If someone reveals them as scam, the pathetic LLM company can just spin more dumb bots to burrow the previous embarassment.
It is what I would describe as _fraud_ though.
Maybe SAP is not interested in this kind of potential.
“Applied AI” means keep being technologically dependent on other countries (in this context that would be US and China).
This is the same business model of shutting down nuclear power plants and relying on cheap natural gas from Russia. It’s all nice until the music stops and you need to hurry and sign agreements with other dictators to get natural gas at higher prices.
There's two ways of seeing this:
What I know for sure, is that the marketing of these LLMs is a big business. Maybe bigger than LLMs themselves.Companies can distribute freebies to make people talk good about them, even when their product sucks. It has been done for decades.
A particularly pathetic and scammy LLM company could deploy thousands of bots to forums like Hacker News or reddit just posting stuff like "It works for me", or generating simplistic blog posts that praise their latest scam. Just to pretend word of mouth exists.
These bots don't even need to be intelligent. If someone reveals them as scam, the pathetic LLM company can just spin more dumb bots to burrow the previous embarassment.
It is what I would describe as _fraud_ though.
Maybe SAP is not interested in this kind of potential.
“Applied AI” means keep being technologically dependent on other countries (in this context that would be US and China).
This is the same business model of shutting down nuclear power plants and relying on cheap natural gas from Russia. It’s all nice until the music stops and you need to hurry and sign agreements with other dictators to get natural gas at higher prices.
Really, really dumb take.