Is AI really grifting? It's not like mom and pop can sink their savings into AI tech and lose it all to scams, etc. like they can with crypto. At worst some big investors sink a big seed round in and never get it back from a 'grifting' AI company--IMHO no real harm done, if you're an angel investor you're mature enough to deal with getting burned it's just part of the risk (and no one is going to cry for someone rich enough to gamble millions and lose it all).
I suspect his AI company will be like his previous rocket company, Armadillo Aerospace, that tried to go after the x prize for space. A purely passion project that bootstraps itself from the start and either sinks or swims. I can't see Carmack 'grifting' by courting huge seed rounds from tons of investors, expanding quickly into an enormous company to steamroll into series rounds with no solid business plan, etc.
A scam implies malfeasance or fraud. There can be scam companies anywhere. What I'm saying is that AI is not inherently full of scammy companies, unlike say crypto. Sure AI tech is over-hyped but it isn't designed to defraud people.
AI in its current form is grifting. Trying to actually productionize anything with GPT3 for example is a nightmare, it can actively lie to you, the embeddings are pretty sub-par, and inference is pretty expensive. But you hear nothing but praise from it here on HN, and people act like the 30 minute web app they built and charge $15/month for is going to change the industry.
But it's getting better. GPT3.5/InstructGPT and now ChatGPT are showing incredible leaps in performance. Less hallucination, more coherence, it's getting better over time.
So guess who wins and profits once the tech catches up? Is it the people like me sitting on the sidelines and poo-pooing the tech? Or is it the people who have been in the space for a while?
Just the act of being "in proximity" to a technology can be so valuable. I know first-hand, I was an Objective-C developer for pure passion, because I loved clean MacOS apps and wanted to build myself tools. Well guess what? That proximity to Objective-C, familiarity with Xcode, and knowledge of Apple API patterns paid handsomely when the iPhone came out and I became an iOS developer. The same happened for WatchOS.
You see this pattern in technology over and over again. And I have no reason to think that AI/large language models will be an exception.
TLDR: It's kind of a grift. Carmack likely won't advance the field of AI or make a major breakthrough. But I have no doubt the infrastructure and talent he surrounds himself with will be able to manifest something profitable when the time comes.
Could you give some actual examples of projects or companies that you see as "grifting"?
Most companies are clearly communicating that they're in the R&D phase of the tech. R&D definitely isn't grifting.
The problem spaces where people find value and pay for AI isn't grifting either, like the bulk of content moderation happening now, recommendation systems, text to speech, speech to text, etc. The camera on my phone uses neural networks, with great success. I use ChatGPT daily, at this point.
What do you see as clearly being "grifting" (ok, lets try to keep Elon Musk related projects out of this)?
