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Fuck Sabrine Hoffsteader. She’s an idiot and you should get your news from someone else. Stupid grifter
Regardless of her personal opinions, she’s right on this.
Do you have some Information about this?
She is a transphobe and peter thiel fangirl. She is against renewables and thinks that ‘mainstream science’ is just a money making scam. All around dumb bitch who chugged the kool aid.
I used to watch her when, as far as I knew, all she talked about was science (mainly physics) news. You know, talking about the thing she actually studied in.
Then one day she did a “capitalism is actually great” video, and spouted a bunch of erroneous neo-lib bullshit. Thankfully most of the comments tore into her, pointing out the logical falacies and out right lies she was parroting.
I only watched a few more vids after that as she seemed to get more and more out of her area of knowledge and saying dumb shit.
I had no idea about the anti trans stuff though. I’d just stopped watching and written her off as the Nth person to be smart in one area and try and apply that to other areas where they have no expertise but think they know more about it than anyone else.
So yeah, fuck her
I stopped watching her generally when she put up her poorly thought out, TERF-filled anti-trans video, but the “Capitalism is good, actually” video came up in my feed and I watched it out of curiosity.
It’s so wrong it’s impossible to know where to begin. She invents a history of money that didn’t happen, defines capitalism in a nonsensical way and in the comments admitted she did no research for the video whatsoever and yet still defended her points as if her absolute ignorance on the subject was somehow laudable.
Absolute buffoon. Nobody should watch her videos. She is intellectually dishonest and generates ignorant content to garner clicks.
The facts are:
She has a PhD in theoretical physics. She could not find meaningful employment in particle physics. Unless somebody can correct me, she’s produced little if anything substantive to the field.
In the last several years she has engaged in attacks against the public trust for science. She engages the conspiratorial-minded viewers who’re looking for any reason to disavow scientific knowledge.
One example was putting on scripted theatrics while reading a self-penned letter fraudulently claimed was from a prominent scientist, who’s identity and details of course must be kept totally secret. Reading out this “bombshell letter” was a transparent children’s play, where the held-anonymous writer magically agreed with every one of her endless, bleating refrains, that most scientific research is “bullshit”.
Then her support for Eric Weinstein who is a complete grifting con-man with an “entertainment” publishing that he fraudulently describes as both a “paper” and a credible physical theory. It was literally released on April 1 and directly in it, it tells you it is a work of fiction meant for entertainment, and like all good science (/s) may not be used, incorporated into other works, or improved upon. It’s a complete piece of hogwash, and every credible physicist from here to Mars has described as not fit to wipe fecal matter; not a theory, not even science.
Then there’s all the Theil money.
Check out Professor Dave on YT, he just fucking obliterates her.
Edit
First https://youtu.be/70vYj1KPyT4
Second and better https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0
Third and best, 3.5 hours of clobbering with qualified physicists https://youtu.be/oipI5TQ54tA
Thanks for explaining!
If the last 5 years has taught me anything, it is that stock prices are completely divorced from the realities of the fundamentals of business. It is a clown economy and more like a casino then an honest measure of what a stock is worth. Especially with tech.
AI is way overhyped, to a level we perhaps have never seen before, but I would not expect the stock prices too reflect that.
Look at Tesla. The intrinsic value was no more than 10 billion before he started sieg heiling on national TV and alienated half of the western world.
What will continue to drive the stock prices is the support or acquiescence of governments to it. Do you the United States and the rest that follow.
The price isn’t based on what the company is worth, it’s based on what people think the company will be worth in the future. Clearly, a lot of people believe that truly autonomous vehicles are just around the corner, and AI is going to revolutionise everything.
They’re most likely wrong, but it will take a long time for the market to accept that.
You’re correct about how the stock price works, but I’d go even further to add that it’s also based on what a small percentage of very wealthy people/funds want it to be at the time. The markets are so insanely easy to manipulate by them.
As for the rest, it’s almost certain that you’re the one that’s wrong - autonomous vehicles are absolutely the future. They could essentially end road fatalities, as well as allow commute time to be included as work hours as people could work while being driven to work, passive income via auto-taxi etc.
AI/LLM/etc, there’s zero doubt here that it is going to - if it hasn’t already, which I’d argue it already has - revolutionise the world. It’s already completely changing many industries beyond belief, and its uses and “intelligence” is already growing exponentially. It’s just the cool thing to hate by anti-capitalists/lefties because of various reasons, and make no mistake - the anti-AI people, and the people who think it’s just a fad or that it’s overrated, will be looked at like the people who thought of cars in the same way.
What we have now is like the DOS of AI and self driving cars compared to the Windows XP/7/11 versions that are coming, but the detractors are acting like it’s the finished product and will never improve. It’s here to stay, and what we have now is only scratching the surface.
For those of us who have been around the block a few times, AI is going to just be invisible in a few years, replaced by the new marketing buzzword, probably “Quantum”.
Source: Seen it before when the word was “Cloud”. Oh, it’s all in the Cloud! Cloud, cloud, cloud.
Before that it was “Virtualization”. It’s going to make everything more efficient!
Man, I need to make an AI powered quantum cloud virtualization.
For someone who has “been around the block a few times” you seem to not understand just how incredibly revolutionary “cloud” and “virtualisation” were, and how they did revolutionise the tech world……
And yet nobody is currently talking about them, having the marketing push replaced with AI.
In a few years, AI tech will be silent, behind the scenes, and if anyone mentions it at all it will be “hey, remember when everyone was talking about AI?” while we’re all bitching about the new marketing buzzword.
I’ve been working in tech for 30+ years and involved in tech for close to 50 now. I’ve seen this pattern over and over again.
Cloud is still talked about everywhere because it’s pretty much how every service is hosted. Same with virtualization and containerization - it has all become the standard, it’s being talked about by default.
I mean, it’s not in the news anymore, but it’s definitely talked about. Businesses need to decide if they’re hosting on-prem or in the cloud, and if it’s cloud they’ll want to decide which provider, etc etc. It’s just become part of the system.
Look at Tesla. The intrinsic value was no more than 10 billion before he started sieg heiling on national TV and alienated half of the western world.
My conspiracy theory is that Musk gave multiple investors billions of his personal cash to invest in Tesla stock at key moments. He tells his straw purchasers when to buy hundreds of millions worth of stock in order to pump the price and kill those who short the stock. This scares the shorters out of the market and ultimately removes a natural source of downward pressure on the price. They sell off what they purchase all at once relatively slowly so they can then do it again.
But he invested a billion of his own money…or 0.01% of the TSLA market cap
No one in STEM takes Musk seriously.
Even 0.01% of a businesses shares in volume in the span of a 1 minute order is enough to massively swing the price. I saw it multiple times in after hours trading when I let my options ride for the day.
writes this while sitting in a meeting where the boss is excited about all the fancy AI tool that are being sold to him [send help]
I know the feeling…
Number 1 reason is the people selling it are far more excited by it than the people having to use it.
I’m actually planning to move my retirement into a money market because of the bubble and stock prices ballooning at a speed that just makes me anxious.
I’m waiting until the new year, though, so as not to miss dividends and because Christmas is coming, and with it, likely elevated spending in the US economy.
But I fully expect it to burst and think it’ll be uglier than 2000.
I agree, but it is nearly impossible for a normal investor to be certain that the current stock price ISN’T the lowest it’ll ever be. The bullshitters have an incentive to keep up the lies a few years longer, just look at the housing bubble, and when it burst, it might burst down to the current level or even higher, if that happens in a couple of years.
I was right once when I sold my ETFs before the Ukraine crisis unfolded, but I realise now that I was stupid-lucky-right. Will never do that again.
Also, I fully expect that some AI usage will withstand a critical review, and will prevail, just like the dot-com.
Then, there is the risk that the unexpected breakthrough DOES come, and the ai-super-senior can fix all the vibe-coded nonsense. I don’t see it in the next 5 years, but both unexpected breakthroughs as well as unexpected plateaus have happened in the past.
It’s true.
No one can time the market. If I opt to move into a money market at the end of the year, I’m likely giving up some short-term gain, but the flip side is that if this bubble does burst then I can buy back those shares at a massive discount, and profit over the long-term on the market recovering.
It’s all a risk. Everyone has to evaluate the info we have and make the best choice according to their risk tolerance.
What really gives me the heebie jeebies are two things:
-The tremendous greed and valuation of so many of these companies, many of which haven’t delivered anything except bold promises. LLM’s can do simple things well, but its output can’t be trusted without human validation, and that’s after training on all of the accumulated knowledge of humankind, which is why I tend to think that this bubble is eventually going to pop in dramatic fashion. I also don’t think we the public have yet seen the extent of the negative effects of using LLM’s, such as the emerging observations of their effect on people’s cognitive abilities and how they’re able to manipulate.
-The absolutely massive gains in the market over the past two years. My own retirement has had legitimate gains over the past two years that are above and beyond what ponzi schemes promise to deliver, and that’s simply unsustainable over the long term, so the question for me becomes when to take the profit and hold for a major event.
Anyway, that’s my reasoning around the choices I plan to make. I am not a financial adviser, so don’t take any of this as suggestions for what to do with your investments. This is just what makes sense to me.
six rounds of funding without making any money should be proof enough, an industry can’t be entirely made of unicorns.
I used to like Sabine but she’s a hack.
Can you elaborate?
TLDR she’s educated but had some clashes with academia and basically leans into an anti-establishment slant on everything. She’s kind of like an enlightened centrist but for science and conspiracy. She’s no broken clock, but she’s wrong on enough things that you can’t really take her at her word.
She also doesn’t really say a lot for how long she takes to say it.
She’s a failed academic who blames anything but herself. To be fair, it’s not a career for most.
I enjoyed Sabine’s analysis in another video that continuing to make increasingly larger models with more compute is about as effective as continuing to make larger and larger particle accelerators. Come on, bro, this million km Gigantic Hadron Collider will finally get us to the TOE. Just one more trillion, bro.
Hasn’t Sabine been getting in some hot water about promoting academic skepticism and making authoritative claims on fields well outside of her expertise?
She has also peddled transphobic talking points
Source video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_RAp73ra0
And here are some videos categorizing more of her grifts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70vYj1KPyT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJjPH3TQif0
Wow… i mostly ignore the click-bait stuff she puts out based on the thumbnails alone and tend to follow the “science-oriented” stuff (which has been dwindling but i’ve only followed her for a few months), but watching those 3 PDE videos really shed a light on an underlying pattern.
He makes a good (and logical) point showing that “older” fields of science will have fewer breakthroughs, as is the case of physics.
I like how the interviewees state “not my field of science, here’s my layman interpretation”.
The view-count by type of content is a bit worrying indeed and a telling sign, she could (and should) chose quality over quantity and stick to physics…Indeed the only video that’s somewhat on that note is the first one about transgenders: it’s a “new” phenomenon, people are still getting to terms with it, there are few studies, some of questionable quality, with few individuals… but i didn’t notice anything specifically transphobic about it.
Out of curiosity i went and watched one of her latest videos and she blurts out in the first few minutes A lot of research in the foundations of physics is now pseudo-science. It hasn’t followed the scientific method for decades. Decades?!
I get the churning out papers without real content angle. Anecdotally i’ve had an acquaintance who’s a published astrophysicist complain about how it’s getting harder to get work 'cos academia is shifting from peer review and quality to quantity of published papers as the sole metric. But claiming an entire field has been bullshit for decades…I guess i’ll switch subscriptions.
but i didn’t notice anything specifically transphobic about it.
It might not sound transphobic to the uneducated, but many points she peddled in that video (esp. the Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria stuff) and used by transphobic groups to discredit trans people. And the fact she is trying to discreetly legitimize transphobic dog-whistles should be a huge red flag.
There is a very good video (not related to Sabine) that explains all this stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiOc0r31-Os
Be warned, it’s 5 hours long. (Yes, there is a lot to explain, and there is a lot of bad stuff there.)
Every particle accelerator that has been built has paid for itself in research value. There’s basically nothing that comes out of AI research except the need for a bigger model.
The comparison is poor. Particle accelerators are science, LLMs do not produce science.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t build LLMS that would be useful for scientific purposes but we’re not. That is not the function or the goal of the people building these things.
Not really my area of expertise, but this article lays out her perspective on this for anyone who isn’t aware: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/
TL;DR - Many times the cost of the LHC and unlike the LHC, the gains are likely to be incremental instead of revolutionary. The same funding could do much more good elsewhere.
To your point, agreed that even small, incremental gains for science are more valuable than what we are likely to get from AI.
And then AI will just go away and everything will go back to normal again, yes? It’ll suddenly stop working and so people will stop using it for all the things they’re currently using it for.
consider the Dot Com Bubble: the internet obviously didn’t disappear but that doesn’t mean there weren’t serious economic consequences.
ELI5. Because I was actually 5 when that happened.
people will stop using it for all the things they’re currently using it for
They will when AI companies can no longer afford to eat their own costs and start charging users a non-subsidized price. How many people would keep using AI if it cost $1 per query? $5? $20?
OpenAI lost $5 billion last year. Billion, with a B. Even their premium customers lose them money on every query, and eventually the faucet of VC cash propping this whole thing up is gonna run dry when investors inevitably realize that there’s no profitable business model to justify this technology. At that point, AI firms will have no choice but to pass their costs on to the customer, and there’s no way the customer is going to stick around when they realize how expensive this technology actually is in practice.
I run local LLMs and they cost me $0 per query. I don’t plan to charge myself more than that at any point, even if the AI bubble bursts.
Realy? I get what you want to say, but at least the power consumption of the machine you need the model to run on will be yours forever. Depending on your energy price it is not 0 per query.
It’s so near zero it makes no difference. It is not a noticeable factor in my decision on whether to use it or not for any given task.
The training of a brand new model is expensive, but once the model has been created it’s cheap to run. If OpenAI went bankrupt tomorrow and shut down the models it had trained would just be sold off to other companies and they’d run them instead, free from the debt burden that OpenAI accrued from the research and training costs that went into producing them. That’s actually a fairly common pattern for first-movers like that, they spend a lot of money blazing the trail and then other companies follow along afterwards and eat their lunch.
It’s cheap to run for one person. Any service running it isn’t cheap when it has a good number of users.
I work in finance (IT side) if the bubble is gonna burst all the ppl making money off of it haven’t got the memo and I trust their collective intelligence over this woman.
All the people making money off of it are trying to maximize profit, as always.
As soon as they see the downward trend they’ll dump.
Or sink.
