Built on unearned hype.
I really don’t understand the hype about AI in it’s current state.
It’s not for you. Its for corporations who want to fire half their staff and replace them with an algorithm. That’s why it has such a high valuation.
Those corporations are about to find out the fun way that these algorithms, in their current and near-future states, cannot replace human beings.
Well, except for maybe lazy copywriters who pump out pointless listicles and executives who do - whatever it is they do - but any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools.
You’re assuming that they care about running a viable service or product.
The hope is that their customers care. Or their customer’s customers.
The “corporation” might care. The Senior Vice Director of Data Intelligence who made the decision and got $50k bonus for it does not
- Computers might be good at numbers and typesetting, but we’ll always need human secretaries and phone operators to keep things running.
- They might be able to beat a novice, but no computer will ever beat a human grandmaster at chess.
- Okay, then they can’t beat humans at Go or poker.
- Any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools. ← you are here
- AI-run corporations will never be able to outcompete ones with ones with human boards and CEOs.
- An AI scriptwriter could never win an Oscar.
- I’m voting for the human candidate for president, I don’t think the AI one is up to the task.
“When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages.”
Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.
Your grandmother (or great grandmother depending how old you are) had to spend hours of hard labour every day to wash clothes dishes and rooms with just a tub of water a broom and a mop. Now all that takes maybe 20 minutes of light labour with a vacuum, dishwasher and washing machine. Technology absolutely has reduced drudgery
Mate, the horse whip and the wheel were Technology back when they got invented.
It’s a massivelly generic word.
Absolutelly some Technology has reduced drudgery. Meanwhile some Technology has managed to increase it (for example: one can make the case that the mobile phone, by making people be always accessible, has often increased pressure on people, though it depends on the job), some Technology has caused immense Environmental destruction, some Technology has even caused epidemics of psychological problems and so on.
Not only is there a lot of stuff in the big umbrella called Technology, but the total effect of one of those things is often dependent on how its its used and Capitalism seems especially prone to inventing and using Technology that’s very good for a handful of people whilst being bad for everybody else.
One can’t presume that just because something can be classified as Technology it will reduce drudgery or in even that it will be overall a good thing, even if some past Technologies did.
Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn’t see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.
Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn’t rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.
Be glad we’re not the horses. The glue factory might be coming next.
Not the best analogy. The glue factory was a thing while horses were a primary tool for transport and heavy labour. And horses were treated appallingly. Now that they’ve been made redundant, living standards for horses have improved dramatically and the glue factory is long gone (though their population has also reduced significantly).
We can only hope for a similar outcome for ourselves.
Before the car there were three to four people per horse
There are currently about 140 people per horse.
So if you want to cheer on taking the world population from 8.6 billion to about 188 million, treating us better, I can’t say I’m a big fan.
Phone operators weren’t call center staff, they were literally routers in human form. Secretaries were your email program, calendar, and your folders full of word documents.
I’m well aware of switchboard operators. Computers were originally a profession as well.
Secretaries are still all that, both using digital tools as well as physical. They weren’t replaced by any of those programs. They just changed how they do their job. They schedule your meetings for you now in their cell phone instead of on a desk-sized paper calendar mat.
Alright, since you find this such an important issue, consider the first bullet point cropped off of my humorous list of milestones.
Doesn’t change the underlying point.
Dude, secretaries and assistants still exist.
Yeah we have one for a building of 100+ people. I wonder how many we would’ve needed 50 years ago.
Good one. Did you use an LLM to generate it?
Too good for a human to have written so it must have been AI? I guess I’ll take it as a compliment that I’m writing at that level.
No…?
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I would argue that there’s neither understanding nor creativity happening. It’s guessing, aping, remixing, which is impressive enough.
It’s a machine that knows everything, but understands nothing.
And yet it’s accomplishing those tasks. I guess that means “understanding” wasn’t necessary for them after all.
You forgot maintenance and security. They need constant surveillance and maintenance.
The future portion of this list reads like something produced from ChatGPT.
I’m voting for the human candidate for president, I don’t think the AI one is up to the task.
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos_bot
The point isn’t that we’ll never get there. The point is we sure as shit aren’t there yet.
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Nah that’s what they’re saying. That people used to say that and they were proved wrong.
Lol I figured that out shortly after typing my comment, hence deleting it
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Honestly the easiest people to replace with a bot.
An AI chatbot for a cloud service I use helped me find the right documentation for setting up SSO. It’s not all bad. But the way it’s pushed is bad.
It’s all leading to one final product: VR sex robots
It better.
Like your optimism, but unlikely
It’s not related to the technology, is the venture industry trying tp figure out the next unicorn, which they have been trying to find for the last ten years.
Cloud? Neva heard of it! AI is where the money is at now.
Buzzwords, that’s all they are.
Server farms are the real money maker. Doesn’t matter the fad, they’ll need processing power from somewhere.
As always when someone looks for gold, sell them the shovel.
I wouldn’t say “the cloud” is exactly in the same realm. It’s broad and definitely had its heyday being thrown around in marketing, but it’s a very real facet in modern software. More specialized and actually useful AI will probably end up in a similar place eventually.
I think I’m talking myself out of my original point though lol. Kind of conflated LLMs and AI at first. I just wish LLMs weren’t the only things with money behind them.
Honestly, I can say I don’t really get it either. I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.
I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.
I feel like the last few months have been an inflection point, at least for me. Qwen 2.5, and the new Command-R, really make a 24GB GPU feel “dumb, but smart,” useful enough so I pretty much always keep Qwen 32B loaded on the desktop for its sheer utility.
It’s still in the realm of enthusiast hardware (aka a used 3090), but hopefully that’s about to be shaken up with bitnet and some stuff from AMD/Intel.
Altman is literally a vampire though, and thankfully I think he’s going to burn OpenAI to the ground.
What do you think about the possibility of decentralized AI through blockchain so that you could pay some tokens or something like that to rent the GPUs to run your AI for as long as you wish to instead of having to buy all the hardware and assemble it yourself?
I cannot tell if you are being serious or just having fun with buzzwords
I stopped at block chain
Oh, I’m being completely serious. I’ve been interested in crypto since about 2013.
crypto fizzled years ago without a major use case. source: check google trend history.
bitcoin wouldn’t be useful for tracking the rental of cpu/gpu assets.
Yeah, no Bitcoin would be the wrong chain for that. But there are other chains that would work better for such a use case.
There is no need to use Blockchain for this. Computing pools like this have been used for ages
The solution to all the world’s computing issues is not “blockchain.”
you mean a computing pool, like SETI@home since the late 90s?
absolutely no need to make this idea stink of a crypto scam.
You can already do it but there isn’t really any need for a blockchain. I personally use runpod but there’s vast.ai and a few others.
It’s usually quite cheap.
Isn’t that just cloud computing but with extra steps?
Tbh it’s just hard to see the value proposition in the age of cloud computing. I think aspects of the underlying technology are cool but basically every crypto project that comes to mind has been an actual scam. Sure there’s eth and RDNR that was built on top of it but why should i spend what will ultimately be more money in periods of high demand (gas goes up when more people use the network) when i can just plug my credit card into amazon or microsoft AND get the benefit of infosec regulation like PCI-DSS. Crypto just doesn’t ever inspire confidence because bad actors consistently shit in the punch bowl while providing no extra utility over existing cloud providers.
When distilled down crypto-compute just seems like cloud compute with extra steps, which is already just using a computer with extra steps.
We already can rent GPUs to run AIs with tokens - those tokens are just managed by govt instead of some random.
I somehow didnt’ get a notification for its post, but thats a terrible idea lol.
We already have AI horde, and it has nothing to do with blockchain. We also have APIs and GPU services… that have nothing to do with blockchain, and have no need for blockchain.
Someone apparently already tried the scheme you are describing, and absolutely no one in the wider AI community uses it.
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Are you trying to solve science with it or something? You are supposed to turn carefully worded sentences into funny pictures and show people.
Maybe that explains it. Because I am blind, pictures mean very little to me. I think image memes were one of the most abhorrent things to ever exist. Because I miss out on so much because of that.
Have you tried music generation? That’s also fun. There are a bunch.
It doesn’t matter. Just understand that there are people who get paid way more than the average joe to hype the shit out these companies to attract investor value. Then get mad at capitalism like the rest of us.
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MBA degrees are way too easy to obtain. And the federal government bailing things out for a few decades has taught the market that they can take huge risks without much direct risk.
That’s because we’re using it wrong. It’s not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it’s mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it’s wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it’s great
For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you’re looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains
Those are some projects I’ve used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I’m looking to build a new one
I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like “build a class to represent this db object”. I don’t trust it to do anything that’s not straightforward - I don’t trust myself to do anything tedious
The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it’s flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible
As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let’s you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer
That’s my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo “rampancy”, a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job
This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn’t have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don’t know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool
You’re doing it wrong, you’re only allowed to hate AI and if you don’t you’re a crypto shill or something idk
It’s just the new grift. There’s probably some value in there somewhere, some elements of it that will evolve into useful tools that get used a lot and presumably make a bunch of money for someone but yeah. Grifters gonna grift.
You must not be feeling the AGI.
I like it. I use it every day. Much faster and better than sifting through garbage websites to find answers.
How’s the glue on your pizza working out?
Possibly correct answers lol
You guys want me to invest? I’m guaranteed to lower the stock value by ~30% within about a month with my shidas touch
Yeah, do it!
I had a similar touch when I was younger. I’ve worked for Circuit City, Toys ‘R’ Us, and Blockbuster Video. Sadly, Best Buy somehow survived.
Can you… Work for Broadcom? Or Oracle or EA, or something. Just a suggestion.
Alrighty then, just need to wait for fucking novideo stock to get back to what I bought it at and I’ll dump and switch (don’t have anything spare to play around with sadly)
I hear you though, I also had(have?) similar physical effect on things like toys as a kid or some electronics since then…just brake shit randomly without trying, especially if I don’t own it.
I gotta get employed there, but yeah similar effect.
You will? Really?
Yeah, two months into it and they’ll be toast.
I can’t wait for this current “A.I.” craze to go away. The tech is doofy, useless, wasteful, and a massive energy consumer. This is blockchain nonsense all over again, though that still hasn’t fully died yet, unfortunately.
Like blockchain there is some niche usefulness to the technology, but also like blockchain it’s being applied to a myriad of things it is not useful for.
Also it’s not fucking ai is it. I actually find the blatant misuse of this term incredibly annoying to be honest.
Arguably you are the one misusing the term. Even painfully mundane tasks like the A* pathfinding algorithm fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. It’s a big, big (like, stupidly big) field.
You are right that it’s not AGI, but very few people (outside of marketing) claim that it is.
I’m going to argue quite strongly that my general, all purpose understanding of the words ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence’ constitute the ‘correct’ definition for the term, and I don’t really care how ‘ai’ is defined ‘in industry’. It’s not intelligent, therefore it’s not artificial intelligence. You can redefine ‘intelligent’ in this context to mean whatever you like, but unless the general definition of the word changes then it doesn’t mean jack about shit.
So what is intelligence in your general, all-purpose understanding?
Are newborns intelligent? How about dogs? Ants?
You may argue that current AI is still behind an average human adult and therefore not intelligent, but academia is a bit more nuanced.
recursive fuzzy logic
It is, machine learning, neural networks and all the other parts in LLMs and generative algorithms like midjourney etc are all fields of artificial intelligence. The AI Effect just means the goalposts for what people think of as “proper” AI are constantly moving.
This might be the case ‘in the industry’, but I would argue quite strongly that it represents a gross misuse of the word ‘intelligence’. Like a fun new definition of the word, that doesn’t mean anything close to what it usually means.
Words often have multiple meanings in different contexts. “Intelligence” is one of those words.
Another meaning of “Intelligence” is “the collection of information of military or political value.” Would you go up to CIA headquarters and try to argue with them that “the collection of information of military or political value” lacks understanding, and therefore they’re using the wrong word and should take the “I” out of their name?
AI was a computer science term before any industry adopted it.
The colloquial use of “AI” is basically the Hollywood concept of a conscious computer. Nobody knows about AI as it’s used in computer science industry. Nor does it matter in regular discourse. In this sense it’s not AI. It’s a disservice to lead the on laypeople to believe it’s something it’s not.
The term AI was coined in 1956 at a computer science conference and was used to refer to a broad range of topics that certainly would include machine learning and neural networks as used in large language models.
I don’t get the “it’s not really AI” point that keeps being brought up in discussions like this. Are you thinking of AGI, perhaps? That’s the sci-fi “artificial person” variety, which LLMs aren’t able to manage. But that’s just a subset of AI.
‘Intelligence’ requires understanding. The machine has no understanding, because it is not conscious. You can fiddle around with the definitions of these words until you’re blue in the face but this will be true in rain, sun, hail, puffed wheat, etc.
Did you check the link I posted? The term “Artificial Intelligence” is literally used for the sorts of topics in computer science that LLMs fall under, and has been for almost 70 years now.
You are the one who is insisting that the meaning of the words should now be changed to something else.
Yes, no one seems to raise this anymore. AI to me has always been something akin to computer sentience.
Things like ‘self healing’ systems are being badeged as AI when they’re little more than an application load balancer.
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Drugs(silk road), scams&malware(pay 5 Bitcoin to unlock PC), money laundering&pump dump (unregulated market), and Nvidia hype (should have bought amd at 5$)
“we ran out of useful things to do with computing at the consumer level and now we are inventing problems” - “just bill’em” gates, 1984.
This work will have lots of applications in the future. I personally stay as far away from it as I can because I just have zero need for it to write souless birthday card messages for me but to act like the work is doing nothing is kinda stupid.
Every stage it’s been at people would say “oh this can’t even do X” and then it could and they’d so “oh it can’t do Y” and then it could and they’d say…do I really need to go on?
The biggest issue with it all right, for me anyway, now is that we’re trying to use it for the absolute dumbest shit imaginable and investors are throwing tonnes of money, that could solve real problems we don’t need AI for, into the grinder while poverty and climate change run rampant around us.
It has its uses, but it is being massively overhyped.
Having trialled Copilot and a few other AI tools in my workplace, I can confidently says it’s a minor productivity booster.
apparently so far the research disagrees with the productivity claims https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html
Whereas I have been finding uses for it to produce things that simply could not have produced myself without it, making it far more than a mere “productivity boost.”
I think people are mainly seeing what they want to see.
Yes, it enables you to create something like an image without any train in and quickly.
The total market cap across all cryptocurrencies is currently about 2.5 trillion dollars, which isn’t far below its all-time high of 3 trillion. If that’s something you’d say “hasn’t fully died yet” then AI’s not going to go away any time soon by that standard.
I didn’t specify cryptocurrencies. They were not the only “good” attached to blockchain hype. Besides, they are primarily money laundering schemes and also used to steal from the financially illiterate. Touting market caps doesn’t change the actual real-world use case.
Oh good! I remember when they said they couldn’t afford to pay independent copyright owners. Now they can pay for the work they stole!
This is exactly what will happen.
/s
…said the lawyer getting ready to fill out a class action lawsuit.
I hope this is the case, but I can’t see the creators getting paid more than a small fraction of the value of their work even so.
If I had 10k to leverage I would be shorting the FUCK out of this, it’s a bubble and everyone knows it
Market can remain irrational, etc
Even if you 1000 x your $10k I don’t think you’d have enough to short something valued at $157B, however inflated that valuation might be.
You can short something with $1. It’s just not enough to affect the value itself. You also don’t technically need any money at all, the point of a basic short is to profit off selling borrowed stock after all.
Fair point. I, perhaps wrongly, assumed OP wanted to short them out of existence and not just profit from shorting them.
You definitely do need money. No broker is going to let you short without collateral, and you’re going to be paying interest for the duration of your short position beside any fees/commission.
That’s fair, but let’s not pretend there aren’t brokers that just run a credit check below a certain amount and leave it at that.
Maybe if you have a super low cap, high fees, and they automatically close your position at a pretty conservative point. But that’d hardly be worth any broker’s time with that risk/reward, unless they are hosing the borrower with insane fees. Though if that’s the case, putting up collateral would be cheaper (even if you have to borrow it from somewhere).
You can short something without forcing a short squeeze…
And one for you
A block for you…
Eh?
I’d say still risky. They might perpetuate the bubble for longer, which means high risk of forced covering at loss.
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You’ll never have 10k if you keep eating all those avocados.
How do you short a privately-held company?
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When I copy and paste someone else’s work, I get called a plagiarist and get fired.
When OpenAI creates a robot that does it really really really fast, they make enough money to feed the planet hundreds of times over.
I don’t want to live on this planet any more.
You need to do more fancy thingy between the copy and the pasting.
Good, intellectual property is a mental illness of capitalism
Sure, but I think recognizing someone when they accomplish something of value is important regardless of the economic system in place.
And in this Capitalistic society OpenAI is doing nothing but literally capitalizing on the hard work of thousands of individuals without giving them any form of recognition
Capitalism is incompatible with meritocracy.
It rewards ruthless capture and enclosure of other people’s hard work and surplus value.
Read what Disney did to folk culture. Read what Edison did to his underlings, it is all a repeat of the “enclosures”, the thefts of our commons for private profits.
If you don’t know what the enclosures were, read this macabre story and focus on the people who attacked the fences and paid with their lives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Sugrue
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I say we indict Sam Altman for both securities fraud and 8 billion counts of reckless endangerment. Him and other AI boosters are running around shouting that AGI is just around the corner, OpenAI is creating it, and that there is a very good chance we won’t be able to control it and that it will kill us all. Well, the way I see it, there are only two possibilities:
-
He’s right. In which case, OpenAI is literally endangering all of humanity by its very operation. In that case, the logical thing to do would be for the rest of us to arrest everyone at OpenAI, shove them in deep hole and never let them see the light of day again, and burn all their research and work to ashes. When someone says, “superintelligent AI cannot be stopped!” I say, “you sure about that? Because it’s humans that are making it. And humans aren’t bullet-proof.”
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He’s lying. This is much more likely. In that case, he is guilty of fraud. He’s falsely making claims his company has no ability to achieve, and he is taking in billions in investor money based on these lies.
He’s either a conman, or a man so dangerous he should literally be thrown in the darkest hole we can find for the rest of his life.
And no, I REALLY don’t buy the argument that if the tech allows it, that superintelligent AI is just some inevitable thing we can’t choose to stop. The proposed methods to create it all rely on giant data centers that consume gigawatts of energy to run. You’re not hiding that kind of infrastructure. If it turns out superintelligence really is possible, we pass a global treaty to ban it, and simply shoot anyone that attempts to create it. I’m sorry, but if you legitimately are threatening the survival of the entire species, I have zero qualms about putting you in the ground. We don’t let people build nuclear reactors in their basement. And if this tech really is that capable and that dangerous, it should be regulated as strongly as nuclear weapons. If OpenAI really is trying to build a super-AGI, they should be treated no differently than a terrorist group attempting to build their own nuclear weapon.
But anyway, I say we just indict him on both charges. Charge Sam Altman with both securities fraud and 8 billion counts of reckless endangerment. Let the courts figure out which one he is guilty of, because it’s definitely one or the other.
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Even its name is full of shit.
Even its name is
full of shit.a hallucinationThere, fixed it for you.
The name use to be closer to the truth, but then money corrupted it - as it always does.
Closed statistical algorithms would be more suitable but less marketing friendly.
Just a speculation bubble, no work no real technos, same as every other fucking ai company
It’s the new crypto, NFT scam.
Can’t wait for the AI boom to inevitably pop and all those billions that could have been spent on…literally anything else, go down the drain.
Sounds like the perfect time for artists to sue and get their fair* share of that.
*All of it. They deserve all of it.
Sounds like a bubble.
Let’s see for how long.
Why not just withdraw that money in banknotes, and burn it in a stove?
The Money Hole bit from Onion News Network is a classic https://youtu.be/JnX-D4kkPOQ
Hey you know as well as I do that that money belongs in the money hole. 🕳️
Great read on the topic: OpenAI Is A Bad Business by Ed Zitron (Where’s Your Ed At)
Ed Zitron is amazing. That dude just says it like it is.
I love his podcast.
