"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
As time rolls on im increasingly confused by the growing chasm between the lovers and the haters.
FWIW im firmly team fuckai. I find the implications for the future and for my children kinda terrifying.
The part I dont really understand is that to me it just seems SO inescapably terrible for any specific purpose, but people still seem to think ita useful.
It makes more sense when you realize that you are not the target customer. C-suite people are the target customer. They have no idea what real work looks like, so whatever it barfs out looks perfect to them.
The only thing it's really good at is generating bull shit with a very confident tone. So, ironically, the best candidate for its use to replace an entire industry of "jobs" is for replacing CEOs.
But, I say we just get rid of AI and CEOs.
They also have big dreams of finally being able to get rid of all the peasants.
It's because AI is such a huge umbrella of things, some of it genuinely useful and others just a pure detriment to the world, and the discourse has become so vitriolic that there isn't room for nuance or discussion.
For example, I have a friend working in bioinformatics and a huge number of people in his field love AI. It's incredibly useful for their research. These aren't out of touch boomers, they're multi-doctorate holding, cutting-edge researchers with intimate knowledge of both neural nets and their field of expertise and they find AI (typically not the commercial-facing generative AI, but sometimes that, too) useful for what they're doing. It's anecdotal, but the actual experts I've talked to have said it sped up their work and opened new avenues of research.
That said, it's pretty obvious all of the absolute fuckery that is coming along with these companies; the slop, the job loss, the enshittification, the privacy nightmares, the theft of art and literature, the literal damage it's doing to people's ability to think–I could go on. It's easy to find reasons to be against AI in totality.
If you go into AI spaces, the vast majority of fans aren't fans of the slop or companies, either. They're mostly just optimistic that the improvements of AI will be so destabilizing that we all have to remake basically all of our systems and we'll only be left with the benefits. If AI figures out a cure for every disease, healthcare is going to be destabilized, but you'll still have every cure. If AI takes every job, you can't really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?
Again, it's anecdotal, and at this point I'm fully atop my soap box, but my experience has been that people who are AI "fans" actually hate the companies and the way that AI is being used. What they're hoping for is the world that comes after 'the big breakthrough' that breaks all the systems.
I think there's room for nuance. For the record, I'm a writer and game dev every time I see someone pop into my social media talking about using AI to write or make a game (or replace human creativity in any real way), I wanna beat them to death with my laptop, but when I see a new application for AI in cancer research, or a nearly century old math conjecture proven, I do feel a little optimistic, too.
If AI figures out a cure for every disease, healthcare is going to be destabilized, but you'll still have every cure
Why are we assuming that if we acquire the knowledge of how to cure a disease that the cure will be made accessible to all?
If AI takes every job, you can't really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?
What they're hoping for is the world that comes after 'the big breakthrough'
we'll only be left with the benefits
Why are we assuming anything positive would happen for the vast majority of humanity? Is our allegiance to the tech billionaire’s verbatim propaganda completely predicated on optimistic vibes?
These aren't out of touch boomers, they're multi-doctorate holding, cutting-edge researchers
It is extremely important for everyone to understand that intelligent people are not necessarily less likely to be deceived. In fact, without specialized training, a more intelligent person may in fact be better at compartmentalizing their beliefs, and have a very robust ability to internalize false beliefs without letting it decay their ability to function within their field of specialization.
Indeed, if we observe cult recruiting tactics, being an extremely capable high achiever often just puts a bigger target on your back, attracting more robust efforts to indoctrinate you into the fold.
All of which is to say, you are not immune to propaganda, regardless of being a phd researcher.
when I see a new application for AI in cancer research
We had an absolute flood of reporting about “ai” breakthroughs across different fields of science. There have been countless examples of these stories being investigated, and it turns out the “breakthrough” was either unrelated to AI or blatantly fabricated. I myself work in one of these cutting edge industries and I personally know of two major international companies who have heavily marketed and sold “AI” systems, complete with public press releases detailing the breakthroughs, when in reality the systems are literally and totally unrelated to anything AI. In one case they simply affixed an “AI” sticker to an existing device without changing the programming or capabilities whatsoever.
Just be careful out there friend. This whole affair is rotten to the core. Have optimism that we can protect one another from what’s coming. Don’t be optimistic that the billionaires are simply waiting until the right moment, when they are satisfied with the power they have amassed, to finally share their prosperity with us
Why are we assuming that if we acquire the knowledge of how to cure a disease that the cure will be made accessible to all?
We aren't. I was answering the point of the OP about why there is such a divergence in beliefs. Just illustrating what the other side thinks as I've seen it. To your question, though, I don't think it will. I think it'll be about the same distribution it currently is.
Why are we assuming anything positive would happen for the vast majority of humanity? Is our allegiance to the tech billionaire’s verbatim propaganda completely predicated on optimistic vibes?
Again we aren't. I know that I wouldn't trust the billionaire salesman's pitch. But I would argue that having zero access to a medication is worse than having some access to it, though. There's definitely room for an unequal distribution of resources to be had, but I don't know if that can be blamed on AI, specifically.
All of which is to say, you are not immune to propaganda, regardless of being a phd researcher.
Couldn't agree more. Being educated doesn't preclude being stupid.
We had an absolute flood of reporting about “ai” breakthroughs across different fields of science. There have been countless examples of these stories being investigated, and it turns out the “breakthrough” was either unrelated to AI or blatantly fabricated...
I mean, these examples aren't really a mark against AI so much as the industry and the state of research, isn't it? Fabricating research, lying about AI use, or scamming is kinda just... people, right?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for skepticism. Most AI is just garbage and not useful, and even less of it is useful for actual research, but the idea that there is nothing good being developed at all, that it has zero benefit, strikes me as the inverse of the pure, unadulterated optimists have where they think that a total system collapse from 'the big breakthrough' wouldn't be absolutely catastrophic for a ton of people, too.
I just think it is more complex than the current discussion around AI. That's all.
Again we aren't
I know friend, I’m addressing the people you are speaking for, regardless of who amongst us here agrees with them. I apologize for the confusion
but the idea that there is nothing good being developed at all, that it has zero benefit, strikes me as the inverse
This comes up a lot.
Are you familiar with the story of The Lorax?
To summarize briefly, a billionaire creates a comfortable scarf, made from felled trees. He aggressively markets this fashion item to the point where it becomes a worldwide sensation, and all the trees are felled in the pursuit of manufacturing more scarves. In the end, without any trees, there is no more fresh air to breathe. Ah but, worry not, the billionaire rises to the occasion, and graciously begins selling the populace canned air so they can survive.
In this story, do you consider the many objectively good qualities of the scarf to be relevant in any way? How comfortable it is? How warm? How stylish? Would you dismiss the pleas of environmentalists for being too narrow minded in their denial of these many clear benefits?
I think The Lorax comparison is warranted for LLMs, hyping the race for AGI, and AI as marketing/branding, but the AI umbrella includes a lot of Machine Learning that's just practical, applied statistics.
A lot of ML applications aren't anymore resource intensive then using Lemmy. So I think the discussion about harms v. benefits of ai-- beyond hypers and doomers-- often diverges from conflating "AI" with these AI companies that are all-in on LLMs vs AI as a field that contains an over-hyped, over-invested, resource-intensive, subcategory bubble that needs to pop already as well as subcategories that make it easy and efficient to classify and cluster data.
In this story, do you consider the many objectively good qualities of the scarf to be relevant in any way? How comfortable it is? How warm? How stylish? Would you dismiss the pleas of environmentalists for being too narrow minded in their denial of these many clear benefits?
This comes across a bit condescendingly. I obviously think that destroying the environment is a bad thing.
But I think you're misreading my point entirely. I'm not advocating for AI wholesale or saying the ends justify the means, so I don't see how the Lorax is relevant here.
I wanna beat them to death with my laptop, but when I see a new application for AI in cancer research, or a nearly century old math conjecture proven, I do feel a little optimistic, too.
I feel like these are such divergent types of machine learning that they have nearly nothing in common with the generative AI used in chatbots and code generators (especially that used to predict disease). Even if they may use some of the same underlying technologies and theory.
Which is why the overloading of the word AI to mean literally all of it is frustrating. So I guess I don't have a problem with using machine learning to target narrowly defined problems to gain new knowledge, versus outsourcing all of our thoughts and actions to chatbots and AI agents.
Couldn't agree more. It makes me yearn for the days when AI meant NPC pathfinding in games, but deep in my bones I know that's where the problem started. My personal conspiracy theory is that basically every AI marketing department intentionally muddies the water to make the conversation more difficult so people can't just decide to massively regulate LLM services.
It’s because AI is such a huge umbrella of things
In reality, yes, but in common discourse people mean LLM slop and image/video generation because that is what is being marketed to the general public. The acronym has been coopted by techbros.
If AI takes every job, you can’t really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?
The rich send out AI bots to hunt us down and exterminate us, now that they no longer need us for labor.
A lot of people only say they are supporting AI because they feel they have to. If somebody would mention anything critical about the tech in my workplace or e.g. linkedin, they would definitely tank their career chances. Our managing director is a huge fan (or says he is, so the board likes him, who knows), so nobody would darw to go against the direction he sets.
I am required to use AI. It is literally part of my annual review accounting for 25% of my evaluation "grade"
People also think praying is useful.
For me, I've long had little patience for shoddy work from a lot of people. I am used to making sure I have a fundamental understanding of things before I make proclamations about why something is the way it is or how to improve it. To me, AI is largely horrible because it just spews out plausible sounding stuff without understanding, which turns out to be a strategy that works often enough, but creates huge headaches in obnoxious ways when it is wrong.
For a lot of others I work with, that has been their whole career strategy, when in doubt, just spew words that seem plausible and hope it works out. AI actually can compete with them in many ways because they have largely built their career of making plausible sounding guesses that get ignored when they are totally wrong and praised when they happen to be right. This crowd loves the AI, and they also get promoted because society rewards confidence more than competence.
Another facet is that so many folks reckon themselves to be creative geniuses with no time to realize their great ideas, and they see the slurry of hollow crap they can fling onto the internet as fantastic, while the rest of us are exhausted by a flood of soulless crap drowning out some of the content we used to enjoy discovering.
Keep in mind that clickbait has long worked and enough people want to engage with clickbait, while another contingent smells it a mile away and wants to avoid it at all costs as they know it's empty crap to bait us. I suspect there's a similar breakdown of AI fans and foes, excepting that AI is at least useful in certain contexts.
Xai valuation before Elmo let his company purchase itself: $200 billion
Xai profit that year: -6.4 billion
Ah, but Anthropic might could maybe make more money in the future, possibly. Just imagine if they made ten times more money than they do now.
They will... Very temporarily, and only if they don't have major competitors by the time they raise prices considerably.
It's pretty clear what all these fucks are doing. They're making it cheap now to get as many users as possible and make sure companies are completely dependent on their technology. And when they are, payday! Token prices go up, AI prices start looking crazy, separation of products into Claude, Claude Plus, Claude Plus Ad Free, Claude Enterprise, etc.
And the companies pay for it, very temporarily, until shit normalizes and enshittification ensues.
My point was that ten times what they make now isn’t even half of what Walmart makes.
Investors have fully embraced the sunken cost fallacy.
Revenue != profit but profit cannot outscale revenue.
Came to say the exact same thing; to top it all off - as a (currently) private company - Anthropic doesn’t need to publish gross/net operating profits. However, they did for the most recent quarter - highlighting their first ever quarterly profit - so up until now, they’ve been burning investors’ money hand-over-fist.
So you're so you're saying there's a profit.,..
Calls on dc infrastructure. Up up and away...
It's not about the money, it's about the joy of gambling with generational wealth that physically can't run out.
The capitalist class is salivating at the prospect of replacing middle management and any other sort of mid to low level workforce wit "ai"
Valuation is merely a prediction on how valuable the company is now and how much they will grow in the future, it's basically a hype train with money in mind. FTX is valued at $32billions in 2022, we all know what happened to the company that year. Same goes for NFT. It is still impressive Antropic's revenue is at $20 billions though, if you ignore the expenses and the cash they burned so far.
Now do net profit, it's funnier.
You're not taking into account how much anthropic will save on headcount after replacing their workers with ai.
/S
Claude did the valuation.
Because Claude told him to, my recently retired family member is trying to convince a nearby university to open an AI data centre/research centre/community hub in his town. It is proposing that the heat generated will be used to warm some buildings and a swimming pool, Claude likes the water and power availability from a nearby river with a hydroelectric plant. The man is calling city councillors and deans with Claude as his source.
For all I know, maybe it’s a good proposal. I am automatically skeptical when the entire proposal is a bunch of AI yes-man stuff. But really, I wish he had taken up painting or tennis in retirement instead.
Heating is one (dumb) thing, but is he aware of the noise?
i... actually using the heat water as a byproduct and diverting the water from a hydro dam's spillway and then back into the river might be one of the more environmentally responsible ways I've heard dreamt up to deal with one of those bullshit centers. slap it right next to the dam (which are already noisy as fuck) and you've just created a minor ecological disaster instead of a superfund site. i mean i think he's onto something, i just don't think it's ready for publishing. "it's a good idea that now needs a human polish" like shoe polish not Poland Polish i know i'm irresponsible with my capitals but not that bad anyways this might be the thing to get him to step back.
I don't like how SPY and other indexes are loosening the rules in favor of allowing IPOs to get onto their indexes quicker, it makes it so even more capital of people who don't even give a shit about these industries are more even more wrapped up in them
AI investors:
Similiar to what happened in the roaring twenties if I read this History channel article correctly. But not exactly the same. Wild to read banks lend money to people to buy stocks back then. Do they still do that today?
They do, it's called margin trading, shorting, and options trading. Most private equity firms do it.