Unfortunately, as Keynes noted: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
And my god, they’re committed to irrationality right now.
But that's where the money is!!
(Until it's not)
Your Return of Investment can be someone else's investment.
One might call it a pyramid scheme
What trillion dollar problem is it solving? In the minds of investors, that “problem” is paying people for labor.
Even when the same people need to get money from people they don't wanna pay (or there aren't any buyers), this is still the case.
So if GDP doesn't come from nature (which it shouldn't, at least net shouldn't), the system cannot work with financial wealth being the only goal.
But it can work long enough to destroy much of everything everywhere.
And this absolutely will not change the course of AI investment whatsoever because it still driving a huge amount of profit.
The only thing that will finally change the course of AI investment is when the bubble finally burst which will cause the collapse of our economy because, by that point, so much money will have been invested in it. There will be no other possible result.
And why? Because these assholes only care about one thing: short term results at any cost.
Too big to fail, too big even to jail - it's worked before, they seem to be counting on it working once more.
But I could be giving them too much credit - perhaps they really do believe in it.
What's failing or jailing?
Like, I'm not defending AI here but using a lot of power, and building software tools people buy is not illegal.
We can argue it's a bit of a scam in the sense that many objectives purported are not accomplished, but that's a tale as old of time with software.
We can also argue the copyright issue, I think that's the most relevant topic.
But in general this is just software 2024 MEGA EDITION. Everything sucks, everything is just executives moving money around.
You think it's too big to fail now, wait until they start wondering what they built all of those extra data centers for.
“profit” is gonna need some qualifiers there.
Firing the staff & reporting “earnings”? Goosed stock price on the above + hypey garbage? Enforced “features” no one wants? AI hardware makers? Okay, that one’s legit, but ironically not AI.
Number 3 drives me hair-tearing insane, I have straight up seen AI cultists say AI will fix the power grid but only if we keep pouring resources into it so that it can fix all our problems. ಠ_ಠ
“I’ll finally have he strength to kick this heroin habit if I just do more heroin.”
That is, entirely unironically, how deep addiction makes you think. Just need enough to get to normal...
"we should all do heroin to support the habit and mainstream it." - every fucking company pushing AI onto society when it's dangerous, janky af and ridiculously expensive.
I'm very confident that with carte blanche the electrical engineers already overseeing the grid could solve the problems it faces. We don't need an ai miracle, we need to remove bureaucratic and funding obstacles for critical infrastructure.
And this is it: Many of those "AI will be so smart that it can solve these problems for us!" arguments refer to problems where having a "smart" enough solution isn't the problem... Getting people to care/notice/participate/get out of the way is.
The great AI decrees that you must increase solar and wind subsidies! And pay no attention to the electrical engineer behind the curtain!
That's what Altman himself claims.
e/acc. The dumb MFs believe burning fossil fuels as fast as possible will lead to technological advancements to mitigate the problems. It's all wishful thinking and convienant blind faith.
I love that Ed Zitron is getting more popular. He is on a ferocious rampage against the rot economy and I'm all here for it.
If AI is a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?
Why, the trillion dollars not yet in the pockets of the companies that think they can take advantage of AI of course.
The naked truth is that #4 answers #1. The biggest utility AI might provide would be replacing paid workers. That's a trillion dollar problem if your ultimate goal is to hoard wealth and sit atop the highest pile of gold like a dragon.
So again, we have a solution to a problem only the wealthy elite have, being marketed as an advancement for the greater good of society, to justify stealing the massive resources it consumes, in order to not have to pay that directly to their workers.
Capitalism.
Okay, yes true. But have you considered that Big Number Go Up? Do you really want to miss the boat on this massive speculative opportunity?
Yeah this is basically Metaverse or NFTs but with a slightly more plausible use case so that it will drag out far longer before corporations quietly pretend it never happened.
The tech itself is decent. But as always, profit above anything else, so we can't have anything nice.
So instead, it will be wasted and forgotten.
AI will get better
Aren't LLM already pretty much out of (past) training data? Like, they've already chewed through Reddit/Facebook etc and are now caught up to current posts. Of course people will continue talking online and they'll continue to use it to train AI. But if devouring decades of human data, basically everything online, resulted in models that hallucinate, lie to us, and regurgitate troll posts, how can it reach the exponential improvement they promise us!? It already has all the data, has been trained on it, and the average person still sees no value in it...
Your mistake is in thinking AI is giving incorrect responses. What if we simply change our definition of correctness and apply the rubric that whatever AI creates must be superior to human work product? What if we just assume AI is right and work backwards from there?
Then AI is actually perfect and the best thing to feed AI as training data is more AI output. That's the next logical step forward. Eventually, we won't even need humans. We'll just have perfect machines perfectly executing perfection.
My wife works for a hospital system and they now interact with a chat bot. Somehow it's HIPAA compliant, I dunno. But I said to her, all it's doing is learning the functions of you and your coworkers, and it will eventually figure out how to streamline your position. So theres more to learn, but it's moved into private sectors too.
I mean, happily, chatbots are not really capable of learning like that.
So she's got a while, there.
The last part is wrong. They aren’t imagining improvement. They know this is it for now and they’re lying their asses off to pretend that they’ll be able to keep improving it when there’s no training data left. The grift is all that’s left.
The trillion dollar problem is paying billions of pesky workers to work
I think that's the obvious implication of this question, but you're missing the implied question arising from that answer: is this a problem we want to solve in this way ?
I like to read AI as Al (i.e. Allen) and pretend he's just some guy stealing ideas, lying, and generally fucking up at his job. Al is an asshole
Weird Als Twitter account is worth a read: https://x.com/alyankovic/status/1670113967497433090?lang=en
Link to the article please?
No, not the research, the article they're referring to by the tech reporter. But thank you.
Edit: This is the article: https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/
The AI makes the art. The art is made into an NFT. The NFT goes on the blockchain. We all get rich. Climate is saved. End of story. How are people not getting this??? 😂😭
This is all true if you take a tiny portion of what AI is and does (like generative AI) and try to extrapolate that to all of AI.
AI is a vast field. There are a huge number of NP-hard problems that AI is really really good at.
If you can reasonably define your problem in terms of some metric and your problem space has a lot of interdependencies, there's a good chance AI is the best and possibly only (realistic) way to address it.
Generative AI has gotten all the hype because it looks cool. It's seen as a big investment because it's really expensive. A lot of the practical AI is for things like automated calibration. It's objectively useful and not that expensive to train.
Also at the same time, and for many of the same reasons, fuck Goldman Sachs.
"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.
