"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.
I got into AI in 2023 for a few months just to see if I could make sense of it all.
The whole thing as an industry is almost entirely smoke and mirrors meant to confuse, obscuring theft and fraud.
It does have some neat applications and opportunities, (generating templates; storyboarding) but warrants a small R&D team of enthusiasts, not the collective investment and resources of entire nations.
What comes after that is the next google/amazon.
We're going to need a new BS tech meme for arsehole investors to speculate in. Whats next? I'm guessing something medical. Personalized health care perhaps.
I think you're right.
We're due for something DNA based, since they can all grab a cheap copy of the 23andMe data set, now.
the only people ever obsessed with AI, were corporate heads looking to reduce headcount in thier companies, and to suck up more VC money.
Right. And now AI has failed to deliver the promised miracles (as expected) for three years. So now it's time to pick a new hype train to introduce the venture capitalists to.
All aboard!
It's worse than that... They are broken. Like, they are all fucking broken.
You should probably mention that this is an article from 7 months ago.
3 years ago Sam Altman said the current models hit a wall and the media blocked it out
Has anything changed?
nope, AI already kinda peaked what it can do currently.
No, they already stole everything, so there’s nothing left they can use to train and improve further.
Don’t get my hopes up. I want them to lose as much of their dumb tech bro money as possible.
PSA:
Loose is the opposite of tight.
Lose is the opposite of win.
Also lefty-loosy, righty-tighty, or if you want to translate from the Spanish expression "la derecha oprime y la izquierda libera" ("the right oppresses and the left liberates") that's sage advice too.
Lowes is a store
I have a theory about this.
The people who had both genius and work ethic made magic. That was the GPT, Dall-E, AlphaGo generation of AI. You can't make magic because you want to have a good career and you did some seminars. You have to do it because you have it burning inside you, and you're in a community of people who all have that type of vision, and all pulling in the same direction you can make things that are impossible before you did them.
(Not that I'm saying AI itself is necessarily a good thing, certainly not in its present trajectory. I'm just saying that getting the tech from recognizing digits to ChatGPT was pretty fucking impressive.)
Now probably about 90% of the people in the field are there because it's a good career. And, the people giving them their marching orders day-to-day are greedy idiots. You just can't make magic that way. All you can do is follow the road that's been laid down. The industry is just throwing orders of magnitude more electricity, money, and engineer time at these still-impossible remaining problems and hoping that'll get them suddenly solved.
Remember when ChatGPT was programmed by competent and humble people (who are now, a lot of them, fired because they fought with Sam Altman), and so it kept emphasizing to people that it was not an AI (meaning an AGI), just a language model? They felt like that was important for people to understand (not that it did any good). Anyway, those days are gone, and with them, the forward progress that people like that can make.
Why? Because we're trying to make magic with career people. It doesn't work that way, never has. It's like trying to start a fire with a bunch of rocks. Rocks are fine. Fire is fine, if a little bit dangerous. But they are not interchangeable.
GPT, DALL-E and AlphaGo are not the type of magic born from passion. They are the type of magic born by years of researchers doing the mostly boring work of science. Those are career people. They are just career researchers.
The current public AI scene is what happens when commercial interests take over. They can push the current state of the art to its limit, but aren't going to make any fundamental breakthroughs.
Those are career people. They are just career researchers.
People mostly only accept the extremely shitty working conditions of the research industry if they have at least one of a lot of passion, extreme egomania, or independent wealth. Preferably more than one. Most of the people doing a research career do at least start out with a lot of passion.
Career people can easily make magic. Lots and lots of career people make magic.
The problem is the greedy fucks. When choice X appears to make 10x the money as creative, difficult decision Y, which choice is made every time when it's the greedy fuck choosing?
yay!
Yes of course they are at the limit, and because they poisoned the internet with generative bullshit, they can't scrape it and expect improvement, but they are still scraping it, so they're poisoning themselves.
The end of the article has classic snake oil trash. The idea that newer AI could be trained to think similar to how humans think. Yes, great, you know scientists have been working on that for decades. Good luck succeeding where nobody else did. There's a reason that so-called weak AI or so-called expert systems are the ones that we all remember as having lasted for decades.
Shh. Let it happen. Let the poison take hold.
I don't think it's just the poison, but an inherent limitation on the technology. An LLM is never going to be able to have critical thinking skills.