AI as we know it does have its uses, but I would definitely agree that 90% of it is just marketing hype
The image generation features are fun, even though you have to browbeat the idiot AI into following the description.
You just haven’t tried OpeningAI’s latest orione model. A company employee said it is soooo smart, can you believe it? And the government is like, goddamn we are so scareded of it. Im telling you AGI december 2024, you’ll will see!
There was a great article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results years ago about the development of Artificial Stupidity (AS). I always do a mental translation to AS when ever I see AI.
I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.
Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they’re just tools we use without thinking about them.
I’m sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it’s just the keyboard app on my phone.
As a fervent AI enthusiast, I disagree.
…I’d say it’s 97% hype and marketing.
It’s crazy how much fud is flying around, and legitimately buries good open research. It’s also crazy what these giant corporations are explicitly saying what they’re going to do, and that anyone buys it. TSMC’s allegedly calling Sam Altman a ‘podcast bro’ is spot on, and I’d add “manipulative vampire” to that.
Talk to any long-time resident of localllama and similar “local” AI communities who actually dig into this stuff, and you’ll find immense skepticism, not the crypto-like AI bros like you find on linkedin, twitter and such and blot everything out.
The saddest part is, this is going to cause yet another AI winter. The first few ones were caused by genuine over-enthusiasm but this one is purely fuelled by greed.
TSMC are probably making more money than anyone in this goldrush by selling the shovels and picks, so if that’s their opinion, I feel people should listen…
There’s little in the AI business plan other than hurling money at it and hoping job losses ensue.
TSMC doesn’t really have official opinions, they take silicon orders for money and shrug happily. Being neutral is good for business.
Altman’s scheme is just a whole other level of crazy though.
Agreed that’s why it’s so dangerous. These tech bros are going to do damage with their shitty products. It seems like it’s Altman’s goal, honestly.
He wants money/power, and he is getting it. The rest of the AI field will forever be haunted by his greed.
I really want to like AI, I’d love to have an intelligent AI assistant or something, but I just struggle to find any uses for it outside of some really niche cases or for basic brainstorming tasks. Otherwise, it just feels like alot of work for very little benefit or results that I can’t even trust or use.
It’s useful.
I keep Qwen 32B loaded on my desktop pretty much whenever its on, as an (unreliable) assistant to analyze or parse big texts, to do quick chores or write scripts, to bounce ideas off of or even as a offline replacement for google translate (though I specifically use aya 32B for that).
It does “feel” different when the LLM is local, as you can manipulate the prompt syntax so easily, hammer it with multiple requests that come back really fast when it seems to get something wrong, not worry about refusals or data leakage and such.
Attractive. You got some pretty solid specs?
Rue the day I cheaped out on RAM. soldered RAMmmm
I receive alerts when people are outside my house, using security cameras, Blue Iris, CodeProject AI, Node-RED and Home Assistant, using a Google Coral for local AI. That’s a good use case for AI since it avoids false positives that occur with regular motion detection.
For real. Being a software engineer with basic knowledge in ML, I’m just sick of companies from every industry being so desperate to cling onto the hype train they’re willing to label anything with AI, even if it has little or nothing to do with it, just to boost their stock value. I would be so uncomfortable being an employee having to do this.
As someone who was working really hard trying to get my company to be able use some classical ML (with very limited amounts of data), with some knowledge on how AI works, and just generally want to do some cool math stuff at work, being asked incessantly to shove AI into any problem that our execs think are “good sells” and be pressured to think about how we can “use AI” was a terrible feel. They now think my work is insufficient and has been tightening the noose on my team.
For sure, it seems like 90% of ai startups are nothing more than front end wrappers for a gpt instance.
They’re all built on top of OpenAI which is very unprofitable at the moment. Feels like the whole industry is built on a shaky foundation.
Putting the entire fate of your company in a different company (OpenAI) is not a great business move. I guess the successful AI startups will eventually transition to self-hosted models like Llama, if they survive that long.
Seriously, I’d love to be enthusiastic about it because it’s genuinely cool what you can do with math.
But the lies that are shoved in our faces are just so fucking much and so fucking egregious that it’s pretty much impossible.
And on top of that LLMs are hugely overshadowing actual interesting approaches for funding.
After getting my head around the basics of the way LLMs work I thought “people rely on this for information?”, the model seems ok for tasks like summarisation though
I don’t love it for summarization. If I read a summary, my takeaway may be inaccurate.
Brainstorming is incredible. And revision suggestions. And drafting tedious responses, reformatting, parsing.
In all cases, nothing gets attributed to me unless I read every word and am in a position to verify the output. And I internalize nothing directly, besides philosophy or something. Sure can be an amazing starting point especially compared to a blank page.
It’s good for coding if you train it on your own code base. Not great for writing very complex code since the models tend to hallucinate, but it’s great for common patterns, and straightforward questions specific to your code base that can be answered based on existing code (eg “how do I load a user’s most recent order given their email address?”)
It’s wild when you only know how to use SELECT in SQL, but after a dollar worth of prompting and 10 minutes of your time, you can have a significantly complex query you end up using multiple times a week.
the model seems ok for tasks like summarisation though
That and retrieval and the business use cases so far, but even then only if the results can be wrong somewhat frequently.
TSMC’s allegedly calling Sam Altman a ‘podcast bro’ is spot on, and I’d add “manipulative vampire” to that.
What’s the source for that? It sounds hilarious
When Mr. Altman visited TSMC’s headquarters in Taiwan shortly after he started his fund-raising effort, he told its executives that it would take $7 trillion and many years to build 36 semiconductor plants and additional data centers to fulfill his vision, two people briefed on the conversation said. It was his first visit to one of the multibillion-dollar plants.
TSMC’s executives found the idea so absurd that they took to calling Mr. Altman a “podcasting bro,” one of these people said. Adding just a few more chip-making plants, much less 36, was incredibly risky because of the money involved.
It’s selling the future, but nobody knows if we can actually get there
It’s selling an anticompetitive dystopia. It’s selling a Facebook monopoly vs selling the Fediverse.
We dont need 7 trillion dollars of datacenters burning the Earth, we need collaborative, open source innovation.
The first part is true … no one cares about the second part of your statement.
Yep the current iteration is. But should we cross the threshold to full AGI… that’s either gonna be awesome or world ending. Not sure which.
Current LLMs cannot be AGI, no matter how big they are. The fundamental architecture just isn’t right.
You’re absolutely right. LLMs are good at faking language and sometimes not even great at that. Not sure why I got downvoted but oh well. But AGI will be game changing if it happens.
I know nothing about anything, but I unfoundedly believe we’re still very far away from the computing power required for that. I think we still underestimate the power of biological brains.
Very likely. But 4 years ago I would have said we weren’t close to what these LLMs can do now so who knows.
Based on what I’ve witnessed so far, people will play with their AGI units for a bit and then put them down to continue scrolling memes.
Which means it is neither awesome, nor world-ending, but just boring/business as usual.
There are people way smarter than me that claim it will be a threshold and would likely grow exponentially after it’s crossed. I guess we won’t know for sure until it happens. I do agree most people get bored easily but if this thing is possible to think for itself without interaction it won’t matter if the humans get bored.
Ya, it’s like machine learning but better. That’s about it IMO.
Edit: As I have to spell it out: as opposed to (machine learning with) neural networks.
I mean… it is machine learning.
It’s also neural networks, and probably some other CS structures.
AI is a category, and even specific implementations tend to use multiple techniques.
Well there is a very specific architecture “rut” the LLMs people use have fallen into, and even small attempts to break out (like with Jamba) don’t seem to get much interest, unfortunately.
Sure, but LLMs aren’t the only AI being used, nor will they eliminate the other forms of AI. As people see issues with the big LLMs, development focus will change to adopt other approaches.
There is real risk that the hype cycle around LLMs will smother other research in the cradle when the bubble pops.
The hyperscalers are dumping tens of billions of dollars into infrastructure investment every single quarter right now on the promise of LLMs. If LLMs don’t turn into something with a tangible ROI, the term AI will become every bit as radioactive to investors in the future as it is lucrative right now.
Viable paths of research will become much harder to fund if investors get burned because the business model they’re funding right now doesn’t solidify beyond “trust us bro.”
the term AI will become every bit as radioactive to investors in the future as it is lucrative right now.
Well you say that, but somehow crypto is still around despite most schemes being (IMO) a much more explicit scam. We have politicans supporting it.
Sure, but those are largely the big tech companies you’re talking about, and research tends to come from universities and private orgs. That funding hasn’t stopped, it just doesn’t get the headlines like massive investments into LLMs currently do. The market goes in cycles, and once it finds something new and promising, it’ll dump money into it until the next hot thing comes along.
There will be massive market consequences if AI fails to deliver on its promises (and I think it will, because the promises are ridiculous), and we get those every so often. If we look back about 25 years, we saw the same thing w/ the dotcom craze, where anything with a website got obscene amounts of funding, even if they didn’t have a viable business model, and we had a massive crash. But important websites survived that bubble bursting, and the market recovered pretty quickly and within a decade we had yet another massive market correction due to another bubble (the housing market, mostly due to corruption in the financial sector).
That’s how the market goes. I think AI will crash, and I think it’ll likely crash in the next 5 years or so, but the underlying technologies will absolutely be a core part of our day-to-day life in the same way the Internet is after the dotcom burst. It’ll also look quite a bit different IMO than what we’re seeing today, and within 10 years of that crash, we’ll likely be beyond where we were just before the crash, at least in terms of overall market capitalization.
It’s a messy cycle, but it seems to work pretty well in aggregate.
That’s like saying breathing is like turning oxygen into carbon dioxide but better…
Oh please. Wait until they release double-sided, double-density 128bit AI quantum blockchain that runs on premises/in the cloud edge hybrid.
It will have revolutionary rock star synergy
The blue sky, out of the box thinking will disrupt the glass ceiling.
Sounds about right. There are some valid and good use cases for “AI”, but the majority is just buzzword marketing.
I have lots of uses for Attack Insects….
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AI is nothing more than a way for big businesses to automate more work and fire more people.
and do that at the expense of 30+ years of power reduction and efficiency gains, to the point that private companies are literally buying/building/restarting old power plants just to cover the insane power demand, because literally operating a power plant is cheaper than paying the energy costs.
For the common every day person its 3d tv and every other bullshit fad that burned brilliantly for all of 3 seconds before snuffing itself out, leaving people to have had paid for overpriced garbage thats no longer useful.
AI is nothing more than a way for big businesses to automate more work and fire more people.
All technology in human history has done that. What are you proposing? Reject technology to keep people employed on inefficient tasks?
At some point people need to start thinking that is better to end capitalism that to return to monke.
game devs gonna have to use different language to describe what used to be simply called “enemy AI” where exactly zero machine learning is involved
CPU
Logic and Path-finding?
I’m waiting for the part that it gets used for things that are not lazy, manipulative and dishonest. Until then, I’m sitting it out like Linus.
I’m waiting for the part that it gets used for things that are not lazy
Replacing menial or boring tasks is like 90% of what I’m hoping from it.
AI has been used for these things for decades, they are just in the background and not noticed by laypeople
Though the biggest issue is that when people say “AI” today, they mean specifically LLMs, but the world of AI is so much larger than that
This is where I’m at. The push right now has nft pump and dump energy.
The moment someone says ai to me right now I auto disengage. When the dust settles, I’ll look at it seriously.
What happened to Linus? He looks so old now…
He’s 54 years old
He got old.
That’s an excessive amount of aging is what folks are seeing. Not that he’s just old.
He’s lost a lot of weight in 4 years so that’s probably exacerbating the wtf.
Not especially old, though; he looks like a 54yo dev. Reminds me of my uncles when they were 54yo devs.
As a 46 year old dev I’m starting to look that way too.
I guess having 3 kids will do that to you.
That, and developing software for 30+ years.
That and leading an open source project for 30 years.
THE open source project.
Whether you’re leading a project or not, time will have pretty much the same impact. He’s in his mid-50s, and he looks pretty good for that age.
I mean he’s aging quite well given his position… Many people burn out way earlier.
[citation needed]/s
If you find out what happened, let me know, because I think it’s happening to me too.
What happened to he is happening now to you.
he aged
Source?
Oxidative stress is a bitch
It’s like he aged 10 years in the past 2 years… damn
People age. You don’t look the same as in 2010 either, I know that without having any idea what you look like.
Time
He has a real Michael McKean vibe
Wow, yeah that’s a big difference from how I remember him
I admit I understand nothing about ai and haven’t used it in any way nor do I plan to. It feels wrong for me and I believe it might fuck as harder than social media ever could.
But the pictures it creates, the stories and conversations don’t seem like hot air. And I guess, compared to the internet we are at the stage where the modem is still singing the songs of its people. There is more to come.
I heard it can code at a level where entry positions might be in danger to be swapped for ai. It detects cancer visually, recognizes people by the way they walk in China. Also I fear that vulnerable persons might fall for those conversation bots in a world where there is less and less personal contact.
Gotta admit I’m a little afraid it will make most of us useless in the future.
It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like “delve”). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn’t alive. It isn’t even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.
Don’t worry, human toil isn’t going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of “enhanced” products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn’t the same as having power over other humans. We won’t let computers make us all useless.
Yeah, he’s right. AI is mostly used by corps to enshittificate their products for just extra profit
And then people will complain about that saying it’s almost all hype and no substance.
Then that one tech bro will keep insisting that lemmy is being unfair to AI and there are so many good use cases.
No one is denying the 10% use cases, we just don’t think it’s special or needs extra attention since those use cases already had other possible algorithmic solutions.
Tech bros need to realize, even if there are some use cases for AI, there has not been any revolution, stop trying to make it happen and enjoy your new slightly better tool in silence.
Hi! It’s me, the guy you discussed this with the other day! The guy that said Lemmy is full of AI wet blankets.
I am 100% with Linus AND would say the 10% good use cases can be transformative.
Since there isn’t any room for nuance on the Internet, my comment seemed to ruffle feathers. There are definitely some folks out there that act like ALL AI is worthless and LLMs specifically have no value. I provided a list of use cases that I use pretty frequently where it can add value. (Then folks started picking it apart with strawmen).
I gotta say though this wave of AI tech feels different. It reminds me of the early days of the web/computing in the late 90s early 2000s. Where it’s fun, exciting, and people are doing all sorts of weird,quirky shit with it, and it’s not even close to perfect. It breaks a lot and has limitations but their is something there. There is a lot of promise.
Like I said else where, it ain’t replacing humans any time soon, we won’t have AGI for decades, and it’s not solving world hunger. That’s all hype bro bullshit. But there is actual value here.
Hi! It’s me, the guy you discussed this with the other day! The guy that said Lemmy is full of AI wet blankets.
Omg you found me in another post. I’m not even mad; I do like how passionate you are about things.
Since there isn’t any room for nuance on the Internet, my comment seemed to ruffle feathers. There are definitely some folks out there that act like ALL AI is worthless and LLMs specifically have no value. I provided a list of use cases that I use pretty frequently where it can add value. (Then folks started picking it apart with strawmen).
What you’re talking about is polarization and yeah, it’s a big issue.
This is a good example, I never did any strawman nor disagree with the fact that it can be useful in some shape or form. I was trying to say its value is much much lower than what people claim to be.
But that’s the issue with polarization, me saying there is much less value can be interpreted as absolute zero, and I apologize for contributing to the polarization.
Seems generous, might be more like 5% reality.
Just like Furbys
