- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
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Hard disagree. There was a pod I was listening to where the argument was AI is akin to the farming revolution. A coworker this week said the steam engine may be valid too.
The point is, AI is a train roaring down the tracks. You can’t stop it. You might be able to slow it down at best but it’s here and it’s heading in the direction of the future.
The worst thing you can do is dig in your heels and pretend the train away. I acknowledge the train and will use the train but it concerns me.
Smoking indoors, child labor and slavery are all still here, just transformed and under a different coat of paint
I dislike what AI could do to art, but i don’t really mind AI at work. I mentioned it in another post, I like AI because it minimises the tedious and time-wasting data entry at my job.
You’re using it for data entry? Are you INSANE?
I was skeptical but it is surprisingly good. Of course I double check before finalising it.
And to pre-empt the anti-AI crowd in Lemmy, I don’t know what field you guys are in, but my field has plenty of data to deal with. This is talked about even before I graduated from college many years ago. “Big data” was the term iirc. In my job, there are mistakes that happen and remeasurements have to be done. The problem? I have to go through the spreadsheet cells one by one and manually change the data with the new, remeasured data. Using AI minimises this time-wasting exercise.
The current AI models are bad for more critical analysis but they are good for “secretary work”.
You may be able to automate this without AI and then you don’t have to re-check its work. Worth looking into.
Of course I double check before finalising it.
Every single piece of data?
Yup.
Honest to god I wonder if the detractors have jobs? I as well use AI at work for various things and it’s amazing. I have gone from hours or days of effort to minutes to hours of effort. I use it for everything from coding, troubleshooting issues and wordsmithing emails or documentation.
Like you I validate everything.
It’s comparing apples to oranges.
AI is software. We never stopped any software change before. Even heavily disliked and banned systems like crypto currency or vpns etc. still exist.
For the record I agree that AI needs more regulation and we could even force stop development of new models but LLMs will never be stopped in any meaningful way. You can take an open source model and run it today.
LLMs are here to stay until it’s replaced by other technology.
AI is software. We never stopped any software change before.
Good point, hard to stop something that has near zero cost of copying (see also ‘piracy’)
Which is why techbros are trying to put a moat around it with ‘datacentres’ . Problem is, as the tech advances, it keeps getting smaller. QWEN 3.6 27B can run fine on a 16GB video card and if you give it more time it’ll be as ‘smart’ as bigger models. Doesn’t have as much world knowledge as the bigs, but for many usecases that’s irrelevant.
Really, ‘datacentres’ are more about stealing compute from the masses so they can rent it back, with control.
QWEN 3.6 27B can run fine on a 16GB video card and if you give it more time it’ll be as ‘smart’ as bigger models.
As much as I’d like this to be true (don’t believe all the benchmarks), in reality, using e.g. gpt 5.5 is still a lot less pain in the ass, mostly has to do with more reprompting (gpt is just smarter, oneshots stuff more often) + a lot slower (on an RTX 3090 for reference).
I’ve tried using it for some time, but I think I’m faster writing (better, although that’s also true for gpt-5.5) code by hand, than using this (+ I need the valuable VRAM for other stuff, as I’m a graphics/shader programmer most of the time).
That said, it’s already fairly impressive how much progress these smaller models have made the last year, it’s usable, you can “vibe-code” at least simple stuff.
Eh, valid I do in fact agree and perhaps I exaggerated with 16GB, I do in fact have two,
You may have a good point here that changed my opinion on datacenter opposition. We definitely need more datacenter compute and always will but maybe making it more difficult can shift the market towards on device compute or smaller servers so opposing datacenters can be a net good outcome.
I feel like this comic is bait
Reminds me of when the stupid “Web 3.0” made up by blockchain freaks was supposed to be the future. Not every technology will be as widespread as the internet. The internet facilitates communication across the entire world and offers many advantages over phone, mail, and other forms of communication.
The use cases and advantages are clear, even if there was an overly eager hype cycle in the 90s. AI might have some uses, but a clear advantage has not actually been established yet, nor have the legal challenges been ironed out. Remember that the current iteration of AI would not have been possible without breaking tons of IP law, slurping up as much data as possible.
Distributed web is a great idea. With a shitty vibecoded reference implementation (IPFS). And then also buzzworded as “Web 3” together with blockchain DNS and everything else.
Agree AI is as overhyped as the internet in the late 90’s was. I also think AI or some descendent of it will likely be as ubiquitous as the Internet is now. There’s quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem. I look at AI as being the bridge between the real world where things are fuzzy, rules are inconsistent, things don’t have clear cut answers, etc and the digital world where everything is precise and well defined. That’s not something that’s going away.
However, what I see happening with AI is much the same thing as what happened with the Internet. To use the Internet in the late 90’s was frustrating. The computers sucked, they were huge, they used a bunch of power, the connection was slow, connections dropped, they weren’t always on, they took quite some to establish, etc. It wasn’t till CPUs got good enough to be able to be battery powered and still render full websites (in other words, the key building block of a smartphone) that the Internet really became a ubiquitous thing for most people. Today’s AI uses way too much power, requires hardware that’s way too expensive, is less smart than people think it is, has problems learning, has problems with hallucinations, etc. What I see happening is the AI bubble crashes, like the dotcom crash, but then it comes back once the technology is really ready.
As far as law and IP go, the Internet often had lots of issues with that too. Lookup the origins of why we have Section 230. It’s still something we’re arguing over. We’ll figure out the legal issues. And IP law is broken, has been for a long time. It needs a revamp to bring it back to some sanity. I have no problem with AI breaking IP law. Much of that shouldn’t be under copyright anyway.
Except child and slave labour was cheap and profitable. AI is neither cheap nor profitable.
I am more mad about people saying “it’s improvng exponentially.” The rate of improvement is falling, if enything.
Bunch of people said it because sci-fi made them believe so, and then everyone else went along with it for some reason.
Either the exponent is 1/2 or people are just having shared delusions.
Or people don’t know what exponentially means
No, because you guys debating with actors who exist only in your head
Why do you say that? I had this exact conversation today at work
Because people do not listen. Pro-ai people are not as charged as pro trump people - most of them would debate in a good faith
Well to be fair to the giant pieces of shit in positions of power all over the states they are trying to bring child labor back as well
I’d bet good money it’s the same people fighting to keep child marriage.
Good bet they’d like to bring smoking indoors and slavery back, too.
- Smoking indoors happens all the time because someone who’s good at vaping is unclockable
- Slavery is still legal in the USA as long as it’s prison work (ever wondered why American police always look for excuses to arrest black people?)
- Child labour has never gone away
Whats wrong with blowing smoke into the face of your child slave??? We used to be a country
Most people want to bring smoking indoors back. The only people who don’t are the weird shut-ins who sit around posting online all day. People out in the real world don’t view having an after meal cigarette as equivalent to fucking slavery.
You guys have to remember that if you ask a random person on the street what Cthulhu is, they’re not going to have a fucking clue. Everyone in this thread is a weirdo. Including me.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they’re in the minority.
Of course it’s not morally equivalent to slavery, but the ban on smoking indoors made my life and a lot of people’s lives much nicer, even before you factor in the reduced risk of lung cancer from secondhand smoke.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they’re in the minority.
I like my booze, but if someone wants to light up, they ought to be outside with their booze.
This proves my point. Normal people don’t think like this. It’s weird. A bar without smoking is like a church Jesus. This is one of those topics online where you feel like you’re being deliberately gas lit. But I have to remember I’m surrounded by the weirdest of the weird.
They are not in the minority. The Internet is not the majority. You and I do not remotely represent the vast majority of people in any way shape or form. No one here does.
I there data that backs up your claim?
I’m a chainsmoker and I’d prefer if they didn’t.
Anyone who is impressed with LLMs to the point they believe they should in any way be mistaken for intelligence must be summarily ignored and excluded from decision processes which affect anyone not similarly impaired.
LLMs are only AI as Accelerators and Amplifiers of Ignorance and Incompetence, with vanishingly scarce examples of Iteration and Insight.
LLMs might be garbage but the children yearn for the mines. And are we really better as a civilization for the loss of indoor smoking while indulging the all-you-can-eat option at Sizzler?
Thats not how it works.
A better example would be “nuclear arms are already here, theres no going back”
Its not a capitalism thing, its an arms race thing.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Same goes for AI, once one country starts doing it, everyone else is gonna need to keep up so they dont lose the arms race.
The AI “arms race” as you put it is absolutely capitalism at its core. Replace humans with shitty robots so they don’t have to continue paying wages to actual humans. Its just the the first person that makes it work will be able to set the rules for the ones that follow. Getting paid for those rules and making further entrenched in capitalism.
It’s a tool, use it as you wish but you either have it or not.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.
There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time.
Either the collapse of civilization or a literal uprising.
I think we may very well be on the precipice of the world you imagine, or something like it. But the old world dies hard and takes effort to abolish. We didn’t get where we are because we were given what we have - we fought for it. I think we’re seeing the beginning stages of people demanding that the benefits of AI and automation flow to them, rather than to just the elite. Won’t be without pain, but I think we get there. Partly because we kind of have to. People get over their fear of socialism and collectivism really fast when they get desperate yet there’s people making huge piles of money off the automation that stole their job. I can’t say for sure what the future looks like, but I don’t think we stay locked here forever. To think so is to look at the situation during the first gilded age and say nothing can change. Well, it did and we got the progressive age.
I agree with you, I think the will for change is there. The next challenge is turning will into action.
We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
I dont think this is true.
Space mining is only for resources to use in space. The economics of transporting resources back to earth will never stack up.
I dont think any significant number of humans will spend any amount of time in space in any practical time scale.
I don’t mean people actually being in space. Perhaps a better word choice would be place, eg “we could be in a place where…”
Oh my bad i misread that.
I think we could be seeing a shift in the economics if humans can reliably live off world anyway.
I think NASAs SR-1 can show a reliable link to mars via what amounts to automated space trucks, but really only time will tell if we can kick off a new age of humanity or just keep letting neo-aristocrats take over again and again.
Nah.
It would be infinitely better to go live in a box in your back yard for several years. At least that way you avoid the chronic health issues arising from “living off world”.
Even with a lot of yet-to-be-theorised physics, I just cant see the motivation for humans to leave earth in significant numbers.
IMO space will be populated almost exclusively by machines.
I don’t think this is quite how the world works. The reason people need to work to survive is because we can’t survive if everyone stopped working. We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn’t there is too great a risk they wouldn’t work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society. How many people would quit their job tomorrow if they won the lottery? Sure some would find work doing something they preferred, but not all of them, and often the thing they prefer doing is not the job that actually needs doing the most. If it’s something they even are good at. Loads of people would love to be an actor, but how many actually have both the talent and the skills needed to do that?
In a society where most people actually don’t need to work because most work can be handled by machines without significant negative consequences things would change to be very different. People like to think rich people or politicians or kings control the world by themselves but the reality is there are always limits on what they can actually do. If you dick around too much even in an absolute monarchy you will be overthrown one way or another. Typically by your own military, underlings, or family, sometimes by revolution or insurrection. The same thing applies today to liberal democracy. In fact it applies even more so. Anyone who tried to kill off the working class as a whole would find themselves very quickly dead or dethroned one way or another.
We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn’t there is too great a risk they wouldn’t work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society
No, people want to work. Look at Wikipedia, SCP, Minecraft, all those job simulator games, Linux, the Fediverse. The drive to create something that benefits people is fundamental to the human experience.
No, thats not what I was talking about at all.
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
The unemployment explosion is obviously also happening. But that’s actually a pretty good thing in the long run as a society with 90% unemployment and the need to work to live is absolutely unsustainable. AI will basically force the end of capitalism by increasing the system’s volatility until it adapts.
LLMs will never be able to be terminators. This is just an expensive exercise in futility.
I thought, LLMs would never become able to write code. And now, I use Claude Code as the always available senior on coke.
LLMs have a reliability problem. If that gets solved somehow, they can actually drive a worker bot - or a terminator.And the big money pits also don’t only do LLMs. Those just get all the press because they are usable by normal users right now. Of course, some of those money pits are just investor scams. It’s a fully corrupted society after all.
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
I think you’re right that this is what they are thinking, but they are being idiots.
My bash script terminators will easily destroy any AI terminators.
My bash scripts don’t hallucinate, and aren’t so bloated that they require an always-available link to a data center.
What we call “AI” today is not remotely close to being a good combat-ready solution.
The winners of any coming AI war won’t win it with the bullshit slop-peddling tools being pushed by con artists, today.
Except 90% of what people talk about when they refer to AI is LLMs which have no direct military applications other than vague productivity boost claims. You could say the same thing about sending kids to the mines, “our society is more productive sending kids to dig out coal instead of playing. If we don’t send our kids to the mines China will and then we’ll really be behind”.
… no I am talking about actual AI as a field as a whole, not just LLMs…
Yall forgetting about Boston dynamics or something?
We got fuckin guns strapped to the back of autonomous robot dogs that can run at over 60 km/h
We got autonomous drones with facial recognition that can fly through dense forests at 90 km/h+
The fuck you think Im talking about lol…
Are you conflating robotics with intelligence?
To be fair, we tried robots without much intelligence and they sucked. They couldn’t figure out how to balance on two legs so they just fell over a lot. Robots are just better now that they have more intelligence.
Boston dynamics isn’t building countless data centers and (poorly) replacing peoples’ jobs. OP’s comic is obviously about ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc.
Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.
If your enemies win the generative AI “arms” race they can use it to, uh…
???
(Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they’re the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation’s GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)
GenAI is really fucking useful for propaganda and disinformation warfare.
That may sound like a compliment to GenAI, it’s not.
LLMs are not the final state of AI
But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that’s assuming only if — and this is a very big “if” — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.
Then you’re well aware of the massive power that AGI will bring to any nation that can harness it. And no, LLMs alone are not the path, and possibly not the path at all.
Yep, by design LLM cannot become ‘inteligent’, you can only make it more believable but it’s still copying humans not really thinking by itself. No amount of development or money invested will change that, it’s not a pokemon it won’t just evolve into something different one day.
I think LLMs are intelligent. They’re at least as intelligent as My pocket calculator, and My calculator is intelligent.
I think you’re setting the bar too low. A tiny amount of intelligence is super easy to program.
And it’s worth reiterating, the current crop of generative “AI” is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.
The current push is the notion that “hyperscaling,” i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn’t. Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Well said.
Depends on your definition of novel.
From TFA:
The AI did not prove that its approach is the best anyone can do, though. In fact, mathematician Will Sawin has already improved upon the AI’s grid.
OpenAI privately contacted Litt, Sawin, Gowers and a number of other mathematicians to verify the LLM’s proof. Together (and without the company’s direct involvement), they wrote up their individual takeaways. (No external experts have seen the AI’s original output, however—just an edited version of its train of thought.)
What stood out, they said, was the AI’s preternatural patience and focus.
…
“AIs have an edge: It’s not just that they can try all known methods,” says Jacob Tsimerman, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work but was part of the companion paper solicited by OpenAI. “They can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without getting overwhelmed.”
…
The mathematical tools the AI used here are not novel, although their application in this domain appears to be. “The model did not invent something fundamentally new that nobody saw coming,” says Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician leading OpenAI’s mathematical explorations. “It just executed like an amazing mathematician.”
So, it’s a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested. And we’re not allowed to see its homework.
This is categorically failing to set the world on fire, except possibly in the literal sense.
Such a fallacy. Anything that falls under the umbrella of machine learning will contribute to future AI. We certainly won’t improve LLMs such that they become AGI, but all of it contributes.
And, whether or not future AI even uses traditional silicon computing is also irrelevant.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc. That all happens each step of the way, even if the next technology is completely different.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc.
All of which have absolutely nothing to do with what we are currently calling AI.
Doing with it, sure, but the creation of LLMs, and the algorithms behind them, especially the training, are what I’m talking about. It’s a lot of very impressive, complicated math
I think it’s pretty pathetic that “fuck AI” has become the trendy, cool thing. It really misses the mark. It should be fuck capitalism and the sociopathic CEOs abusing AI and shoving it down our throats. AI is not the problem.
It’s actually just a lot of pretty simple maths from decades ago, but it’s a lot of it. The big changes in those decades have been the feasibility of doing enough of that simple maths to achieve anything useful, and domain-specific network architecture stuff that’s rarely transferable, e.g. LLMs are possible because of the invention of the transformer architecture in 2017, and that’s also turned out to be useful for a few things like image generation and protein folding simulation, but not for all neural network based techniques, and then most of the things that have made successive LLMs better haven’t also been useful for the few other transformer-architecture-based neural networks. Most not-LLM AI isn’t going to be meaningfully easier to create than it would have been had the world got bored after GPT-2 and we’d only focussed on doing image and video generation.
They can use it to do a lot of things. AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people. Arguably there’s substantially more value in training inexperienced humans to get better in their fields than in settling for AI as a cheap alternative that starts with a maybe slightly higher or similar but cheaper baseline, but that doesn’t eliminate all value they create. You can make arguments about the long term benefits socially or for individual organizations that leverage AI, but spend a couple hours playing with Claude and it becomes extremely evident that they’re not anything resembling useless.
Even if we completely throw chat bots out the window, there are some instances of general utility for thinking models. This comic is making a moral argument that’s more compelling, but arguing that they’re actually totally useless doesn’t really reflect reality
The people no longer review their broken code the catch is that if they do it would negate all the gains.
As someone who’s used Claude and most other big LLMs as part of my job, they’re all absolutely useless. They don’t have the capacity for thought or care, all they are is a word generation algorithm similar to Cleverbot. So you can’t rely on them for useful information, you can’t rely on them for remembering info you told them, half the time it feels like talking to a brick wall (because you essentially are), and their only actual value is to CEOs as something they can blame layoffs on, even when it’s bullshit.
What do you use them for? I use them day to day for significant automation hooked into a rag tool and several custom mcp services. They are absolutely amazing but with some serious flaws that do require significant guard rails and human in the loop points.
They are obviously over hyped and being used as an excuse by shitty CEOs but to call them useless is a mistake I thinkSorry, I’m curious: what’s your workflow looking like when you’re dealing with LLMs?
Because I‘m just tinkering with them as a hobby and while I consider them erratic and certainly limited in many regards, I still find them useful. Even fun, but on the other hand I’m not forced to use them.
I’m with you: the experiences people have with these tools are just dramatically different from mine. They are quite good. By no means even close to perfect, but they’re just so much faster than me at pulling up some random information that would be hard to find with an Internet search myself and very good at going from nothing to something that works with code. I don’t particularly enjoy using them because I find the whole industry abhorrent, but their usefulness isn’t in question to me.
Laughable to call an LLM a thinking machine. It’s glorified auto-complete built on stolen data. I work in the industry and the fact that any of this can impress anyone is fairly depressing to me.
That’s not what “thinking model” means. It’s not a statement about cognition, it means it takes steps in which it explains itself to itself to check if it’s missing something.
Whoever coined that is using those words wrong, then.
Making a better LLM isn’t the point of all this, it’s taking what they have and building on it until they create a true AGI.
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
In a world where the organisations that are blazing the trail are in private hands, this is very bad news for everyone who isn’t in the winning organisation.
That’s essentially the arms race: who gets to be king of the world.
The slim chance of it not being monumentally detrimental to humanity is basically tied to us abandoning capitalism wholesale and uniting the world, so I’m not holding my breath.
Edit: few downvotes on this, so check my other replies for clarity, if you still think I’m taking out my arse, comment and set me right. It’s Lemmy, the points don’t matter, I’d rather have a conversation. Plus read again if you somehow get the impression I’m advocating for any of this
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
TechBros repeat this constantly, but it just isn’t true.
Plenty of second-on-the-scene solutions have emerged as most popular, or most impactful.
But Tech Bros need the fear of missing out (fear of arriving second) to justify huge investments with no worthwhile results.
I’m answering the question of what the arms race is
The goal is a technology that replaces the need for humans in any job.
The FOMO is different now because they don’t give a shit about the consumer. The FOMO is versus the other competitors because it’s a winner takes all scenario.
They will keep accelerating to the detriment of literally everything else.
Whether you believe they’ll make it is almost moot. They’re going to burn the world down trying.
True AGI is not happening within the lifetime of anyone or anything alive today.
See my other comments
Nobody’s making AGI anytime soon. LLMs do not have any of the baselines required for this. They’re expensive predictive text algorithms, more or less the same ones used in mobile keyboards, but upscaled to an absurd degree. Anyone truly worried about other companies or nations developing AGI has no idea how our current “AI” works. You’re never going to get there by building on them.
I’d like to believe too, but it doesn’t really track when you watch what these companies are actually doing.
Of course an LLM on its own isn’t going to become an AGI. Anyone with a braincell can see that. These orgs aren’t so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
Nearly all of the actual uses today aren’t just the LLM, but the tooling built on top of it, the LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
That’s what’s happening in parallel to the model development, tooling and harnesses that make the overall system more capable. If it can be done by a computer (or by extension a sufficiently advanced robot), the LLM can do it too with a bit of integration work (which it is very able to do on its own today, with minimal steering). If you can test for something being correct in any way, that too can be ultimately hooked up to an LLM as another input to push it back onto the desired path when it veers off.
Frankly I’m starting to feel like for most people it’ll feel like it’s years off until the day it happens. I don’t see remotely enough people taking the risk seriously in time to do anything.
These orgs aren’t so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
You make some interesting points.
But…the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
Interesting point. But the folks giving these things autonomy are mostly just creating huge messes, right now, and then claiming victory and taking a quick bow before the stage caves in.
The places we do see success are where no human could be patient enough - which is the stuff computers were already better at, than us.
As you point out, all that can be fixed.
But it’s all already not worth the money invested, before they build dozens more data centers in the hope that they can fix it. There’s just massive amounts of magic thinking going on, by investors.
I do agree with your point that there’s probably somethings that are useful and some that are dangerous on the other side of this.
But…the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
Completely agree, but in the gap left by “vast majority”, these guys don’t seem to be behaving entirely like your conventional consumer squeezing companies, they seem to be playing a much more collusive game at the very least
But it’s all already not worth the money invested
That’s the flaw in the common view of this. You’re looking too short term. The second someone can offer to replace a business owners employees for half price, it’s basically infinite money.
That is what they’re pouring all the money in for: a chance at that prize. A chance at replacing all paid work with an automation they own.
It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
Wheels are a key component of my car I guess.
You know what, that’s actually a very good example.
The wheels are the interface between the engine and any kind of° surface, with no prior knowledge of those surfaces
We’ve got an engine of basically everything that followed the industrial revolution until now.
An LLM can very much function as the wheel to marry a surface to that engine.
°Horizontal, don’t be a smart ass
LOL.
In my “analogy” you just invented all of the actual complexity of the car in the same hand wavy way you claim AGI will just coalesce from the ether.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Except we did stop. We ended nuclear testing. We downsized our arsenal. We never deployed the high yield, neutron bombs, or other “tactical” variants in subsequent wars. And neither did the French or the Russians or the Chinese. Or even the Israelis.
Our nuclear program is derelict. It belongs in a museum. There’s an outstanding question as to how many of the bombs currently in circulation are duds.
Unlike with the F-35 or the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or the Predator Drone or even the Virginia class submarine, we’re just not putting any more money into nuclear proliferation and improved first strike capabilities like we were 60 years ago.
Mutually Asssured Destruction is an easily technolngically achievable goal, that’s why we don’t see much development past that point. You only need to exterminate an enemy’s population once.
The lesson learned by the world, at this point, is that nukes are the only way to guarantee your country isn’t invaded and that agreeing to unilateral nuclear disamament is downright idiotic. Expect more countries gettng nukes this century.
Even before there was an atomic weapon, the utility, the effectiveness, of atomic weapons was never in doubt.
“AI” isn’t like that.
pushes glasses up um actually the usefulness of AI has never been in doubt, we’ve been using it for years, what actually isn’t like that is specificly generative AI.
We’ve been calling the good stuff “machine learning” since forever, and we’ve overwhelmingly been calling the new generative stuff “AI,” however inadvisable that may be. If we can just stop insisting that machine learning is AI, actually, we’ll have no trouble of this kind. This is an unforced error, it’s just muddying the waters for no benefit at all.
The only people who think ML isn’t AI are science fiction nerds who play too many video games and think AI means Cortana.
^
None of those things were new technology. The assembly line didn’t go away when people were angry about being laid off.
If you’re talking about a specific product of AI (“art” for example), you might want to make that clearer. If you’re talking about AI in general, you’re treating this one thing like it’s a reason to try turning back the clock.
The rational thing to do would be getting politically involved to get AI out of corporate ownership.
I think another reasonable thing is for our justice systems to tie human responsibility/culpability to the actions of AI (or whatever we may be calling these computing advancements in the future).
Wish in one hand…
American justice isn’t a guarantee, and until political action comes back into style we can’t expect good outcomes.
Such a dumb comparison.
No, it’s apt. They’re all tools of capitalism promoted by oligarchs and bootlickers.
It really isn’t, they’re completely different things. This is comparing the invention of the transistor to slavery and child labour. It’s fucking idiotic is what it is. If they made valid comparisons they’d be making a point, instead thayre making a fool of themselves and the message.
You are aware that AI, as it is currently used, is a mass plagiarism machine, yes? That threatens to put people in many different sectors out of work? And accelerates climate change to do so?
Why haven’t we heard about AI doing literally anything good, like curing cancer, solving famous unsolved problems, reducing waste in logistics and distribution, etc?
Each character in the OP comic is an arrogant chud trying to reassure themselves that their precious methods of control aren’t fragile.
Solving famous unsolved problem: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/
Drug discovery (AI can’t do anything about the time needed for clinical trials): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03434-4
Assisting the blind: https://www.acb.org/i-am-blind-self-driving-cars-waymo-give-people-me-independence
You’re lumping in other uses of AI with LLMs (chatGPT etc), which is how @pfried@reddthat.com contradicted you.
It’s specifically the LLMs, which were trained with AI but are more like context-specific hyperplausible random text generators, and yes, are mass plagiarism projects currently being used as an excuse to fire a bunch of creative folk in multiple industries.
Other non-LLM AI uses tend to be more specifically problem-solving and narrowly useful.
So are photocopiers.
You’re really not getting it. You are saying the comparison of the printing press, the photocopier and then the scanner are equal to slavery and child labour.
Somethings pretty fucked up in your head if you’re making that correlation.
Also, ML has done a lot of good things too, even LLMs have their function and benefit, be it at a cost that may not be worth paying with our current energy generation and cooling solutions. You just don’t want to see it, you are deliberately looking away in your blind hatred for the system. Which I get, fuck the system and it’s owners. But God damn, comparing it to the torture that is slavery?
LLMs are a tool, they have no inherent morality to them (I’m not talking about companies stealing shit to train their LLMs, you can do it without theft).
Slavery is not a technology or a tool, besides a “tool of capitalism” or whatever the fuck you want to call it, seeing as it’s been around since we learned to lift a rock to another human. Humanities evil behaviour is not a technology.
Why is plagiarism bad? Aren’t you a bit of a bootlicker here for enforcing anti sharing constructs now? Nobody owns information, period.
You think artists, writers, musicians etc should all get replaced by data centers? The bootlickers are the ones groveling at the oligarchs’ feet
No, really, its a technology.
A more apt comparison would be more like internal combustion engines, wood burning stoves, or magnetic tape hard drives. That is to say, it probably has some niche place where its still a practical use or may be advantageous (backup/emergency generators for hospitals, in remote wooded locations without modern infrastructure, for cheap long term data back ups, for my examples, respectively), but that place is not the common place.
An individual stove, engine or hard drive has a negligible effect on climate change. AI requires huge amounts of material, space, energy and water to run. So a closer comparison would be if a civilization threw all their building materials, firestarter and food into a big pit and lit it.
Right now, yes. You can thank greedy capitalists for that. There’s no fundamental reason why it must be an environmental disaster. Look at the human brain. It’s way beyond any AI today and uses 10 watts. That’s peanuts to any AI. Drop the power consumption of AI by a couple orders of magnitude and nobody cares. Impossible you say? We done crazier power drops in conventional computing. Take a Pentium 3 500Mhz computer. Ran about 200 watts. It’s about the same compute performance as a Raspberry Pi Pico at 2 watts. Or take a 486 vs an Arm Cortex M3. The 486 is 2-10 watts, depending on variant. The M3 is a couple of mW for equivalent performance. Point is, we’ve slashed power consumption wildly in the past and I see no reason to think AI should be any different. We just let greedy capitalists push the technology out way too widely before it was ready. Which means we waste alot of energy and resources to build stuff that will likely soon be very obsolete.
Thing is: All of the examples still exist to various degrees.
And just like them AI is not going to vanish. Even more so than the others because AI is information. It’s like trying to ban E2E: The genie is out of the bottle.
In 2021, there were an estimated 50 million people living as slaves, and in 2013, there were an estimated 168 million children (aged 5-17) involved in child labor. These are the numbers I found off of Wikipedia.
I mean yeah I have one friend that smokes indoors still and it’s wild to be transported to the 70s when I visit her, and there are casinos where you usually smoke indoors. I just think if these models were trained on the worlds data then we should probably nationalize the data centers or just have the majority of people have affordable gpus again to self host and continue making strides optimizing the models to run on lower vram if people insist on using these things. I think it should be considered cringe to try to make money off them or use them for art, and the other use cases need to be regulated - giant scam apparatus manipulating the shit out of people, propaganda spreading convincing bot accounts, automated cyber attack attempts…ya know all the wonderful and most popular use cases benefiting humanity and improving our lives.
It’s a pipe dream to think someone will pull a big switch and turn off AI. Blockchain stopped being relevant but it’s still being used.
But Blockchain did stop being needlessly added into everything, at least.
AI being irrelevant is good enough for me.
Agreed, the technology exists and bad faith actors will from now on be able to use it for massive disinformation. No matter what happens, you just need some computing power, some decently smart people and time and you can train an LLM from scratch. But those damn datacenters can still be not build.
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