657
‘Sputnik moment’: $1tn wiped off US stocks after Chinese firm unveils AI chatbot
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
657 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
35484 readers
345 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
LLMs aren't spyware, they're graphs that organize large bodies of data for quick and user-friendly retrieval. The Wikipedia schema accomplishes a similar, abet more primitive, role. There's nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.
If you no longer need to boil down half a Great Lake to create the next iteration of Shrimp Jesus, that's good whether or not you think Meta should be dedicating millions of hours of compute to this mind-eroding activity.
I think maybe it's naive to think that if the cost goes down, shrimp jesus won't just be in higher demand. Shrimp jesus has no market cap, bullshit has no market cap. If you make it more efficient to flood cyberspace with bullshit, cyberspace will just be flooded with more bullshit. Those great lakes will still boil, don't worry.
Not that demand will go down but that economic cost of generating this nonsense will go down. The number of people shipping this back and forth to each other isn't going to meaningfully change, because Facebook has saturated the social media market.
The efficiency is in the real cost of running the model, not in how it is applied. The real bottleneck for AI right now is human adoption. Guys like Altman keep insisting a new iteration (that requires a few hundred miles of nuclear power plants to power) will finally get us a model that people want to use. And speculators in the financial sector seemed willing to cut him a check to go through with it.
Knocking down the real physical cost of this boondoggle is going to de-monopolize this awful idea, which means Altman won't have a trillion dollar line of credit to fuck around with exclusively. We'll still do it, but Wall Street won't have Sam leading them around by the nose when they can get the same thing for 1/100th of the price.
Westoids? Are you the type of guy I feel like I need to take a shower after talking to?