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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Okay seriously this technology still baffles me. Like its cool but why invest so much in an unknown like AIs future ? We could invest in people and education and end up with really smart people. For the cost of an education we could end up with smart people who contribute to the economy and society. Instead we are dumping billions into this shit.
Because rulling class got high on the promise that they could finally eliminate workers as a cost and be independent from us.
They don't want to get rid of workers because then there would be no consumers. No, they want to increase the downward pressure on wages so they can vacuum up further savings.
They want you to owe your soul to the company store, to live hand-to-mouth by their largess.
Those are different "we"s.
Tech/Wall St constantly needs something to hype in order to bring in “investor” money. The “new technology-> product development -> product -> IPO” pipeline is now “straight to pump-and-dump” (for example, see Crypto currency).
The excitement of the previous hype train (self-driving cars) is no longer bringing in starry-eyed “investors” willing to quickly part ways with OPM. “AI” made a big splash and Tech/Wall St is going to milk it for all they can lest they fall into the same bad economy as that one company that didn’t jam the letters “AI” into their investor summary.
Tech has laid off a lot of employees, which means they are aware there is nothing else exciting in the near horizon. They also know they have to flog “AI” like crazy before people figure out there’s no “there” there.
That “investors” scattered like frightened birds at the mere mention of a cheaper version means that they also know this is a bubble. Everyone wants the quick money. More importantly they don’t want to be the suckers left holding the bag.
It's like how revolutionary battery technology is always just months away.
I follow EV battery tech a little. You’re not wrong that there is a lot of “oh its just around the bend” in battery development and tech development in general. I blame marketing for 80% of that.
But battery technology is changing drastically. The giant cell phone market is pushing battery tech relentlessly. Add in EV and grid storage demand growth and the potential for some companies to land on top of a money printing machine is definitely there.
We’re in a golden age of battery research. Exciting for our future, but it will be a while before we consumers will have clear best options.
It's easier to sell people on the idea of a new technology or system that doesn't have any historical precedent. All you have to do is list the potential upsides.
Something like a school or a workplace training programme, those are known quantities. There's a whole bunch of historical and currently-existing projects anyone can look at to gauge the cost. Your pitch has to be somewhat realistic compared to those, or it's gonna sound really suspect.
Monorail!!!
Because the silicon valley bros had convinced the national security wonks in the Beltway that it was paramount for national security, technological leadership and economic prosperity.
I think this will go down as the biggest grift in history.
Kevin Walmsley reported on Deepseek 10 days ago. Last week, the smart money exited big tech. This week the panic starts.
I'm getting big dot-com 2.0 vibes from all of this.
https://youtube.com/@inside_china_business
Education doesn't make a tech CEO ridiculously wealthy, so there's no draw for said CEOs to promote the shit out of education.
Plus educated people tend to ask for more salary. Can't do that and become a billionaire!
And you could pay people to use an abacus instead of a calculator. But the advanced tech improves productivity for everyone, and helps their output.
If you don’t get the tech, you should play with it more.
“Improves productivity for everyone”
Famously only one class benefits from productivity, while one generates the productivity. Can you explain what you mean, if you don’t mean capitalistic productivity?
I’m referring to output for amount of work put in.
I’m a socialist. I care about increased output leading to increased comfort for the general public. That the gains are concentrated among the wealthy is not the fault of technology, but rather those who control it.
Thank god for DeepSeek.
I get the tech, and still agree with the preposter. I'd even go so far as that it probably worsens a lot currently, as it's generating a lot of bullshit that sounds great on the surface, but in reality is just regurgitated stuff that the AI has no clue of. For example I'm tired of reading AI generated text, when a hand written version would be much more precise and has some character at least...
Try getting a quick powershell script from Microsoft help or spiceworks. And then do the same on GPT
What should I expect? (I don't do powershell, nor do I have a need for it)
It’s one thing to be ignorant. It’s quite another to be confidently so in the face of overwhelming evidence that you’re wrong. Impressive.
That I'd really like to see. And I mean more than the marketing bullshit that AI companies are doing...
For the record I was one of the first jumping on the AI hype-train (as programmer, and computer-scientist with machine-learning background), following the development of GPT1-4, being excited about having to do less boilerplaty code etc. getting help about rough ideas etc. GPT4 was almost so far as being a help (similar with o1 etc. or Anthropics models). Though I seldom use AI currently (and I'm observing similar with other colleagues and people I know of) because it actually slows me down with my stuff or gives wrong ideas, having to argue, just to see it yet again saturating at a local-minimum (aka it doesn't get better, no matter what input I try). Just so that I have to do it myself... (which I should've done in the first place...).
Same is true for the image-generative side (i.e. first with GANs now with diffusion-based models).
I can get into more details about transformer/attention-based-models and its current plateau phase (i.e. more hardware doesn't actually make things significantly better, it gets exponentially more expensive to make things slightly better) if you really want...
I hope that we do a breakthrough of course, that a model actually really learns reasoning, but I fear that that will take time, and it might even mean that we need different type of hardware.
Any other AI company, and most of that would be legitimate criticism of the overhype used to generate more funding. But how does any of that apply to DeepSeek, and the code & paper they released?
Look at it in another way, people think this is the start of an actual AI revolution, as in full blown AGI or close to it or something very capable at least. Personally I don't think we're anywhere near something like that with the current technology, I think it's a dead end, but if there's even a small possibility of it being true, you want to invest early because the returns will be insane if it pans out. Full blown AGI would revolutionize everything, it would probably be the next industrial revolution after the internet.
How would the investors profit from paying for someone's education? By giving them a loan? Don't we have enough problems with the student loan system without involving these assholes more?