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Drop AI hot takes I’m a bit tipsy
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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Probably a very hot take among us leftists on hexbear, but "consumer/generative AI" is here to stay and there's not much we can do about it. I was a massive skeptic in terms of it's staying power, initially thinking it was a fad, but the progress made from the first ChatGPT models, to now with all the latest models including deepseek, it's quite large and there's no going back anymore. It's the future, regardless of if we like it or not, the "invention of the touchscreen smartphone" moment of the 2020s. I guess I'm going to have to start using AI soon, unless I want to be my generation's equivalent of a boomer still using a Nokia 3310 instead of an iPhone or Android.
And this is bad how? Technology isn't inherently better because it's new or widely used. Old printers that dont brick themselves because of not using the correct toner are more useful than one that can print out a page of AI slop.
AI isnt the "smartphone revolution". The technology has existed for decades, they just found a way to market it to users and creating this shock and awe narrative of promised breakthroughs that will never come.
Dont get caught up in the hype because a dying, deindustrialized empire thinks a slop machine will defeat communism. Israel doesn't use AI to accurately predict which Palestinian father and his family to vaporize, they use AI to make this process more cruel and detached.
Because getting left behind leaves one out of touch with wider society, which has wide effects. Think about the boomer who can't use a smartphone and doesn't know how to open a PDF. What would their job or relationship prospects be in the modern job market or dating scene? Now that's not a problem for boomers because most are retired, and settled down for a long time, but now imagine that same scenario, but the boomers are magically decades younger and somehow have to integrate into the modern world. How would that go?
The technology used in smartphones also existed for decades, and the magic of what Apple did was finding a way to combine it all into a small and affordable enough package that created a shock and awe. AI is doing similar. A lot of the promised breakthroughs around smartphones never came (VR/AR integration for one, see Google glass, being able to scroll with your eyes or pseudo telekinesis, voice assistants were never that useful for most), but that didn't mean that they went away.
Again, you could have said the same about smartphones. Don't get caught up in the hype, this is just the dying empire creating some new toys for the masses during the 2008 financial crash. But fundamentally it's not a communism vs capitalism issue, China has made large advances in AI on the consumer, and more importantly industrial side. They are not making the same mistake the Soviets did with computers.
We've hit a wall in terms of progress with this technology. We've literally vacuumed up all the training data there is. What is left is improvements in efficiency (see DeepSeek).
LLMs are cool, they have their uses, but they have fundamental flaws as rational agents, and will never be fit for this purpose.
There's still a lot of room to grow in image, especially video, generation. The models still have room for optimization and we've seen tons of little improvements in stuff like text.
You could have said the same thing about smartphones 10-12 years ago, that we've hit a wall in the fundamentals and all that remains is improvements in efficiency, optimisation, speed and quality (compare the feature set of an iPhone 6 or Galaxy S4 to the latest phones, nothing has fundamentally changed), yet that didn't make smartphones disappear. In fact, it allowed them to effectively dominate the market.
Smartphones reached their current saturation about 10 years ago, and perhaps not coincidentally that's when they stopped improving. Can you honestly say that since 2015, cell phones in developed countries have gotten more common? At a time when people were already giving them to 10 year olds? Can you even say they've become more useful, when you could already browse social media, check the weather, apply for jobs, write documents, and order food to your door with them?
That's exactly my point. Nothing has fundamentally changed about smartphones in over a decade, yet that didn't make them go away, it made them more ubiquitous.
One, I said they are no more commonplace than they were ten years ago.
Two, I never said LLMs will go away. In fact I said they have their uses. But, and I will say this again in stronger terms: They are stupid, rote memorizers. Their fundamental flaw is that they cannot apply intelligent, rational thought to novel problems. Using them in situations that require rational thought is a mistake. This is an architectural flaw, not a problem of data. Large language models predict text, they cannot think. They can give an illusion of thought by aping a large body of text that itself demonstrates thought processes, but the moment a problem strays from the existing high quality data, the facade crumbles, it produces nonsense, and it is clear that there never was any thought in the first place. And now that we've scraped all the text there is, the body of problems LLMs can imitate the solution for has reached its greatest extent. GPT will never lead to a rational agent, no matter how much OpenAI and co say it will.