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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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The approach is not sound when all the other factors are considered. If AI continues along this approach it is likely that big AI companies will need to usurp next possible tech breakthroughs like quantum computing and fusion energy to be able to keep growing and produce more profit instead of these techs being used for better purposes (cheaper and cleaner household energy, scientific advances etc). All things considered excelling at image analysis, creative writing and digital arts wont be worth all the damage its going to cause.
Usurp? They won't be the ones to develop quantum computers, nor will they be developing fusion, if those technologies become available they might start using them but that won't somehow mean it won't be available for other uses.
And seeing as they make money from "renting out" the models, they can easily be "used for better purposes"
ChatGPT is currently free to use for anyone, this isn't some technology they're hoarding and keeping for themselves
By usurp I mean fill out all the available capacity for their own use (along with other tech giants who will be running the same moon race), assuming by that time they will be the largest tech giants of the time and have the financial means to do so.
Don't get me wrong the things that chatgpt can do are amazing. Even if hallucinates or cant really reason logically, it is still beyond what I would have expected. But when the time I mentioned above comes, people wont be given a choice between AI or cheaper energy/better health care. All that technological advancements will be bought to full capacity by AI companies and AI will be shoved down people's throats.
And yes chatgpt is free but it is only a business decision not a "for the good of the humanity" act. free chatgpt helps testing and generating popularity which in turn brings investment. I am not saying anything negative (or positive) about their business plan but dont think for a second that they will have any ethical concerns about leeching upcoming technological innovations for the sake of generating profit. And this is just one company. There will be others too, Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc etc. They will all aggressively try to own as much as possible of these techs as possible leaving only scraps for other uses (therefore making it very expensive to utilise basically).
It's ai and cheaper healthcare or no ai and spiraling costs to healthcare - especially with falling birthrate putting a burden on the system.
AI healthcare tools are already making it easier to provide healthcare, I'm in the uk so it's different math who benefits but tools for early detection of tumors not only cuts costs but increases survivability too, and its only one of many similar tech already in use.
Akinator style triage could save huge sums and many lives, especially in underserved areas - as could rapid first aid advice, we have a service for non-emergency medical advice, they basically tell you if you need to go to a&e, the doctor, or wait it out - it's helped allocate resources and save lives in cases where people would have waited out something that needs urgent care. Having your phone able to respond to 'my arm feels funny' by asking a series of questions that determines the medically correct response could be a real life saver 'alexia I've fallen and can't get up' has already save people's elderly parents lives 'clippy why is there blood in my poop' or 'Hey Google, does this mole look weird' will save even more.
Medical admin is a huge overhead, having a 24/7 running infinite instances of medically trained clerical staff would be a game changer - being able to call and say 'this is the new situation' and get appointments changed or processes started would be huge.
Further down the line we're looking at being able to get basic tests done without needing a trained doctor or nurse to do it, decreasing their workload will allow them to provide better care where it's needed - a machine able to take blood and run tests on it then update the GP with results as soon as they're done would cut costs and wasted time - especially if the system is trained with various sensors to perform healthchecks of the patient while taking blood, it's a complex problem to spot things out of the ordinary for a patient but one ai could be much better at than humans, especially rover worked humans.
As for them owning everything that can only happen if the anti ai people continue to support stronger copyright protections against training, if we agreed that training ai is a common good and information should be fair use over copyright then any government, NGO, charity, or open source crazy could train their own - It's like electricity, Edison made huge progress and cornered the market but once the principles are understood anyone can use them so as tech increased it became increasingly easy for anyone to fabricate a thermopile or turbine so there isn't a monopoly on electricity, there are companies who have local monopolies by cornering markets but anyone can make an off grid system with cheap bits from eBay.
I feel like all the useful stuff you have listed here is more like advanced machine learning and different than the AI that is being advertised to the public and being mostly invested in. These are mostly stuff we can already do relatively easily with the available AI (i.e highly sophisticated regression) for relatively low compute power and low energy requirements (not counting more outlier stuff like alpha fold which still requires quite a lot of compute power). It is not related to why the AI companies will need to own most of the major computational and energy innovations in the future.
It is the image/text generative part of AI that looks more sexy to the public and that is therefore mostly being hyped/advertised/invested on by big AI companies. It is also this generative part of AI that will require much bigger computation and energy innovations to keep delivering significantly more than it can now. The situation is very akin to the moon race. It feels like trying to develop the AI on this "brute force" course will deliver relatively low benefits for the cost it will incur.
Thats all well and good but here in America thats just a long list of stuff I can't afford, and won't be used to drive down costs. If it will for you, then I'm happy you live in a place that gives a shit about its populations health.
I know there will be people who essentially do the reverse of profiteering and will take advantage of AI for genuinely beneficial reasons, although even in those cases a lot of the time profit is the motive. Unfortunately the American for profit system has drawn in some awful people with bad motives.
If, right now, the two largest AI companies were healthcare nonprofits, I dont think people would be nearly as upset at the massive waste of energy, money, and life current AI is.
For instance, I would be completely fine with this if they said "We will train it on a very large database of articles and finding relevant scientific information will be easier than before". But no they have to hype it up with nonsense expectations so they can generate short term profits for their fucking shareholders. This will either come at the cost of the next AI winter or senseless allocation of major resources to a model of AI that is not sustainable in the long run.
Well get your news about it from scientific papers and experts instead of tabloids and advertisements.
I mean the person who said this is the CTO of OpenAI and an engineer working in this project. I would imagine she could be considered an expert.
Not sure i'm fully understanding your point, are you saying that the large AI companies will create AIs that will create technologies beyond what everyone else is capable of, thus outcompeting everyone, effectively monopolizing every market and from there basically become the umbrella corporation?
I would be very impressed if anyone managed to make an AI capable of innovation to that degree, but sure, in that case we would have to fall back on something like government oversight and regulations to keep the companies in check i suppose
No, other people will generate technologies like quantum computing, fusion energy. Big AI companies will try to own (by buying them out) as much of these as possible because the current model of AI they are using requires these techs to be able to deliver anything significantly better than what they have now. So these tech advancements will basically be owned by AI companies leaving very little room for other uses.
For these AI companies trying to go toward general AI is risky, as you said above it is not even well defined. On the other hand scaling up their models massively is a well defined goal which however requires major compute and energy innovations like those mentioned above. If these ever happen during like the next ten years or so big tech involved in AI will jump on these and buy as much of it as possible for themselves. And the rest will be mostly bought by governments for military and security applications leaving very little for other public betterment uses.
What if i say big fusion companies will take over the ai market since they have the energy to train better models, seems exactly as likely.
Remember when GPUs stopped being available because openAI bought nvidia and AMD and took all the gpus for themselves?
No? Weird, since gpus are needed for them to be able to deliver anything significantly better than what we have now 🤔
I guess the end result would be the same. But at large the economic system and human nature would be to blame which is actually what I am trying to blame here too, not AI but people in power who abuse AI and steer it towards hype and profit
General AI is a good goal for them because its poorly defined not in spite of it.
Grifts usually do have vague and shifting goal lines. See star citizen and the parallels between its supporters/detractors vs the same groups with AI: essentially if you personally enjoy/benefit from the system, you will overlook the negatives.
People are a selfish bunch and once they get a fancy new tool and receive praise for it, they will resist anyone telling them otherwise so they can keep their new tool, and the status they think it gives them (i.e. expert programmer, person who writes elegant emails, person who can create moving art, etc.)
AI is a magic trick to me, everyone thinks they see one thing, but really if you showed them how it works they would say, "well that's not real magic after all, is it?"
Idiots thinking a new thing is magic that will solve all the worlds problems doesn't mean the thing doesn't have merit. Someone calling themselves an exper carpenter because they have a nailgun doesn't make nailguns any less useful.
If you see a person doing a data entry job, do you walk over to them, crack their head open and say "aww man, it's not magic, it's just a blob of fat capable of reading and understanding a document, and to then plot the values into a spreadsheet"?
It's not magic, it's not a super intelligence that will solve everything, it's the first tool we've been able to make that can be told what to do in human language, and able to then perform tasks with a degree of intelligence and critical thinking, something that normally would require either a human or potentially years of development to automate programmatically. That alone makes it very useful
Why isnt it being sold as just a new coding language then?
Because it isn't
What other practical use for it is there?
So.many people have conspiracy theories about how chat gpt is stealing things and whatever, people in this threat crowing that it's immoral if they teach it with paywalled journal articles - though I bet I can guess who their favorite reddit founder is...
I use gpt to help coding my open source project and it's fantastic, everyone else I know that contributes to floss is doing the same - it's not magic but for a lot of tasks it can cut 90% of the time out especially prototyping and testing. I've been able to add more and better functionality thaks to a free service, I think that's a great thing.
What I'm really looking forward to is CAD getting generative tools, refining designs into their most efficient forms and calculating strengths would be fantastic for the ecosystem of freely shared designs, text2printable would be fantastic 'design a bit to fix this problem' could shift a huge amount of production back to local small industry or bring it into the home.
The positive possibilities of people having access to these technologies is huge, all the groups that currently can't compete with the big corporations suddenly have a huge wall pulled down for them - being able to make custom software tools for niche tasks is fantastic for small charities or community groups, small industry, eco projects, etc.
It'll take time for people to learn how to use the tools effectively just like when computers were new but as it becomes more widely understood I think we'll see a lot of positive innovation which it enables.
I am not denying the positive use cases being employed now and possibly being employed in the future. I am not opposing the use/development of AI tools now and in in future too.
However the huge negative possibilities are very real too and is/will be effecting humanity. I am against the course big AI companies seem to be taking and against the possible future allocation of most of major tech innovations to their cause.
It is of course very hard to predict how the positives and negatives will balance out but I think big tech companies don't have any interest in balancing this out. They seem to be very short sighted for anything other than direct profits. I think they will take the easiest way to more profit/AI dominance which is a short term investment. So I am not very optimistic on how it will pan out. Maybe I am wrong and like computers it will open up a whole new world of possibilities. But the landscape then and landscape now is also quite different in terms of how big tech companies and richest people act.
Your position is: "I like AI because it makes my job/hobbies easier. Also my coworkers do the same, because they are in almost the same position as me. I understand why people don't like AI, they must just be reading fake-news about it and believing it. Why can't they see that AI is a benefit for society?"
Not once did you mention any of the reasons people are opposed to AI, just that you hope one day they will get over it and learn how to use the tools to bring down big business.
I like how you imply that only programmers at large corporations know how to build things. If they would just use the AI tools I bet you could hire in a bunch more developers for cheap to boost productivity!
Here's a clue: no one gives a shit about making it slightly easier to code, make pictures, or write emails. The costs for maintaining the system and developing it are absurd when we have actual problems affecting people right now. This is all a waste of time, and is Americas latest scam. Before that was crypto currency, medical investment fraud, and a hundred other get rich quick/save the world schemes designed to do one thing: generate profit for a small group of people so they can ride off into the sunset, their American dream complete.
You're absolutely delusional if you think no one wants code done quicker and easier, and that's not to .mention the endless other things it makes possible like giving people access to vital services like heathcare in their native language, etc, etc.
These are things that are going to totally change the world for the better, removing power from corporations and giving to to people. You may not understand that because you're not involved in actually doing anything productive but it's a reality everyone can see.
Yes things have been scams there are also things that have dramatically changed the world for the better, heathacare and education in remote and impoverished areas all entirely depends on the mobile networks. They're also now absurdly cheap, the cost and effort of sending text used to be prohibitive but now you can video chat with your whole family all day every day at no extra thanks to a technology which became ubiquitous.
As for your very wise solution of 'just hire more developers' yes that is why corporations are able to capture and control markets, a world where only the rich have the power to make things and compete is a horrible late capitalist hell - stop defending capitalism just because you're used to it, yes you have an affluent life thanks to the suffering of others which is great for you but I don't want to live like that, I don't want to require children to slave in cocoa and coffee plantations or starving mothers to work 16 hour days in fast fashion garment factories when we have the ability to free those people and give them good lives by harnessing ai to help automate boring and laborious tasks.
Capitalism is not as good as you seem to think it is, learn about the reality of capitalism beyond your glib bubble and you'll realize that ai tools are vital for a fair world and a world at peace.