AI has some legit uses but the hype around it is mostly VC's throwing money at buzzwords while the actual tech is nowhere near the "AGI revolution" they keep promising us lol.
A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.
A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it's what's selling for some reason?
The latter isn't even selling, just used because it is free to use or they jammed it into an existing ecosystem like Copilot.
The former isn't "kind of interesting" and there are lots and lots of daily use cases solved by AI that are much much more than "kind of interesting".
What a simple way to try to downplay it by calling it only kind of interesting.
The former is important, but attracts little attention from the tech & mainstream press, is not heavily marketed by major corporations to other corporations and the general public, and makes VCs fall asleep. Whereas the latter gets ALL the coverage, marketing, and gives VCs big fat boners. My comment expresses my bewilderment at this state of affairs (hence the "for some reason?"). You want to white-knight machine learning, expert systems and pattern recognition? Call VentureBeat, Andressen-Horowitz, PitchBook, and TechCrunch. And while you're at it, tell them to stop vaporizing genAI slop.
Sure, I'm just hoping smart people can see through the bullshit and call it out instead of treating all "AI" the same.
The crap they're promoting it for also showcases the direction they're developing it for which is an utterly depressing, unsustainable and impractical one. It's frustrating to see how much money is invested (and ultimately burned) to actively destroy the economy and create problems rather than fixing some.
How does this differ from most other things VCs throw money at?
cough cough crypto cough
This. Everybody wanted it to be AGI right out of the gate. It's just a tool, like Photoshop. It will get better over time but it's not the end all be all.
"Use our AI!"
"Hmm... I don't know."
"If you use AI you can fire all your employees 🤞 ."
"GIMMEE! GIMMEE! I'LL PAY ANY PRICE! I HATE EMPLOYEES SOO MUCH!"
two months later
"Why is everything broken?"
Every tech buzzword is a grift to try to rationalize endless exponential growth in a world where that’s just impossible
No fucking shit.
So is the article, absolutely zero credibility on an unknown author. Author didnt exist prior to this article. Yall cheering a ghost
I've met the author IRL. He's quite famous in his niche
Duh
chatbots like gpt and gemini learn from conversations with veiwers, so what we need is a virus that will pretend to be a user and flood its chats with pro racism arguments and sexist remarks, which will rub off on the chatbots making them unacceptable for public use
How do models learn from conversations with users?
Been there. Done that
well duh, much like CRYPTO was a grift/ponzi scheme, after it crashed people started looking for th next big thing, it was AI.
Unrelated, but what’s the difference between grift vs. scam? Internet search seems to give me the same definitions.
Is it just that grifts are personal, while scams are impersonal (like phone/internet scams)?
When I think of a scam, I think a one-off, obviously amateur attempt. An email with awful grammar saying the government will fine me a bajillion dollars if I don’t download a file is a scam. A scam will also leave you alone.
A grift is done by career slimeballs. Used car salesmen, big C-suites and corrupt politicians are grifters. It’s more offensive and more aggressive. You can’t escape a grift.
Hmm, yeah that’s helpful! So maybe if I think of grifting as more of a lifestyle, as in done by con artists.
Well not exactly but completely misunderstood.
Everyone who actually knows about AI is familiar with the alignment and takeoff problems.
(Play this if you need a quick summary
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
)
So whenever someone says, we are making AI, the response should be “oh fuck no” (using bullets and fire if required)
New tagging and auto-completion is fine (there is probably a whole space of new tools that can come out of the AI research field; that doesn’t risk human extinction)
We are so far away from a paperclip maximizer scenario that I can't take anyone concerned about that seriously.
We have nothing even approaching true reasoning, despite all the misuse going on that would indicate otherwise.
Alignment? Takeoff? None of our current technologies under the AI moniker come anywhere remotely close to any reason for concern, and most signs point to us rapidly approaching a wall with our current approaches.
Each new version from the top companies in the space right now has less and less advancement in capability compared to the last, with costs growing at a pace where "exponentially" doesn't feel like an adequate descriptor.
There's probably lateral improvements to be made, but outside of taping multiple tools together there's not much evidence for any more large breakthroughs in capability.
I agree currently technology is extremely unlikely to achieve general intelligence but my expression was that we never should try to achieve AGI; it is not worth the risk until after we solve the alignment problem.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
