Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
Thats not how it works.
A better example would be “nuclear arms are already here, theres no going back”
Its not a capitalism thing, its an arms race thing.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Same goes for AI, once one country starts doing it, everyone else is gonna need to keep up so they dont lose the arms race.
Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.
If your enemies win the generative AI “arms” race they can use it to, uh…
???
(Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they’re the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation’s GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)
LLMs are not the final state of AI
But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that’s assuming only if — and this is a very big “if” — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.
Yep, by design LLM cannot become ‘inteligent’, you can only make it more believable but it’s still copying humans not really thinking by itself. No amount of development or money invested will change that, it’s not a pokemon it won’t just evolve into something different one day.
And it’s worth reiterating, the current crop of generative “AI” is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.
The current push is the notion that “hyperscaling,” i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn’t. Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Well said.
Depends on your definition of novel.
From TFA:
The AI did not prove that its approach is the best anyone can do, though. In fact, mathematician Will Sawin has already improved upon the AI’s grid.
OpenAI privately contacted Litt, Sawin, Gowers and a number of other mathematicians to verify the LLM’s proof. Together (and without the company’s direct involvement), they wrote up their individual takeaways. (No external experts have seen the AI’s original output, however—just an edited version of its train of thought.)
What stood out, they said, was the AI’s preternatural patience and focus.
…
“AIs have an edge: It’s not just that they can try all known methods,” says Jacob Tsimerman, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work but was part of the companion paper solicited by OpenAI. “They can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without getting overwhelmed.”
…
The mathematical tools the AI used here are not novel, although their application in this domain appears to be. “The model did not invent something fundamentally new that nobody saw coming,” says Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician leading OpenAI’s mathematical explorations. “It just executed like an amazing mathematician.”
So, it’s a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested. And we’re not allowed to see its homework.
This is categorically failing to set the world on fire, except possibly in the literal sense.
To strongman your argument, “LLMs with a supervised training pipeline cannot become intelligent”.
RL training pipelines are much more open-ended, and experts still unsure one way or the other if an LLM + RL could lead to intelligence.
I think LLMs are intelligent. They’re at least as intelligent as My pocket calculator, and My calculator is intelligent.
I think you’re setting the bar too low. A tiny amount of intelligence is super easy to program.
Not only that, it’s basically eating all the resources that could go into making AGI.
There is nooooo way for companies to invest in actual innovation when they are throwing everything at this dead end.
Such a fallacy. Anything that falls under the umbrella of machine learning will contribute to future AI. We certainly won’t improve LLMs such that they become AGI, but all of it contributes.
And, whether or not future AI even uses traditional silicon computing is also irrelevant.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc. That all happens each step of the way, even if the next technology is completely different.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc.
All of which have absolutely nothing to do with what we are currently calling AI.
Doing with it, sure, but the creation of LLMs, and the algorithms behind them, especially the training, are what I’m talking about. It’s a lot of very impressive, complicated math
I think it’s pretty pathetic that “fuck AI” has become the trendy, cool thing. It really misses the mark. It should be fuck capitalism and the sociopathic CEOs abusing AI and shoving it down our throats. AI is not the problem.
It’s actually just a lot of pretty simple maths from decades ago, but it’s a lot of it. The big changes in those decades have been the feasibility of doing enough of that simple maths to achieve anything useful, and domain-specific network architecture stuff that’s rarely transferable, e.g. LLMs are possible because of the invention of the transformer architecture in 2017, and that’s also turned out to be useful for a few things like image generation and protein folding simulation, but not for all neural network based techniques, and then most of the things that have made successive LLMs better haven’t also been useful for the few other transformer-architecture-based neural networks. Most not-LLM AI isn’t going to be meaningfully easier to create than it would have been had the world got bored after GPT-2 and we’d only focussed on doing image and video generation.
Then you’re well aware of the massive power that AGI will bring to any nation that can harness it. And no, LLMs alone are not the path, and possibly not the path at all.
GenAI is really fucking useful for propaganda and disinformation warfare.
That may sound like a compliment to GenAI, it’s not.
Unfortunately, the ability to programmatically weaponize false-humanity is real, and really effective.
Which is yet another ethical question that has yet to be widely judged before being deployed everywhere. Just a bunch of greedy, short-sighted exceptionalists.
They can use it to do a lot of things. AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people. Arguably there’s substantially more value in training inexperienced humans to get better in their fields than in settling for AI as a cheap alternative that starts with a maybe slightly higher or similar but cheaper baseline, but that doesn’t eliminate all value they create. You can make arguments about the long term benefits socially or for individual organizations that leverage AI, but spend a couple hours playing with Claude and it becomes extremely evident that they’re not anything resembling useless.
Even if we completely throw chat bots out the window, there are some instances of general utility for thinking models. This comic is making a moral argument that’s more compelling, but arguing that they’re actually totally useless doesn’t really reflect reality
As someone who’s used Claude and most other big LLMs as part of my job, they’re all absolutely useless. They don’t have the capacity for thought or care, all they are is a word generation algorithm similar to Cleverbot. So you can’t rely on them for useful information, you can’t rely on them for remembering info you told them, half the time it feels like talking to a brick wall (because you essentially are), and their only actual value is to CEOs as something they can blame layoffs on, even when it’s bullshit.
What do you use them for? I use them day to day for significant automation hooked into a rag tool and several custom mcp services. They are absolutely amazing but with some serious flaws that do require significant guard rails and human in the loop points.
They are obviously over hyped and being used as an excuse by shitty CEOs but to call them useless is a mistake I thinkSorry, I’m curious: what’s your workflow looking like when you’re dealing with LLMs?
Because I‘m just tinkering with them as a hobby and while I consider them erratic and certainly limited in many regards, I still find them useful. Even fun, but on the other hand I’m not forced to use them.
I’m with you: the experiences people have with these tools are just dramatically different from mine. They are quite good. By no means even close to perfect, but they’re just so much faster than me at pulling up some random information that would be hard to find with an Internet search myself and very good at going from nothing to something that works with code. I don’t particularly enjoy using them because I find the whole industry abhorrent, but their usefulness isn’t in question to me.
Laughable to call an LLM a thinking machine. It’s glorified auto-complete built on stolen data. I work in the industry and the fact that any of this can impress anyone is fairly depressing to me.
That’s not what “thinking model” means. It’s not a statement about cognition, it means it takes steps in which it explains itself to itself to check if it’s missing something.
Whoever coined that is using those words wrong, then.
The people no longer review their broken code the catch is that if they do it would negate all the gains.
AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people.
I gotta pull you up on this one. Realistically, they’re not in the same ballpark. The mistakes made by people are so minor and infrequent they can be trusted to perform brain surgery, and the kinds of mistakes made are things like ‘we miscounted the sponges on 1 out of 1000 surgeries,’ or ‘I took too little tissue and didn’t get all the red cancer out of the identically red tissue because I was trying to conserve quality of life,’ while LLMs are doing the equivalent of hallucinating a spleen inside someone’s head or ignoring the cancer to look for cankers. You can’t even rightly call of a mistake because the LLM isn’t ‘trying to do something and failing.’ It’s just producing probabilities and we’re hoping they’re useful.
When it’s really important to get something right, we have a person double check the work of the first person, which they can do, because they are grounded in reality. When you want to check the output of AI, you use a person for the same reason. AI has no grounding in reality, only words, which are famously not the same thing as reality if you have an intellectual age greater than seven.
If you’d like to take the next sentence into consideration and respond to the context of what I was actually saying there, feel free.
The rest of it is just as silly, albeit differently. The point is not that AI is useless, but that it is being used and will be used in ways that make things worse. You, as a person who seems like they have more than two braincells, can tell AI can be used by smart people to do smart things. But that’s not how they’re used. Most people are stupid. Many of them are staggeringly stupid. They will also use the AI, and they will use it to do staggeringly stupid things. They will replace humans with LLMs where they can because they are stupid and don’t care when the eggheaded nerds tell them it’s a bad idea because it makes them feel smart. We are at the whims of idiots with money and power who now have automated even the position of sycophant who tells them they are right.
100%
There’s definitely a ceo-driven tendency to insert AI anywhere and everywhere whether or not it actually is a reasonable application. What I’m saying is that there are also some reasonable applications. When people focus entirely on “AI useless!”, they’re fooling themselves every bit as much as the people who think it’s suitable for every possible application. Their arguments are just as empty and vibes-based.
Making a better LLM isn’t the point of all this, it’s taking what they have and building on it until they create a true AGI.
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
In a world where the organisations that are blazing the trail are in private hands, this is very bad news for everyone who isn’t in the winning organisation.
That’s essentially the arms race: who gets to be king of the world.
The slim chance of it not being monumentally detrimental to humanity is basically tied to us abandoning capitalism wholesale and uniting the world, so I’m not holding my breath.
Edit: few downvotes on this, so check my other replies for clarity, if you still think I’m taking out my arse, comment and set me right. It’s Lemmy, the points don’t matter, I’d rather have a conversation. Plus read again if you somehow get the impression I’m advocating for any of this
Nobody’s making AGI anytime soon. LLMs do not have any of the baselines required for this. They’re expensive predictive text algorithms, more or less the same ones used in mobile keyboards, but upscaled to an absurd degree. Anyone truly worried about other companies or nations developing AGI has no idea how our current “AI” works. You’re never going to get there by building on them.
I’d like to believe too, but it doesn’t really track when you watch what these companies are actually doing.
Of course an LLM on its own isn’t going to become an AGI. Anyone with a braincell can see that. These orgs aren’t so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
Nearly all of the actual uses today aren’t just the LLM, but the tooling built on top of it, the LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
That’s what’s happening in parallel to the model development, tooling and harnesses that make the overall system more capable. If it can be done by a computer (or by extension a sufficiently advanced robot), the LLM can do it too with a bit of integration work (which it is very able to do on its own today, with minimal steering). If you can test for something being correct in any way, that too can be ultimately hooked up to an LLM as another input to push it back onto the desired path when it veers off.
Frankly I’m starting to feel like for most people it’ll feel like it’s years off until the day it happens. I don’t see remotely enough people taking the risk seriously in time to do anything.
It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
Wheels are a key component of my car I guess.
You know what, that’s actually a very good example.
The wheels are the interface between the engine and any kind of° surface, with no prior knowledge of those surfaces
We’ve got an engine of basically everything that followed the industrial revolution until now.
An LLM can very much function as the wheel to marry a surface to that engine.
°Horizontal, don’t be a smart ass
LOL.
In my “analogy” you just invented all of the actual complexity of the car in the same hand wavy way you claim AGI will just coalesce from the ether.
These orgs aren’t so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
You make some interesting points.
But…the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
Interesting point. But the folks giving these things autonomy are mostly just creating huge messes, right now, and then claiming victory and taking a quick bow before the stage caves in.
The places we do see success are where no human could be patient enough - which is the stuff computers were already better at, than us.
As you point out, all that can be fixed.
But it’s all already not worth the money invested, before they build dozens more data centers in the hope that they can fix it. There’s just massive amounts of magic thinking going on, by investors.
I do agree with your point that there’s probably somethings that are useful and some that are dangerous on the other side of this.
But…the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
Completely agree, but in the gap left by “vast majority”, these guys don’t seem to be behaving entirely like your conventional consumer squeezing companies, they seem to be playing a much more collusive game at the very least
But it’s all already not worth the money invested
That’s the flaw in the common view of this. You’re looking too short term. The second someone can offer to replace a business owners employees for half price, it’s basically infinite money.
That is what they’re pouring all the money in for: a chance at that prize. A chance at replacing all paid work with an automation they own.
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
TechBros repeat this constantly, but it just isn’t true.
Plenty of second-on-the-scene solutions have emerged as most popular, or most impactful.
But Tech Bros need the fear of missing out (fear of arriving second) to justify huge investments with no worthwhile results.
I’m answering the question of what the arms race is
The goal is a technology that replaces the need for humans in any job.
The FOMO is different now because they don’t give a shit about the consumer. The FOMO is versus the other competitors because it’s a winner takes all scenario.
They will keep accelerating to the detriment of literally everything else.
Whether you believe they’ll make it is almost moot. They’re going to burn the world down trying.
Whether you believe they’ll make it is almost moot. They’re going to burn the world down trying.
That is a really good point.
True AGI is not happening within the lifetime of anyone or anything alive today.
See my other comments
Except 90% of what people talk about when they refer to AI is LLMs which have no direct military applications other than vague productivity boost claims. You could say the same thing about sending kids to the mines, “our society is more productive sending kids to dig out coal instead of playing. If we don’t send our kids to the mines China will and then we’ll really be behind”.
… no I am talking about actual AI as a field as a whole, not just LLMs…
Yall forgetting about Boston dynamics or something?
We got fuckin guns strapped to the back of autonomous robot dogs that can run at over 60 km/h
We got autonomous drones with facial recognition that can fly through dense forests at 90 km/h+
The fuck you think Im talking about lol…
Boston dynamics isn’t building countless data centers and (poorly) replacing peoples’ jobs. OP’s comic is obviously about ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc.
Are you conflating robotics with intelligence?
AI as a field is the study of any form of NN application, which includes the software powering Boston dynamics robots…
You didnt think those robots capabilities were programmed manually by hand, did you?
To be fair, we tried robots without much intelligence and they sucked. They couldn’t figure out how to balance on two legs so they just fell over a lot. Robots are just better now that they have more intelligence.
The biggest strength of LLMs is in processing a huge amount of text very quickly. I imagine that contributes a lot to military intelligence.
Again that’s a use case with entirely speculative applications at best. It can “process info”, but the answers it gives from them could be hallucinated. So if it’s analyzing nuclear threats, what if it “hallucinates” one? This isn’t Comcast ticket support, the military can’t afford LLMs making up bad info.
Implying that the only way to use LLMs is with 0 human oversight.
The AI “arms race” as you put it is absolutely capitalism at its core. Replace humans with shitty robots so they don’t have to continue paying wages to actual humans. Its just the the first person that makes it work will be able to set the rules for the ones that follow. Getting paid for those rules and making further entrenched in capitalism.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.
There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad
I think we may very well be on the precipice of the world you imagine, or something like it. But the old world dies hard and takes effort to abolish. We didn’t get where we are because we were given what we have - we fought for it. I think we’re seeing the beginning stages of people demanding that the benefits of AI and automation flow to them, rather than to just the elite. Won’t be without pain, but I think we get there. Partly because we kind of have to. People get over their fear of socialism and collectivism really fast when they get desperate yet there’s people making huge piles of money off the automation that stole their job. I can’t say for sure what the future looks like, but I don’t think we stay locked here forever. To think so is to look at the situation during the first gilded age and say nothing can change. Well, it did and we got the progressive age.
I agree with you, I think the will for change is there. The next challenge is turning will into action.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time.
Either the collapse of civilization or a literal uprising.
Seeing as we’re already heading down the nightmare route, it seems poor risk management.
I mean we passed that point decades ago, im not an expert but im pretty sure it’s literally been decades since we produced enough food for everyone on the planet to be obese and at least in the US I believe we have more empty houses than individual homeless people. AI overinvestment is another step in the wrong direction but it’s not the cause of any of our current problems.
We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
I dont think this is true.
Space mining is only for resources to use in space. The economics of transporting resources back to earth will never stack up.
I dont think any significant number of humans will spend any amount of time in space in any practical time scale.
I don’t mean people actually being in space. Perhaps a better word choice would be place, eg “we could be in a place where…”
Oh my bad i misread that.
I think we could be seeing a shift in the economics if humans can reliably live off world anyway.
I think NASAs SR-1 can show a reliable link to mars via what amounts to automated space trucks, but really only time will tell if we can kick off a new age of humanity or just keep letting neo-aristocrats take over again and again.
Nah.
It would be infinitely better to go live in a box in your back yard for several years. At least that way you avoid the chronic health issues arising from “living off world”.
Even with a lot of yet-to-be-theorised physics, I just cant see the motivation for humans to leave earth in significant numbers.
IMO space will be populated almost exclusively by machines.
I suppose my time as a submariner may skew my view of life out there some.
Actually I’m interested to hear your perspective because I have no experience of anything like that.
I just feel like star trek has romanticised space exploration to the point where most people can’t conceptualise the hardships that would be involved.
Just as an example, on the ISS, just outside earth’s atmosphere, ive heard that the air smells putrid. Astronauts just deal with it because they’re passionate about the project.
I guess my pessimistic view is that “life on Mars” would basically be very similar to life on a submarine but with no ports or shore leave or furlough.
Maybe that’s the end use for AI.
Edit: i think of space as like this infinite ocean depth. There is eventually gonna be like this massive pocket of new world down there, but until there is, there just isn’t any reason to go ourselves unless you’re one of those types of people.
I’d also like to invoke the cautions of 2001 Space Odyssey as food for thought
Thats kinda of my point though, im predicting that there will never be a new world, either under the ocean or “off world”.
Its a fascinating concept, and I do love sci fi, but in reality it just doesn’t seem plausible.
I don’t think this is quite how the world works. The reason people need to work to survive is because we can’t survive if everyone stopped working. We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn’t there is too great a risk they wouldn’t work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society. How many people would quit their job tomorrow if they won the lottery? Sure some would find work doing something they preferred, but not all of them, and often the thing they prefer doing is not the job that actually needs doing the most. If it’s something they even are good at. Loads of people would love to be an actor, but how many actually have both the talent and the skills needed to do that?
In a society where most people actually don’t need to work because most work can be handled by machines without significant negative consequences things would change to be very different. People like to think rich people or politicians or kings control the world by themselves but the reality is there are always limits on what they can actually do. If you dick around too much even in an absolute monarchy you will be overthrown one way or another. Typically by your own military, underlings, or family, sometimes by revolution or insurrection. The same thing applies today to liberal democracy. In fact it applies even more so. Anyone who tried to kill off the working class as a whole would find themselves very quickly dead or dethroned one way or another.
We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn’t there is too great a risk they wouldn’t work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society
No, people want to work. Look at Wikipedia, SCP, Minecraft, all those job simulator games, Linux, the Fediverse. The drive to create something that benefits people is fundamental to the human experience.
It’s a tool, use it as you wish but you either have it or not.
Tool of your own destruction and a death knell of human logic, reasoning, and creativity.
No, thats not what I was talking about at all.
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
The unemployment explosion is obviously also happening. But that’s actually a pretty good thing in the long run as a society with 90% unemployment and the need to work to live is absolutely unsustainable. AI will basically force the end of capitalism by increasing the system’s volatility until it adapts.
LLMs will never be able to be terminators. This is just an expensive exercise in futility.
I thought, LLMs would never become able to write code. And now, I use Claude Code as the always available senior on coke.
LLMs have a reliability problem. If that gets solved somehow, they can actually drive a worker bot - or a terminator.And the big money pits also don’t only do LLMs. Those just get all the press because they are usable by normal users right now. Of course, some of those money pits are just investor scams. It’s a fully corrupted society after all.
The “reliability problem” is a fundamental part of how they work. There is no solving it.
BTW, I wish you luck debugging all that vibe code when it stops working. Seriously.
Never say never
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
I think you’re right that this is what they are thinking, but they are being idiots.
My bash script terminators will easily destroy any AI terminators.
My bash scripts don’t hallucinate, and aren’t so bloated that they require an always-available link to a data center.
What we call “AI” today is not remotely close to being a good combat-ready solution.
The winners of any coming AI war won’t win it with the bullshit slop-peddling tools being pushed by con artists, today.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Except we did stop. We ended nuclear testing. We downsized our arsenal. We never deployed the high yield, neutron bombs, or other “tactical” variants in subsequent wars. And neither did the French or the Russians or the Chinese. Or even the Israelis.
Our nuclear program is derelict. It belongs in a museum. There’s an outstanding question as to how many of the bombs currently in circulation are duds.
Unlike with the F-35 or the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or the Predator Drone or even the Virginia class submarine, we’re just not putting any more money into nuclear proliferation and improved first strike capabilities like we were 60 years ago.
Mutually Asssured Destruction is an easily technolngically achievable goal, that’s why we don’t see much development past that point. You only need to exterminate an enemy’s population once.
The lesson learned by the world, at this point, is that nukes are the only way to guarantee your country isn’t invaded and that agreeing to unilateral nuclear disamament is downright idiotic. Expect more countries gettng nukes this century.
Even before there was an atomic weapon, the utility, the effectiveness, of atomic weapons was never in doubt.
“AI” isn’t like that.
pushes glasses up um actually the usefulness of AI has never been in doubt, we’ve been using it for years, what actually isn’t like that is specificly generative AI.
We’ve been calling the good stuff “machine learning” since forever, and we’ve overwhelmingly been calling the new generative stuff “AI,” however inadvisable that may be. If we can just stop insisting that machine learning is AI, actually, we’ll have no trouble of this kind. This is an unforced error, it’s just muddying the waters for no benefit at all.
The only people who think ML isn’t AI are science fiction nerds who play too many video games and think AI means Cortana.
It would also apply to child labour and slavery. We may have outlawed it locally, but that doesn’t change the fact that companies who make use of it will be at an advantage, so we just ended up outsourcing it.
^
I find it ironic that every top comment author seems to feel the urge to point out why it’s actually different, but never question the point. I’m also sick of people telling me there’s no turning back, like, yeah, you do you, bro. My life is great without social networks, which are not going anywhere I guess.
Have you guys seen Reddit lately? It’s nothing but bots and AI. Its such a weird time.
Smoking indoors, child labor and slavery are all still here, just transformed and under a different coat of paint
This article assumes the person in the first panel wouldn’t want the 3 panels to not still be the case.
Except child and slave labour was cheap and profitable. AI is neither cheap nor profitable.
It’s comparing apples to oranges.
AI is software. We never stopped any software change before. Even heavily disliked and banned systems like crypto currency or vpns etc. still exist.
For the record I agree that AI needs more regulation and we could even force stop development of new models but LLMs will never be stopped in any meaningful way. You can take an open source model and run it today.
LLMs are here to stay until it’s replaced by other technology.
AI is software. We never stopped any software change before.
Good point, hard to stop something that has near zero cost of copying (see also ‘piracy’)
Which is why techbros are trying to put a moat around it with ‘datacentres’ . Problem is, as the tech advances, it keeps getting smaller. QWEN 3.6 27B can run fine on a 16GB video card and if you give it more time it’ll be as ‘smart’ as bigger models. Doesn’t have as much world knowledge as the bigs, but for many usecases that’s irrelevant.
Really, ‘datacentres’ are more about stealing compute from the masses so they can rent it back, with control.
QWEN 3.6 27B can run fine on a 16GB video card and if you give it more time it’ll be as ‘smart’ as bigger models.
As much as I’d like this to be true (don’t believe all the benchmarks), in reality, using e.g. gpt 5.5 is still a lot less pain in the ass, mostly has to do with more reprompting (gpt is just smarter, oneshots stuff more often) + a lot slower (on an RTX 3090 for reference).
I’ve tried using it for some time, but I think I’m faster writing (better, although that’s also true for gpt-5.5) code by hand, than using this (+ I need the valuable VRAM for other stuff, as I’m a graphics/shader programmer most of the time).
That said, it’s already fairly impressive how much progress these smaller models have made the last year, it’s usable, you can “vibe-code” at least simple stuff.
You may have a good point here that changed my opinion on datacenter opposition. We definitely need more datacenter compute and always will but maybe making it more difficult can shift the market towards on device compute or smaller servers so opposing datacenters can be a net good outcome.
Well to be fair to the giant pieces of shit in positions of power all over the states they are trying to bring child labor back as well
I’d bet good money it’s the same people fighting to keep child marriage.
Good bet they’d like to bring smoking indoors and slavery back, too.
Whats wrong with blowing smoke into the face of your child slave??? We used to be a country
- Smoking indoors happens all the time because someone who’s good at vaping is unclockable
- Slavery is still legal in the USA as long as it’s prison work (ever wondered why American police always look for excuses to arrest black people?)
- Child labour has never gone away
Most people want to bring smoking indoors back. The only people who don’t are the weird shut-ins who sit around posting online all day. People out in the real world don’t view having an after meal cigarette as equivalent to fucking slavery.
You guys have to remember that if you ask a random person on the street what Cthulhu is, they’re not going to have a fucking clue. Everyone in this thread is a weirdo. Including me.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they’re in the minority.
Of course it’s not morally equivalent to slavery, but the ban on smoking indoors made my life and a lot of people’s lives much nicer, even before you factor in the reduced risk of lung cancer from secondhand smoke.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they’re in the minority.
I like my booze, but if someone wants to light up, they ought to be outside with their booze.
This proves my point. Normal people don’t think like this. It’s weird. A bar without smoking is like a church Jesus. This is one of those topics online where you feel like you’re being deliberately gas lit. But I have to remember I’m surrounded by the weirdest of the weird.
No, “normal” people don’t want to bring back smoking indoors. Alcoholics who spend most of their time indoors in bars want to bring smoking indoors back. Your “normal” people aren’t the norm.
Im an off and on smoker and am SUPER against smoking indoors and even around kids (like even within eyesight fr). I even got to xperience it before the bans. I remember being a kid in that and its why i have asthma now. Its awful. This person is a minority even among most smokers i know. Its only the selfish lazy people that think that way.
They are not in the minority. The Internet is not the majority. You and I do not remotely represent the vast majority of people in any way shape or form. No one here does.
I there data that backs up your claim?
Is there data that the vast majority of people in the world are not communist Linux-using weebs on the autistic spectrum suffering from anxiety problems who find jokes about operating systems, Lovecraftian horrors, and quantum mechanics hilarious, and relate to memes about standing in the corner at a party and not talking to anybody?
We are not the majority, my friend. This is one of those things where you really need to take “trust me bro" as the best double blind study you’re gonna get. Your question is the best data I can give.
I meant the claim that most people want to bring back indoor smoking. I’m assuming you have nothing more than “trust me bro” for that too.
The only people who talk positively about bringing indoor smoking back are smokers and pub owners, and they’re in the minority.
You and I do not remotely represent the vast majority of people in any way shape or form. No one here does.
What you say about Lemmy users is true, but I wasn’t talking about Lemmy users, I was talking about the general public. Most people don’t smoke.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-rates-by-country
I’m a chainsmoker and I’d prefer if they didn’t.
Thing is: All of the examples still exist to various degrees.
And just like them AI is not going to vanish. Even more so than the others because AI is information. It’s like trying to ban E2E: The genie is out of the bottle.
I mean yeah I have one friend that smokes indoors still and it’s wild to be transported to the 70s when I visit her, and there are casinos where you usually smoke indoors. I just think if these models were trained on the worlds data then we should probably nationalize the data centers or just have the majority of people have affordable gpus again to self host and continue making strides optimizing the models to run on lower vram if people insist on using these things. I think it should be considered cringe to try to make money off them or use them for art, and the other use cases need to be regulated - giant scam apparatus manipulating the shit out of people, propaganda spreading convincing bot accounts, automated cyber attack attempts…ya know all the wonderful and most popular use cases benefiting humanity and improving our lives.
It’s a pipe dream to think someone will pull a big switch and turn off AI. Blockchain stopped being relevant but it’s still being used.
AI being irrelevant is good enough for me.
That will never, ever happen. It has a usecase nothing can replace. It’s not perfect, but you’re delusional if you think it’s ever going away. It might go away from your toothbrush and everything that doesn’t need it, but AI for eg. writing your emails is here to stay forever.
But Blockchain did stop being needlessly added into everything, at least.
In 2021, there were an estimated 50 million people living as slaves, and in 2013, there were an estimated 168 million children (aged 5-17) involved in child labor. These are the numbers I found off of Wikipedia.
Agreed, the technology exists and bad faith actors will from now on be able to use it for massive disinformation. No matter what happens, you just need some computing power, some decently smart people and time and you can train an LLM from scratch. But those damn datacenters can still be not build.
https://futurism.com/data-centers-financial-bubble
The massive investments being made aren’t economically viable.
Asbestos is already in all the buildings, we can’t remove it. All the cars already require leaded gasoline, we can’t unlead it.
Fun fact I didn’t know until recently: if you have a classic car that requires leaded gasoline, they actually sell lead substitute that you mix with modern unleaded gas
Depending on where you live, you can also install a conversion kit to run your older car on natural gas instead of gasoline
Isn’t the problem now the ethanol and not the octane?
I don’t know the exact mechanisms at play that make it necessary, but they sell the additive at automotive stores!
Lead helped with the valves not getting as much wear because of specific metallurgy that depended on it. It wasn’t strictly needed, the change occured after cars were already mainstream.
I am more mad about people saying “it’s improvng exponentially.” The rate of improvement is falling, if anything.
Bunch of people said it because sci-fi made them believe so, and then everyone else went along with it for some reason.
Either the exponent is 1/2 or people are just having shared delusions.
Or people don’t know what exponentially means
Ha the exponene might be half, but you’re right exponential is a huge oversimplification, even as the processing power increases exponentially, the resl world results increment much less quickly.
My theory is that eventually there is going to be so much ai slop on the web all ai will inevitably stop working and the whole thing will collapse
As much as I hate ai/llm’s, here we’re conflating new technologies with bad practices. This is a fallacy.
However much we hate llm’s they definitely aren’t going away anytime soon. You can’t make laws or policies to make ideas/technologies go away.
It is like the machine in industrial revolution stayed and flourished, yet the child labor and unfair labor practice are being fight against.
Clearly, this is not a justification for current LLM system or those feeding it. I feel it is important to keep these companies accountable for the crime they have commited.
In the long run, I feel it is also important to think about what do we need to do to keep LLM working for humanity, and organize to make that a reality. If that requires complete removal of LLM as a technology, so be it; but I am not entirely convinced we even need to go that far.
You can’t make laws or policies to make ideas/technologies go away.
Yes you can. You write a bill saying AI data centers are banned. That’s it. That’s the bill.
About as effective as writing a bill saying war is banned.
Ah yeah, that’ll stop China. Or the UK. Or India, or whatever other country wants a piece of the pie.
Pushing back isn’t like trying to ban child labour, it’s like trying to ban factories.
This would make sense if I believe AI was even valuable to have.
Legit, I do not care if China has the monopoly.
Cool. But it still means that AI will be out there and being used.
No one can stop me from using chat IRC—no one!
I’m not sure you can really draw a clean bright line between a “technology” and a “practice.”
I think you could call the American practice of slavery – which required a network of infrastructure, culture, agricultural conditions and market opportunities, and government policies – a “technology.” As surely as the Internet is, anyway.
Luddites completely failed to prevent industrialisation. But through successive incremental efforts, child labour was banned in most countries.
Trying to prevent AI is like trying to prevent factories.
Whatever you have to tell yourself, man.
I don’t “have to tell myself” anything. Forgive me if I misinterpreted your extremely vague reply, but it sounds like you think anyone who says that AI is going to continue to be used must be some kind of AI-hyping techbro fanboi, which is idiotic.
I have no interest in trying to convince you that AI is likely going to remain in use, but you really need to make at least a minimal amount of effort at understanding (not agreeing with) other people’s positions, if only for the sake of your own blood pressure.
But you are an AI hyping fanboi. Like, just own it man.
I’m not that upset, either; when AI has finished tricking people into becoming dependent on it before summarily dropping them into the dark pit of unemployment, I will be one of the few remaining capable of doing any work.
What makes you think I am hyping it or a fanboi?
Reminds me of when the stupid “Web 3.0” made up by blockchain freaks was supposed to be the future. Not every technology will be as widespread as the internet. The internet facilitates communication across the entire world and offers many advantages over phone, mail, and other forms of communication.
The use cases and advantages are clear, even if there was an overly eager hype cycle in the 90s. AI might have some uses, but a clear advantage has not actually been established yet, nor have the legal challenges been ironed out. Remember that the current iteration of AI would not have been possible without breaking tons of IP law, slurping up as much data as possible.
Distributed web is a great idea. With a shitty vibecoded reference implementation (IPFS). And then also buzzworded as “Web 3” together with blockchain DNS and everything else.
What do you mean clear advantage has not actually been established?? Im getting weeks worth of stuff done in hours, like it’s self evident how powerful AI is. If you use it to make deepfake porn instead of making you better at your job, that’s a human choice. If you make a half decent effort, AI makes you an order of magnitude more productive. It’s pretty freaking amazing, like how the automobile was a massive improvement over a horse and buggy.
I get your point. There’s real benefit here. The question is if the benefit really outweighs the real costs, once they start charging for the actual resources used.
One reason we expeirence it differently is that some of us were already an order of magnitude more productive than average, without AI.
AI is a great tool for catching up. It slurps up popular patterns and spits them out, sometimes in novel contexts.
For everyone who used AI to catch a productivity technique(s) they had not yet encountered, I can see how it feels life changing.
I suspect we have a wave of realizations coming from folks whose token costs get too high, and realize they can get 95% of the AI productivity gain they experienced, with zero use of tokens - just by copying and pasting the patterns and tools AI already introduced them to. We don’t talk about that aspect enough - genuine acceleration is happening, and some of those folks will stay more productive after the AI hype wave ends.
Of course, there’s a whole other category of folks genuinely benefitting from AI because they need needlessly verbose language output to bullshit their dumb bosses. I don’t currently have a dumb boss, so I’m not making use of that. But I 100% will start, if needed. Lol.
Well yes that’s the case with me i was never trained in coding just started out as a low level employee in an accounting department teaching myself how to do vba scripts in excel to do basic stuff and now im building data pipelines and web UIs with claude to automate reconciliations and rollforwards that used to take me a week without using Claude. I also have friends who are senior devs real master programmers, and yes they can do everything I do with claude faster and better.
But, while one claude agent isn’t faster than them, they have the ability to run a dozen agents at once getting 10x the work done they used to. Instead of paying ten good programmers $100K/yr each to be his code monkey slaves and not think too luch for themselves, they pay claude $2,500 a year to be ten codemonkeys and not think too much for itself.
It really is as game changing as the automobile was. That doesn’t mean an idiot can’t drive it off a cliff like they literally can with a car, and horses had some self preservation instincts that would save an idiot from riding over a cliff, but the answer is to let these idiots drive themselves off a cliff with AI, not to ban a new technology that helps a lot if you’re not an idiot about it.
Well yes that’s the case with me i was never trained in coding just started out as a low level employee in an accounting department teaching myself how to do vba scripts in excel to do basic stuff and now im building data pipelines and web UIs with claude to automate reconciliations and rollforwards that used to take me a week without using Claude.
Very cool. Welcome to the trade! I can tell you caught the passion for it! Lol.
With or without Claude, you’re a developer now.
If I can offer some advice: Don’t let anyone tell you which tools to use. And also never let anyone tell you that all the magic is in the tool.
But, while one claude agent isn’t faster than them, they have the ability to run a dozen agents at once getting 10x the work done they used to. Instead of paying ten good programmers $100K/yr each to be his code monkey slaves and not think too luch for themselves, they pay claude $2,500 a year to be ten codemonkeys and not think too much for itself.
Oh, yes. For the places that were already getting by on slinging CRUD (create/read/update/delete) calls, I can see how this is a game changer.
Although, the pattern I see over and over is that the boss-man buys cheap code for a few years, then pays ultra-premium prices for a consulting company to dig them out of their costly mess of spaghetti code.
They usually repeat this every few years.
These AI tools are promising to solve that, but so did Web 2.0 frameworks, and so did memory safe languages, and so did COBOl and BASIC. All of them helped, and none of them really solved the good/cheap/fast trade-off.
That doesn’t mean an idiot can’t drive it off a cliff like they literally can with a car, and horses had some self preservation instincts that would save an idiot from riding over a cliff, but the answer is to let these idiots drive themselves off a cliff with AI, not to ban a new technology that helps a lot if you’re not an idiot about it.
Lol. Yes!
It’s faster to go from the 50th floor of a building to the bottom by jumping out the window than it would be taking the elevator, but that just makes a mess of things. Similarly, you seem to be going faster with AI, and in some respects you are, but there’s also the matter of technical debt, which is the messy aspect that someone has to deal with later.
I have used AI to quickly write up small functions here or there, but even then I’ve had to go in and clean up the code because even in small tasks it can be messy. The mess scales with the size of the problem, even if you do split it up among more agents (in fact it can be worse if you use too many agents).
Especially when people claim 10x productivity gains (a suspiciously oft-repeated claim, by the way), alarm bells ring in my mind, because I’ve seen the garbage that AI generates, and no one is actually reading that garbage carefully and cleaning it up while maintaining 10x productivity.
It’s faster to go from the 50th floor of a building to the bottom by jumping out the window than it would be taking the elevator, but that just makes a mess of things.
And yet how much of our industrial engineering uses free falling gravity whenever safely possible? What’s wrong with a garbage chute straight from the sixth floor to a dumpster in the basement? What’s wrong with a water tower using gravity to store energy and let the towns water literally fall straight down 50ft into the plumbing system?
That’s what I’m saying, if an idiot breaks stuff letting it fall, that doesn’t mean we have to stop everyone from letting anything fall ever.
Technical debt
Im just building rest api clients, what technical debt? Then i have a simple streamlit server with a clean UI.
Like this is all cookie cutter stuff but now a layperson can do it. It’s basically ikea furniture for coding, and yeah im sure ikea uses a ton of water and energy and put a lot of furniture makers out of business, but that’s the way of the world. And yeah a complete moron finds a way to fuck up building ikea furniture too, but there is now a way for moderately smart people to put together furniture and also put together simple computer apps without dedicating their lives to the study of woodworking or coding.
So idk, i mean once every twenty minutes maybe i correct something Claude is doing, sometimes they look for stuff on the wrong hard drive, sometimes they request network access when it’s categorically not necessary nor what I asked it to do. Sometimes it wants to ping a server continuously until it no longer gets a 521 and i have to tell it “HELL NO STOP” but then my human coworker is like “yes this is why i love claude” and i just have to make sure that branch he’s working on never sees production.
But the semicolons brackets pythonwhitespaces are always in the right spot, variables are always instantiated properly and then dumped from memory based on best practices, while/for loops incremented correctly. And yeah it all costs me some number of gallons of water. It’s the water cycle it all ends up in the clouds and rains back down, idk sounds terrible for people who live in irrigated deserts but i could never live somewhere like that because i don’t do well in hot weather wcyd
Agree AI is as overhyped as the internet in the late 90’s was. I also think AI or some descendent of it will likely be as ubiquitous as the Internet is now. There’s quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem. I look at AI as being the bridge between the real world where things are fuzzy, rules are inconsistent, things don’t have clear cut answers, etc and the digital world where everything is precise and well defined. That’s not something that’s going away.
However, what I see happening with AI is much the same thing as what happened with the Internet. To use the Internet in the late 90’s was frustrating. The computers sucked, they were huge, they used a bunch of power, the connection was slow, connections dropped, they weren’t always on, they took quite some to establish, etc. It wasn’t till CPUs got good enough to be able to be battery powered and still render full websites (in other words, the key building block of a smartphone) that the Internet really became a ubiquitous thing for most people. Today’s AI uses way too much power, requires hardware that’s way too expensive, is less smart than people think it is, has problems learning, has problems with hallucinations, etc. What I see happening is the AI bubble crashes, like the dotcom crash, but then it comes back once the technology is really ready.
As far as law and IP go, the Internet often had lots of issues with that too. Lookup the origins of why we have Section 230. It’s still something we’re arguing over. We’ll figure out the legal issues. And IP law is broken, has been for a long time. It needs a revamp to bring it back to some sanity. I have no problem with AI breaking IP law. Much of that shouldn’t be under copyright anyway.
There’s quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem.
That’s a great point.
- Web 2.0 was way overhyped, but widely useful.
- Web 3.0 was way overhyped and really useful in some very niche applications.
- “Mobile first” was way overhyped, but basically correct (they typed into their phone, lol.)
- AI is way overhyped, and probably falls somewhere in between - not as complete of a waste of time as most of the blockchain crap, and nowhere near as practical as web 2.0 or mobile first.
Edit: (Sarcasm incoming:) But we can all agree with the tech bros, that I became obsolete during each of these transitions, because I didn’t drop everything else and focus on it completely to the exclusion of all else.
I guess my paycheck disagrees, but who are we going to trust - cold hard cash, or some con artist tech bro CEOs? Lol.
I actually think that AI might be closer to Web 2.0 than blockchain. Where I see it’s biggest potential though isn’t in the stuff most people do everyday, but in specialized applications. I see some of the uses in stuff like medical research and find the potential there to be wild. In alot of ways, it’s sort of a revolution in how we think about doing computing. We’re still really early on it, so its hard to know just where it takes us. Even on the more mundane stuff, it really does help programmers be alot more productive (though it’s hardly a replacement for talented programmers). Which is a huge for helping us build the next generation of tech.
There’s alot of stuff they say is obsolete but really isn’t. For example, in my day job, I’m an analog IC design engineer. The most advanced process I work on is sort of 90nm (but not really). The previous silicon process I worked on was basically a 0.5um process. Ask most people and that’s all stupidly obsolete - should have died out in the 90s or something. But I work on power products. Power is analog, not digital. We may have some digital stuff, to be sure, but what we fundamentally do is analog. And you can’t use 5nm processes to deal with “high” voltages - that’s all on “old”, “obsolete” silicon processes. Oh and you know what we power with all this? Among many other things, those fancy AI chips. So yeah, alot of these transitions do obsolete stuff, but there’s often still important niches in older technologies. I mean you still have people learning COBOL so they can program mainframes for banks.
I actually think that AI might be closer to Web 2.0 than blockchain.
I 100% agree. I use AI on purpose for things, once in awhile. I’ve never had a use for blockchain, only had it shoved at me.
I mean you still have people learning COBOL so they can program mainframes for banks.
Exactly. Ilike Cobol as an obvious point against both extremes of the AI argument.
“AI is going completely away…” - Sure. Right after Cobol and the Fax machine.
But also “AI has eliminated all need for X, Y and Z.” Sure. Right. And it also just got rid of Cobol and fax machines, right?
Things change surprisingly fast, at the same time as things change shockingly slowly.
What doesn’t go out of style is learning and expertise.
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