this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Built on unearned hype.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 month ago (9 children)

I really don't understand the hype about AI in it's current state.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It's not for you. Its for corporations who want to fire half their staff and replace them with an algorithm. That's why it has such a high valuation.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Those corporations are about to find out the fun way that these algorithms, in their current and near-future states, cannot replace human beings.

Well, except for maybe lazy copywriters who pump out pointless listicles and executives who do - whatever it is they do - but any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You’re assuming that they care about running a viable service or product.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

The hope is that their customers care. Or their customer’s customers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (6 children)
  • Computers might be good at numbers and typesetting, but we'll always need human secretaries and phone operators to keep things running.
  • They might be able to beat a novice, but no computer will ever beat a human grandmaster at chess.
  • Okay, then they can't beat humans at Go or poker.
  • Any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools. ← you are here
  • AI-run corporations will never be able to outcompete ones with ones with human boards and CEOs.
  • An AI scriptwriter could never win an Oscar.
  • I'm voting for the human candidate for president, I don't think the AI one is up to the task.
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Good one. Did you use an LLM to generate it?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (15 children)

"When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages."

Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I’m voting for the human candidate for president, I don’t think the AI one is up to the task.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos_bot

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

You forgot maintenance and security. They need constant surveillance and maintenance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

The future portion of this list reads like something produced from ChatGPT.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would argue that there’s neither understanding nor creativity happening. It’s guessing, aping, remixing, which is impressive enough.

It’s a machine that knows everything, but understands nothing.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

They could fire 3 layers of management without spending a dime while increasing productivity.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

An AI chatbot for a cloud service I use helped me find the right documentation for setting up SSO. It's not all bad. But the way it's pushed is bad.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It’s all leading to one final product: VR sex robots

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Like your optimism, but unlikely

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Honestly, I can say I don't really get it either. I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.

I feel like the last few months have been an inflection point, at least for me. Qwen 2.5, and the new Command-R, really make a 24GB GPU feel "dumb, but smart," useful enough so I pretty much always keep Qwen 32B loaded on the desktop for its sheer utility.

It's still in the realm of enthusiast hardware (aka a used 3090), but hopefully that's about to be shaken up with bitnet and some stuff from AMD/Intel.

Altman is literally a vampire though, and thankfully I think he's going to burn OpenAI to the ground.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Are you trying to solve science with it or something? You are supposed to turn carefully worded sentences into funny pictures and show people.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Maybe that explains it. Because I am blind, pictures mean very little to me. I think image memes were one of the most abhorrent things to ever exist. Because I miss out on so much because of that.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's not related to the technology, is the venture industry trying tp figure out the next unicorn, which they have been trying to find for the last ten years.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Cloud? Neva heard of it! AI is where the money is at now.

Buzzwords, that's all they are.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Server farms are the real money maker. Doesn't matter the fad, they'll need processing power from somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

As always when someone looks for gold, sell them the shovel.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I wouldn't say "the cloud" is exactly in the same realm. It's broad and definitely had its heyday being thrown around in marketing, but it's a very real facet in modern software. More specialized and actually useful AI will probably end up in a similar place eventually.

I think I'm talking myself out of my original point though lol. Kind of conflated LLMs and AI at first. I just wish LLMs weren't the only things with money behind them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

MBA degrees are way to easy to obtain. And the federal government bailing things out for a few decades has taught the market that they can take huge risks without much direct risk.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

It’s just the new grift. There’s probably some value in there somewhere, some elements of it that will evolve into useful tools that get used a lot and presumably make a bunch of money for someone but yeah. Grifters gonna grift.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's because we're using it wrong. It's not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it's mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it's wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it's great

For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you're looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains

Those are some projects I've used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I'm looking to build a new one

I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like "build a class to represent this db object". I don't trust it to do anything that's not straightforward - I don't trust myself to do anything tedious

The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it's flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible

As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let's you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer

That's my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo "rampancy", a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job

This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn't have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don't know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

You're doing it wrong, you're only allowed to hate AI and if you don't you're a crypto shill or something idk

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

You must not be feeling the AGI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I like it. I use it every day. Much faster and better than sifting through garbage websites to find answers.