Sounds like the internet in the 90s.
It also reminds me of crypto. Lots of people made money from it, but the reason why the technology persists has more to do with the perceived potential of it rather than its actual usefulness today.
There are a lot of challenges with AI (or, more accurately, LLMs) that may or may not be inherent to the technology. And if issues cannot be solved, we may end up with a flawed technology that, we are told, is just about to finally mature enough for mainstream use. Just like crypto.
To be fair, though, AI already has some very clear use cases, while crypto is still mostly looking for a problem to fix.
No, this isn’t crypto. Crypto and NFTs were trying to solve for problems that already had solutions with worse solutions, and hidden in the messaging was that rich people wanted to get poor people to freely gamble away their money in an unregulated market.
AI has real, tangible benefits that are already being realized by people who aren’t part of the emotion-driven ragebait engine. Stock images are going to become extinct in several years. People can make at least a baseline image of what they want, no matter the artistic ability. Musicians are starting to use AI tools. ChatGPT makes it easy to generate low-effort, high-time-consuming letters and responses like item descriptions, or HR responses, or other common draft responses. Code AI engines allow programmers to present reviewable solutions in real-time, or at least something to generate and tweak. None of this is perfect, but it’s good enough for 80% of the work that can be modified after the initial pass.
Things like chess AI has existed for decades, and LLMs are just extensions of the existing generative AI technology. I dare you to tell Chess.com that “AI is a money pit that isn’t paying off”, because they would laugh their fucking asses off, as they are actively pouring even more money and resources into Torch.
The author here is a fucking idiot. And he didn’t even bother to change the HTML title (“Microsoft’s Github Copilot is Losing Huge Amounts of Money”) from its original focus of just Github Copilot. Clickbait bullshit.
I totally agree. However, I do feel like the market around AI is inflated like NFTs and Crypto. AI isn’t a bust, there will be steady progress at universities, research labs, and companies. There is too much hype right now, slapping AI on random products and over promising the current state of technology.
slapping [Technology X] on random products and over promising the current state of technology
A tale as old as time…
Still waiting on those “self-driving” cars.
Self driving will be available next year.*
*since 2014
Let’s combine AI and crypto, and migrate it to the cloud. Imagine the PowerPoints middle managers will make about that!
I’m still trying to transfer $100 from Kazakhstan to me here. By far the lowest fee option is actually crypto since the biggest difference is the currency conversion. If you have to convert anyway, might as well only pay 0.30% on both ends
if A.I. dies out because capitalism I will wheeze
The current breed of generative “AI” won’t ‘die out’. It’s here to stay. We are just in the early Wild-West days of it, where everyone’s rushing to grab a piece of the pie, but the shine is starting to wear off and the hype is juuuuust past its peak.
What you’ll see soon is the “enshittification” of services like ChatGPT as the financial reckoning comes, startup variants shut down by the truckload, and the big names put more and more features behind paywalls. We’ve gone past the “just make it work” phase, now we are moving into the “just make it sustainable/profitable” phase.
In a few generations of chips, the silicon will have made progress in catching up with the compute workload, and cost per task will drop. That’s the innovation to watch out for now, who will de-throne Nvidia and its H100?
GPT already got way shittier from the version we all saw when it first came out to the heavily curated, walled garden version now in use
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Flash games did not die out because people stopped playing them. The smart phone was created and this changed the entire landscape of small game development.
Steve Jobs killed Flash. It was premeditated.
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It doesn’t even existing in the medical field, stop lying
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devices marketed in the United States
Not a list of devices in use
None of this image reading tech you refer to exists in actual hospitals yet
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Oh surprise surprise, looks like generative AI isn’t going to fulfill Silicon Valley and Hollywood studios’ dream of replacing artist, writers, and programmers with computer to maximize value for the poor, poor shareholders. Oh no!
As I said here before, generative AIs are not universal solution to everything that has ever existed like they are hyped up to be, but neither are they useless. At the end of the day, they are ultimately tools. Complex, powerful, useful tools, but tools nonetheless. A good artist can create better work faster with the help of a diffusion model, the same way LLM code generation can help a good programmer finish their project faster and better. (I think). All of these AI models are trained on data from data from everyone on Internet, which is why I think its reasonable that everyone should have access to these generative AI models for the benefit of humanity and not profit, and not just those who took other people’s work for free to trained the models. In other words, these generative AI models should belong to everyone.
And here lies my distaste for Sam Altman: OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit for the benefit of humanity, but at the first chance of money he immediately started venture capitalisting and put anything from GPT-2 onwards under locks and keys for money, and now it looks like that they are being crushed under the weight of their own operating costs while groups like Facebook and Stability catches up with actual open models, I will not be sad if "Open"AI fails.
(For as much crap as I give Zuck for the other awful things they do, I do admire their commitment to open source.)
I have to admit, playing with these generative models is pretty fun.
Hm. I think you should zoom out a bit and try to recognize that AI isn’t stagnant.
Voice recognition and translation programs to years before they were appropriate for real-world applications. AI is also going to require years before it’s ready. But that time is coming. We haven’t reached a ‘ceiling’ for AI’s capabilities.
Breakthrough technological development usually can be described as a sigmoid function (s-shaped curve), while there is an exponential progress in the beginning, it usually hit a climax then slow down and plateau until the next breakthrough.
There are certain problem that are not possible to resolve with the current level of technology for which development progress has slowed to a crawl, such as level 5 autonomous driving (by the way, better public transport is a way less complex solution.), and I think we are hitting the limit of what far transformer based generative AI can do since training has become more and more expensive for smaller and smaller gains, whereas hallucination seems to be an inherent problem that is ultimately unfixable with the current level of technology.
There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.
But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.
In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.
AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It’s not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.
I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn’t overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.
Generative AI can make each individual artist/writer/programmer much more efficient at their job, but the shareholders and executives get their way and only big companies have access to this technologu, this increased productivity will instead be used reduce headcount and make the remaining people do more work on a tighter deadline, instead of helping everyone work less, do better work, and be happier.
This is the reason I think democratizing generative AI via local models is important, because as your example shows, it levels the playing field between small and big players, and helps people work less while making more cool stuff.
A big problem in Aus is the industry culture. They don’t care about using technology to improve results. They only care about cutting costs, even if the final product doesn’t meet the previous standard.
And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically. Because studios play silly buggers to weasel out of paying VFX companies what they are due.
From what I hear, even DNEG is in trouble, and were even before the strike.
It’s a race to the bottom it seems.
My honest hope for the film industry is likely the same as yours. That we have smaller productions with access to better post due to improvements in AI-driven compositing software and so on.
But it’s likely that a role that was earning $$$ before is devalued significantly. And while I’m an unabashed anti-capitalist, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what this sudden downward pressure on income can do. Cost of living increasing while wages shrink is an awful combination
I’m 35, left a six figure job, folding my company and starting an electrician’s apprenticeship. To give you an idea around what my views about AI are. And of course this is as an Australian. We have a garbage white collar work culture anyway.
I think there will be a net improvement. But I worry that others will fail to adapt quickly. Too many are writing off AI as this thing that already came and went, but the tools have just landed, and we don’t yet have workflows that correctly implement and leverage these yet.
It’s crazy that with current economic systems, tools that make people work more efficiently have such a negative impact on society.
A powerful tool maybe, but useless
If your drill needs a nuclear plant and monthly subcription to drill a hole, it’s a shitty tool
Going to have to disagree with you there. I’ve gotten plenty of use out of chat GPT in multiple scenarios. I find it difficult to imagine what exactly you think is useless about it because it seems so indispensable to me at this point.
Indispensable, nothing less. lmao
Have fun when they decide to multiply the price x10 and you are too dependant to have an alternative, or when it becomes stupid or malevolent 👍
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand how that makes it useless. I get the feeling that you just want to feel smug, so if it makes you feel better go ahead, I guess.
Because it’s too fragile and not ready to be use at scale without causing massive damage
Not useless for now (even if i’d like to know more about the domains where it’s really “indispensable”), but as useless as a drill with a dead battery the day they decide to cut it.
I don’t find it future-proof, as impressive as some results are
Nowdays LLM can be ran on consumer hardware, so the “dead battery” analogy fall short here too.
With the same efficiency ? I’m interested in an example
Why everyone using these crappy SaaS then ?
You sound like the people who thought credit cards would never replace cash.
And you sound like the people who thought cryptos would replace credit cards ;)
Silicon like usual thinking these things are as big as the invention as the internet, and trying to get their money in there the first place. AI was and still is a massive game changer, but nothing can live up to the hype of which they throw a stupid amount of money at these things. They didn’t learn their lesson after crypto or the “metaverse” either lol. I see AI being a tool, an incredibly useful one. That also means it has a lot of jobs it simply can’t do. It can’t replace artists, but artists can use it as a tool to help them work off of things.
So far I’ve only seen AI being used to fire employees that a company totally absolutely still needs but just doesn’t want to pay wages to. Companies are dumb as fuck, that’s my conclusion, but what else can you expect by organizations run by ladder-climbing CEO figures?
There’s utility in keeping workers desperate, it depresses wages.
Think about the coordinated tech layoffs that happened and now the tech industry has a labor surplus.
Saves them money.
The company that laid me off is paying me 4 months of wages without any work, this is the severance package I get in exchange for them not being forced to try to find me another suitable position in the company or “prove” that there no tasks at the company that I could do with my existing skill set (that’s how the law works where I live).
Was it really worth it?
My point was it’s not dumb, it’s malicious and self serving.
It’s not worth it.
Are you in the states? I’m surprised you have those protections.
No, Sweden
What I’m curious is what’s going to happen to all these companies that went all-in on building data centers when they weren’t doing it previously. Places like Meta and Amazon are huge enough that it’s always been a sound investment but with this hype there are other companies trying to set up server farms with no real prize in sight.
I mean A100s don’t exactly break that quickly and they’re specialised enough hardware so that they will continue to be able to rent them out. They’re also overpriced AF though which might cut into the bottom line but they’re probably not going to end up with a giant loss, I don’t really doubt they will break even. Opportunity costs are stellar, but OTOH there’s so much billionaire capital floating around screaming for opportunities to park itself in that macro-economically it’s negligible. Also I’m not exactly in the habit of crying about billionaires having a low ROI.
Ever since the Internet Bubble crashed around 2000 that the business community in the Valley has been repeatedly trying to pump up a new bubble, starting with what they called Web 2.0 which started being hyped maybe even before the dust settled on tha crash after the first Tech bubble.
And if you think about it, it makes sense: the biggest fortunes ever made in Tech are still from companies which had their initial growth back then, such as Google, Amazon and even Paypal (Microsoft and Apple being maybe the most notable exceptions, both predating it).
AI is a tool to assist creators, not a full on replacement. Won’t be long until they start shoving ads into Bard and ChatGPT.
AI is a tool to
assistplagiarize the work of creatorsFixed it
LOL OK it’s a super-powerful technology that will one day generate tons of labor very quickly, but none of that changes that in order to train it to be able to do that, you have to feed it the work of actual creators- and for any of that to be cost-feasible, the creators can’t be paid for their inputs.
The whole thing is predicated on unpaid labor, stolen property.
At what line does it become stolen property? There are plenty of tools which artists use today that use AI. Those AI tools they are using are more than likely trained on some creation without payment. It seems the data it’s using isn’t deemed important enough for that to be an issue. Google has likely scraped billions of images from the Internet for training on Google Lens and there was not as much of an uproar.
Honestly, I’m just curious if there is an ethical line and where people think it should be.
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So much fucking this.
Every cash grab right now around AI is just a frontend for a chatGPT API. And every investor who throws money at them is the mark. And now they’re crying a river.
people are doing
No they ain’t doing shit, they just prompt
IRL, people are doing some amazing things with generative AI, esp in 2D graphic art.
Woah, shiny bland images that are a regurgitation of stolen artwork!!!
You’d think at this point that investors would wait for a thing to fill out the question mark second step in their business plan before investing in it, but you’d be way, way wrong.
Every new tech company comes to the investor panel with:
-
build expressive to run new tool and give it away to end users for free
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???
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profit!
And somehow they keep falling for it.
Because people assume all these investors know what they are doing. They don’t. Now, some investors are good, but they usually don’t go for shit like this. At lot of investors are VCs, rich upper class twits, who can afford to lose money. Pure and simple. It’s like a bunch of lotto winners telling people they know how to pick numbers, betting outside bets once in a while, get lucky, and have selective bias.
Plus, they have enough money to hedge their bets. For example, say you invest $1mil in companies A, B, C, D, E, and F. All lose everything except A and B, which earn you $3mil each. You put in $6mil, got back $6mil. You broke even, tell people you knew what you were doing because you picked A and B, and conveniently never mention the rest. Then rich twits people invest in what YOU invest in. So you invest in H, others invest in H because you did, drives up the value. Now magnify this by a lot of investors, hundreds of letters, and it’s all like some weird game of luck and timing.
But a snapshot in time leads to your 2) ??? Point. Many know this is a confidence game, based on luck, charm, and timing. Some just stumble through it, and others are fleeced, but who cares? Daddy’s got money.
Money works different for rich people. It’s truly puzzling.
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Have they not tried simply asking the AI how to make it profitable?
Thats how this works. Blow though VC money to try and “strike gold” fail. Change model to become profitable." Move to the next scam.
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So far what I’ve seen from AI is that it lies and lies and lies. It lies about history. It lies about science. It lies about politics. It lies about case law. It lies about programming libraries. Maybe this will all be fixed some day, or maybe it will just get worse. Until then the only thing I would trust it is about something in which their is no wrong answer.
I never ask it things I don’t know. I don’t think that’s really what’s it’s useful for. It’s really good at combining words though. So it can write a better sentence than I could. Better in a sense that it’s easier for others to understand what my thoughts are if I feed them in as input. Since they were my thoughts originally I can spot the bullshit pretty fast.
These are the same kind of people who go, “We spent money on Timmy’s clothes for over two years and it’s not paying off.”
Bro, AI is an investment.
AI isn’t paying off if you’re too dumb to figure out how to use the many amazing tools that have come about.
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Do people really not understand that we are in the early stages of ai development?
Yes. Top post in this thread is someone cheering that AI won’t replace people in hollywood.
Just give it time. Remember how poor voice recognition and translation software was at first?
Top post in this thread is someone cheering that AI won’t replace people in hollywood.
I really like how I’m just “someone” here now.
To be fair, who pays attention to user names?
I do. 🥺
Goood. Gooooooooooood.
Great, now factor in the cost of data collection if not subsidizing usage that you are effectively getting free RLHF from…
The one thing that’s been pretty much a guarantee over the last 6 months is that if there’s a mainstream article with ‘AI’ in the title, there’s going to be idiocy abound in the text of it.
