I think AI has mostly been about luring investors into pumping up share prices rather than offering something of genuine value to consumers.
Some people are gonna lose a lot of other people’s money over it.
Definitely. Many companies have implemented AI without thinking with 3 brain cells.
Great and useful implementation of AI exists, but it’s like 1/100 right now in products.
Yes, I’m getting some serious dot-com bubble vibes from the whole AI thing. But the dot-com boom produced Amazon, and every company is basically going all-in in the hope they are the new Amazon while in the end most will end up like pets.com but it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
“You might lose all your money, but that is a risk I’m willing to take”
- visionairy AI techbro talking to investors
Investors pump money in a bunch of companies so the chances of at least one of them making it big and paying them back for all the failed investments is almost guaranteed. That’s what taking risks is all about.
Sure, but it SEEMS, that some investors are relying on buzzword and hype, without research and ignoring the fundamentals of investing, i.e. besides the ever evolving claims of the CEO, is the company well managed? What is their cash flow and where is it going a year from now? Do the upper level managers have coke habits?
You’re right, but these fundamentals don’t really matter anymore, investors are buying hype and hoping to sell a bigger hype for more money later.
Seeing the whole thing as Knowingly Trading in Hype is actually a really good insight.
Certainly it neatly explains a lot.
Also called a Ponzi scheme, where every participant knows it’s a scam, but hopes to find some more fools before it crashes and leave with positive balance.
If the whole sector turns out to be garbage it won’t matter which particular set of companies within it you invest in; you will get burned if you cash out after everyone else.
OpenAI will fail. StabilityAI will fail. CivitAI will prevail, mark my words.
A lot of it is follow the leader type bullshit. For companies in areas where AI is actually beneficial they have already been implementing it for years, quietly because it isn’t something new or exceptional. It is just the tool you use for solving certain problems.
Investors going to bubble though.
I tried to find the advert but I see this on YouTube a lot - an Adobe AI ad which depicts, without shame, AI writing out a newsletter/promo for a business owner’s new product (cookies or ice cream or something), showing the owner putting no effort into their personal product and a customer happily consuming because they were attracted by the thoughtless promo.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
I’m not. My particular beef is with is with plastics and toxic materials and chemicals being ubiquitous in everything I buy. Systemic problem that I can do almost nothing about apart from make things myself out of raw materials.
As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic:
Slapping the words “artificial intelligence” onto your product makes you look like those shady used cars salesmen: in the best hypothesis it’s misleading, in the worst it’s actually true but poorly done.
LLMs: using statistics to generate reasonable-sounding wrong answers from bad data.
Often the answers are pretty good. But you never know if you got a good answer or a bad answer.
With proper framework, decent assertions are possible.
- It must cite the source and provide the quote, not just a summary.
- An adversarial review must be conducted
If that is done, the work on the human is very low.
That said, it’s STILL imperfect, but this is leagues better than one shot question and answer
Except LLMs don’t store sources.
They don’t even store sentences.
It’s all a stack of massive N-dimensional probability spaces roughly encoding the probabilities of certain tokens (which are mostly but not always words) appearing after groups of tokens in a certain order.
And all of that to just figure out “what’s the most likely next token”, an output which is then added to the input and fed into it again to get the next word and so on, producing sentences one word at a time.
Now, if you feed it as input a long, very precise sentence taken from a unique piece, maybe you’re luck and it will output the correct next word, but if you already have all that you don’t really need an LLM to give you the rest.
Maybe the “framework” you seek - which is quite akin to a indexer with a natural language interface - can be made with AI, but it’s not something you can do with LLMs because their structure is entirely unsuited for it.
The proper framework does, with data store, indexing and access functions.
The cutting edge work is absolutely using LLMs in post-rag pipelines.
Consumer grade chat interfaces def do not do this.
Edit if you worry about topics like context window, sentence splitting or source extraction, you aren’t using a best in class framework any more.
Sounds familiar. Citation please
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Market shows that investors are actively turned on by products that use AI
Market shows that the market buys into hype, not value.
Customers worry about what they can do with it, while investors and spectators and vendors worry about buzzwords. Customers determine demand.
Sadly what some of those customers want to do is to somehow improve their own business without thinking, and then they too care about buzzwords, that’s how the hype comes.
There are different types of people in the market. The informed ones hate AI, and the uninformed love it. The informed ones tend to be the cornerstones of businesses, and the uninformed ones tend to be in charge.
So we have… All this. All this nonsense. All because of stupid managers.
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It’s the new block chain or NFT hype, they think it’s magic.
No shit, because we all see that AI is just technospeak for “harvest all your info”.
Not to mention it’s usually dog shit out put
Yes the cost is sending all of your data to the harvest, but what price can you put on having a virtual dumbass that is frequently wrong?
+ a monthly service fee
for the price of a cup of coffee
More like “instead of making something that gets the job done, expect pur unfinished product to complain and not do whatever it’s supposed to”. Or just plain false advertising.
Either way, not a good look and I’m glad it’s not just us lemmings who care.
LLM based AI was a fun toy when it first broke. Everyone was curious and wanted to play with it, which made it seem super popular. Now that the novelty has worn off, most people are bored and unimpressed with it. The problem is that the tech bros invested so much money in it and they are unwilling to take the loss. They are trying to force it so that they can say they didn’t waste their money.
Honestly they’re still impressive and useful it’s just the hype train overload and trying to implement them in areas they either don’t fit or don’t work well enough yet.
Even in areas where they would fit it’s really annoying how some companies are trying to push it down our throats.
It’s always some obnoxious UI element, screaming at me their 3 example questions, and I always sigh and think, “I have to assume you can only answer these 3 particular questions, and why would I ask those questions, and when I ask UI questions I expect precise answers so would I want to use AI for that.”
I have no doubt that LLM’s have more uses than I can think of, but come on…
I’m happy for studies like this. People who are trying to smear their AI all over our faces need to calm, the f…k, down.
AI does a good job of generating character portraits for my TTRPG games. But, really, beyond that I haven’t found a good use for it.
…also TTRPH, TTRPI, TTRPJ, TTRPK, TTRPL, TTRPM, TTRPN, TTRPO, TTRPP, TTRPQ, TTRPR, TTRPS, TTRPT, TTRPU, TTRPV, TTRPW, TTRPX, TTRPY and TTRPZ games.
But beyond that, no good use, no siree.
PS: spoiler
that was WAY harder to type than I expected.
Many of us who are old enough saw it as an advanced version of ELIZA and used it with the same level of amusement until that amusement faded (pretty quick) because it got old.
If anything, they are less impressive because tricking people into thinking a computer is actually having a conversation with them has been around for a long time.
So you want to tell me they all spent billions and made huge data centres that suck more power than small country so we can all play with it, generate some cringy smut and then toss it away?
This is kinda insane if that’s how it will play out
Not the first time this has happened. Even recently. See NFTs. Venture capitalists hear “tech buzzword” and throw money at it because if they’re lucky, it’s the next Google. Or at least it gets an IPO and they can cash out.
Yeah but the scale is bigger and we could be doing something worthwhile with all these finite resources it makes me a bit dizzy
We could, but they don’t care about making the world a better place. They care about getting rich. And then if everything collapses, they can go to their private island or their doomsday vault or whatever and enjoy the apocalypse.
Are you like 80?
No, 47. Believe it or not, the first PCs came out when I was a young whippersnapper.
IBM 486 was my first PC as a kid. Throw in those floppys and game on DOS!
Mine was an Apple ][+.
(And yes, that’s how you write it properly. I’m a pedant.)
I would have it no other way. I am the same. 😂
I have 6.22 and Win3.11 running in a VM for fun.
Fuck yea man, Dr Sbaitso was the one for me. I loved that shit. It still fucks with people when I bust that out on Dosbox.
Doggdorzbaydzoh.
Oh OK cause the article you sent mentioned ELIZA being developed between 1964-67 so I had to ask.
They’ve overhyped the hell out of it and slapped those letters on everything including a lot of half baked ideas. Of course people are tired of it and beginning to associate ai with bad marketing.
This whole situation really does feel dotcommish. I suspect we will soon see an ai crash, then a decade or so later it will be ubiquitous but far less hyped.
Thing is, it already was ubiquitous before the AI “boom”. That’s why everything got an AI label added so quickly, because everything was already using machine learning! LLMs are new, but they’re just one form of AI and tbh they don’t do 90% of the stuff they’re marketed as and most things would be better off without them.
What did they even expect, calling something “AI” when it’s no more “AI” than a Perl script determining whether a picture contains more red color than green or vice versa.
Anything making some kind of determination via technical means, including MCs and control systems, has been called AI.
When people start using the abbreviation as if it were “the” AI, naturally first there’ll be a hype of clueless people, and then everybody will understand that this is no different from what was before. Just lots of data and computing power to make a show.
Gartner Hype Cycle is the new Moore’s Law.
For the love of god, defund MBAs.
Give them a box of crayons to eat so the adults can get some work done
Fallout was right.
Fallout was so on point, only a lot of distance and humour makes it not outright painful or scary knowing the damn nukes will be popping sooner or later one just doesn’t know if tomorrow or in 80 years. The question is not if but when
Take the hint, MBAs.
They don’t care. At the moment AI is cheap for them (because some other investor is paying for it). As long as they believe AI reduces their operating costs*, and as long as they’re convinced every other company will follow suit, it doesn’t matter if consumers like it less. Modern history is a long string of companies making things worse and selling them to us anyway because there’s no alternatives. Because every competitor is doing it, too, except the ones that are prohibitively expensive.
[*] Lol, it doesn’t do that either
Assuming MBAs can do math might be a mistake. I’ve worked on an MBA pet project that squandered millions in worker time and opportunity cost to save 30k mrc…
Eh, they understand “number go down”
and the smarter ones can even look at two or more separate numbers
I read this article that out of the 10 top Harvard MBA grads 8 of them had have gone to tank the company they were CEOs at. Or something ridiculous.
I can attest this is true for me. I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them. It gave me the feeling LG clothes washer division is full of shit.
Bought a SpeedQueen instead and been super happy with it. No AI bullshit anywhere in their product info.
Honestly, +1 for SpeedQueen. That’s the brand that every laundromat uses, because they’re basically the Crown Vic of washers; They’re uglier than sin, but they’ll run for literal decades with very little maintenance. They do exactly one thing, (clean your clothes), and they do that one thing very well. They’re the “somehow my grandma’s appliances still work 70 years later, while mine all break after three years" of washing machines.
SpeedQueen doesn’t have any of the modern bells or whistles… But that also means there’s nothing to break prematurely and turn the washer into the world’s largest paperweight. Samsung washers, for instance, have infamously shitty LCD panels, which are notorious for dying right after the warranty expires. And when it dies, the entire washer is dead until you replace basically the entire control interface. SpeedQueen doesn’t have this issue, because they don’t even have LCD panels; everything is just physical knobs and buttons. If something ever does break, it’s just a mechanical switch that you can swap out in 15 minutes with a YouTube tutorial.
FYI, all current Speed Queen models except the Classic Series dryer (DC5, not the washer) are electronically controlled. Even the ones with knobs. They are not mechanical and no longer use the oldschool sequencing drums.
The TR7/DR7 are at least still sold with a 7 year manufacturer’s warranty, though. This is specifically to assuage consumer fears about the electronic control panel.
Yes! A washer doesn’t need AI or wifi. It needs power, water, detergent and dirty laundry. Had a guest the other day pull out their phone and go Oh my dish washer is out of surfactant. Why the fuck do you need to know that, when you’re 20min away by car?
I will pay more if an appliance isn’t internet connected.
Speed Queen for the win. I recently replaced a couple of trusty machines that had finally given up after decades of abuse. Went for speed queen, no regrets.
Speed Queen is great stuff. It will last just about forever. When it does break it is built so it can be repaired.
I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them.
I might be thinking the same. But I actually purchased an LG washer a couple months ago and finally got around to finding and reading the manual, and realized that I should have been doing “AI wash” instead of the “normal wash” that I always did.
The manual says that this is what “AI wash” actually is for:
“This cycle automatically adjusts wash and rinse patterns based on load size”.
I literally uninstalled and disabled every AI process and app in that latest galaxy AI update, which was the whole update btw. my reasons are:
1- privacy and data sharing.
2- the battery, cpu, ram of AI bloatware running in the background 247.
3- it was chaging and doing things which I didn’t want especially in the galary photo albums and camera AI modes.
I was considering a new Samsung phone - is that baked into it? (Assuming you’re talking Samsung anyway, based on the galaxy name)
To give you a second opinion from the other guy, I’ve had quite a few Samsungs in a row at this point. From Galaxy S2 to S23Ultra skipping years between every purchase.
They are effectively the premium vendor of Android, at least for western audiences. The midrange has some good ones, but other companies do well there too. At the high end, Samsung might lose out a bit to google on images of people, but the phones Samsung sell are well built, have a long support life, have lots of features that usually end up being imported to AOSP and/or Google’s own version of Android. The last few generations are the Apple of Android. The AI features they’ve added can be run on device if you want, and idk what the other guy is talking about, but the AI features aren’t that obnoxiously pushed on my device, the S23 Ultra. I have some things on, most things off. Then again, I’ve used HTC for a few years and iPhone for two weeks, so except for helping my dad with his Pixel 6a while that device lasted, I’ve not really tried other brands. The added customization on Samsung is kind of a problem for me, because I don’t feel like changing brands after being able to customize so much out of the box.
And I’ve never had issues connecting to a simple Windows computer, given that the phone has always been able to use the normal Plug-and-play driver that is there already. If you have a macbook like I do, it’s a bit cringe, but that’s a macbook issue moreso.
Did it help with battery life? My S24U has not been getting the greatest battery life lately and I wonder if this is why.
I don’t know about the AI stuff specifically. Check your battery usage to see which process is doing that. but yes debloating in general makes your phone battery longer, and with the help of few more tricks also faster. There are thousands of no-root-required debloating tutorials online.
I mean, pretty obvious if they advertise the technology instead of the capabilities it could provide.
Still waiting for that first good use case for LLMs.
I’ve built a couple of useful products which leverage LLMs at one stage or another, but I don’t shout about it cos I don’t see LLMs as something particularly exciting or relevant to consumers, to me they’re just another tool in my toolbox which I consider the efficacy of when trying to solve a particular problem. I think they are a new tool which is genuinely valuable when dealing with natural language problems. For example in my most recent product, which includes the capability to automatically create karaoke music videos, the problem for a long time preventing me from bringing that product to market was transcription quality / ability to consistently get correct and complete lyrics for any song. Now, by using state of the art transcription (which returns 90% accurate results) plus using an open weight LLM with a fine tuned prompt to correct the mistakes in that transcription, I’ve finally been able to create a product which produces high quality results pretty consistently. Before LLMs that would’ve been much harder!
Writing bad code that will hold together long enough for you to make your next career hop.
I think the LLM could be decent at the task of being a fairly dumb personal assistant. An LLM interface to a robot that could go get the mail or get you a cup of coffee would be nice in an “unnecessary luxury” sort of way. Of course, that would eliminate the “unpaid intern to add experience to a resume” jobs. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad,l. I’m also not sure why anyone would want it, since unpaid interns are cheaper and probably more satisfying to abuse.
I can imagine an LLM being useful to simulate social interaction for people who would otherwise be completely alone. For example: elderly, childless people who have already had all their friends die or assholes that no human can stand being around.
Is that really an LLM? Cause using ML to be a part of future AGI is not new and actually was very promising and the cutting edge before chatGPT.
So like using ML for vision recognition to know a video of a dog contains a dog. Or just speech to text. I don’t think that’s what people mean these days when they say LLM. Those are more for storing data and giving you data in forms of accurate guesses when prompted.
ML has a huge future, regardless of LLMs.
Llm’s are ML…or did I miss something here?
Yes. But not all Machine Learning (ML) is LLM. Machine learning refer to the general uses of neural networks while Large Language Models (LLM) refer more to the ability for an application, or a bot, to understand natural language and deduct context from it, and act accordingly.
ML in general as a much more usages than only power LLM.
Just look at AlphaProof. Lol we’re all about to be outclassed. I’m sure everyone will still derrid the bots. They could be actual ASI and especially here in the US we’d say “I don’t see any intelligence.” I wish or society and all of us at individualsc would reflect on our limitations and tiny tiny insignificance on the grand scale. Our egos may kill us.
P.S… I give us a 10% to make it to 2100 in any numbers or quality of life we’d consider remotely acceptable today. Pretty grim, but I think that’s the weight of the challenges we’re facing. Without AI I’d probably just say it was fucking hopeless. Because we’ve had all the time we needed and all the tech we needed and hardly ever fix anything. Always running a day late and a dollar short. This species has dreams to big for our collective britches. It’s always been a foolish endeavor and full of suffering and horrors. We’re here though so I hope we at least give it a good go. Would be super lame to go out in a putter and take must lifev on earth with us.
So now the question is if we can use all these access models to actually do something about our problems. Even LLMs seem quite good at pointing out how we are really bad at using the tools we already have and know exactly how to use because we’re always too busy arguing while the ship sinks!
COVID tried and a lot of people paid the price for being low information and not so bright. Sadly plenty of people who did the right things still got fucked by stupidity of others!
I feel like everyone who isn’t really heavily interacting or developing don’t realize how much better they are than human assistants. Shit, for one it doesn’t cost me $20 an hour and have to take a shit or get sick, or talk back and not do its fucking job. I do fucking think we need to say a lot of shit though so we’ll know it ain’t an LLM, because I don’t know of an LLM that I can make output like this. I just wish most people were a little less stuck in their western oppulance. Would really help us no get blindsided.
I actually think the idea of interpreting intent and connecting to actual actions is where this whole LLM thing will turn a small corner, at least. Apple has something like the right idea: “What was the restaurant Paul recommended last week?” “Make an album of all the photos I shot in Belize.” Etc.
But 98% of GenAI hype is bullahit so far.
How would it do that? Would LLMs not just take input as voice or text and then guess an output as text?
Wouldn’t the text output that is suppose to be commands for action, need to be correct and not a guess?
It’s the whole guessing part that makes LLMs not useful, so imo they should only be used to improve stuff we already need to guess.
One of the ways to mitigate the core issue of an LLM, which is confabulation/inaccuracy, is to have a layer of either confirmation or simply forgiveness intrinsic to the task. Use the favor test. If you asked a friend to do you a favor and perform these actions, they’d give you results that you can either/both look over yourself to confirm they’re correct enough, or you’re willing to simply live with minor errors. If that works for you, go for it. But if you’re doing something that absolutely 100% must be correct, you are entirely dependent on independently reviewing the results.
But one thing Apple is doing is training LLMs with action semantics, so you don’t have to think of its output as strictly textual. When you’re dealing with computers, the term “language” is much looser than you or I tend to understand it. You can have a “grammar” that is inclusive of the entirety of the English language but also includes commands and parameters, for example. So it will kinda speak English, but augmented with the ability to access data and perform actions within iOS as well.
Wrote my last application with chat gpt. Changed small stuff and got the job
Please write a full page cover letter that no human will read.
Mostly true before, now 99.99%. The charades are so silly because obviously as a worker all I care about is how much I get paid. That’s it.
All the company organization will care about. Is that work gets done to their standards or above and at the absolute lowest price possible.
So my interests are diametrically opposed to their interests because my interest is to work as little as possible for as much money as possible. Their goal is to get as much work out of me as possible for as little money as possible. We could just be honest about it and stop the stupid games. I don’t give a shit about my employer anymore than they give a shit about me. If I care about the work that just means I’m that much more pissed they’re relying on my good will towards people who use their products and or services.
That’s because businesses are using AI to weed out resumes.
Basically you beat the system by using the system. That’s my plan too next time I look for work.
LLM have greatly increased my coding speed: instead of writing everything myself I let AI write it and then only have to fix all the bugs
I’m glad. Depends on the dev. I love writing code but debugging is annoying so I would prefer to take longer writing if it means less bugs.
Please note I’m also pro code generators (like emmet).
I’ve learned to hate companies that replaced their support staff with AI. I don’t mind if it supplements easy stuff, that should take like 15 seconds, but when I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to the one lone bastard stuck running the support desk on their own, I start to wonder why I give them any money at all.
I love it when I have to trick those stupid ai chatbots to let me talk to a human customer service rep
“AI” is certainly a turn-off for me, I would ask a salesman “do you have one that doesn’t have that?” and I will now enumerate why:
-
LLMs are wrongness machines. They do have an almost miraculous ability to string words together to form coherent sentences but when they have no basis at all in truth it’s nothing but an extremely elaborate and expensive party trick. I don’t want actual services like web searches replaced with elaborate party tricks.
-
In a lot of cases it’s being used as a buzzword to mean basically anything computer controlled or networked. Last time I looked up they were using the word “smart” to mean that. A clothes dryer that can sense the humidity of the exhaust air to know when the clothes are dry isn’t any more “AI” than my 90’s microwave that can sense the puff of steam from a bag of popcorn. This is the kind of outright dishonest marketing I’d like to see fail so spectacularly that people in the advertising business go missing over it.
-
I already avoided “smart” appliances and will avoid “AI” appliances for the same reasons: The “smart” functionality doesn’t actually run locally, it has to connect to a server out on the internet to work, which means that while that server is still up and offering support to my device, I have a hole in my firewall. And then they’ll stop support ten minutes after the warranty expires and the device will no longer work. For many of these devices there’s no reason the “smart” functionality couldn’t run locally on some embedded ARM chip or talk to some application running on a PC that I own inside my firewall, other than “then we don’t get your data.”
-
AI is apparently consuming more electricity than air conditioning. In fact, I’m not convinced that power consumption isn’t the selling point they’re pushing at board meetings. “It’ll keep our friends in the pollution industry in business.”
Can you help me with problems this complex? Idk maybe we could use it to help make things better. Just most people prompt like things I can’t say because they aren’t nice. Oh by the way. Can you do it right now for $0 please? Thanks!
Edit. Also need it done now. If you’re reading this you were too slow.
Your response doesn’t apply to ANY of his 4 points…
And might be subject to 1. LLMS are wrongness machines.
Yeah, lmfao. I like the tech and all but ignoring criticism and jumping straight to gatekeeping is just soooo bad. Those people are one of the reasons why people dislike ai.
-
<greentext>
Be me
Early adopter of LLMs ever since a random tryout of Replika blew my mind and I set out to figure what the hell was generating its responses
Learn to fine-tune GPT-2 models and have a blast running 30+ subreddit parody bots on r/SubSimGPT2Interactive, including some that generate weird surreal imagery from post titles using VQGAN+CLIP
Have nagging concerns about the industry that produced these toys, start following Timnit Gebru
Begin to sense that something is going wrong when DALLE-2 comes out, clearly targeted at eliminating creative jobs in the bland corporate illustration market. Later, become more disturbed by Stable Diffusion making this, and many much worse things, possible, at massive scale
Try to do something about it by developing one of the first “AI Art” detection tools, intended for use by moderators of subreddits where such content is unwelcome. Get all of my accounts banned from Reddit immediately thereafter
Am dismayed by the viral release of ChatGPT, essentially the same thing as DALLE-2 but text
Grudgingly attempt to see what the fuss is about and install Github Copilot in VSCode. Waste hours of my time debugging code suggestions that turn out to be wrong in subtle, hard-to-spot ways. Switch to using Bing Copilot for “how-to” questions because at least it cites sources and lets me click through to the StackExchange post where the human provided the explanation I need. Admit the thing can be moderately useful and not just a fun dadaist shitposting machine. Have major FOMO about never capitalizing on my early adopter status in any money-making way
Get pissed off by Microsoft’s plans to shove Copilot into every nook and cranny of Windows and Office; casually turn on the Opympics and get bombarded by ads for Gemini and whatever the fuck it is Meta is selling
Start looking for an alternative to Edge despite it being the best-performing web browser by many metrics, as well as despite my history with “AI” and OK-ish experience with Copilot. Horrified to find that Mozilla and Brave are doing the exact same thing
Install Vivaldi, then realize that the Internet it provides access to is dead and enshittified anyway
Daydream about never touching a computer again despite my livelihood depending on it
</greentext>
I like the article I read were ww2 german soldiers were being generated by AI as asians, black woman, etc. Glad it doesn’t take context into consideration. lol
