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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#751

Post by fsndz »

techdmn wrote: post #547
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host. Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. PR and ad cul…

Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing…

"Doing work" vs. "performing work": the epitome of this is consulting. Companies pay huge sums of money to consultants that often spend most of their time "performing work", doing beautiful slides even if the content and reasoning is superficial or even dubious, creating reports that are just marketing bullshit, framing the current mission in a way that makes it possible to capture additional projects and bill the client even more. Almost everything is bullshit.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#752

Post by nasaeclipse »

At some point, I wonder if we will go more analog again. How do we know if a book was written by a human? Simple, he used a typewriter or wrote it by hand!

Photos? Real film.

Video.... real film again lol.

I think that may actually happen at some point.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#753

Post by yoyohello13 »

lurking_swe wrote: post #734
DanHulton wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner. You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about…

nothing prevents you from asking an LLM to explain a snippet of code. And then ask it to explain deeper. And then finally doing some quick googling to validate the answers seem correct. Blindly accepting code used to happen all the time, people copy pasted from stack overflow.

Yes, but copy/paste from stack overflow was a meme that was discouraged. Now we've got people proudly proclaiming they haven't written a line of code in months because AI does everything for them.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#754

Post by fsndz »

rjbwork wrote: post #572
techdmn wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing…

Yeah. It's like our entire society has been turned into a Goodhart's Law based simulacrum of a productive society. I mean, here it's late morning and I'm commenting on hacker news. And getting paid for it.

crazy that this is true and GDP just keeps increasing anyway

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#755

Post by bunderbunder »

bloppe wrote: post #713
amelius wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were plateauing it would mean OpenAI would have lost its headstart wrt the competition, which is not the case I believe.

OpenAI has the biggest appetite for large models. GPT-4 is generally a bit better than Gemini, for example, but that's not because Google can't compete with it. Gemini is orders of magnitude smaller than GPT-4 because if Google were to run a GPT-4-sized model every time somebody searches on Google, they would literally cease to be a profitable company. That's how expensive inference on these ultra-large models is. Op…

This, I think, is the crux of it. OpenAI is burning money at a furious rate. Perhaps this is due to a classic tech industry hypergrowth strategy, but the challenge with hypergrowth strategies is that they tend to involve skipping over the step where you figure out if the market will tolerate pricing your product appropriately instead of selling it at a loss.

At least for the use cases I've been directly exposed to, I don't think that is the case. They need to keep being priced about where they are right now. It wouldn't take very much of a rate hike for their end users to largely decide that not using the product makes more financial sense.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#756

Post by [deleted] »

canxerian wrote: post #749

I'm a software dev and I'm tired of LLMs being crowbar'd in to every single product I build and use, to the point where they are unanimously and unequivocally used over better, cheaper and simpler solutions. I'm also tired of people who claim to be excited by AI. They are the dullest of them all.

[deleted]

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#757

Post by sangnoir »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #478
Roark66 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die Do you think AI has changed that in any way? I remember the sea of excrement overtaking genuine human written content on the Internet around mid 2010s. It is around that time when Google stopped pretending they are a search company and focused on their pr…

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host. Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. PR and ad cul…

> Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done.

And what did that get us? Radium poisoning and microplastics in every organ of virtually all animals living within thousands of miles of humans. Our reach has always exceeded our grasp.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#758

Post by sedatk »

WillyWonkaJr wrote: post #729
sedatk wrote: post #722

I remember being awestruck at the first avocado chair images DALL-E generated. So many possibilities ahead. But, we ended up with all oversaturated, color-soup, greasy, smooth pictures everywhere because as it turns out, beauty is in the eye of the prompter.

I asked ChatGPT once if its generated images were filtered to reduce the realism and it said that it did. Maybe we don't like the safety filter they are applying to all images.

The thing is we have no way to know if ChatGPT is telling the truth.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#759

Post by [deleted] »

khafra wrote: post #339
neta1337 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But superhuman AI seems now only few years away Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.

> If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right - Arthur C. Clarke Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want? *Corrected by kranner

[deleted]

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#760

Post by slyall »

akudha wrote: post #419
gizmo wrote: post #33

AI writing is pretty bad, AI code is pretty bad, AI art is pretty bad. We all know this. But it's easy to forget how many new opportunities open up when something becomes 100x or 10000x cheaper. Things that are 10x worse but 100x cheaper are still extremely valuable. It's the relentless drive to making things cheaper, even at the expense of quality, that has made our high quality of life possible. You can make houses…

The bigger problem is that we as a species get used to subpar things quickly. My dad's bicycle some 35 years ago was built like a tank. That thing never broke down and took enormous amounts of abuse and still kept going and going. Same with most stuff my family owned, when I was a kid. Today, nearly anything I buy breaks in a year or two, is of poor quality and depressing to use. This is by design, of course. Just as…

One think to check about higher quality stuff in the past is how much it cost vs the average wage.

You might be comparing a $100 bike from Walmart with something that cost the equivalent of $600

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