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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this? We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-e…

"Other countries" means China here, I think. China got a little on board with the global capitalism (and lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty along the way, if we're looking for the point), but never really embraced Liberalism and so ideally isn't the one aligning superintelligence. It would be lousy if Russia or North Korea or Somalia was in that position and it would be fine if the UK or Denmark or Braz…

And it's a pretty big game

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#272
post #119
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's technically ambiguous, most native speakers would immediately understand that Steve was not the person cheering. Firstly, Steve cheering makes no sense. Secondly, it's a very common construction for newspaper/article headlines. For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..." Okay, in…

While it's technically ambiguous Is it? To read it as intended, shouldn't it be "Wozniak is cheered"?

I mean technically in the sense that you -can- interpret it two different ways, even if most people wouldn't.

The 'is' is not required because it's using newspaper headline grammar.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#273
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* * *

I agree Woz is a sweet lie how everyone is unique and a snowflake. But regarding "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", I think the problem is the work hard part. Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or…

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#274
post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

Yes! We need them to have hope, but hopefully there can be substance behind it, otherwise it's like when the Hitler Youth got those badges before Hitler killed himself. In the sense that we are awarding people medals when their future is bleak

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#275
post #81
post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

Blame Dario, guy has been building something great, while selling snake oil. Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.

Something changed with Dario a year or so ago. I think he started out with good intentions, although really hard to tell. Maybe it was really all about power and control for him from day one. Certainly now he's a different person - appears totally corrupted by money and power.

Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has done nothing to bring about the positive part and is now just accelerating the harmful part as fast as he can. Google is an AI company, bringing us things like AlphaFold, and Anthropic (also OpenAI) are just LLM companies.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#276

The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after t…

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy looked really good before the dotcom crash too. The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions. Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I do…

> The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions. The crash did not make the internet go away. I don't foresee a world where we will go back to the pre-AI times either. In the same way that post dotcom crash, you would be a fool to not have your business online, I think we will find similar things to be the case…

The irony of the dotcom crash is that a lot of 'dark fiber' service started rolling out decades later. Fiber that was laid during the dotcom era.

There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And famously, the economy never changes course. Something, something, stocks always go up.

Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back? Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead? Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete. The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy. I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going oversea…

> Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?

Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.

>The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.

It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.

> Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?

In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#279
post #34

Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hard…

This too shall pass. Among my software engineering friend group bubble: Every single individual (~12 of us) are actively and seriously tokenmaxing. We have middle-managers who have been given an AI mandate, upper-managers saying "uhh...maybe that brush stroke was too broad" when they look at the bill every month, and zero people in that chain have the authority or even ability to roll it back. This week one of my friends cobbled together an agent that runs in an infinite loop, grabs whatever song they're actively listening to on Spotify, writes it in a file, then instructs the agent to emit tokens for 2-3 minutes on what that song and previous songs that day might mean for that person's mental state, like a little music-based diary. Repeat, run all day, 24/7. Kinda cool. But its just a way to use tokens, because the first thing all these AI labs built was a good coding model, and the second thing they built was a dashboard for admins to track how much their users are using the good coding model.

A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#280
post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.

My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.

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