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Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

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Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#31

Post by jgalt212 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #21
jgord wrote: post #18

Has a competent economist modeled the circularity of these deals ? [ numerically or analytically ] It seems a healthy economy has a lot of wide circularity .. money circulating is a good thing, a result of a functioning market, tracking the flow of real goods / services. But large corps circulating paper 'self-deals' or debt-swaps seems like a bad thing - a creative accounting practice designed to pump up their stock…

you'd need to look at prior work associated with the Dot com boom and Enron. Economists rarely look into today's actual activity because America makes it nigh impossible to actually understand who owns what around the fringes; contracts arn't required to be publically disclosed and a bunch of other dark interests make it impossible to really know. MLMs exist in the same murky waters and tread the same ephermal econom…

> prior work associated with the Dot com boom and Enron

The Enron deals weren't circular. Fastow signed both sides of the contracts. The deals were straight up fraud.

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#32

Post by [deleted] »

Diogenesian wrote: post #22
wnmurphy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence doesn't require sentience. Think of it like this: if you can offload a task to an AI model that requires reasoning or representing a nonlinear system, you are offloading intelligence.

The problem is that this doesn't distinguish LLMs from other forms of software! The whole point of computers is to offload tasks requiring reasoning, and they've always helped us understand complex nonlinear systems is that computers work through the hideous details. More significantly: many major advances in scientific or mathematical programming were heralded as a thinking computer! 50's numerical scientific progra…

[deleted]

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#33

Post by cyanydeez »

jgalt212 wrote: post #31
cyanydeez wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd need to look at prior work associated with the Dot com boom and Enron. Economists rarely look into today's actual activity because America makes it nigh impossible to actually understand who owns what around the fringes; contracts arn't required to be publically disclosed and a bunch of other dark interests make it impossible to really know. MLMs exist in the same murky waters and tread the same ephermal econom…

> prior work associated with the Dot com boom and Enron The Enron deals weren't circular. Fastow signed both sides of the contracts. The deals were straight up fraud.

many of the Nvidia deals involve equity in the company instead of cash for the gpu orders.

thats basically one step removed from signing the deal themselves.

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#34

Post by infecto »

jgord wrote: post #28
torginus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also these deals are not circular - NVIDIA has to pay a lot of money for chips and foundry capacity just as an example, so money leaves the circle and participants have to raise capital to replace it, which means if this were just a financialy trick, it would be very expensive to maintain.

Many people are calling them circular, eg bloomberg, BIS : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwcM0By4aJQ https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bursting-ai-bubble-collaps... diagram : https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/AI%20ecosys... My point is, Id like to know how circular or not they are - clearly a lot of money is actually being spent on GPUs/datacenter build/electricity, Id like to know what fraction that…

It’s a catchy headline but I also am not convinced they ultimately are. Certainly some of risky bets in the lot but most of what has been reported on is deals with ultimately cash. Compared to say the dot com bubble where lots of financing was happening.

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#35

Post by autoexec »

root_axis wrote: post #12
rambambram wrote: post #11

> commodification of intelligence Is HN really this fast!? Everybody already skipped the hard questions whether LLMs are intelligent? 'It' can already be commodified? So how much time and effort it took from these companies? A couple of years and millions spent on PR? And LLMs are "intelligent" all of a sudden, is what everybody says nowadays? Especially applicable for programmers: naming things is not only hard, it'…

I'm pretty skeptical of the LLM hype, but I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

> I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

All of the intelligence in their "verbal intelligence" comes from the humans who wrote the text they were trained on. Anyone can sound like they understand something if they regurgitate the words of knowledgeable others.

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#36

Post by Forgeties79 »

zormino wrote: post #19
root_axis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty skeptical of the LLM hype, but I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

Exactly this. LLMs are already some form of useful, and have some kind/level of intelligence. We don't need to get to AGI before AI has uses. It isn't a step function and it isn't all or nothing. Even if LLMs get no better than they are today, we will still have valid practical applications that use them.

> We don't need to get to AGI before AI has uses.

Has anyone said otherwise?

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#38

Post by root_axis »

autoexec wrote: post #35
root_axis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty skeptical of the LLM hype, but I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

> I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence. All of the intelligence in their "verbal intelligence" comes from the humans who wrote the text they were trained on. Anyone can sound like they understand something if they regurgitate the words of knowledgeable others.

I agree, but I'd say there's obviously some verbal intelligence involved in regurgitating arbitrary knowledge on demand in a semi-convincing way. It's absolutely a stochastic parrot, but parrots have some intelligence.

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#39

Post by AlexCoventry »

jgord wrote: post #18

Has a competent economist modeled the circularity of these deals ? [ numerically or analytically ] It seems a healthy economy has a lot of wide circularity .. money circulating is a good thing, a result of a functioning market, tracking the flow of real goods / services. But large corps circulating paper 'self-deals' or debt-swaps seems like a bad thing - a creative accounting practice designed to pump up their stock…

I think there's not much to model. Either AI actually becomes a hot commodity, or the people invested in these deals are going to take a bath.

Re: Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

#40

Post by monk_grilla »

Diogenesian wrote: post #22
wnmurphy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence doesn't require sentience. Think of it like this: if you can offload a task to an AI model that requires reasoning or representing a nonlinear system, you are offloading intelligence.

The problem is that this doesn't distinguish LLMs from other forms of software! The whole point of computers is to offload tasks requiring reasoning, and they've always helped us understand complex nonlinear systems is that computers work through the hideous details. More significantly: many major advances in scientific or mathematical programming were heralded as a thinking computer! 50's numerical scientific progra…

There is no reason to distinguish LLMs from other forms of software, though.

If calling them intelligent makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you can concede that they can solve problems which previous machines relied on external intelligence for? I think this is irrefutably true, and is the practical question that matters.

> None of the progress in LLMs or ANNs gets us any closer to making a robot as smart as a cockroach.

Can you explain this a bit more? As far as I can see, the only barrier to making an artificial cockroach of superior intelligence even at the current state of LLM technology is a mechatronics and miniaturisation problem. I think you would be hard pressed to design a problem that a cockroach can solve but Claude cannot.

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