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My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

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Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#191

Post by colinsane »

jrockway wrote: post #25

Relatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days. I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ai…

> I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect.

i can't not read this as "you didn't complain when we did the first bad thing, so you're wrong to complain when we do the next bad thing". that's an argument i hear presented way too often today, and it's just so dishonest.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#192

Post by ilikemonies »

> I returned to the field because I want to figure out how to use AI in ways that protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving

Bullsh*t. You wanted money. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame you. But let’s not pretend you give two sh*ts about any of that.

More AI slop garbage.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#193

Post by jrockway »

palmotea wrote: post #107
jrockway wrote: post #25

Relatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days. I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ai…

> But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions.... > I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer…

I don't think AI is driving up food and housing and fuel prices. I really don't think AI is a chair-kicker yet. To me, the biggest threat to jobs that AI offers is in the field of software engineering, and yet, it's not the software engineers that are really feeling the pain right now.

Wars in Iran, tariffs, Medicaid cuts, SNAP benefit cuts, rising insurance costs, etc. are what are causing average folks pain, and that is completely unrelated to AI.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#194

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

japhyr wrote: post #2

Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…

You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education.

We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.

We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer important; some people may still study, but it'll be a hobby, and the people who participate in the intelligence revolution (rather than being crushed by it) will no longer need to think.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#195

Post by jrockway »

rf15 wrote: post #114
palmotea wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions.... > I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer…

> Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale. But that's the core problem of AI fanatics, isn't it. They cannot comprehend how people who saw and used the same thing they did, and came away with "this smells like fancy autocomplete" instead of "this is genuine intelligence!"

But nobody who uses Fable and Sol all day is saying that it's fancy autocomplete. Also, nobody is saying it's genuine intelligence.

As always, the Internet fails to find the middle ground. Frontier models are really useful software engineering tools, not AGI, and not tab completion. To me it feels a lot like using a new programming language, like going from assembly to a Lisp machine or something like that.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#196

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

dlubarov wrote: post #62
mintplant wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner cried the other day because her long-planned PC upgrade is now an order of magnitude more expensive than she budgeted for pre-AI-boom.

I don't love this either, but at least it's a short-term economic quirk. At some point fabs will figure out what the long-term demand looks like and scale up production accordingly.

Fabs take multiple years to spin up, so expect it to last probably 3 to 5 years.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#197

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

nylonstrung wrote: post #160
swatcoder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, AI lowers the quality and increases the quantity of the media we experience. Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse. The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous,…

I do think this is true but I think it also reflects negatively on the general populace that this new technology is evaluated in terms of the negative effects on their consumption pattens Transformer models solved the Protein Folding problem in totality but they are categorically "bad" because more of the videos in my feed are low-quality or the advertisement for a cheeseburger looks fake It's predictable but I do th…

Did they? From what I heard, transformer models gave scientists better starting points for computational methods, but we're still far from solving the protein folding problem.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#198

Post by ryandrake »

crote wrote: post #111
jltsiren wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something around the corner threatening to make the future worse. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's climate change, maybe immigration, or terrorism, or war, or whatever.

Don't forget the completely unaccountable megacorps who are increasingly invading our day-to-day lives, and the politicians whose main priority seems to be competing for their bribes. The depressing part isn't that we are facing hard challenges and declining as a society. The depressing part is that it is a deliberate action .

Yes, we should not forget this. The West is not worried about some vague inanimate "something" around the corner threatening to make things worse. We are worried about people deliberately doing this.

AI slop, omnipresent ads, job loss, fake reviews, income inequality, climate collapse, these are not natural phenomenon or amorphous "things" lurking in the shadows. They are deliberately being imposed on us by actual people that you could point to if you could get close enough to them.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#199

Post by dogleash »

briandw wrote: post #102
nomel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a short-term economic quirk Not with the memory cartel that exists right now. They're more than happy to keep things exactly as they are, with lawsuits flying [1]. [1] https://www.rainintelligence.com/blog/dram-price-fixing-laws...

Fabs take a long time to build. The price will come down once the new fabs come on line. It’s expensive because there isn’t enough of it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s supply and demand. We’ve see this boom and bust cycle again and again.

> It’s not a conspiracy

Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.

> To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

We are not the courts. The most reasonable and truth based position is operating with a fuzzy impression that most businesses are substantially more dodgy than their carefully manufactured PR releases are meant to portray themselves as.

And in this case, that includes acknowledging that a literal criminal conspiracy in well within the realm of possibility.

Re: My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

#200

Post by ryandrake »

GPerson wrote: post #35
kadushka wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know loves AI. It is actively making their lives better. All kinds of people, all kind of ages - universally love it and use it every day for all kind of stuff (shopping, health, learning, home improvement, etc, etc).

The people I know who like it the most are at least aware of a lot of the problems with it. I’m surprised everyone in your friend group is uncritically enamored by it.

Same with Social Media. Once people are educated about the harm it does, their view has a chance to change.
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