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Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

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Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#101

Post by trashtester »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #25
kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke?

[flagged]

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#102

Post by trashtester »

bombolo wrote: post #51
borissk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually compared to the economies of past societies, the modern economy in the West is amazing. If you work hard, have a little bit above the average intelligence and potentially a bit of luck you can make a lot of money. If not I guess you can make excuses. The simplest way to organize a group of people, animals, organisms is to make one of them leader and have the rest follow him. This is the way our ancestors beh…

I'm sure you're completely unaware of the fact that your world view comes from protestant religion, which equates richness with god's favour, thus ending up considering poor people as worse sinners who don't deserve a better life due to their moral failings. People of other religions and cultures don't necessarily share your same faith (I realise you think you're being completely rational, but to an external observer…

I'm an atheist, but this is what I learned in school (by Protestant Christian Socialist teachers):

  Matthew 19:23-26 American Standard Version (ASV)
  And Jesus said unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, It is hard 
  for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say 
  unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than 
  for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#103

Post by drawfloat »

Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Being able to take a cab in a single tiny part of the world remains firmly in “sort of works” camp.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#104

Post by intended »

Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Self-driving is never going to happen, and its also sitting in some sort of informational blind spot for the people working on it - I have no idea why.

There is no such thing as "driving" there is no physical force, or particle. There is no force preventing you from driving in the opposite direction of traffic, or through glass panes.

"Driving" is entirely a social phenomnon, the confluence of societal self impositions and engineering.

If you have a car on fire in front of you, you will need to reverse in the wrong direction of traffic.

In many countries - you have to regularly deal with drivers going full tilt, on the wrong side of the road.

Or You have to deal with theft, and people trying to rob you at every red light.

Im underscoring that this is a social issue. You would need to create models for each country and region, to truly improve self driving.

Self driving assumes a far narrower problem space than reality gives a fig for.

Self driving theory currently works in the same way any theory that assumes spherical cows works.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#105

Post by rvz »

satvikpendem wrote: post #5

AI investment is actually down recently, looks like the hype is wearing off since most of the companies funded were just wrapping OpenAI APIs. I will copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue. https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512 Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m --- 6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed reviv…

> Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising.

There are going to be much more losers than winners than people realize in this AI race to zero.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#106

Post by qsort »

Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Does Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 stop working in the presence of traffic cones?

More seriously, the distance between "sort of works" and "works" might not be infinite, but it most likely involves fundamentally unpredictable future developments of the current technology. There is no straight line of incremental improvements that gets us there.

It's fairly straightforward to imagine that if you have a 4.77mhz CPU and 64kb of RAM you will soon have a 3ghz CPU and 64gb RAM.

Bigger number going brrr is no guarantee of anything, here, so much so that models using a fraction of GPT4's resources are somewhat competitive.

By all means continue developing the technology, but claims that we are within arms' reach of X for disparate values of X are not exactly supported by anything.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#107

Post by throwawaymaths »

Almondsetat wrote: post #53
WaxProlix wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this written by GPT? It feels very Trained On Hacker News.

Yes, this was in fact generated by a GPT model I specifically tuned for HN and that I managed to run inside my brain with minimal latency and power requirements. [EDIT] In conclusion

You should have added an "in conclusion,". Your meatGPT model needs more training.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#108

Post by veltas »

qsort wrote: post #106
Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Does Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 stop working in the presence of traffic cones? More seriously, the distance between "sort of works" and "works" might not be infinite, but it most likely involves fundamentally unpredictable future developments of the current technology. There is no straight line of incremental improvements that gets us there. It's fairly straightforward to imagine that if you have a 4.77mhz CPU and…

> Does Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 stop working in the presence of traffic cones?

Yes, but it integrates well into Outlook.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#109

Post by emptyfile »

intended wrote: post #104
Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Self-driving is never going to happen, and its also sitting in some sort of informational blind spot for the people working on it - I have no idea why. There is no such thing as "driving" there is no physical force, or particle. There is no force preventing you from driving in the opposite direction of traffic, or through glass panes. "Driving" is entirely a social phenomnon, the confluence of societal self impositio…

[dead]

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#110

Post by trashtester »

ak_111 wrote: post #100
JimDabell wrote: post #21

Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trend…

I think you are being harsh on the critics. A technology can have tremendous value while still attracting grifters and being an early investors' graveyard. Best example is the dot com bubble in 1996 - 2001, the web had truly world-changing potential, but grifting was rife and practically all early investors lost their money unless you were one of the lucky ones who invested in amazon, yahoo, google or ebay out of the…

Most companies failed, not necessarily most investors.

If you'd put your money into a Nasdaq based index fund in 1998 (that reinvested all dividends), you would have a pretty good return up to today.

Most good investors either spread out like that, or are very good at reasearching what companies have real promise and what do not.

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