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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’

#121

Post by kubb »

robertlagrant wrote: post #41
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…

This isn't exactly untrue, although the numbers are off, I think, but no one seems to invented a better alternative. If you have money because you stole it from your citizens, or because you sent your serfs to die in a war, that's infinitely worse than because you did something someone else thought was valuable and they paid you for it.

Sure, if this is the best possible of all worlds then we should be happy, but is it really? Seems defeatist to think so. Are there economies which function in a healthier way than this? Do you remember the early days of computing, before the big money got tipped off?

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

#122

Post by esperent »

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…

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

I don't agree with most of your comment but this point is worth examining. I think it's not an argument against self driving for a few reasons:

1. There's lots of places in the world where people driving on the wrong side of the road is uncommon. We can start with self driving there. You can apply this to many other situations as well - AI can't handle ice yet? Well, let's start with non-icy roads. Even when you apply all the stipulations like these that you need, you'll still be left with a large enough percentage of the world to make self driving useful. Especially since a lot of the places that are suitable will be rich cities in developed countries.

2. Driving habits change. Thailand is a good example of this, it's a country in transition from the "developing country driving style" to the "developed country driving style", for want of better terms. Driving there 15 years ago was an extremely different, far noiser, far more dangerous experience than driving there now. It's still got a long way to go, of course.

3. If self driving becomes the norm, well then, problem solved. We don't even have to get to FSD. Partial but always on assisted driving that nags you whenever you drive on the wrong side of the road or go over the speed limit would probably be enough to cause a shift if most people have it.

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

#123

Post by jstx1 »

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…

I don't understand the leap from "it's difficult and there are many special circumstances" to "it's never going to happen". I don't get why you think that any of these problems are unsolvable given enough time.

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

#124

Post by kubb »

Tenoke wrote: post #65
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…

You need to be really blinded by cynism to not see how much better modern life is for average people or how many people benefit from advancements and scale which wouldn't be possible without billions of dollars worth of investments.

Is it OK to be content with how much better things are now than before we had modern dentistry and combustion engines, without questioning how entire macroeconomic phenomena contribute to our modern wellbeing? We improved, can we improve further?

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

#125

Post by kubb »

kortilla wrote: post #17
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…

> What could be better? Reality. Most of tech is not funded by existing billionaires.

So let's say you want to start a company that makes some stupid AI cookbook and you want money to payroll people. How do you do that without investor cash?

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

#126

Post by Almondsetat »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #107
Almondsetat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, I fixed the model

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

#127

Post by drawkbox »

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?

That could be a benefit. Imagine being able to go dev shields up with just cones around your desk.

When it is time to innovate, surround yourself with cones.

"You haven't checked on your 'resources' in an hour, how is resource #4233 (Johnson) doing on that new feature?" -- funding borg consultcult front man

"I don't know, his cone shields are up, we can't get our needed hourly metrics" -- Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0

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

#128

Post by zirgs »

fxtentacle wrote: post #87
ben_w wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? > The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. It's also available at zero cost, thanks to the ecosystem around Stable Diffusion. You probably know the meme that gets parroted randomly about OpenAI needing a moat; well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists?

Adobe's moat is that GIMP still cannot properly edit 4-channel CMYK images. And none of the competitors can print with ICC profile correction. I kid you not, there is no way around Adobe for any kind of serious image editing. Adobe's second moat is PDF. And it builds upon their imaging moat because companies want their product boxes to be sharp and with accurate colors, so there is an entire industry built around PDF…

CYMK and ICC profiles are irrelevant in gamedev and vfx industries though.

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

#129

Post by TMWNN »

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…

>It may take a while to get from GPT-3 to Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0. But the path is clear now.

I was intrigued by the announced Business Chat feature for Microsoft Teams https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11swyeu/introd...>, but learned that it is just summaries of conversations. That's not quite what I'd imagined, which is something like this:

----

A: ... and that is why I think we should go with option 1.

B: No, the points you mentioned support my case for option 2.

C: Nothing you guys have said changes my mind about option 3 being best.

D: Business Chat, what do you think?

BC: Based on this discussion, and my research, option 1 seems more realistic but option 2 would be more profitable if possible. My reasons are ...

C: Business Chat and you guys all don't understand point N, which is the main reason why option 3 is best.

B: Higher profit is exactly why I think option 2 is the way to go.

A: No, our rival is going to hit the market next month. We need to get something out there ASAP. Option 1 can do this.

D: You've all given me things to think about. Thank you for coming. Business Chat, email me a summary of the meeting, and set up a followup meeting for Tuesday 3pm.

----

That is, AI used as a colleague/assistant, not necessarily subordinate but not seen as omniscient, either; another viewpoint to consider. Like you said, Middle Manager 2.0. When do you think the above will be feasible? This year? Five years?

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

#130

Post by zirgs »

trashtester wrote: post #112
stale2002 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists? Although this is debatable, lets accept it for the sake of argument that adobe has no moat. If this is the case, this may be bad for adobe, but it is amazing for the design world. Producing more art for cheaper is real value. And we may not know who specifically will capture that value, but it is undeniably value none the less that will go somewhere . That still bene…

> Producing more art for cheaper is real value. Except that if art production becomes too easy, the prices go down, and the only party benefiting is the consumer/customer.

As if that's a bad thing.
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