131–136 of 136 posts
To those who are drinking deep of the AI kool-aid, know this: this is not remotely sustainable. Anyone who is thinking AI will replace writers and artists and voice-overs and who knows who else ... it's going to cost more money than you think, and it's all getting added to the considerable bill we're running up that will end up costing us everything .
Allow me to introduce you to Moore’s law…
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That’s a charitable description of the states that voted against and an uncharitable description of the ones that voted for. A less loaded description would just observe that the opposed countries were the ones where the indigenous peoples would have the greatest claims and the governments would have the greatest resources to claim.
Saying no does require honesty though. Signing a treaty, and then ignoring it, is always an option.
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I think a lot of people drastically underestimate how much the LLMs mislead the user with plausible-sounding answers. I would say that whatever % of queries you found them not to give you correct answers, the actual percentage is materially higher. In my work niche, which at least 10,000 other software engineers do each day, ChatGPT 4 and 4o almost never give correct answers. Usually, they are misleading. I do find m…
It feels like you mostly view generative AI as a system that produces finished products, which you don’t like. And for some reason that is how they are marketed, but it’s a terrible use for them. To me the point of generative AI is as a tool for an expert user to use en route to achieving some larger goal. I can personally attest that it works really well for me in this regard, as can many others. I think if I tried…
I work in an industry adjacent to generative AI, so my views are very specific, and kind of beside the point. But I think the broader public does think what you describe. Much (and probably most) of AI-generated content that ends up on the internet is very barely changed by a human.
I am not saying gen AI is not useful, but that it's not efficient in the process of making high quality content. It's simply not steerable enough in practice. In creative industries, people are going pretty wild about how much work AI can replace, but all I've seen is mediocrity and failure when it is involved. Or frustration, as you say, that what it outputs is very difficult to turn into a high-quality product.
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Why not? What stops training AI's during sunlight hours only and hibernating as power decreases?
Huge waste of CapEx for those expensive training GPUs if you can only use them 8 hours a day (same goes for all other data center hardware). Nevermind data availability and other hard problems if your DCs don't run 24/7.
I assume that most cloud venders are over-provisioning because their margins are so good that they'd rather overspend on inventory than miss out on revenue most of the time.
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It feels like you mostly view generative AI as a system that produces finished products, which you don’t like. And for some reason that is how they are marketed, but it’s a terrible use for them. To me the point of generative AI is as a tool for an expert user to use en route to achieving some larger goal. I can personally attest that it works really well for me in this regard, as can many others. I think if I tried…
This conversation has drifted slightly off-topic. It was originally about the efficiency of producing good quality outputs akin to products or services with generative AI. I work in an industry adjacent to generative AI, so my views are very specific, and kind of beside the point. But I think the broader public does think what you describe. Much (and probably most) of AI-generated content that ends up on the internet…
The interesting use case which has emerged is that there are a lot of times where it would be really helpful to me to have a short conversation with an expert on a topic adjacent to my own expertise. And it turns out that for those conversations, talking to ChatGPT is much better than talking to no one; it can help me with the kind of things someone would learn in the first few months on the job in that area, things a little too hard to google but where a human expert is not readily available.
I think this is the best, maybe the only, professional use case for GenAI right now -- advice and limited assistance in areas just outside your area of expertise, such that you don't need to depend directly on its output and can easily check/integrate the work.