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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

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Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#131

Post by Cthulhu_ »

sixtyj wrote: post #125
Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Easy entry not equals getting rich.

In fact one could argue it makes it harder; if the barrier to entry for making video games is lowered, more people will do it, and there's more competiton.

But in the case of video games there's been similar things already happening; tooling, accessible and free game engines, online tutorials, ready-made assets etc have lowered the barrier to building games, and the internet, Steam, itch.io, etcetera have lowered the barrier to publishing them.

Compare that to when Doom was made (as an example because it's a good source), Carmack had to learn 3d rendering and making it run fast from the scientific text books, they needed a publisher to invest in them so they could actually start working on it fulltime, and they needed to have diskettes with the game or its shareware version manufactured and distributed. And that was when part was already going through BBS.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#133

Post by th0ma5 »

dash2 wrote: post #89
th0ma5 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is different though, the containers were able to be made by others and offered dependable success, and anything downstream of model creators is at the whim of the model creator... And so far it seems not much that one model can do that another can't, so this all doesn't bode well for a reliable footing to determine what value, if at all, can be added by anyone for very long.

So if models, like containers, are able to be made by others (because they can all do the same thing), then they'll be commoditized and as the article suggests you should look for industries to which AI is a complement.

It sucks, while individual anecdotes of success are often unfalsifiable, measurements are also proving misleading, and I don't know an industry that generally benefits from unpredictable material.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#134

Post by namdnay »

zwnow wrote: post #126
hyperbovine wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not clear that being able to sample from a distribution == stealing.

I dont care how you phrase it. Its no secret that art was stolen from artists. Image generation is thievery.

Is it the same if it’s a human doing the learning? If I spend my youth looking at art, I’d any work I then do “theft”?

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#135

Post by rwyinuse »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #127
rwyinuse wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. For me knowing that any form of entertainment has been generated by AI is a massive turn-off. In particular, I could never imagine paying for AI-generated music or TV-shows.

Do you value self expression? I literally mean creating music for MYSELF. I don't really care if anyone else "values" it. I like to listen to it and I enjoy spending an evening(or maybe 10 minutes if it is just a silly idea) to create a song. But this means my incentive to "buy" music is greatly decreased. This is the trend I think we'll see increasing in the near future. Examples: https://suno.com/s/0gnj4aGD4jgVcpqs…

I guess I just don't feel like it's really my self-expression, if I just told a generative AI model to create it. I do sometimes create AI art, but I rarely feel like it's worth keeping, since I didn't really put any effort into creating it. There's no emotional connection to the output. In fact I have a wall display which shows a changing painting generated by stable diffusion, but the fun in that is mainly the novelty, not knowing what will be there next time.

Still, I do think you're probably right. Most new music one hears in the radio isn't that great. If you can just create fresh songs of your own liking for every day, then that could be a real threat to that kind of music. But I highly doubt people will stop listening to the great hits of Queen, Bob Marley etc because you can generate similar music with AI.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#136

Post by graycat »

Apparently a lot of money is flowing into AI.

Looking around, can find curious things current AI can't do but likely can find important things it can do. Uh, there's "a lot of money", can't be sure AI won't make big progress, and even on a national scale no one wants to fall behind. Looking around, it's scary about the growth -- Page and Brin in a garage, Bezos in a garage, Zuckerberg in school and "Hot or Not", Huang and graphics cards, .... One or two guys, ... and in a few years change the world and $trillions in company value??? Smoking funny stuff?

Yes, AI can be better than a library card catalog subject index and/or a dictionary/encyclopedia. But a step or two forward and, remembering 100s of soldiers going "over the top" in WWI, asking why some AI robots won't be able to do the same?

Within 10 years, what work can we be sure AI won't be able to do?

So people will keep trying with ASML, TSMC, AMD, Intel, etc. -- for a yacht bigger than the one Bezos got or for national security, etc.

While waiting for AI to do everything, starting now it can do SOME things and is improving.

Hmm, a SciFi movie about Junior fooling around with electronics in the basement, first doing his little sister Mary's 4th grade homework, then in the 10th grade a published Web site book on the rise and fall of the Eastern Empire, Valedictorian, new frontiers in mRNA vaccines, ...?

And what do people want? How 'bout food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, accomplishment, belonging, security, love, home, family? So, with a capable robot (funded by a16z?), it builds two more like itself, each of those ..., and presto-bingo everyone gets what they want?

"Robby, does P = NP?"

"Is Schrödinger's equation correct?"

"How and when can we travel faster than the speed of light?"

"Where is everybody?"

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#137

Post by lemonberry »

I can see AI helping some businesses do really well. I can also see it becoming akin to mass manufacturing. Take furniture for example, there's a lot of mass produced furniture of varying quality. But there are still people out there making furniture by hand. A lot of the hand built furniture is commanding higher prices due to the time and skill required. And people buy it!

I think we'll see a ton of games produced by AI or aided heavily by AI but there will still be people "hand crafting" games: the story, the graphics, etc. A subset of these games will have mass appeal and do well. Others will have smaller groups of fans.

It's been some time since I've read it, but these conversation remind me of Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#138

Post by guy_5676 »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #115
jcelerier wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this but I see ai generated ads, graphics, etc. daily nowadays and it doesn't seem like it affects at all people going or not going to buy what these people are proposing.

Case in point.. I listen to my own AI generated music now like 90% of the time.

No idea why this is downvoted, making AI music customized to your exact situation/preferences is very addictive. I have my own playlist I listen to pretty frequently

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#139

Post by Den_VR »

iamacyborg wrote: post #129
Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

> It reminds me of what GarageBand or iMovie and YouTube and such did for making music and videos so accessible to people who didn’t go to school for any of that, let alone owned complex equipment or expensive licenses to Adobe Thisandthat. It’s worth reading William Deresiewicz‘ The Death of the Artist. I’m not entirely convinced that marketing that everyone can create art/games/whatever is actually a net positive r…

This reminds me of my preferred analogy: are digital artists real artists if they can’t mix pigment and skillfully apply them to canvas?

Not sure why digital artists get mad when I ask. They’re no Michelangelo.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#140

Post by okamiueru »

visarga wrote: post #111

AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better. But I think the…

I think that AI is a benefit for about 1% of what people think it is good for.

The remaining 99% had become a significant challenge to the greatest human achievement in distribution of knowledge.

If people used LLMs, knowing that all output is statistical garbage made to seem plausible (i.e. "hallusinations"), and that it just sometimes overlaps with reality, it would be a lot less dangerous.

There is not a single case of using LLMs that has lead to a news story, that isn't handily explained by conflating a BS-generator with Fact-machine.

Does this sound like I'm saying LLMs are bad? Well, in every single case where you need factual information, it's not only bad, it's dangerous and likely irresponsible.

But there are a lot of great uses when you don't need facts, or by simply knowing it isn't producing facts, makes it useful. In most of these cases, you know the facts yourself, and the LLM is making the draft, the mundane statistically inferable glue/structure. So, what are these cases?

- Directing attention in chaos: Suggest where focus needs attention from a human expert. (useful in a lot of areas, medicine, software development). - Media content: music, audio (fx, speech), 3d/2d art and assets and operations. - Text processing: drafting, contextual transformation, etc

Don't trust AI if the mushroom you picked is safe to eat. But use its 100% confident sounding answer for which mushroom it is, as a starting point to look up the information. Just make sure that the book about mushrooms was written before LLMs took off....

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