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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#141

Post by famouswaffles »

danaris wrote: post #119
mrob wrote: post #25

>Everybody wanted the Internet. I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.

I've seen this bad take over and over again in the last few years, as a response to the public reaction to cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now generative AI. It's bullshit. I mean, sure: there were people who hated the Internet. There still are! They were very clearly a minority, and almost exclusively older people who didn't like change. Most of them were also unhappy about personal computers in general. But the Internet…

>But the Internet caught on very fast, and was very, very popular. It was completely obvious how positive it was,

>By contrast, generative AI, while it has a contingent of supporters that range from reasonable to rabid, is broadly disliked by the public.

It is absolutely wild how people can just ignore something staring right at them, plain as day.

ChatGPT.com is the 5 most visited site on the planet and growing. It's the fastest growing software product ever, with over 500M Weekly active users and over a billion messages per day. Just ChatGPT. This is not information that requires corporate espionage. The barest minimum effort would have shown you how blatantly false you are.

What exactly is the difference between this and a LLM hallucination ?

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#142

Post by kgeist »

pu_pe wrote: post #101
kgeist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run our own LLM server at the office for a month now, as an experiment (for privacy/infosec reasons), and a single RTX 5090 is enough to serve 50 people for occasional use. We run Qwen3 32b which in some benchmarks is equivalent to GPT 4.1-mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash. The GPU allows 2 concurrent requests at the same time with 32k context each and 60 tok/s. At first I was skeptical a single GPU would be enough, but it…

That's really great performance! Could you share more details about the implementation (ie which quantized version of the model, how much RAM, etc.)?

Model: Qwen3 32b

GPU: RTX 5090 (no rops missing), 32 GB VRAM

Quants: Unsloth Dynamic 2.0, it's 4-6 bits depending on the layer.

RAM is 96 GB: more RAM makes a difference even if the model fits entirely in the GPU: filesystem pages containing the model on disk are cached entirely in RAM so when you switch models (we use other models as well) the overhead of unloading/loading is 3-5 seconds.

The Key Value Cache is also quantized to 8 bit (less degrades quality considerably).

This gives you 1 generation with 64k context, or 2 concurrent generations with 32k each. Everything takes 30 GB VRAM, which also leaves some space for a Whisper speech-to-text model (turbo & quantized) running in parallel as well.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#143

Post by dataflow »

jen729w wrote: post #99
sagacity wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People didn't even want mobile phones. In The Netherlands, there's a famous video of an interviewer asking people on the street ca. 1997 whether they would want a mobile phone. So not even a smartphone, just a mobile phone. The answer was overwhelmingly negative.

I’m at the point where a significant part of me wishes they hadn’t been invented. We sat yesterday and watched a table of 4 lads drinking beer each just watch their phones. At the slightest gap in conversation, out they came. They’re ruining human interaction. (The phone, not the beer-drinking lad.)

Is the problem really the phone, or everything but the actual phoning capability? Mobile phones were a thing twenty years ago and I didn't recall them being pulled out at the slightest gap in the conversation. I feel like the notifications and internet access caused the change, not the phone (or SMS for that matter).

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#144

Post by Drakim »

einrealist wrote: post #89
Gigachad wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you don’t have to train from scratch. You can just distil a new model off an existing one by just buying api credits to copy the model.

Your "API credits" don't buy the model. You just buy some resource to use the model that is running somewhere else.

You don't understand what Gigachad is talking about. You can buy API credits to gain access to a model in the cloud, and then use that to train your own local model though a process called distilling.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#145

Post by babymetal »

brookst wrote: post #102
cs702 wrote: post #95

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue.

Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation.

This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#146

Post by hodgesrm »

jen729w wrote: post #99
sagacity wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People didn't even want mobile phones. In The Netherlands, there's a famous video of an interviewer asking people on the street ca. 1997 whether they would want a mobile phone. So not even a smartphone, just a mobile phone. The answer was overwhelmingly negative.

I’m at the point where a significant part of me wishes they hadn’t been invented. We sat yesterday and watched a table of 4 lads drinking beer each just watch their phones. At the slightest gap in conversation, out they came. They’re ruining human interaction. (The phone, not the beer-drinking lad.)

Think like an engineer to solve the problem. You could start by adjusting the beer-to-lad ratio and see where that gets you.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#147

Post by xdennis »

brookst wrote: post #102
cs702 wrote: post #95

Your may agree or disagree with the OP, but this passage is spot-on: "I don’t want AI customer service—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI responses to my Google searches—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI integrated into my software—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI sending me emails—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI music on Spotify—but I don’t get a choice. I don’t want AI books on Ama…

It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice. The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want? The whole thing is just so damn entitled . If…

> I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores

It's ridiculous to compare bad human books with bad AI books because there many human books which are life-changing, but there isn't a single AI book which isn't trash.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#148

Post by CuriouslyC »

dang wrote: post #115

I also find these features annoying and useless and wish they would go away. But that's not because LLMs are useless, nor because the public isn't using them (as daishi55 pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479578 ) It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing…

I am a huge AI supporter, and use it extensively for coding, writing and most of my decision making processes, and I agree with you. The AI features in non-AI-first apps tend to be awkward bolt-ons, poorly thought out and using low quality models to save money.

I don't want shitty bolt-ons, I want to be able to give chatgtp/claude/gemini frontier models the ability to access my application data and make api calls for me to remotely drive tools.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#149

Post by jeauxlb »

AstroBen wrote: post #132
roxolotl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.

If these things are genuinely so universally hated won't they just be.. capitalism'd out of existence? People will stop engaging with them and better products will win What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?

You might be conflating capitalism (owning things like factories) with consumerism (buying things like widgets).

If all of the factory owners discover a type of widget to sell that can incidentally drive down wages the more units they move, it's unlikely for consumers to be provided much choice in their future widgets.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#150

Post by jzb »

AstroBen wrote: post #132
roxolotl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Onion has a great response to this from 2009: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lMChO0qNbkY Of course you can opt out. People live in the backwoods of Alaska. But if you want to live a semi normal life there is no option. And absolutely people should feel entitled to a normal life.

If these things are genuinely so universally hated won't they just be.. capitalism'd out of existence? People will stop engaging with them and better products will win What book store will stock AI slop that no-one wants to buy?

No, because “better products” won’t exist. That’s the complaint: every company is rushing to throw AI into their stuff, and/or use it to replace humans.

They’re not trying to satisfy customers: they’re answering shareholders. Our system is no longer about offering the best products, it’s about having the market share to force people to do business with you or maybe two other equally bad companies that constantly look for ways to extract more money from people to make shareholders happy. See: Two choices of smartphone OS, ISP regional monopolies or duopolies, two consumer OSes, a handful of mobile carriers, almost all available TVs models being “smart TVs” laden with spyware…

(I’m speaking from the US perspective, this may not be as pronounced elsewhere.)

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