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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’

#161

Post by trashtester »

CapstanRoller wrote: post #116
trashtester wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define "poor"? Net worth of less than $10M? Income less than $1M? Unless you set very strict limits for "poor" like that, the people that the ultra rich hire tend to be rather well off, or at least comfortable, themselves ( by that I mean net worth of >$1M OR income of >$100k. Actual poor people don't built state of the art tech. At best, they work as cleaning staff or in the cafeteria of those companies.…

>income of >$100k This is barely "middle class" now, unless you live in the middle of nowhere or like a college student. $100k/yr stopped being impressive long ago. Even the FAANG rich boys are closer to the janitor than to the CEO.

$100k/yr probably still puts you in the top 1% by personal salary per year, globaly. And about 3x above the median in the US.

I'm not arguing that it makes you rich, but you're definitely NOT "poor" if you have such an income.

Anyway, comparing to the CEO on a linear scale is kind of absurd. Anyone making less than half of what the CEO does is closer to the janitor than the CEO. Still, if you make exactly half as much as the CEO of these companies, you're still objectively rich.

And why do you think you should be closer to the CEO than the janitor in the first place? Do you think your job is that much more important than making sure the power is on and the toilets are not stuck?

If someone is gunuine about protecting the "poor", they should first ensure that the janitors and cafeteria workers are not poor, before they demand raises that would take them even further away from those that really ARE poor.

It appears to be quite typical for those claiming to be poor (while having an above-median income and wealth) to have just the attitude towards those below them that they blame the "rich" for.

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

#162

Post by intended »

jstx1 wrote: post #123
intended wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats not the point.

The point is people who are proponents of self driving have a blind spot. Its construed as a code problem, ignoring entirely the massive social aspect of human behavior.

Driving isn't locomotion. You can't assume that the people around you are going to be reasonable, sane or predictable. More data doesn't fix that, unless you start building a "civilzed behavior" model and then add that to your movement model.

I really want to see how honest people are when they build a fair representation of human civilization, warts and all.

Self driving as has been defined assumes some absurd things about the world in which humans live. No one is going to buy a car which wont know to run when they are about to get robbed.

To be blunt, the blind spot assumes you live in America (and probably california), not that you live in Brazil or India or Egypt.

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

#164

Post by arcticbull »

pjc50 wrote: post #141
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…

> Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 I think we've found the common thread between AI and crypto: the dumping of externalities and increase in energy usage. Do people really want to work for Microsoft Middle Manager? Have we not seen enough horror stories about metric-slavery in Amazon warehouses and the gig economy? It might be cheaper, but it's also worse, for a class of people who don't get any input in the decision. Si…

The other common thread is it’s all the same grifters. The same people who hyped up the worlds slowest coal powered linked list as the future of money are now hyping up AI. I do think AI is somewhat different as we will be left with more to show for it than “PayPal for Cambodian human traffickers running pig butchering scams.”

My banal take is: notwithstanding above, all the risk premium is gone for investors and employees. Everything in the AI space is priced assuming flawless execution over a 20 year time frame. As a potential employee - or investor - that equity is just not interesting to me.

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

#165

Post by trashtester »

zirgs wrote: post #130
trashtester wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Generally, it's not.

Though it tends to disappear into effects that are taken for granted.

Like the improvement in mobile phone quality since 1990.

Just like how easy access to music through Spotify may make us appreciate music less than if we have to actually put a vinyl record on, easily accessed art may also reduce our perceived appreciation.

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

#166

Post by neuronic »

jstx1 wrote: post #123
intended wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me this is a technocratic stance - believing that technology will always find a solution and absolve us of all problems.

Maybe. Maybe not. What I read from his post is much closer in spirit to "we cannot simulate real physics down to the atom" when modeling protein folding so what we do instead is building models (good enough estimations) and AI approaches to recognize complex (but still top level) patterns.

These reduced views on reality help our problem space to a large degree but they can never account for the full scope of the physical reality and they largely work on assumptions which might be proven wrong at any point in time.

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

#167

Post by trashtester »

mihaic wrote: post #135
trashtester wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably no country in the world with no intervention, or even close. In fact, there are massive intervention in pretty much every country. Actual lassez-faire economies was mostly a thing in the 19th century. Since then, regulatations have been accumulating constantly, and total government spending increased to GDP increased from about 10% to 35-75% in most if not all western countries.

Yes, but many of these have one form or another of "take from the middle class and give to everyone else". I wasn't arguing that governments don't do anything, it's that they don't do enough to limit the size if the parasitic rich class, while the original post was saying that this is the best system we've got.

> limit the size if the parasitic rich class

Do you consider it ok to dehumanize your fellow humans by comparing them to parasites?

Also, how can you be so sure that the metaphor even works? Do you truely believe that everyone else would be better off if the top 0.1% richest people in the world had never been born, and never started all those big companies they own?

Because that's what it means to be a "parasite". To consume resources you have no part in creating.

Or is the word "parasictic" ONLY used as a means to dehumanize a group you detest, without even being meant to be seen as a metaphor?

I don't mind having a discussion about how to best distribute the economic output of the economy, but calling one group or another parasites is not a good start.

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

#168

Post by doctor_eval »

vineyardmike wrote: post #134
doctor_eval wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT wrapper products are the equivalent of static corporate HTML pages from the 90s. We build them because we are the early adopters of a brand new technology and we’re working out how it works. I’m working with such a company and yes, the first product is a (very nuanced and very domain specific) wrapper around GPT. But as we gain experience, we expect to develop far more complex and interesting products. But we got…

> 2 years ago, nobody even knew about ChatGPT So chatGPT isn’t 2 years old, but i recently discovered that if you search HN for GPT-2, you’ll discover years of people discussing it, below hype levels. You’ll find “did GPT2 write this” type comments that we see today with 3,4. You’ll see people train it against their texts to talk to themselves. A lot of the ChatGPT induced hype hypotheticals were already done.

> A lot of the ChatGPT induced hype hypotheticals were already done

I really disagree with this.

The more broadly useful and available this technology becomes, the more interesting and unexpected uses will be discovered for it. The people I'm working with now are not remotely software people but they are generating real value from GPT in ways I would never have imagined. I look at what they're doing and I think to myself - a seasoned software engineer - OMG that's incredible, I would never have thought to use it that way.

That's why I say that GPT4 is the 56K modem of AI. Until now it's just been largely software geeks. But now that it's getting out into the broader world, people are coming up with novel ways to use it that are unexpected and occasionally ingenious. Ways to help people that most software engineers wouldn't have the domain experience to think of.

And they're just getting started.

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

#169

Post by ak_111 »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #152
ak_111 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A technology can have tremendous value while still attracting grifters and being an early investors' graveyard. Not sure how this compares to other recent technology revolutions, but most AI startups seem to be one feature announcement from Microsoft away from bancrupcy. So even with the best intentions of founders, it seems like a really volatile market.

This is very similar to the app start-up craze that apple triggered. After every new iOS release or new FB announcement there were a multitude of app startups that were made redundant. For example there were plenty of startups focused on bookmarking websites, or sharing notes, or allowing in-game adverts.

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

#170

Post by bombolo »

trashtester wrote: post #102
bombolo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience that bit is more forgotten in protestant countries rather than catholic ones. As in, in catholic ones rich people aren't seen as model of virtue and everybody knows that "hard work" won't get you there.
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