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

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181–190 of 234 posts

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

#181

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…

This comment is pretty funny in the context of a world where there are currently cars driving millions of miles without human intervention in a variety of conditions. I don't think anyone cares whether it meets your personal definition of "self driving". Reminds of the Chinese proverb: “Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.”

I guess like heavier than air powered flight will never happen. I mean there would be so many problems.

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

#182
post #27

Transformative tech: cars. If you invested in the early movers you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: personal computers. If you invested in early movers you missed microsoft and you very likely lost your money. Transformative tech: Internet/web, dotcom boom. Google, facebook, twitter were not investable or did not even exist even up to when it popped. Whether you believe AI is going to be massively tr…

I guess the time to invest in dot coms would have been around 2002. After the hype wave collapsed and you can see which businesses are hanging in and providing value.

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

#183
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's common to project resentment towards individuals onto someone who expresses dissatisfaction with systemic issues. Perhaps, but it's also quite common for people who are really doing quite well to pretend to argue on behalf of actually marginalized groups when struggling for power with their opponents. The way to tell the difference between those who genuinely want to help marginalized groups and those who just…

There's no struggle for power between an overworked corporate bee, and a billionaire. The latter is hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than the former. You're right though, a lot of the time folks with office jobs don't really care about the marginalized (and who could blame them with their entire energy drained by their jobs). Your heuristic to tell the difference is... dubious.

> There's no struggle for power between an overworked corporate bee, and a billionaire.

Oh, but there is! Why do you think the "bees" try to create unions, and the billionaires try to prevent it? If the bees get their union, that means they can wrestle some amount of power away from the owner.

> and who could blame them with their entire energy drained by their jobs

Some people and some companies and in some countries, it's normal for the company to be able to drain most of the energy from the workers. In other places, there is much more work/life balance.

By heuristic, like the comment that I responded to directly above was not limited to only employer/employee relationships, but rather so called "systemic issues".

It also happens in both directions. For instance, when conservatives argue against a minimum wage, they tend to argue that a minimum wage can lead to increased unemployment. Do you think most conservatives REALLY carethat much about that part, or do they just want to avoid the minimum wage regulations?

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

#184

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…

This comment is pretty funny in the context of a world where there are currently cars driving millions of miles without human intervention in a variety of conditions. I don't think anyone cares whether it meets your personal definition of "self driving". Reminds of the Chinese proverb: “Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.”

Cmon, - you are the one misrepresenting the actual definition of self driving - aka Level 5.

No vehicle is at level 5.

Calling it “my definition” and then switching the actual definition is unfair.

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

#185
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for driverless cars but there's many areas where you don't need 100% to be useful. Stable diffusion and LLMs are 90% there but still very useful and cool.

Most of those areas don't normally have a lot of value or you're marginally improving on existing recommendation systems. It's a coin toss on how much of an improvement this wave of LLM powered ML systems will have over the previous wave of "enterprise knowledge collation" systems and if that will be enough for people to buy them.

People seem to be buying them already, looks like OpenAI is now pulling in $80M per month in revenue.

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

#186
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an oxymoron, that highlights elite's dismissive attitudes towards the working class. You might stumble upon oxymorons in all kinds of non-technical literature in various languages.

Can you explain how that is an 'oxymoron'? because I'm having trouble squaring the intended meaning with the dictionary definition.

Poor is an expression of compassion, and sucker is dismissive. They're contradictory.

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

#187
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how that is an 'oxymoron'? because I'm having trouble squaring the intended meaning with the dictionary definition.

Poor is an expression of compassion, and sucker is dismissive. They're contradictory.

'Poor' is not usually considered an expression of 'compassion' in most contexts, certainly not on HN.

Are you learning English? If so, it's best to follow the dictionary meaning and examples.

For example, when HN users write 'poor engineer', 'poor dev', 'poor software', 'poor working environment', 'poor commute', etc... they most likely don't intend to attach any connotation of compassion.

I think most readers will interpret 'poor suckers' literally as in 'suckers' who are lacking wealth/income/means/etc...

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is undoubtedly useful, perhaps not revolutionary as heralded. Crypto was never anything else than a grift. The only true feature of de-fi is to evade financial regulators, for a time, and enable large scale movements of shady money.

Nice contradiction. > Crypto was never anything else than a grift. Ah, alright then, I guess it's not useful for anything. > evade financial regulators Sounds useful to me! > enable large scale movements of shady money. Large scale movements of money? Super useful!

>> Crypto was never anything else than a grift.

>Ah, alright then, I guess it's not useful for anything.

No. It's a simple English sentence: it means it's not useful for anything else other than grifting. The grifters find it particularly useful, just like MLMs, traditional ponzi schemes, HYIPs etc. But that doesn't mean any of those grifts are "useful".

> Nice contradiction.

Only for the monkey jpeg brigade, who feel that the artificial demand from criminals laundering money and posing as legitimate crypto investors is a feature, not an unacceptable bug.

If the only ones using it are criminals, then it's no longer useful even for them, because the whole point is to claim legitimate crypto profits.

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

#189

It's all a grift. The whole economy is grifters grifting grifters, a game of musical chairs that's going on ever since the stock market was first invented. Probably even before.

I tried to get a really tiny crack in my windshield repaired yesterday. Something coincidentally went wrong during repair, so I have an appointment to get the entire windshield replaced next week!

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

#190

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.

Fortunately, the only party that matters is the consumer.

Businesses may exist and be necessary to serve the consumer. But they are not valuable in and of themselves.

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