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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#21

Post by threetonesun »

qoez wrote: post #11

Best case is hardly a bubble. I definitely think this is a new paradigm that'll lead to something , even if the current iteration won't be the final version and we've probably overinvested a slight bit.

Same as the dot-com bubble. Fundamentals were wildly off for some businesses, but you can also find almost every business that failed then running successfully today. Personally I don't think sticking AI in every software is where the real value is, it's improving understanding of huge sets of data already out there. Maybe OpenAI challenges Google for search, maybe they fail, I'm still pretty sure the infrastructure is going to get used because the amount of data we collect and try to extract value from isn't going anywhere.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#24

Post by apsurd »

kmnc wrote: post #15
block_dagger wrote: post #4

> To think that with enough compute we can code consciousness is like thinking that with enough rainbows one of them will have a pot of gold at its end. What does consciousness have to do with AGI or the point(s) the article is trying to make? This is a distraction imo.

It’s a funny anology because what’s missing for the rainbows with pots of gold is magic and fairytales…so what’s missing for consciousness is also magic and fairytales? I’ve yet to see any compelling argument for believing enough computer wouldn’t allow us to code consciousness.

Yes that's just it though, it's a logic argument. "Tell me why we aren't just stochastic parrots!" is more logically sound than "God made us", but that doesn't defacto make it "The correct model of reality".

I am suspect that the world is modeled linearly. That physical reality is non-linear is also more logically sound, so why is there such a clear straight line from compute to consciousness?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#25

Post by carlosjobim »

bix6 wrote: post #5
carlosjobim wrote: post #2

Let's take the highest perspective possible: What is the value of technology which allows people communicate clearly with other people of any language? That is what these large language models have achieved. We can now translate pretty much perfectly between all the languages in the world. The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted. There will be a time in the future, when people will not be able to comprehend…

We could communicate with people before LLMs just fine though? We have hand gestures and some people learn multiple languages and google translate was pretty solid. I got by just fine in countries where I didn’t know the language because hand gestures work or someone speaks English. What is the value of losing our uniqueness to a computer that lies and makes us all talk the same?

You can maybe order in a restaurant or ask the way with hand gestures. But surely you must be able to take a higher perspective than your own, and realize that there's enormous amounts of exchange between nations with differing language, and all of this relies on some form of translation. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world have to deal with language barriers.

Google Translate was far from solid, the quality of translations were so bad before LLMs that it simply wasn't an option for most languages. It would sometimes even translate numbers incorrectly.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#26

Post by Dilettante_ » 

  My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain.
This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating documentation, and small-scale agentic tasks frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#27

Post by NitpickLawyer »

hagbarth wrote: post #17
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

If you read a little further in the article, the main point is _not_ that AI is useless. But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth.

> But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth.

AGI is a lot of things, a lot of ever moving targets, but it's never (under any sane definition) "infinite growth". That's already ASI territory / singularity and all that stuff. I see more and more people mixing the two, and arguing against ASI being a thing, when talking about AGI. "Human level competences" is AGI. Super-human, ever improving, infinite growth - that's ASI.

If and when we reach AGI is left for everyone to decide. I sometimes like to think about it this way: how many decades would you have to go back, and ask people from that time if what we have today is "AGI".

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#28

Post by carlosjobim »

Herring wrote: post #12
carlosjobim wrote: post #2

Let's take the highest perspective possible: What is the value of technology which allows people communicate clearly with other people of any language? That is what these large language models have achieved. We can now translate pretty much perfectly between all the languages in the world. The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted. There will be a time in the future, when people will not be able to comprehend…

Language is a lot deeper than that. It's like if I say "we speak the same language", it means a lot more than just the ability to translate. It's talking about a shared past and worldview and hopefully future which I/we intend to invest in.

Then are you better off by not being able to communicate anything?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#29

Post by milesskorpen »

Animats wrote: post #23

It's pretty clear that the financialization aspect of AI is a bubble. There's way too much market cap created by trading debt back and forth. How well AI will work remains an open question at this point.

It's a big number - but still less than tech industry profits.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#30

Post by emp17344 »

njarboe wrote: post #7

Many people use AI as the source for knowledge. Even though it is often wrong or misleading, it's advice is better on average than their own judgement or the judgement of people they know. When an AI is "smarter" than 95%? of the population, even if it does not reach superintelligence, will be a very big deal.

How is this different from a less reliable search engine?
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