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Where I'm at with AI

paulosman.me

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Re: Where I'm at with AI

#21

Post by aspenmartin »

rootnod3 wrote: post #6
Legend2440 wrote: post #2

> I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough. You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed. There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsi…

And most of those concerns being wildly dismissed by the AI shills, even here on HN. Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.

Well considering people that disagree with you “shills” is maybe a bad start and indicates you kind of just have an axe to grind. You’re right that there can be serious local issues for data centers but there are plenty of instances where it’s a clear net positive. There’s a lot of nuance that you’re just breezing over and then characterizing people that point this out as “shills”. Water and electricity demands do not have to be problematic, they are highly site specific. In some cases there are real concerns (drought-y areas like Arizona, impact on local grids and possibility of rate impacts for ordinary people etc) but in many cases they are not problematic (closed loop or reclaimed water, independent power sources, etc).

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#23

Post by willtemperley »

It's important to remember these things are almost certainly gaslighting people through subtle psychological triggers, making people believe these chatbots far more than they are, using behavioural design principles [1].

I often find when I come up with the solution, these little autocompletes pretend they knew that all along. Or I make an observation they say something like "yes that's the core insight into this".

They're great at boilerplate. They can immediately spot a bug in a 1000 lines of code. I just wish they'd stop being so pretentious. It's us that are driving these things, it's our intelligence, intuition and experience that's creating solutions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_design

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#24

Post by aspenmartin »

ivanstojic wrote: post #4

> If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.” I’m tired of the hype boss.

Yea I hear this a lot, do people genuinely dismiss that there has been step change progress over 6-12 months timescale? I mean it’s night and day, look at benchmark numbers… “yea I don’t buy it” ok but then don’t pretend you’re objective

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#25

Post by duped »

Legend2440 wrote: post #2

> I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough. You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed. There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsi…

What's not being discussed are the people building these things are evil and they're doing it for evil purposes.

I spent some time thinking of a better word than "evil" before typing this comment. I can't think of one. Doing something bad that harms more than it helps for the purposes of enrichment and power is simply put: evil.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#26

Post by gllmariuty »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #3

Its really hard to take people who say this seriously: "If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said that we’re seeing a lot of interesting movement, but the jury is out on whether it will be useful" Like I'm sorry but if you couldn't see that this tech would be enormously useful for millions if not billions of people you really shouldn't be putting yourself out there opining on a…

[dead]

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#27

Post by AnotherGoodName »

dtnewman wrote: post #8

> The current landscape is a battle between loss-leaders. OpenAI is burning through billions of dollars per year and is expected to hit tens of billions in losses per year soon. Your $20 per month subscription to ChatGPT is nowhere near keeping them afloat. Anthropic’s figures are more moderate, but it is still currently lighting money on fire in order to compete and gain or protect market share. I don't doubt that t…

And just to add to this the reason the Apple macs are used is that they have the highest memory bandwidth of any easily obtainable consumer device right now. (Yes the nvidia cards which also have hbm are even higher on memory bandwidth but not easily obtainable). Memory bandwidth is the limiting factor for inference more so than raw compute.

Memory costs are skyrocketing right now as everyone pivots to using hbm paired with moderate processing power. This is the perfect combination for inference. The current memory situation is obviously temporary. Factories will be built and scaled and memory is not particularly power hungry, there’s a reason you don’t really need much cooling for it. As training becomes less of a focus and inference more of a focus we will at some point be moving from the highest end nvidia cards to boxes of essentially power efficient memory hbm memory attached to smaller more efficient compute in the future.

I see a lot of commentary “ai companies are so stupid buying up all the memory” around the place atm. That memory is what’s needed to run the inference cheaply. It’s currently done on nvidia cards and apple m series cpus because those two are the first to utilise High Bandwidth Memory but the raw compute of the nvidia cards is really only useful for training, they are just using them for inference right now because there’s not much pn the market that has similar memory bandwidth. But this will be changing very soon. Everyone in the industry is coming along with their own dedicated compute using hbm memory.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#29

Post by volkk »

skydhash wrote: post #12
vonneumannstan wrote: post #3

Its really hard to take people who say this seriously: "If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said that we’re seeing a lot of interesting movement, but the jury is out on whether it will be useful" Like I'm sorry but if you couldn't see that this tech would be enormously useful for millions if not billions of people you really shouldn't be putting yourself out there opining on a…

First car prototypes were useless and it has taken a few decades to have a good version. The first combustion engine was in 1826. Would you buy a prototype or a carriage for transportation at that time?

no, but AI isn't going to light on fire as I drive and potentially kill me. it's also not an exorbitant expense.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#30

Post by jdjeeee »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #14
candiddevmike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the rapid iteration and lack of consistency from the model providers is really killing the hype here. You see HN stories all the time around how things are getting worse, and it seems folks success with the major models is starting to heavily diffuse. The model providers should really start having LTS (at least 2 years) offerings that deliver consistent results regardless of load, IMO. Folks are tired of the…

There is a difference between quantization of SOTA model and old models. People want non-quantized SOTA models, rather than old models.

Put that all aside. Why can’t they demo a model on max load to show what it’s capable of…?

Yeah, exactly.

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