We have something useful. Burst the bubble and bring back tech careers which you destroyed yo sloppify the entire field.
No brainwr.
Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
201–210 of 228 posts
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#202Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either). If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades a…
Not to mention that the LAST place I want an all-consuming, privacy-destroying data beast is anywhere near my health data.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#203Start by making your AI useful. Microsoft offerings are complete trash. There are 1 man start ups providing more value in this space and that’s not an exaggeration.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#204It's a simple cost/benefit analysis that (rightly) causes the massive AI backlash. For the average Joe, non-tech worker, the cons of AI are:
* Higher electricty bills.
* 5-6x cost of RAM, GPUs, and other computer components
* Data centers popping up in their backyards
* An internet inundated with slop
* Slop beginning to infiltrate the video game industry and other creative industries
* AI being used to justify gutting entry level jobs for a generation already screwed by larger, long horizon economic forces
* Grok enabling the creation of revenge porn and CSAM with seemingly no repercussions
* Massive IP theft on a scale previously unheard of
* Etc.
The pros of AI are:
* It can summarize text and transcribe audio decently well.
* It can make funny pictures of cats wearing top hats.
* ???
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#205LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…
LLM output is quickly rendering google search unusable, so it's kind of creating its own speedup multiplier.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, I'm getting a shovel factory for practically nothing. I'm easily realizing 5x value on that investment. I'd say for an estate that I am the executor of, it probably saved me $50k in legal fees and other expenses because it helped me analyze a novel problem and organize it ask the right questions of counsel. Another scenario i had to deal with i needed a mobile app to do something very specific for a few weeks.…
I'd wonder how much that scales up though for the benefit of the companies that are each investing hundreds of billions and hope to see a net return. How many developers like you (presumably less of you seeing as each is more productive) or enterprises you work for paying fees (along with slimming down legacy costs paid to someone) does it take to get up in the 12 digit range?
No idea, and not my problem. I’m surprised I’ve been downvoted so much in these comments. I’m not saying OpenAI et al is a good company or good financial scenario, or good investment.
The technology is amazingly powerful. Full stop.
The constraint that drives cost is technical — semiconductor prices. Semiconductors are manufactured commodities over time, those costs will drop over time. The Sun workstation I bought for $40k in 1999 would get smoked by a raspberry pi for $40.
Even if everyone put their pencils down and stopped working on this stuff, you’d get a lot of value from the open source(-ish) models available today.
Worst case scenario, LLMs are like Excel. Little computer programs will be available to anyone to do what they need done. Excel alone changed the world in many ways.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, I'll move much of it locally when it becomes cost justified to do so. I doubt that the exponential cost explosion day is coming. When the bubble pops, the bankruptcies of many of the players will push the costs down. US policy has provided a powerful incentive for Chinese players to do what Google has done and have a lower cost delivery model anyway.
it's not exponential, it's linear > the bankruptcies of many of the players will push the costs down the running costs don't disappear because people go broke
Your words bro. 10x isn’t linear.
The cost iceberg with this stuff isn’t electricity, it’s the capital.
Other than Google and Facebook, the big hype players can’t produce the growth required to support the valuations. That’s why the OpenAI people started fishing for .gov backstops.
The play is get the government to pay and switch out whatever Nvidia stuff they have now with something more efficient in a few years.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#208Scale it back and give us the ability to make our own AI rigs?
You're plaing game of "control" the wrong way. The whole idea of all these investments and movement was that they do have the control over the AI, not users
Why not take that away from the firms and let people have local first AI usage?
Might not work well with those relying on structured finance to break computer component markets, but does well for the majority that are buying their equipment with regular cash.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only search engine AI output didn't constantly haluciate nonexistent APIs, it might be a net productivity gain for me...but it's not. I've been bit enough times by their false "example" output for it to be a significant net time loss vs using traditional search results.
Gemini hallucinated a method on a rust crate that it was trying to use and then spent ten minutes googling 'method_name v4l2 examples' and so on. That method doesn't exist and has never existed; there was a property on the object that contained the information it wanted, but it just sat there spinning its wheels convinced that this imagined method was the key to its success. Eventually it gave up and commented out al…
My favorite with ChatGPT is:
"Tell me how to do X" (where X was, for one recent example, creating a Salt stanza to install and configure a service).
I do as it tells me, which seems reasonable on the face of it. But it generates an error.
"When creating X as you described, I get error: Z. Why?"
"You're absolutely correct and you should expect this error because X won't work this way. Do Y instead."
Gah... "I told you to do X, and then I'm going to act like it's not a surprise that X doesn't work and you should do something else."
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#210This will sound pedantic but I'll explain why it matters: the exact wording is "We need to do something useful with AI", because the current (editorialized) submission title (of an already slanted article) makes it sound like people don't know what to do with AI. We already know many useful things to do; there are already 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are coding-related) doing various ostensibl…
You are exactly right! However, i would say Satya Nadella is quite different from other American CEOs (whose mantra is "greed is good") in that he comes from an Indian middle class family whose focus was on education/good-work and also being forced to take care of a son who suffered from cerebral palsy. All of these shaped his worldviews to be more empathetic of the "common man" which is reflected in his style of lea…
> also being forced to take care of a son who suffered from cerebral palsy
"forced"?