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The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#291

Post by benreesman »

alganet wrote: post #246
LgLasagnaModel wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Also, the fact that I’m adamant that one cannot fly a helicopter to the moon doesn’t mean that I think helicopters are useless. That said, if I’m inundated everyday with people insisting that one CAN fly a helicopter to the moon or that that capability is just around the corner, I might get so fed up that i say F it, I don’t want to hear another F’ing word about helicopters even though I know that helicop…

It's an unholy chimera. As militant as GNU, as greedy as Microsoft, as viral as fidget spinners. The worst aspects of each of those communities. Actual promising AI tech doesn't even get the center stage, it doesn't get a chance to do it.

I was talking to a buddy earlier and realized in a conscious way something I suppose I knew but hadn't thought about deeply.

As godawful as this brute force, "change the laws because China!", 24x7 assault of LLM hypelords has been (and I love GP's analogy about finding a helicopter useful), and its been preeeeety unpleasant, there is a silver lining.

The compute and tooling needed for all the other under-explored, nifty as hell, highly accessible ML/AI stuff is like free by comparison now: there are H100s floating around for around a dollar an hour, L40s for sometimes pennies on that dollar, and like, all of neural machine translation or WaveNet era speech to text or resnet style transfer was done on like, a thousand bucks in today's compute. Lambda Labs has a promo on GB200 where its cheaper than H100!

And there's " plenty of room at the bottom": Jetson boards and super cool autonomy stuff like that is Raspberry Pi accessible.

I'd rather they didn't feel the need to like, take over the government to get terrawatts of "just make it bigger", but given that's sort of already happened, I'm looking for what opportunities are created by such monomania.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#292

Post by kgeist »

oceansweep wrote: post #269
kgeist wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Model: Qwen3 32b GPU: RTX 5090 (no rops missing), 32 GB VRAM Quants: Unsloth Dynamic 2.0, it's 4-6 bits depending on the layer. RAM is 96 GB: more RAM makes a difference even if the model fits entirely in the GPU: filesystem pages containing the model on disk are cached entirely in RAM so when you switch models (we use other models as well) the overhead of unloading/loading is 3-5 seconds. The Key Value Cache is also…

Are you doing this with vLLM? If you're using Llama.cpp/Ollama, you could likely see some pretty massive improvements.

We're using llama.cpp. We use all kinds of different models other than Qwen3, and vLLM startup when switching models is prohibitively slow (several times slower than llama.cpp, which is already 5 sec)

From what I understand, vLLM is best when there's only 1 active model pinned to the GPU and you have many concurrent users (4, 8 etc.). But with just a single 32 GB GPU you have to switch the models pretty often, and you can't fit more than 2 concurrent users anyway (without sacrificing the context length considerably: 4 users = just 16k context, 8 users = 8k context), so I think vLLM so far isn't worth it. Once we have several cards, we may switch to vLLM.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#293

Post by leptons »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #209
IshKebab wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah literally every new tech like this has literally everyone investing in it and trying lots of silly ideas. The web, mobile apps, cryptocurrencies, doesn't mean they are fundamentally useless (though cryptocurrencies have yet to make anything successful beyond Bitcoin). I bet if you go back to the printing press, telegraph, telephone, etc. you will find people saying "it's only a bubble!".

I don't think people had the concept of a bubble at the time of a printing press.

That whole Danish tulips thing taught us about bubbles a pretty long time ago, when the printing press was still getting popular.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#294

Post by slater »

leptons wrote: post #293
suddenlybananas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people had the concept of a bubble at the time of a printing press.

That whole Danish tulips thing taught us about bubbles a pretty long time ago, when the printing press was still getting popular.

*dutch

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#295

Post by skeptrune »

dang wrote: post #115

I also find these features annoying and useless and wish they would go away. But that's not because LLMs are useless, nor because the public isn't using them (as daishi55 pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479578 ) It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing…

There's nuance in that the better ways to add AI into these projects make less money and wouldn't deliver on the hype these companies are looking for.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#296

Post by dwayne_dibley »

dang wrote: post #115

I also find these features annoying and useless and wish they would go away. But that's not because LLMs are useless, nor because the public isn't using them (as daishi55 pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479578 ) It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing…

But my real frustration is that with some thought the AI tools shoved in those apps could be useful but they’ve been rushed out and badly implemented.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#297

Post by ryandrake »

recursive wrote: post #259
spacemadness wrote: post #241

Having seen the almost rabid and fearful reactions of product owners first hand around forcing AI into every product, it’s because all these companies are in panic mode. Many of these folks are not thinking clearly and have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t think they have time to think it through. Doing something is better than nothing. It’s all theatre for their investors coupled with a fear of being seen as f…

The product I'm working on is privately owned. Hence no investors. We're still in the process of cramming AI into everything.

Even if your company is privately owned, it has at least 1 investor (possibly just the founder), and this urge to cram AI is no doubt coming from him.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#298

Post by m4rtink »

LgLasagnaModel wrote: post #239
alganet wrote: post #233

The major issue with AI technology is the people. The enthusiasts that pretend issues don't exist, the cheap startups trying to sell snake oil. The AI community treats potential customers as invaders. If you report a problem, the entire thing turns on you trying to convince you that you're wrong, or that you reported a problem because you hate the technology. It's pathetic. It looks like a viper's nest. Who would wan…

Good point. Also, the fact that I’m adamant that one cannot fly a helicopter to the moon doesn’t mean that I think helicopters are useless. That said, if I’m inundated everyday with people insisting that one CAN fly a helicopter to the moon or that that capability is just around the corner, I might get so fed up that i say F it, I don’t want to hear another F’ing word about helicopters even though I know that helicop…

Well, that's just because Earth and moon are too far apart and don't both have an atmosphere. If they were closer, you could totally do that, just watch for the microgravity around the barycenter.

Better still, you could do that even with a hit air baloon and late middle-age technology! There is even a SF book series about that:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged_Astronauts

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#299

Post by ryandrake »

Planktonne wrote: post #276
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing reasons has always been. It's just rent-seeking. Nobody wants to actually build products for market anymore; it's a long process with a lot of risk behind it, and there's a chance you won't make shit for actual profit. If however you c…

> if OpenAI fails, we get tons of useless tech injected into software products already creaking under the weight of so much bullhockety, and if they succeed, huge swaths of employees will be let go from entry level jobs I think this is the key idea. Right now it doesn't work that well, but if it did work as advertised, that would also be bad.

That's the thing I hate most about the whole AI frenzy: If it doesn't work, it's horrible, and if it does work, it's also horrible but for different reasons. The whole thing is a giant shit sandwich, and the only upside is for the few already-rich people serving it to us.

Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

#300

Post by ruszki »

atemerev wrote: post #268
ruszki wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing changing? For people who are in their 30s? Do you mean internet, mobile phones, smart phones, Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit were already widespread in mid 90s? Or are they the only ones who understand that the rate of real information/(spam+disinformation+misinformation+lies) is worse than ever? And that in the past 2 years, this was thanks to AI, and people who never check what garbage AI spe…

In mid-90s, people who are now in their 30s were about 5 years old. Their formative age was from 2005 to 2015, and yes, things were staying relatively the same during this time.

Smart phones? Mobile internet? Streaming? Steam? Almost none of these were used, or very-very few people in 2005, if they existed at all. The internet of 2005 was completely different than 2015. But heck even in real life. My home country’s weather was very different in 2005 than 10 years later. Cheap flight tickets started to change our travelling pattern completely. Even my parents started to not watch TV before 2015. We had 3 TVs in 2005 in a home. In 2015 the same family had 1 in 3 different flats. And that was used rarely. Very rarely. The consumption of news changed completely.

So what are you talking about?

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