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Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#291

Post by [deleted] »

logicprog wrote: post #232
goalieca wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article was clearly AI generated. I read pages of it and still didn’t see any actual data. Just different phrasing’s of that claim.

What are you talking about? He goes into plenty of data, domain relevant definitions, specific cases, etc? Links to reliable sources for every numbers claim, of which there's several per paragraph, shows graphs, pictures, and does a lot of math (all of which I manually checked myself on paper as I went through). Also, the writing style is very much not ChatGPT-like, especially with all of the very honest corrections…

[deleted]

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#292

Post by adolph »

quantum_state wrote: post #88

Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.

> reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years

Do we not all stand on the shoulders of giants? Will "big next" not take up where "big tech" leaves off one day?

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#293

Post by tremon »

seizethecheese wrote: post #5

> There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society The article is certainly interesting as yet another indicator of the backlash against AI, but I must say, “exists to scam the elderly” is totally absurd. I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in…

The article doesn't specify which elderly they're referring to. They've certainly successfully captured the gerontocrats in Washington and Wall Street that keep bouying their assets.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#294

Post by pixl97 »

Larrikin wrote: post #264
pixl97 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name one thing a plow enables that wasn't previously possible? This line of thinking is ridiculous.

A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands. The phone let's you talk to someone you couldn't before when shouting can't. ChatGPT let's you... Please complete the sentence without an analogy

>A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands.

It does not. You could still till the land with hand tools. You just get a lot more done.

ChatGPT let's me program in languages I was not efficient in before.

Anyway, I'm done with your technology purity contest, it has about zero basis in reality.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#295

Post by pixl97 »

mcv wrote: post #275
Larrikin wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plow enables you to till land you couldn't before with your bare hands. The phone let's you talk to someone you couldn't before when shouting can't. ChatGPT let's you... Please complete the sentence without an analogy

...generate piles of low quality content for almost free. AI is fascinating technology with undoubtedly fantastic applications in the future, but LLMs mostly seem to be doing two things: provide a small speedup for high quality work, and provide a massive speedup to low quality work. I don't think it's comparable to the plow or the phone in its impact on society, unless that impact will be drowning us in slop.

There is a particular problem that comes with your line of thinking and why AI will never be able to solve it. In fact it's not a solved human problem either.

And that is slop work is always easier and cheaper than doing something right. We can make perfectly good products as it is, yet we find Shien and Temu filled with crap. That's not related to AI. Humans drown themselves in trash whenever we gain the technological capability to do so.

To put this another way, you cannot get a 10x speed up in high quality work without also getting a 1000x speed up in low quality work. We'll pretty much have to kill any further technological advancement if that's a showstopper for you.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#296

Post by digiown »

charcircuit wrote: post #231
digiown wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. If the bubble bursts, there will be a huge oversupply and the prices will fall. Unless all Micron, Samsung, Nvidia, AMD, etc all go bankrupt overnight, the prices won't go up when demand vanishes.

There is a massive undersupply of compute right now for the current level of AI. The bubble bursting doesn't fix that.

There is a massive over-buying of compute, much beyond what is actually needed for the current level of AI development and products, paid for by investor money. When the bubble pops the investor money will dry up, and the extra demand will vanish. OpenAI buys memory chips to stop competitors from getting them, and Amazon owns datacenters they can't power.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/data-cent...

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#297

Post by notanastronaut »

muvlon wrote: post #49
seizethecheese wrote: post #5

> There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society The article is certainly interesting as yet another indicator of the backlash against AI, but I must say, “exists to scam the elderly” is totally absurd. I get that this is satire, but satire has to have some basis in…

The article names a lot of other things that AI is being used for besides scamming the elderly, such as making us distrust everything we see online, generating sexually explicit pictures of women without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, driving autonomous killer drones and more generally sucking the joy out of everything. And I think I'm inclined to agree. There are a small amount of things…

>The internet by comparison feels like a clear net positive to me, even with all the bad it enables.

When I think of the internet, I think of malware, porn, social media manipulating people, flame wars, "influencers", and more.

It is also used to scam the elderly, sharing photoshopped sexually explicit pictures of men, women, and children, without their consent, stealing all kinds of copyrighted material, and definitely sucking the joy out of everything. Revenge porn wasn't started in 2023 with OpenAI. And just look at META's current case about Instagram being addicting and harmful to children. If "AI" is a tech carcinogen, then the internet is a nuclear reactor, spewing radioactive material every which way. But hey, it keeps the lights on! Clearly, a net positive.

Let's just be intellectually consistent, that's all I'm saying.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#298

Post by pixl97 »

mogsor wrote: post #283
pixl97 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them. This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediate…

AI doesn't encompass any "human behaviours", the humans controlling it do. Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to, it does it because people tell it to and it has (or had) no instructions to the contrary

I hate to be a smartass, but do you read the stuff you type out?

>Grok doesn't generate nude pictures of women because it wants to,

I don't generate chunks of code because I want to. I do it because that's how I get paid and like to eat.

What's interesting with LLMs is they are more like human behaviors than any other software. First you can't tell non-AI (not just genAI)software to generate a picture of a naked women, it doesn't have that capability. So after that you have models that are trained on content such as naked people. I mean, that's something humans are trained on, unless we're blind I guess. If you take a data set encompassing all human behaviors, which we do, then the model will have human like behaviors.

It's in post training that we add instructions to the contrary. Much like if you live in American you're taught that seeing naked people is worse than murdering someone and that if someone creates a naked picture of you, your soul has been stolen. With those cultural biases programmed into you, you will find it hard to do things like paint a picture of a naked person as art. This would be openAI's models. And if you're a person that wanted to rebel, or lived in a culture that accepted nudity, then you wouldn't have a problem with it.

How many things do you do because society programmed you that way, and you're unable to think outside that programming?

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#299

Post by dpc050505 »

gizmodo59 wrote: post #177
mediaman wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? They are all losing tens of billions of dollars on this, so far. Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models. There doesn't appear to be any moat. This criticism seems very valid against advertising and social media, where strong network effects make dominant players ultra-wealthy and act like a tax, but th…

Nvda is not the only exception. Private big names are losing money but there are so many public companies seeing the time of their life. Power, materials, dram, storage to name a few. The demand is truly high. What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.

The opportunity cost of the billions invested in LLMs could lead one to argue that the benefits are negative.

Think of all the scientific experiments we could've had with the hundreds of billions being spent on AI. We need a lot more data on what's happening in space, in the sea, in tiny bits of matter, inside the earth. We need billions of people to learn a lot more things and think hard based on those axioms and the data we could gather exploring what I mention above to discover new ones. I hypothesize that investing there would have more benefit than a bunch of companies buying server farms to predict text.

CERN cost about 6 billions. Total MIT operations cost 4.7 billions a year. We could be allocating capital a lot more efficiently.

Re: Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in

#300

Post by jredwards »

mediaman wrote: post #166
quantum_state wrote: post #88

Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.

How? They are all losing tens of billions of dollars on this, so far. Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models. There doesn't appear to be any moat. This criticism seems very valid against advertising and social media, where strong network effects make dominant players ultra-wealthy and act like a tax, but th…

I'd like to see evidence that open models are closing that gap. That would be promising.
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