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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#391

Post by bko »

light_triad wrote: post #336

If you've been in SV long enough, you've seen multiple hype cycles. AI is the latest one. It doesn't mean AI is a con, there's just a tendency to exaggerate and make hyperbolic claims to sell. AI is primarily used to write text and code. Actually integrating it into workflows across markets will take time. A great article that is neither overly pessimistic or optimistic is Benedict Evan's The AI Summer [1]. He argues…

The author betrays himself early with this line:

> a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell into an economy run by people that have no concept of labor other than their desperation to exploit or replace it.

He brings up the concept of labor and applies a moral judgement about "replacing" and "exploiting" labor.

And then he throws the kitchen sink at the technology. People use it sure, but it's because journalists write about it. How it's expensive to train. Throw a bunch of explicits and call it a hot take.

It's the equivalent of a vegan trying to convince you that eating meat is morally wrong, and will give you cancer, and make you fat, and give you ED, and ...

This doesn't work primarily due to the fact that most people reading this got real value from an LLM. And I'm sure the author did as well. Claiming otherwise is dishonest. So what is his problem?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#392

Post by jemmyw »

tdeck wrote: post #386
levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

To play devil's advocate here, it takes time for society to orient around new technologies and make them feel indispensable. If smartphones had disappeared in 2008, most users would be mildly inconvenienced. They'd go back to using a flip phone and a TomTom, or printing out map directions, and sending emails on their laptop with WiFi. No employer expected them to have a chat app on their phone* or use PagerDuty, no b…

> Perhaps in 5-10 years people will stop putting any effort into documentation or organizing information

The LLM needs the documentation more than I do

Re: The Generative AI Con

#393

Post by housebear »

bko wrote: post #391
light_triad wrote: post #336

If you've been in SV long enough, you've seen multiple hype cycles. AI is the latest one. It doesn't mean AI is a con, there's just a tendency to exaggerate and make hyperbolic claims to sell. AI is primarily used to write text and code. Actually integrating it into workflows across markets will take time. A great article that is neither overly pessimistic or optimistic is Benedict Evan's The AI Summer [1]. He argues…

The author betrays himself early with this line: > a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell into an economy run by people that have no concept of labor other than their desperation to exploit or replace it. He brings up the concept of labor and applies a moral judgement about "replacing" and "exploiting" labor. And then he throws the kitchen sink at the technology. People use it sure, but it's…

How are you able to make the inference that "most people reading this got real value from an LLM. And I'm sure the author did as well." How are you so sure of that?

Speaking for myself, I've never gotten any real value from an LLM and their disappearance would not affect me in the slightest.

It sounds more like you were upset about his assertion because YOU derive value from an LLM, and are projecting that as some sort of dishonesty on the author's part.

Also, it was his intention to throw "the kitchen sink at the technology" as a means of showing its lack of value. In the same way a vegan would do exactly as you mention to show all the arguments AGAINST eating meat. It is meant to strengthen the intended argument through overwhelming evidence.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#394

Post by mvdtnz »

incorrecthorse wrote: post #368

> So, what exactly has generative AI actually done? Where are the products? The product is ChatGPT, actually. If LLMs are a bubble, then you should expect most of OpenAI's revenue to come from its API (which is used by startups which have raised money to do "magic AI stuff", and the bubble would pop when investors would stop giving the money). But according to https://futuresearch.ai/openai-revenue-report , revenue f…

What a clown analysis. Sorry, that is not worth the bits it is written in. OpenAI is a privately owned company and does not publish its financials. The sources your link brags about are pathetic beyond belief,

> This report draws on a variety of sources, including those not easily found by search engines, e.g.:

> * Personal anecdotes of pricing info from sales calls

> * A blog that used DNS records to infer which Fortune 500 companies pay for ChatGPT Enterprise

> * Transcripts of OpenAI exec interviews

> Just as important are the data points FutureSearch rejected when they didn’t corroborate more trustworthy sources. The core assumption made here is the $3.4 billion in ARR that Bloomberg and TheInformation reported Sam Altman said in a staff meeting.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#395

Post by sebastiennight »

suraci wrote: post #72

this can be both true: 1. The Generative AI is very very useful 2. The Generative AI is a epic bubble and it will kill us all (financially) one day It's entirely appropriate to describe it as a 'con', as long as you look deep enough into OpenAI, SoftBank, MSFT, NVDA, SMCI, etc. it's a con, but it's useful, and it will kill us all

Sadly, this comment still works without the word "(financially)"

Re: The Generative AI Con

#396

Post by sebastiennight »

sambapa wrote: post #67

I always wonder how LLMs will achieve superintelligence when they are, by definition, average.

This is incorrect. If you take the most basic interpretation of an LLM at temperature 0 as predicting the most likely token, and you run it on, say, 1,000 runs of "complete this Spanish sentence with the word for 'X'", then:

- maybe ALL humans would fail the test in some way, eg. let's say everybody gets at least 10 of those wrong, and the average person gets 100 of those wrong.

- still, as long as most people correctly get each word right, your LLM would get every single response correct (because for each item in the test, 900+ people out of a thousand gave the same correct answer in the training set).

In that sense, it's totally possible for a system trained on a vast vat of average-human input to generate super-human outputs.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#397

Post by sebastiennight »

Kye wrote: post #156

I could only skim to verify an automated summary, but if the takeaway is "these AI giants are doomed" then he's right. The future, probably within 10 years, is most tasks being handled by small on-portable-device models (7B parameters or so; see Apple's Intelligence thing), a middle ground of workhorse models (pushing closer to 30s and 70s) running on more capable ML-focused chips in laptops and workstations, and hom…

I'm not on iOS these days, can you elaborate how "Apple's Intelligence thing" has solved the 7B-sized on-portable-device model for everyday users?

My understanding of the zeitgest on HN about Apple Intelligence was definitely not leaning towards "they nailed it". Not even in the ballpark of "promising", I'd say.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#398

Post by [deleted] »

sebastiennight wrote: post #397
Kye wrote: post #156

I could only skim to verify an automated summary, but if the takeaway is "these AI giants are doomed" then he's right. The future, probably within 10 years, is most tasks being handled by small on-portable-device models (7B parameters or so; see Apple's Intelligence thing), a middle ground of workhorse models (pushing closer to 30s and 70s) running on more capable ML-focused chips in laptops and workstations, and hom…

I'm not on iOS these days, can you elaborate how "Apple's Intelligence thing" has solved the 7B-sized on-portable-device model for everyday users? My understanding of the zeitgest on HN about Apple Intelligence was definitely not leaning towards "they nailed it". Not even in the ballpark of "promising", I'd say.

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#399

Post by spondylosaurus »

rsynnott wrote: post #232

I think at this point it's an open question which comes first; the LLM bubble popping, or Ed Zitron exploding from pure indignation.

I largely agree with Zitron but I think the angry-newsletter bubble he's milking is also going to pop sooner or later, lol. And I can't say I'll be sad when it happens.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#400

Post by jibolash »

The possibility that OpenAI, Anthropic or other companies in the space can lose their investors money does not make the technology a "con". As long as they do not try to pass their losses to the tax payers, how is this a problem? If anything, the history of tech has abundant examples of the first movers in a space not capturing the eventual economic value.

It is ridiculous to say that generative AI is a con at this point when it is by far the best way to search the internet (in spite of hallucinations).

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