Missing from Zitron's calculations is government ownership/bailout of American AI in national security interest and winning the race to AGI with China. Trump has been making noise lately of owning 50% of these companies. Taxpayers will prop them up in other words.
AI is slowing down
461–470 of 820 posts
Re: AI is slowing down
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges. There is a financial argument and capability argument. In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows f…
There's no shortage of sources of information. I'll exercise "critical reading" with sources I consider trustworthy to begin with. I've no time to engage with difficult analysis from people who are not worth the effort. You wouldn't engage with every lunacy you read on a tabloid, right? similar principle
Fair enough. I won't debate preferences or how you choose to spend your time. I think one of the merits of his articles is that he surveys and gathers sources that others can engage with. Even if we admit he is biased, that exercise (his writing) alone is valuable because one can contradict or reassess his claims.
Re: AI is slowing down
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you are a consumer and you have a Mac or an iPhone, what do you need from AI that Apple's new offering won't provide? I've been using Kagi Assistant for my AI needs, and have to say, Siri will probably replace it in the fall. The question will be, will I still want to keep Kagi for search, or will this new Siri get me where I need to be on all fronts? I need to start paying more attention to how often I actually…
Very very few consumers will be looking to use an AI to write code for them.
I don’t think what I did would be too uncommon. I asked the LLM to design an exercise program and went back and forth with it a bit. Everything was kind of scattered in the chat and hard to read/find. I asked for a web page to consolidate everything so I could just check it each day and see what to use. It made a single file I can just double-click and open in the browser. It’s infinitely better than what the chat itself would have provided, and much better than telling it to give me a bunch of markdown tables.
I could see the same thing being useful for the ultimate output of a lot of chats. For example, they showed Siri comparing specs for few different products. I used an LLM to do this once as well, but it was comparing 12 things with about 50 attributes. The table was fine, but what was better was asking for a webpage that let me click on the attribute rows I cared about so it could total up each column, which allowed me to easily rank them and better make a decision.
Once it can make html files, it’s a small step to have Siri throw it into iCloud, and make it web accessible. This would be more of a feature than something it would just do, but I could see this being used in the same way Google talked about making dynamic widgets to help explain concepts within Google Search. That’s dynamic coding with an LLM as well, even if people don’t know it. Apple wouldn’t even need to show the code, they could just save it directly to a file and open Safari. That’s essentially what their extension builder will do… write some JavaScript and load it into Safari.
Re: AI is slowing down
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha thought you were referring to the upsell at the start asking to subscribe to the newsletter for $70 / year. But yes it does call out the unprecedented amount of money getting dumped into AI. What turned me off though was this paragraph: > This is a hysterical era perpetuated by liars, cowards, imbeciles, craven boosters and the easily-fooled. Those excited about generative AI are either the victim or the perpetr…
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I just woke up and THIS! ... you almost owe me a new keyboard! I love it!
This statement cleanly encapsulates the entire problem with all of the frontier models' companies' pre-IPO numbers.
They have something-something "new technology" and we don't know anything about how the market is going to settle on the ethics, the utility, the human capacity opportunity cost impacts of not training and/or mis-educating an entire cohort of intern-engineers for a few seasons to a generation, the full environmental costs of hardware and operations necessary for the training each new larger model, ... and we cant even quantify the unknown-unknowns - the risks we cannot forsee.
To predict market revenues for the next few years based on the curves, that they self report without external disclosure of the underlying numbers, is just like expecting your 2 yr old to continue growing at the same pace in the future and in the past - laughable. Good thing it was just water not coffee and it didnt quite come "out my nose" :- ) Thank you kind stranger!
Re: AI is slowing down
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who use ChatGPT have fed so much data about their own lives and interests into it. This includes a lot of information about personal lives, interests, plans, business and even family! Shifting to another AI app is painful as they would need to start from scratch.
I don’t know anyone who uses ChatGPT who cares about that stuff. Most people just use it as a Google replacement. I actively hate it when it brings in some nonsense it thinks it knows about me. I told it my income once in an attempt to use it to find the perfect rewards credit card mix. Now anytime I try to get it to search for a deal it brings up some nonsense about “as a high income individual you don’t worry about…
Turn off the "memory" feature in the settings. It just rots the context anyways.
Re: AI is slowing down
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Burry of course has famously predicted 40 of the last 5 crashes, so maybe not the best example.
And lost his shirt doing it. (Or, well, his investors' money. I'm sure he's fine.) https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...
This is like the old quote, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
Re: AI is slowing down
#467Always a bit eyebrow-raising to me how much people focus on Ed’s style rather than his message, which is, broadly, that the tech industry is deeply morally corrupted. He struggles to speak about it without becoming impassioned, but I read it as incredulousness rather than baseless hyperbole: “How are you still investing in and working for companies like Meta, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are terrible c…
Style is relevant to how humans communicate and it's not always about the message, and it can sometimes work against it. AP Style is an editorial standard for a reason. IF I WROTE AN ENTIRE BLOG POST IN ALL CAPS ABOUT HOW AI IS LITERALLY SATAN PEOPLE WOULD JUST THINK I AM A CRAZY PERSON
You're right style does matter, and the flat tone of AP is basically extinct now because it was not a meaningful or widely desired style.
Re: AI is slowing down
#468Ed is an interesting character. His financial analysis of the AI industry makes logical sense to me (though I am not knowledgeable enough to actually know if it is correct .) However, he seems to be so angry at AI in general, that he misses the obvious areas where LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art. Coding seems to be one of the core use-cases for LLMs (as Simon Willison pointed out recently) and even if…
It seems that a certain kind of person cannot separate the following things:
1) I dislike AI as a technology
2) I dislike the people and companies that profit from AI
3) I think AI is useless
These are three completely separate positions to have. You can think AI is incredibly useful and also dislike it because it will, for example, reduce your relative status in society. You can love the tech but think that Sam Altman is a dishonest person, etc. But for some reason, most anti-AI commentators feel compelled to present all three arguments.
Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged. Of course, I don't really believe that they think it's useless. I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige, though, and they're just hoping beyond hope that somehow everyone will one day "wake up" and share their belief that LLMs are just "stochastic parrots" with no utility, despite the fact that people are using them every day and can watch in real time as they improve.
Re: AI is slowing down
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows has been pushing the same thing hard without much success. Why do I care if AI is integrated into my OS when I can choose my preferred AI and it can use the OS directly?
This. The other day I wrote up some notes for a presentation. Opened Google Slides, clicked the gemini button, pasted the notes in and asked it to make the slides. Nope; gemini can only modify a single slide at a time in Google Slides. Pasted the same notes into claude, it wrote a pptx file, I imported that into Slides, job done. Being integrated into the product doesn't always mean a better result.
Yeah!
Not being integrated can be an advantage because it gives you the freedom to think outside the box.
Meanwhile an AI engineer embedded into an incumbent slide app team has to ask permission and get cross functional alignment for every little feature. And deal with neckbeard tech leads lecturing them on what the right architecture is
Re: AI is slowing down
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you point to anything specific from the article that you'd describe as consistently wrong? Not disagreeing with you, but nothing popped out to me after skimming the article.
I didn't read the posted article (I don't read this author anymore because I think it's basically anti-AI ideological propaganda). But from the article I linked back in March 2024: "Generative AI models are expensive and compute-intensive without providing obvious, tangible mass-market use cases. Murati and Altman's futures depend heavily on keeping the world believing that development and improvement of their models…
His point is that coding is only a “market” because it is being sold at a loss. Businesses have to pay per-token prices and are saying that the cost is not justified.
Nevertheless, it all misses the point if we get to AI post-scarcity utopia. But thats a big if.