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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#71

Post by peterlk »

Modern AI is a miracle. The math that makes it work is beautiful and really impressive. For example, if you wanted to map all knowledge on earth, how would you do it? AI answers that question by building a high dimensional vector space of embeddings, and traversing that space moves you through a topology of basically every concept that humans have.

Or another thought; why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logic puzzles consistently and accurately? It might not be 100%, but it’s still much better than what you might expect from a markov model of ngrams.

Openclaw is only sort of interesting. How to vibe code your first product is uninteresting. Claims about productivity increase from model usage are speculative and uninteresting. Endless think pieces on the effects of AI slop are uninteresting. There’s a lot of hype and grift and bullshit that is downstream of this very interesting technology, and basically none of that is interesting. The cool parts are when you actually open the models up and try to figure out what’s going on.

So no, I’m not bored of talking about AI. I’m not sure I ever will be. My suspicion is that those who are bored of it aren’t digging deep enough. With that said, that will likely only be interesting to people who think math is fun and cool. On the whole, AI is unlikely to affect our lives in proportion to the ink spilled by influencers.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#74

Post by dvt »

vrganj wrote: post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> incredible amounts of ... energy

So tired of seeing this trope. Data center energy expenditure is like less than 1% of worldwide energy expenditure[1]. Have you heard of mining? Or agriculture? Or cars/airplanes/ships? It's just factually wrong and alarmist to spread the fake news that AI has any measurable effect on climate change.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#76

Post by somewhereoutth »

My only hope is that it is such a disaster that it is effectively an extinction level event for this current technoscene (along the lines of the Permian–Triassic extinction event and others).

Then we can get back to the unglamorous, boring, thankless task of delivering business value to paying clients, and the public discourse will no longer be polluted by our inane witterings.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#78

Post by MisterTea »

It is getting stuffy in the tech sector lately with all these AI postings but it's still a very new and very disruptive technology.

I also have to say that I don't use AI in my personal or professional life. And that is simply because I haven't felt any need to use it.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#79

Post by dylan604 »

bilsbie wrote: post #54

I’m confused why the hype and the investment got so high. And why everyone treats it like a race. Why can’t we gradually develop it like dna sequencing.

I assumed it was obvious. Being first is all that matters. Investors don't want to invest in second place. Obviously, first is achieving AGI and not some GPT bot. That's why so many people keep saying AGI is in _____ weeks away with some even being preposterous stating AGI might have already happened. They need to keep attracting investors. Same as Musk constantly saying FSD is ____ weeks away.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#80

Post by nicbou »

I'm not.

At least I'm not tired of talking about how it's killing websites and filling everything with spam. I have spent most of a decade building a useful resource, and Google AI overviews has killed my traffic. It killed everyone's traffic. This thing gave me purpose, and I'm watching AI slowly strangle it.

I mourn the death of the independent web, and it frightens me that this is still the happy stage. We haven't yet felt the effect of stiffing content creators, and the LLM tools haven't yet begun to enshittify.

I am tired of discussions about agentic coding, but I would feel a lot better if we acknowledged all the harm being caused. Big tech went all in on this, stealing everything, putting everyone out of work, using up all resources with no regards for consequences, and they threaten to kill the economy if we don't let them have their way.

I feel like we are heading for a much worse place as a society, and all we can talk about is how to 10x our bullshit jobs, because we're afraid of falling behind.

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