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AI Crap

drewdevault.com

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Re: AI Crap

#81

Post by yomlica8 »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #20
pjerem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone suffering from severe inattentive ADHD, I can see a great potential in the rise of really smart personal assistants which could aggregate every single data point in my life and throw the information at me when needed. But that’s the only thing I could imagine and it must be local not to be a privacy nightmare. Because I have no doubt that Google and Amazon are already working on that. For anything else, I…

If the model of streaming services is anything to go by, the LLM would be offered as a paid subscription with ads.

And once ads are involved, the perverse incentives will mean the assistant will begin pushing you toward advertised products.

Re: AI Crap

#82

Post by RecycledEle »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #16
Jack000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

A doctor is a lot more than just a black box taking the patients' descriptions and measurements, and running regressions on them. Doctors can touch, feel, understand, comfort in ways that our sensors or tensors (hah) can't. Same applies for a teacher too, in various other aspects. Reducing important professions into statistical models is exactly the kind of crappification that the author's talking about. The logical…

AIs have been shown to have better empathy then human physicians.

AIs have more patience than human teachers.

Re: AI Crap

#83

Post by dagw »

krapp wrote: post #62
dagw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors can touch, feel, understand... Sure they can, but many don't either because of lack of time, or quite frankly, because many doctors are bad at their job. And even in the best case scenario we will never be able to provide doctors to 100% of the population. For many people the choice won't be AI or a (free) caring, passionate doctor who has time to understand you and answer your questions, it's AI or nothing.…

This is an argument in favor of more human doctors and teachers, not replacing doctors and teachers with software.

The richest countries in the world cannot even produce enough competent doctors and teachers to fill their current needs. A world that produces enough skilled human doctors to meet everyones needs is even more science fiction than a world with skilled AI doctors.

Re: AI Crap

#84

Post by ben_w »

squarefoot wrote: post #26
Jack000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?

If the OpenAI pricing is indicative, reading 16k token of medical history and giving a 4k token response will cost $1.50 on GPT-4 and 6.4¢ on GPT-3.5-turbo.

The lower of those two is roughly what someone at the UN abject poverty threshold will spend in 48 minutes 30 seconds on "not literally starving to death".

Re: AI Crap

#85

Post by falloutx »

RecycledEle wrote: post #77
sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

The good AI can do for humanity is increasing our productivity. It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible. Every job that is eliminated frees up that person and the people who would have done that job in the future to do other work. Humanity gain the productivity of that other work. If we had not forced painful job losses on people, we would still be 97% subsistence farmers, as we wer…

Not every worker is so good that they will just get free from the job and they would instantly turn into mega entrepreneur god creating 12 companies in a month. Most of them will struggle to put food on the table, resorting to crimes and eventually ending up in worse jobs

Re: AI Crap

#86

Post by brabel »

andai wrote: post #76
danpalmer wrote: post #7

As with much of this author's content this is a strong opinion that lacks nuance, but I basically agree with the fundamental assertion: that the lasting impact of this AI bubble will be to further centralise power, taking it away from workers. My hope is that a desire for authenticity prevents this from happening – whether that's a strong bias towards human content creators, towards speaking to a human on the phone f…

>bias towards speaking to a human on the phone Hatred of phone calls aside, I heard an interesting take from Alex Hormozi (paraphrased): "You're on the phone and you say, are you human? No? Oh thank God, because you know the AI has a thousand times more experience than all the humans combined."

I think that's a point a lot of people are missing. If AI can already talk about certain topics better than most humans, imagine in the future. There may be a time when talking to humans may become really underwhelming compared to all-knowing AIs.

Re: AI Crap

#87

Post by eesmith »

emptysongglass wrote: post #12
block_dagger wrote: post #2

A one sided argument with sweeping generalities and something about minorities being killed in the process. Got it.

Seems we just can't resist hating on anything new, no matter what it is these days. Drew has some good ideas but they're often lost in his reactionary rejection of anything not his narrowly defined vision of UNIXy enough. His inexplicable dislike of containers being just one example. There can be nuance to our view of new things. It's important we stress our ability as humans to think this way. LLMs are not all or no…

Surely you mean "Plan9y enough". https://drewdevault.com/2022/11/12/In-praise-of-Plan-9.html shows how he prefers Plan 9 over Unix.

I think he doesn't like the way Unix containers are done, preferring other ways to get them. From that URL:

> Recall that everything really is just a file on Plan 9, unlike Unix. Access to the hardware is provided through normal files, and per-process namespaces do not require special permissions to modify mountpoints. Making a container is thus trivial: just unmount all of the hardware you don’t want the sandboxed program to have access to. Done. You don’t even have to be root.

Where does he express a dislike for the concept of containers? After all, he's working on a new microkernel OS, with a permissions model that seem designed to make containers easy to implement.

Re: AI Crap

#88

Post by rvz »

> AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the AI data monster.

Again, I've said this same thing months and yet the AI bros continue to deflect with more nonsense to justify burning the planet with their snake-oil garbage.

Drews points still stand and the Deep Learning industry has no methods of efficient methods of training, fine-tuning and inference and continues to burn down the planet no matter the amount of greenwashing they continue to project.

Re: AI Crap

#89

Post by read_if_gay_ »

lijok wrote: post #80
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just a typical degrowther take downvoters: is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics?

> is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics? Quite literally yes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog The reason most people don't think so is because human brains are not wired to comprehend the danger that slow buildups of a negative create. In general, the complete waste de…

then I'm sure you also believe the logical consequence that all graphical user interfaces are unethical as well due to frivolously wasted compute.

out of interest, how did you make this post? with moral standards as high as yours, you certainly wouldn't run something as wasteful as a full browser, right? especially when hackernews' html is this easy to parse manually. i'd gues you used curl? and as for your hardware? what did you personally find the most ethical choice there? and about those unethical ISPs? and how did you verify that HN's backend is efficient enough to be considered ethical?

Re: AI Crap

#90

Post by icrbow »

> Flame bait

I'll take it.

> ChatGPT is the new techno-atheist's substitute for God

Not really, no ~~true~~ AInotKillingeveryoneIst says that ChatGPT (or GPT-like) is ASI. Please stop beating this particular strawman.

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