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Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us

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Re: Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us

#81
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mRNA vaccines takes the first place for sure, and by a wide margin. But also advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology. We also finally generated electricity with fusion power this century, traveled to Pluto and set up the James Webb Space telescope [albeit the latter two are engineering achievements]. I think using an absurd amount of power to train a neural network on stolen data which is then…

mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s, i.e. last century. None of the other things you mention come close, but I'll detail that at the end. First, I want to point out how inconsistent you're being in mentioning "electricity with fusion power". We've had the ability to create fusion for almost 3/4 of a century. Most of the nuclear weapons in the world today are primarily fusion weapons (mostly with fission starter…

You are being overly obtuse. LLMs is also a technology of the 1990s with many minor breakthroughs this century and finally a major breakthrough this decade. And these breakthroughs were all about finding novel algorithms to apply to the model. Neural networks and language models are ancient technology really.

The exact same story is with mRNA vaccines. And almost the same with fusion power, though it is still on the minor improvements phase, the latest being the first time we reached an energy gain factor in the National Ignition Facility experiment in California in 2022.

You are applying arbitrary limitations in what counts as “new technology” and then selectively applying them such that LLMs have a lower barrier then other technology.

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