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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#871

Post by encyclopedism »

Thews wrote: post #844
encyclopedism wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is about centralisation of power I do not believe this is the main reason at all. The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I ca…

It sounds like you agreed by the end, just with a slightly different way of getting there.

> AI is about centralisation of power > So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things,

There are open source models and these will continue to keep abreast of new features. On device only models are likely to be available too. Both will be good enough especially for consumer use cases. Importantly it is not corporations alone that have access to AI. I for-see whole countries releasing their versions in an open source fashion and much more. After all you can't stop people applying linear algebra ;-)

There doesn't appear to be a moat for these organisations. HN users mention hopping from model to model like rabbits. The core mechanic is interchangeable.

There is a 'barrier to entry' of sorts that does exert some pressure or centralisation particularly at scale. It conveniently aligns well for large corporations and it is that GPU's are expensive and AI requires a lot of processing power. But it isn't the core issue.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#872

Post by sfink »

deaux wrote: post #700
sfink wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fallibility isn't the problem. It's probably a net benefit for learning. Promoting dependency is the problem. Replacing effort is the problem. Making self-discipline be a thing only for suckers is the problem.

I don't get this line of thinking. Never in my life have I heard the reasoning "replacing effort is the problem" when talking about children who are able to afford 24/7 brilliant private tutors. Having access to that has always been seen as an enormous privilege.

Having an actual human who is a "brilliant private tutor" is an enormous privilege. A chatbot is not a brilliant private tutor. It is a private tutor, yes, but if it were human it would be guilty of malpractice. It hands out answers but not questions. A tutor's job is to cause the child to learn, to be able to answer similar questions. A standard chatbot's job is to give the child the answer, thus removing the need to learn. Learning can still happen, but only if the child forces it themselves.

That's not to say that a chatbot couldn't emulate a tutor. I don't know how successful it would be, but it seems like a promising idea. In actual practice, that is not how students are using them today. (And I'd bet that if you did have a tutor chatbot, that most students would learn much more about jailbreaking them to divulge answers than they would about the subject matter.)

As for this idea that replacing effort not being a problem, I suggest you do some research because that is everywhere. Talk to a teacher. Or a psychologist, where they call it "depth of processing" (which is a primary determinant of how much of something is incorporated, alongside frequency of exposure). Or just go to a gym and see how many people are getting stronger by paying 24/7 brilliant private weightlifters to do the lifting for them.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#875

Post by stockresearcher »

rvba wrote: post #861
Zoquento wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the fact that most of the time, the AI tools don't actually work well enough to be worth the trouble. AI meeting notes are great! After you spend twice as long editing out the errors, figuring out which of the two Daves was talking each time, and removing all the unimportant side-items that were captured in the same level of detail as the core decision. AI summaries are great - if you're the sort of pers…

AI summaries are great for orgs that dont do them (AI better than nothing) but not that great for those orgs that have an agenda and a note taker. What is very rare. Bur better quality

No way. Anything written down becomes the source of truth 3+ months later. Either write it down correctly or don’t write it down at all.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#876

Post by exasperaited »

tptacek wrote: post #5
somekyle2 wrote: post #3

Anecdotally, lots of people in SF tech hate AI too. _Most_ people out of tech do. But, enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters.

It is not at all my experience working in local government (that is, in close contact with everybody else paying attention to local government) that non-tech people hate AI. It seems rather the opposite.

I live in a medium-sized British town of 100,000 people or so. It may be a slightly more creative town than most — lots of arts and music and a really surprisingly cool music scene — but I can tell you that AI pleases (almost) nobody.

I think actually a lot about it is the sort of crass, unthinking, default-American-college-student manner about the way ChatGPT speaks. It's so American and we can feel it. But AI generated art and music is hugely unpopular, AI chatbots replacing real customer service is something we loathe.

Generally speaking I would say that AI feels like something that is being done to us by a handful of powerful Americans we profoundly distrust (and for good reason: they are untrustworthy and we can see through their bullshit).

I can tell you that this is so different to the way the internet was initially received even by older people. But again, perhaps this is in part due to our changing perspectives on America. It felt like an exciting thing to be part of, and it helped in the media that the Web was the brainchild of a British person (even if twenty years later that same media would have liked to pretend he wasn't at a European research institution when he did it).

The feeling about AI is more like the feeling we have about what the internet eventually did to our culture: destroying our high streets. We know what is coming will not be good for what makes us us.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#877

Post by sfink »

eru wrote: post #682
sfink wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they do. In fact, imperfect teachers can sometimes induce more learning than more perfect ones. And that's what is insidious about learning from AI. It looks like something we've seen before, something where we know how to make it useful and take advantage even of the gaps and inadequacies. AI can be effective for learning a new skill, but you have to be constantly on your guard to prevent it from hacking your b…

> Personally, I still believe that human + AI hybrids have enormous potential. [...] That was true in chess for a long time, but since at least 20 years or so, approximately anytime the human deviates from what the AI suggests, it's a mistake.

It turns out that with enough effort, "chess" can be lumped in with "arithmetic". The machines are just better at it. We're continually finding new things in that category, including things we never would have guessed. But that doesn't mean that everything is. At least right now, very little is.

Even things that AI has gotten best at, like coding, are nowhere near that category yet. AI-written text and code is still crap compared to what humans can write. Both can often superficially look better, but the closer you look and the less a human guided it, the worse you discover it is.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#878

Post by entropi »

lerp-io wrote: post #762
entropi wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying now that you can bypass a lot of solutions offered by a mix of small/large providers by using a single solution from a huge provider, this is the opposite of a centralization of power?

with ai specialized hardware you can run the open source models locally too and without without the huge provider stealing your precious IP

ah, so what you are saying is this: now you can buy your own specialized hardware, which is realistically produced and sold by a single company on earth, compete with ~3 of the largest multinational corporations to do so (consider the ram prices lately, to get a sense of the effect of this competition), spend tens of thousands in the process, and run your 'own' model, which someone spends millions to train and makes it open for some reason (this is not a point about its existence, its about its reliability. I don't think its wise to assume the open models will be roughly in line with SOTA forever). This way, by spending roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude more, you can eliminate a handful of SaaS products that you use.

Sorry, I don't see this happening, at least not for the majority. Even if it does, it would still be arguably centralizing.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#879

Post by marssaxman »

adastra22 wrote: post #710
waterTanuki wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI isn't about making financial sense it's about keeping the last traces of society duct taped together before it all collapses. Remove all pathways to a middle-class life and you're left with a populace on the precipice of violent revolts.

What I mean is that it simply would not work. The math doesn't add up. It would directly lead to Weimar levels of hyperinflation. Which is a far worse outcome.

Depends on how you define it, I suppose. The State of Alaska has been providing a universal basic income to its residents for almost half a century now, and that seems to work just fine.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#880

Post by hollerith »

marssaxman wrote: post #879
adastra22 wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that it simply would not work. The math doesn't add up. It would directly lead to Weimar levels of hyperinflation. Which is a far worse outcome.

Depends on how you define it, I suppose. The State of Alaska has been providing a universal basic income to its residents for almost half a century now, and that seems to work just fine.

Not enough to live on. In 2022, the payment was $3,284 per eligible resident, and the 2023 payment was $1,312. I could not easily find the 2024 figure. This is is paid once a year, not monthly.

It is called the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.

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