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submitted 2 months ago by some_guy to c/technology@lemmy.world

Built on unearned hype.

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[-] WaxiestSteam69@lemmy.world 171 points 2 months ago

I really don't understand the hype about AI in it's current state.

[-] Blackout@fedia.io 146 points 2 months ago

It's not for you. Its for corporations who want to fire half their staff and replace them with an algorithm. That's why it has such a high valuation.

[-] Madrigal@lemmy.world 69 points 2 months ago

Those corporations are about to find out the fun way that these algorithms, in their current and near-future states, cannot replace human beings.

Well, except for maybe lazy copywriters who pump out pointless listicles and executives who do - whatever it is they do - but any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools.

[-] stoly@lemmy.world 36 points 2 months ago

You’re assuming that they care about running a viable service or product.

[-] vzq@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

The hope is that their customers care. Or their customer’s customers.

[-] mindaika@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 months ago

The “corporation” might care. The Senior Vice Director of Data Intelligence who made the decision and got $50k bonus for it does not

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 12 points 2 months ago
  • Computers might be good at numbers and typesetting, but we'll always need human secretaries and phone operators to keep things running.
  • They might be able to beat a novice, but no computer will ever beat a human grandmaster at chess.
  • Okay, then they can't beat humans at Go or poker.
  • Any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools. ← you are here
  • AI-run corporations will never be able to outcompete ones with ones with human boards and CEOs.
  • An AI scriptwriter could never win an Oscar.
  • I'm voting for the human candidate for president, I don't think the AI one is up to the task.
[-] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 2 months ago

"When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages."

Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Your grandmother (or great grandmother depending how old you are) had to spend hours of hard labour every day to wash clothes dishes and rooms with just a tub of water a broom and a mop. Now all that takes maybe 20 minutes of light labour with a vacuum, dishwasher and washing machine. Technology absolutely has reduced drudgery

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Mate, the horse whip and the wheel were Technology back when they got invented.

It's a massivelly generic word.

Absolutelly some Technology has reduced drudgery. Meanwhile some Technology has managed to increase it (for example: one can make the case that the mobile phone, by making people be always accessible, has often increased pressure on people, though it depends on the job), some Technology has caused immense Environmental destruction, some Technology has even caused epidemics of psychological problems and so on.

Not only is there a lot of stuff in the big umbrella called Technology, but the total effect of one of those things is often dependent on how its its used and Capitalism seems especially prone to inventing and using Technology that's very good for a handful of people whilst being bad for everybody else.

One can't presume that just because something can be classified as Technology it will reduce drudgery or in even that it will be overall a good thing, even if some past Technologies did.

[-] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 months ago

Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn't see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.

Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn't rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.

[-] linearchaos@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Be glad we're not the horses. The glue factory might be coming next.

[-] Madrigal@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

Not the best analogy. The glue factory was a thing while horses were a primary tool for transport and heavy labour. And horses were treated appallingly. Now that they’ve been made redundant, living standards for horses have improved dramatically and the glue factory is long gone (though their population has also reduced significantly).

We can only hope for a similar outcome for ourselves.

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[-] Madrigal@lemmy.world 16 points 2 months ago

Good one. Did you use an LLM to generate it?

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[-] JoShmoe@ani.social 5 points 2 months ago

You forgot maintenance and security. They need constant surveillance and maintenance.

I would argue that there’s neither understanding nor creativity happening. It’s guessing, aping, remixing, which is impressive enough.

It’s a machine that knows everything, but understands nothing.

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[-] aesthelete@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

The future portion of this list reads like something produced from ChatGPT.

[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

I’m voting for the human candidate for president, I don’t think the AI one is up to the task.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos_bot

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[-] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 32 points 2 months ago

They could fire 3 layers of management without spending a dime while increasing productivity.

[-] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 12 points 2 months ago

Honestly the easiest people to replace with a bot.

[-] Lizardking13@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

An AI chatbot for a cloud service I use helped me find the right documentation for setting up SSO. It's not all bad. But the way it's pushed is bad.

[-] Fester@lemm.ee 42 points 2 months ago

It’s all leading to one final product: VR sex robots

[-] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 17 points 2 months ago
[-] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago

Like your optimism, but unlikely

[-] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 35 points 2 months ago

It's not related to the technology, is the venture industry trying tp figure out the next unicorn, which they have been trying to find for the last ten years.

[-] comador@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

Cloud? Neva heard of it! AI is where the money is at now.

Buzzwords, that's all they are.

[-] degen@midwest.social 7 points 2 months ago

I wouldn't say "the cloud" is exactly in the same realm. It's broad and definitely had its heyday being thrown around in marketing, but it's a very real facet in modern software. More specialized and actually useful AI will probably end up in a similar place eventually.

I think I'm talking myself out of my original point though lol. Kind of conflated LLMs and AI at first. I just wish LLMs weren't the only things with money behind them.

[-] phorq@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 months ago

Server farms are the real money maker. Doesn't matter the fad, they'll need processing power from somewhere.

[-] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 4 points 2 months ago

As always when someone looks for gold, sell them the shovel.

[-] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 25 points 2 months ago

Honestly, I can say I don't really get it either. I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.

[-] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.

I feel like the last few months have been an inflection point, at least for me. Qwen 2.5, and the new Command-R, really make a 24GB GPU feel "dumb, but smart," useful enough so I pretty much always keep Qwen 32B loaded on the desktop for its sheer utility.

It's still in the realm of enthusiast hardware (aka a used 3090), but hopefully that's about to be shaken up with bitnet and some stuff from AMD/Intel.

Altman is literally a vampire though, and thankfully I think he's going to burn OpenAI to the ground.

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[-] Beldarofremulak@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

Are you trying to solve science with it or something? You are supposed to turn carefully worded sentences into funny pictures and show people.

[-] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 months ago

Maybe that explains it. Because I am blind, pictures mean very little to me. I think image memes were one of the most abhorrent things to ever exist. Because I miss out on so much because of that.

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[-] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

It doesn't matter. Just understand that there are people who get paid way more than the average joe to hype the shit out these companies to attract investor value. Then get mad at capitalism like the rest of us.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

MBA degrees are way too easy to obtain. And the federal government bailing things out for a few decades has taught the market that they can take huge risks without much direct risk.

[-] casmael@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago

It’s just the new grift. There’s probably some value in there somewhere, some elements of it that will evolve into useful tools that get used a lot and presumably make a bunch of money for someone but yeah. Grifters gonna grift.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 6 points 2 months ago

That's because we're using it wrong. It's not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it's mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it's wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it's great

For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you're looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains

Those are some projects I've used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I'm looking to build a new one

I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like "build a class to represent this db object". I don't trust it to do anything that's not straightforward - I don't trust myself to do anything tedious

The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it's flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible

As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let's you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer

That's my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo "rampancy", a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job

This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn't have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don't know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool

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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
335 points (91.6% liked)

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