I’m honestly stunned. If you can’t trust rich capitalists, who can you trust‽
Politicians!
Really? The guy behind the company called “Open” AI that has contributed the least to the open source AI communities, while constantly making grand claims and telling us we’re not ready to see what he’s got. We’re supposed to stop taking that guys word?
Wow, thanks journalists, what would we do without you.
Should your disappointment here really be pointed at the journalists?
Which group of people uncritically magnified his voice and others like it for years? Tech journalism builds the legacies of people like Musk, Bankman-Fried and Altman.
That’s yellow journalism.
Oh, don’t worry we have enough to go around.
People talk a lot about the genericisation of brand names, but the branding of generic terms like this really annoys me.
I’ll use the example I first noticed. A few years ago, the Conservative government was under criticism for the minimum wage being well under a living wage. In response, they brought in the National Living Wage, which was an increase to the minimum wage, but still under the actual living wage. However, because of the branding, it makes criticising it for not meeting the actual living wage more difficult, as you have to explain the difference between the two, and as the saying goes, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”.
When that major drama unfolded with him getting booted then re-hired. It was super fucking obvious that it was all about the money, the data, and the salesmanship He is nothing but a fucking tech-bro. Part Theranos, part Musk, part SBF, part (whatever that pharma asshat was), and all fucking douchebag.
AI is fucking snake oil and an excuse to scrape every bit of data like it’s collecting every skin cell dropping off of you.
I’d agree the first part but to say all Ai is snake oil is just untrue and out of touch. There are a lot of companies that throw “Ai” on literally anything and I can see how that is snake oil.
But real innovative Ai, everything to protein folding to robotics is here to stay, good or bad. It’s already too valuable for governments to ignore. And Ai is improving at a rate that I think most are underestimating (faster than Moore’s law).
I think part of the difficulty with these discussions is that people mean all sorts of different things by “AI”. Much of the current usage is that AI = LLMs, which changes the debate quite a lot
No doubt LLMs are not the end all be all. That said especially after seeing what the next gen ‘thinking models’ can do like o1 from
ClosedAIOpenAI, even LLMs are going to get absurdly good. And they are getting faster and cheaper at a rate faster than my best optimistic guess 2 years ago; hell, even 6 months ago.Even if all progress stopped tomorrow on the software side the benefits from purpose built silicon for them would make them even cheaper and faster. And that purpose built hardware is coming very soon.
Open models are about 4-6 months behind in quality but probably a lot closer (if not ahead) for small ~7b models that can be run on low/med end consumer hardware locally.
I don’t doubt they’ll get faster. What I wonder is whether they’ll ever stop being so inaccurate. I feel like that’s a structural feature of the model.
May I ask how you’ve used LLMs so far? Because I hear that type of complaint from a lot of people who have tried to use them mainly to get answers to things, or maybe more broadly to replace their search engine, which is not what they’re best suited for, in my opinion.
What are they best suited for?
Personally, I’ve found that LLMs are best as discussion partners, to put it in the broadest terms possible. They do well for things you would use a human discussion partner for IRL.
- “I’ve written this thing. Criticize it as if you were the recipient/judge of that thing. How could it be improved?” (Then address its criticisms in your thing… it’s surprisingly good at revealing ways to make your “thing” better, in my experience)
- “I have this personal problem.” (Tell it to keep responses short. Have a natural conversation with it. This is best done spoken out loud if you are using ChatGPT; prevents you from overthinking responses, and forces you to keep the conversation moving. Takes fifteen minutes or more but you will end up with some good advice related to your situation nearly every time. I’ve used this to work out several things internally much better than just thinking on my own. A therapist would be better, but this is surprisingly good.)
- I’ve also had it be useful for various reasons to tell it to play a character as I describe, and then speak to the character in a pretend scenario to work out something related. Use your imagination for how this might be helpful to you. In this case, tell it to not ask you so many questions, and to only ask questions when the character would truly want to ask a question. Helps keep it more normal; otherwise (in the case of ChatGPT which I’m most familiar with) it will always end every response with a question. Often that’s useful, like in the previous example, but in this case it is not.
- etc.
For anything but criticism of something written, I find that the “spoken conversation” features are most useful. I use it a lot in the car during my commute.
For what it’s worth, in case this makes it sound like I’m a writer and my examples are only writing-related, I’m actually not a writer. I’m a software engineer. The first example can apply to writing an application or a proposal or whatever. Second is basically just therapy. Third is more abstract, and often about indirect self-improvement. There are plenty more things that are good for discussion partners, though. I’m sure anyone reading can come up with a few themselves.
Martin Shkreli is the scumbag’s name you’re looking for.
From wikipedia: He was convicted of financial crimes for which he was sentenced to seven years in federal prison, being released on parole after roughly six and a half years in 2022, and was fined over 70 million dollars
Thank you!
It’s not snake oil. It is a way to brute force some problems which it wasn’t possible to brute force before.
And also it’s very useful for mass surveillance and war.
Yeah. It sucks I had to be downvoted into irrelevance way back when this clown was first becoming worshipped by the tech bros.
I don’t take pride in patting myself on the back, but I was fucking right all along about this douche.
The day of reckoning is approaching fast. May this teach a lesson to my fellow techies that tech billionaires aren’t any better than the other billionaires. I hope there won’t be another cryptoscam after LLMs 🤷♀️
Or, if there’s another one, I hope that it won’t consume massive amounts of energy. If techbros only hurt themselves, I suppose it’s fine.
Both crypto and LLMs are new, disruptive tech. The chaos around them is expected.
Which cryptoscam are you referring to? Theres hundreds daily lol
Crypto and blockchain is tech coming up with a solution that no one asked for. Blockchain is just a database that is (at best!) extremely energy inefficient. Trust comes from the same sources (brand, marketing, advertising, social cues), it being on a blockchain does not magically generate trust.
And crypto’s biggest strength as an uncontrollable and decentralised store of wealth ignore the fact you can only buy and sell it on marketplaces, which control and centralise it, so for nearly everyone involved it’s a pyramid scheme, those at the beginning persuading new people to join to prop up their assets profits
Do you mind if I explain a little more about decentralized ledger technology to help you understand the tech, and correct some of your mistaken understanding?
How is LLM a cryptoscam?
I don’t trust any of these types. If you haven’t noticed by now morally decent people are never in charge of a any large organization. The type of personality suited to claw their way to the top usually lack any real moral compass that doesn’t advance their pursuit of power.
Was this not obvious at the very least when his own board kicked him to the curb due to an inability to trust him?
Name a CEO tech bro that isn’t a raving douche.
Does Woz count? He’s CEO of the Silicon Valley Comic Con (or he used to be anyway).
Also just gonna go with an old guard and say maybe Tom, once he sold Myspace he fucked right off. I think he has a travel blog or some shit.
Though I wouldn’t consider him a tech bro.
It’s hard to find a very of any variety that isn’t a raving douche
It’s beyond time to stop believing and parroting that whatever would make your source the most money is literally true without verifying any of it.
The guy that was lying since day one? Why?
Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.
Stop trying to make “streets ahead” happen!
Your criticism is so fetch.
Ohh i’m stroads ahead, i never heard of that term.
the techbros that think that with sufficiently advanced AI we could solve climate change are so stupid. like, we might not have a perfect solution, but we have ideas on how to start to make things better (less car-centric cities, less meat and animal products, more investment in public transport and solar), and it gets absolutely ignored. why would it be different when an AI gives the solution? unless they want the “eat fat-free food and you will be thin” solution to climate change, in which we change absolutely nothing of our current situation but it is magically ecological
I don’t think you’re imagining the same thing they are when you hear the word “AI”. They’re not imagining a computer that prints out a new idea that is about as good as the ideas that humans have come up with. Even that would be amazing (it would mean that a computer could do science and engineering about as well as a human) but they’re imagining a computer that’s better than any human. Better at everything. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and perhaps the start of something much better. In any case, climate change wouldn’t be our problem anymore.
That’s the thing, there could be a human 10’000x smarter than Einstein telling us what to do… And it would still not happen.
I disagree with you, because a modern human could offer the people of the distant past (with their far less advanced technology) solutions to their problems which would seem miraculous to them. Things that they thought were impossible would be easy for the modern human. The computer may do the same for us, with a solution to climate change that would be, as you put it, magically ecological.
With that said, the computer wouldn’t be giving humans suggestions. It would be the one in charge. Imagine a group of chimpanzees that somehow create a modern human. (Not a naked guy with nothing, but rather someone with all the knowledge we have now.) That human isn’t going to limit himself to answering questions for very long. This isn’t a perfect analogy because chimpanzees don’t comprehend language, but if a human with a brain just 3.5 times the size of a chimpanzee’s can do so much more than a chimpanzee, a computer with calculational capability orders of magnitude greater than a human’s could be a god compared to us. (The critical thing is to make it a loving god; humans haven’t been good to chimpanzees.)
Imagine Jesus Christ as a time traveler, going back from a dying planet to just about the dawn of both roads and also safer sea travel than previously, those two connecting what would become the entire modern world.
Jesus: like, forget all this “religion” crap about what foods to eat & where & when & with who, and like, just be excellent to one another dudes & dudettes
Everyone since then, especially those who borrow His actual fucking name to label themselves: um… how about “no”?
There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.
One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.
There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.
$ GPT how do we solve climate change?
GPT: command not found
$ cd /home/chatgpt
cd: command not found
You shouldn’t judge people on appearances.
… but, I mean, come OOON… he looks like a reanimated Madame Tussaud’s sculpture. Like someone said, “Give me a Wish.com Mark Zuckerberg… but not so vivacious this time.” And he’s the CEO of an AI-related company.
News at 10! It was time to stop taking his word for everything. Quite a while back.
Applicable to everyone really, especially those that want to sell you something that sounds too good to be true.
The time was last year, but better late than sorry.
He’s the musk in making
