I was just talking to a colleague about the AI bubble. These companies are in so deep they can't tell the truth. They are all lying about the efficacy, costs to consumers and most importantly how & when this tech works or doesn't.
Is there enough money on the line to kill over?
There's likely a trillion bucks of valuations across the industry. Billions in sunk costs, billions in c suite remuneration, billions in VC mgmt costs.
RIP Suchir
mercurynews.com/2024/12/13/ope…
#OpenAI #AI #VC #SuchirBalaji
OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
A former OpenAI researcher who raised concerns about the company is dead at 26.Jakob Rodgers (The Mercury News)
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nullagent
in reply to nullagent • • •This whole situation is about as believable as a Russian dissident or oligarch falling out of a midrise window in Moscow. Like the Boeing whistle blower I don't think it much matters if "foul play" was involved because this whole scenario is foul af.
This young man was very brave and righteous to blow the whistle and was undoubtedly under immense social and professional pressure not to. He's fucking up A LOT of people's grifty gravy train.
We should read his words
suchir.net/fair_use.html
#AI
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Mark Otway
in reply to nullagent • • •I was explaining to a non-tech friend how "AI" works - ie what an LLM is, and does, including hallucinations and the fact that it's basically spicy autocomplete.
Once he understood, he was open-mouthed, aghast. "But all the media articles saying its going to replace 80,000 jobs, and make our lives easier? Is that all BS?"
It was depressing watching it sink in how deep the lie was that's been sold by all these huge corps.
@cstross
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in reply to Mark Otway • • •@markotway @cstross
Oh it might well replace those jobs. And it'll be absolute dogshit at doing it.
The management class are dumb as fuck.
0xC0DEC0DE07E8
in reply to [intentionally left blank] • • •@drunkenmadman
This is a common refrain over on @pluralistic’s blog: AI might not be able to do your job, but that doesn’t mean they can’t convince your boss of that.
@markotway @nullagent @cstross
raganwald 🍓
in reply to 0xC0DEC0DE07E8 • • •A small variation on this reasoning is that AI may not be able to do your job, and management may know that all too well, but if a critical mass of companies replace people with AI, everyone will just lower their expectations and management will be fine.
See also: Self-checkout in retail.
Thad
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Nicole Parsons
in reply to Thad • • •@Thad @c0dec0dec0de @drunkenmadman @pluralistic @markotway @cstross
Women have experienced this process over and over.
Male manager retires or quits, woman gets the job but it's now called a "coordinator" job at 40% less, because a typewriter & secretary was replaced by a laptop & word processor.
Same job responsibilities, different title, less money.
Wage suppression tactics using titles and tech is an old old technique.
nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/…
msnbc.com/know-your-value/care…
I was paid less than the men I was managing. Here’s what happened next.
Josie Cox (MSNBC)ᒍᗪᙎ 🇨🇦
in reply to Mark Otway • • •@markotway @Rob_T_Firefly @cstross I dunno. I definitely see low/early skill knowledge workers being tossed. Which means there will be no senior people sometime in my lifetime. Which means more AI to counter that. Which means less jobs. I think you did your friend a real disservice by dismissing AI as “spicy auto complete”. It’s taking jobs today, even in its infancy.
I don’t have a position on whether that’s good or bad, though. Throughout history jobs have fallen by the wayside due to progess and new jobs show up to support that progress.
Charlie Stross
in reply to ᒍᗪᙎ 🇨🇦 • • •@jdw @markotway @Rob_T_Firefly You need to distinguish between generative AI (spicy autocomplete) and analytical/pattern recognition AI (which works surprisingly well). And also remember it's not "intelligence" in any human sense, it's just statistical modelling on a huge scale.
The term "AI" is pure sales hype, to extract money from private equity and sell the tech to oligarchs who can use it to attack their work force.
madopal
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to madopal • • •madopal
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross It's not so much about the objectionability as much as the work to assemble/verify/train. And if the set can change, that process is usually arduous and horribly manual.
But yes, the hidden surface is what it's trained on & how, and I hate that even when it works, that whole aspect is often very obscured.
As usual, Mike Judge/Silicon Valley nailed it.
youtu.be/vIci3C4JkL0?t=51
- YouTube
youtu.bemmalc
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross @jdw @markotway @Rob_T_Firefly
“You need to distinguish between generative AI […] and analytical/pattern recognition AI”
Thank you.
It's simply mind-boggling how many people just inanely repeat the anti-"AI" mantra without any understanding of the scope of the field.
That said:
'The term "AI" is pure sales hype’
Well, no; it's a term that's been used — however “unfortunately" — for well over half a century also with rather broad scope.
Charlie Stross
in reply to mmalc • • •Token Sane Person
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Marko Karppinen
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross the problem with making that distinction is that it’s less and less technically accurate as folks notice that actually, large language models often perform better at their analytical workloads than their custom-trained ML models ever did.
Turns out it’s predicting the next token all the way down.
StarkRG
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross @jdw @markotway @Rob_T_Firefly The more useful, pattern-matching AI still needs to have its results looked over by an actual human to determine if what it discovered is actually real. It's a "well, that kinda looks something" generator.
I think pattern-matching AI is actually a fair amount worse than a human doing the same thing, it's just a whole lot faster, so combining it with someone checking its results ends up being just as good but faster.
Troed Sångberg
in reply to Mark Otway • • •@markotway
Wait until someone tells him how human brains work based on physics and chemistry.
@nullagent @cstross
nullagent
in reply to Troed Sångberg • • •@troed @markotway @cstross
Its an interesting point. Imo this is the crux of the issue, what the AI craze has proven for me is how astonishingly efficient the human minds mix of physics and chemistry truly is.
Digital computing, tho impressive that spicy autocomplete can do so much, its astounding that people believe the energy expense is worth the squeeze. For sure, LLMs are worthy of researching but this is all clearly not economically viable presently and is an artifact of VC speculation.
Troed Sångberg
in reply to nullagent • • •Brains are indeed extremely energy efficient at a level we don't understand, but I was more alluding to that according to all known science we're also just deterministic autocomplete machines.
This is such an inconvenient fact though so we tend to just claim - without any scientific backing - that "there must be more to it".
@markotway @cstross
Misuse Case
in reply to Troed Sångberg • • •@troed @markotway @cstross >> according to all known science we're also just deterministic autocomplete machines.
No. The scientific consensus on human cognition says the opposite of this.
Troed Sångberg
in reply to Misuse Case • • •@MisuseCase
Eh no. We know of no physics or chemistry that can result in anything except deterministic autocomplete.
(Thus you have some who talk about "quantum tubes" or pure dualism with "a soul outside of physics" etc)
Sabine Hossenfelder has a good video on why she doesn't think free will exists.
@nullagent @markotway @cstross
Misuse Case
in reply to Troed Sångberg • • •@troed @markotway @cstross >> We know of no physics or chemistry that can result in anything except deterministic autocomplete.
neurosciencenews.com/ai-human-…
Neuroscience News
Neuroscience NewsCharlie Stross
in reply to Misuse Case • • •Misuse Case
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Troed Sångberg
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross
Exactly. The air brushing against the hair on our arms is also input into the brain so we'll never be predictable.
@MisuseCase @nullagent @markotway
Rob Hughes
in reply to Troed Sångberg • • •There is a large debate about whether free will and determinism are compatible.
In any case, the question whether human cognition is deterministic is different from the question whether human cognition is computationally similar to autocomplete.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Rob Hughes • • •@robhughes @troed @MisuseCase @markotway
"Free will" as I understand it is a theological requirement (without it, original sin and redemption/damnation narratives make no sense), not anything we have any evidence for.
As an unbeliever I tend to roll my eyes when people start talking about free will, souls, or heaven and hell.
Jens Finkhäuser
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross @robhughes @troed @MisuseCase There's this fascinating thing where when you measure brain activity it's clear we take action *before* we make the decision to do so.
nature.com/articles/nn.2112
That's of course not entirely correct. What is more precise is that the brain can be shown to exhibit patterns that predict an action before we become aware of our decision.
Which means what we *experience* as freely making choices is an illusion, a story our brain tells itself.
Note...
Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain - Nature Neuroscience
Nature0ddj0bb
in reply to nullagent • • •there wont be a manhunt. There wont be national live news updates. There wont be loads of linkedin posts mourning the loss of a great person.
And everyone will continue to invest in openai.
Had the ceo of openai been found dead thered be a completely different movement in the corporate news media and tech industry
I am Jack's Lost 404
in reply to nullagent • • •Sensitive content