It's crazy how much fud is flying around, and legitimately buries good open research. It's also crazy what these giant corporations are explicitly saying what they're going to do, and that anyone buys it. TSMC's allegedly calling Sam Altman a 'podcast bro' is spot on, and I'd add "manipulative vampire" to that.
Talk to any long-time resident of localllama and similar "local" AI communities who actually dig into this stuff, and you'll find immense skepticism, not the crypto-like AI bros like you find on linkedin, twitter and such and blot everything out.
For real. Being a software engineer with basic knowledge in ML, I'm just sick of companies from every industry being so desperate to cling onto the hype train they're willing to label anything with AI, even if it has little or nothing to do with it, just to boost their stock value. I would be so uncomfortable being an employee having to do this.
For sure, it seems like 90% of ai startups are nothing more than front end wrappers for a gpt instance.
They're all built on top of OpenAI which is very unprofitable at the moment. Feels like the whole industry is built on a shaky foundation.
Putting the entire fate of your company in a different company (OpenAI) is not a great business move. I guess the successful AI startups will eventually transition to self-hosted models like Llama, if they survive that long.
As someone who was working really hard trying to get my company to be able use some classical ML (with very limited amounts of data), with some knowledge on how AI works, and just generally want to do some cool math stuff at work, being asked incessantly to shove AI into any problem that our execs think are “good sells” and be pressured to think about how we can “use AI” was a terrible feel. They now think my work is insufficient and has been tightening the noose on my team.
This. Exactly.
TSMC are probably making more money than anyone in this goldrush by selling the shovels and picks, so if that's their opinion, I feel people should listen...
There's little in the AI business plan other than hurling money at it and hoping job losses ensue.
TSMC doesn't really have official opinions, they take silicon orders for money and shrug happily. Being neutral is good for business.
Altman's scheme is just a whole other level of crazy though.
Seriously, I'd love to be enthusiastic about it because it's genuinely cool what you can do with math.
But the lies that are shoved in our faces are just so fucking much and so fucking egregious that it's pretty much impossible.
And on top of that LLMs are hugely overshadowing actual interesting approaches for funding.
I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:
A set of securities fraud charges.
8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.
He's out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there's a good chance that they won't be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?
So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he's telling the truth, he's endangering us all. If he's lying, then he's committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.
"When you're rich, they let you do it."
I really want to like AI, I’d love to have an intelligent AI assistant or something, but I just struggle to find any uses for it outside of some really niche cases or for basic brainstorming tasks. Otherwise, it just feels like alot of work for very little benefit or results that I can’t even trust or use.
It's useful.
I keep Qwen 32B loaded on my desktop pretty much whenever its on, as an (unreliable) assistant to analyze or parse big texts, to do quick chores or write scripts, to bounce ideas off of or even as a offline replacement for google translate (though I specifically use aya 32B for that).
It does "feel" different when the LLM is local, as you can manipulate the prompt syntax so easily, hammer it with multiple requests that come back really fast when it seems to get something wrong, not worry about refusals or data leakage and such.
Attractive. You got some pretty solid specs?
Rue the day I cheaped out on RAM. soldered RAMmmm
Soldered is better! It's sometimes faster, definitely faster if it happens to be lpddr.
But TBH the only thing that really matters his "how much VRAM do you have," and Qwen 32B slots in at 24GB, or maybe 16GB if the GPU is totally empty and you tune your quantization carefully. And the cheapest way to that (until 2025) is a used MI60, P40 or 3090.
I receive alerts when people are outside my house, using security cameras, Blue Iris, CodeProject AI, Node-RED and Home Assistant, using a Google Coral for local AI. Entirely local - no cloud services apart from Google's notification system to get notifications to my phone while I'm not home (which most Android apps use). That's a good use case for AI since it avoids false positives that occur with regular motion detection.
I've been curious about google coral, but their memory is so tiny I'm not sure what kinds of models you can run on them
A lot of people use them for the use case I described (object detection for security cameras), using either Blue Iris or Frigate. They work pretty well for that use case.
Wake word detection is a good use case too (eg if you're making your own smart assistant).
The Coral site lists a few use cases.
The saddest part is, this is going to cause yet another AI winter. The first few ones were caused by genuine over-enthusiasm but this one is purely fuelled by greed.
The AI ecosystem is flooded, we need a good bubble pop to slow down the massive waste of resources that our current info-remix-based-on-what-you-will-likely-react-positively-to shit-tier AI represents.
Agreed that’s why it’s so dangerous. These tech bros are going to do damage with their shitty products. It seems like it's Altman's goal, honestly.
He wants money/power, and he is getting it. The rest of the AI field will forever be haunted by his greed.
After getting my head around the basics of the way LLMs work I thought "people rely on this for information?", the model seems ok for tasks like summarisation though
I don’t love it for summarization. If I read a summary, my takeaway may be inaccurate.
Brainstorming is incredible. And revision suggestions. And drafting tedious responses, reformatting, parsing.
In all cases, nothing gets attributed to me unless I read every word and am in a position to verify the output. And I internalize nothing directly, besides philosophy or something. Sure can be an amazing starting point especially compared to a blank page.
It's good for coding if you train it on your own code base. Not great for writing very complex code since the models tend to hallucinate, but it's great for common patterns, and straightforward questions specific to your code base that can be answered based on existing code (eg "how do I load a user's most recent order given their email address?")
It's wild when you only know how to use SELECT in SQL, but after a dollar worth of prompting and 10 minutes of your time, you can have a significantly complex query you end up using multiple times a week.
the model seems ok for tasks like summarisation though
That and retrieval and the business use cases so far, but even then only if the results can be wrong somewhat frequently.
It's selling the future, but nobody knows if we can actually get there
It's selling an anticompetitive dystopia. It's selling a Facebook monopoly vs selling the Fediverse.
We dont need 7 trillion dollars of datacenters burning the Earth, we need collaborative, open source innovation.
The first part is true .... no one cares about the second part of your statement.
TSMC's allegedly calling Sam Altman a 'podcast bro' is spot on, and I'd add "manipulative vampire" to that.
When Mr. Altman visited TSMC’s headquarters in Taiwan shortly after he started his fund-raising effort, he told its executives that it would take $7 trillion and many years to build 36 semiconductor plants and additional data centers to fulfill his vision, two people briefed on the conversation said. It was his first visit to one of the multibillion-dollar plants.
TSMC’s executives found the idea so absurd that they took to calling Mr. Altman a “podcasting bro,” one of these people said. Adding just a few more chip-making plants, much less 36, was incredibly risky because of the money involved.
Ya, it's like machine learning but better. That's about it IMO.
Edit: As I have to spell it out: as opposed to (machine learning with) neural networks.
I mean... it is machine learning.
It's also neural networks, and probably some other CS structures.
AI is a category, and even specific implementations tend to use multiple techniques.
Well there is a very specific architecture "rut" the LLMs people use have fallen into, and even small attempts to break out (like with Jamba) don't seem to get much interest, unfortunately.
Sure, but LLMs aren't the only AI being used, nor will they eliminate the other forms of AI. As people see issues with the big LLMs, development focus will change to adopt other approaches.
There is real risk that the hype cycle around LLMs will smother other research in the cradle when the bubble pops.
The hyperscalers are dumping tens of billions of dollars into infrastructure investment every single quarter right now on the promise of LLMs. If LLMs don't turn into something with a tangible ROI, the term AI will become every bit as radioactive to investors in the future as it is lucrative right now.
Viable paths of research will become much harder to fund if investors get burned because the business model they're funding right now doesn't solidify beyond "trust us bro."
the term AI will become every bit as radioactive to investors in the future as it is lucrative right now.
Well you say that, but somehow crypto is still around despite most schemes being (IMO) a much more explicit scam. We have politicans supporting it.
Sure, but those are largely the big tech companies you're talking about, and research tends to come from universities and private orgs. That funding hasn't stopped, it just doesn't get the headlines like massive investments into LLMs currently do. The market goes in cycles, and once it finds something new and promising, it'll dump money into it until the next hot thing comes along.
There will be massive market consequences if AI fails to deliver on its promises (and I think it will, because the promises are ridiculous), and we get those every so often. If we look back about 25 years, we saw the same thing w/ the dotcom craze, where anything with a website got obscene amounts of funding, even if they didn't have a viable business model, and we had a massive crash. But important websites survived that bubble bursting, and the market recovered pretty quickly and within a decade we had yet another massive market correction due to another bubble (the housing market, mostly due to corruption in the financial sector).
That's how the market goes. I think AI will crash, and I think it'll likely crash in the next 5 years or so, but the underlying technologies will absolutely be a core part of our day-to-day life in the same way the Internet is after the dotcom burst. It'll also look quite a bit different IMO than what we're seeing today, and within 10 years of that crash, we'll likely be beyond where we were just before the crash, at least in terms of overall market capitalization.
It's a messy cycle, but it seems to work pretty well in aggregate.
Sure, but those are largely the big tech companies you’re talking about, and research tends to come from universities and private orgs.
Well, that's because the hyperscalers are the only ones who can afford it at this point. Altman has said ChatGPT 4 training cost in the neighborhood of $100M (largely subsidized by Microsoft). The scale of capital being set on fire in the pursuit of LLMs is just staggering. That's why I think the failure of LLMs will have serious knock-on effects with AI research generally.
To be clear: I don't disagree with you re: the fact that AI research will continue and will eventually recover. I just think that if the LLM bubble pops, it's going to set things back for years because it will be much more difficult for researchers to get funded for a long time going forward. It won't be "LLMs fail and everyone else continues on as normal," it's going to be "LLMs fail and have significant collateral damage on the research community."
The scale of capital being set on fire in the pursuit of LLMs is just staggering.
I'm guessing you weren't around in the 90s then? Because the amount of money set on fire on stupid dotcom startups was also staggering. Yet here we are, the winners survived and the market is completely recovered now (took about 15 years because 2008 happened).
I just think that if the LLM bubble pops, it’s going to set things back for years because it will be much more difficult for researchers to get funded for a long time going forward
Maybe. Or if the research is promising enough, investors will dump money into it just like they did with LLMs, and we'll be right back where we are now with ridiculous valuations.
I'm guessing you weren't around in the 90s then? Because the amount of money set on fire on stupid dotcom startups was also staggering.
The scale is very different. OpenAI needs to raise capital at a valuation far higher than any other startup in history just to keep the doors open another 18-24 months. And then continue to do so.
There's also a very large difference between far ranging bad investments and extremely concentrated ones. The current bubble is distinctly the latter. There hasn't really been a bubble completely dependent on massive capital investments by a handful of major players like this before.
There's OpenAI and Anthropic (and by proxy MS/Google/Amazon). Meta is a lesser player. Musk-backed companies are pretty much teetering at the edge of also rans and there's a huge cliff for everything after that.
It's hard for me to imagine investors that don't understand the technology now but getting burned by it being enthusiastic about investing in a new technology they don't understand that promises the same things, but is totally different this time, trust me. Institutional and systemic trauma is real.
(took about 15 years because 2008 happened).
I mean, that's kind of exactly what I'm saying? Not that it's irrecoverable, but that losing a decade plus of progress is significant. I think the disconnect is that you don't seem to think that's a big deal as long as things eventually bounce back. I see that as potentially losing out on a generation worth of researchers and one of the largest opportunity costs associated with the LLM craze.
OpenAI needs to raise capital at a valuation far higher than any other startup in history
The only difference is the concentration of wealth. Whether you spread the eggs across a dozen baskets or put them all in one doesn't matter if the farm producing the eggs has a salmonella outbreak. It's the same underlying problem whether it impacts a handful of companies or hundreds, investors are investing way too much in the same thing.
That said, the investment is still somewhat spread out among OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon (leaving Nvidia out intentionally here since their risk is limited). Each of those is investing a ton into AI, so if there's a problem in management instead of the underlying tech, then there will be winners and losers among that bunch, but if there's a problem with the underlying tech, all of them are going to get hit.
It’s hard for me to imagine investors that don’t understand the technology now but getting burned by it being enthusiastic about investing in a new technology they don’t understand that promises the same things
But that's just it, they'll market it differently. Apple has the "Apple intelligence" brand they're going for, and they're trying to distance themselves a bit from the rest of the pack. Amazon is largely betting on AI processing hardware, so they're a bit less exposed if consumers shift from one incarnation to another, provided they still use similar hardware for whatever that replacement is. One of those players will capitalize on the hysteria going the other direction and rebrand successfully to attract investors.
So if LLMs end up being a liability, we'll see a bunch of rebranding of similar tech (say, "real intelligence" or "intelligent digital assistant" or whatever). Some companies will transition successfully, others won't, but tech companies will find a way to keep the funding flowing.
losing a decade plus of progress is significant
But it's not real progress, it's inflated progress. If you look at average, inflation-adjust returns (CAGR, not simple average) over the past 30 years, from the start of the dotcom (1993 -> 2023), average returns are 7.5%/year. 20 years (1993 -> 2013) is 6.7%.
If you look at innovations, smartphones started coming out right after the dotcom bust, "Web 2.0" was coined in 1999 (peak of the dotcom bubble) and became a thing in the early 2000s, etc. There was a lot of innovation in tech, which seemed largely unaffected by the dotcom bubble.
So I'm really not worried about it. We had a massive tech correction in 2000, yet the decade following had some of the biggest changes in tech, a lot of it coming from the companies that survived the dotcom bubble. Likewise after the 2008 crash, the financial sector had a massive run. I don't see any reason for the AI bubble to be any different.
That's like saying breathing is like turning oxygen into carbon dioxide but better...
It is. It's that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.
Yep the current iteration is. But should we cross the threshold to full AGI… that’s either gonna be awesome or world ending. Not sure which.
Current LLMs cannot be AGI, no matter how big they are. The fundamental architecture just isn't right.
You’re absolutely right. LLMs are good at faking language and sometimes not even great at that. Not sure why I got downvoted but oh well. But AGI will be game changing if it happens.
Based on what I've witnessed so far, people will play with their AGI units for a bit and then put them down to continue scrolling memes.
Which means it is neither awesome, nor world-ending, but just boring/business as usual.
There are people way smarter than me that claim it will be a threshold and would likely grow exponentially after it’s crossed. I guess we won’t know for sure until it happens. I do agree most people get bored easily but if this thing is possible to think for itself without interaction it won’t matter if the humans get bored.
I know nothing about anything, but I unfoundedly believe we're still very far away from the computing power required for that. I think we still underestimate the power of biological brains.
Very likely. But 4 years ago I would have said we weren’t close to what these LLMs can do now so who knows.
What makes you think there's a threshold?
I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.
Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they're just tools we use without thinking about them.
I'm sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it's just the keyboard app on my phone.
The approach of LLMs without some sort of symbolic reasoning layer aren't actually able to hold a model of what their context is and their relationships. They predict the next token, but fall apart when you change the numbers in a problem or add some negation to the prompt.
Awesome for protein research, summarization, speech recognition, speech generation, deep fakes, spam creation, RAG document summary, brainstorming, content classification, etc. I don't even think we've found all the patterns they'd be great at predicting.
There are tons of great uses, but just throwing more data, memory, compute, and power at transformers is likely to hit a wall without new models. All the AGI hype is a bit overblown. That's not from me that's Noam Chomsky https://youtu.be/axuGfh4UR9Q?t=9271.
I've often thought LLMs could replace all of the C-suites and upper and middle management.
Funny how no companies push that as a possibility.
I almost expect that we’ll see some company reveal it has been letting an AI control the top level decision making for the business itself, including if and when to reveal the AI.
But the funny thing will be that all the executives and board members still have jobs and huge stock awards. They will all pat each other on the back for getting paid more money to do less work, by being bold and taking a risk to let the computer do half their job for them.
There's a name for it the phenomenon: the AI effect.
Yup.
I don't know why. The people marketing it have absolutely no understanding of what they're selling.
Best part is that I get paid if it works as they expect it to and I get paid if I have to decommission or replace it. I'm not the one developing the AI that they're wasting money on, they just demanded I use it.
That's true software engineering folks. Decoupling doesn't just make it easier to program and reuse, it saves your job when you need to retire something later too.
Their goal isn't to make AI.
The goal of both the VCs and the startups is to make money. That's why.
It’s not even to make money, they already do that. They need GROWTH. More money this quarter than last or the stockholders don’t get paid.
Growth doesn't mean revenue over cost anymore, it just means number go up. The easiest way to create growth from nothing is marketing tulips to venture capital and retail investors.
The people marketing it have absolutely no understanding of what they're selling.
Has it ever been any different? Like, I'm not in tech, I build signs for a living, and the people selling our signs have no idea what they're selling.
The worrying part is the implications of what they're claiming to sell. They're selling an imagined future in which there exists a class of sapient beings with no legal rights that corporations can freely enslave. How far that is from the reality of the tech doesn't matter, it's absolutely horrifying that this is something the ruling class wants enough to invest billions of dollars just for the chance of fantasizing about it.
I make DNNs (deep neural networks), the current trend in artificial intelligence modeling, for a living.
Much of my ancillary work consists of deflating/tempering the C-suite's hype and expectations of what "AI" solutions can solve or completely automate.
DNN algorithms can be powerful tools and muses in scientific endeavors, engineering, creativity and innovation. They aren't full replacements for the power of the human mind.
I can safely say that many, if not most, of my peers in DNN programming and data science are humble in our approach to developing these systems for deployment.
If anything, studying this field has given me an even more profound respect for the billions of years of evolution required to display the power and subtleties of intelligence as we narrowly understand it in an anthropological, neuro-scientific, and/or historical framework(s).
Sounds about right. There are some valid and good use cases for "AI", but the majority is just buzzword marketing.
That's about right. I've been using LLMs to automate a lot of cruft work from my dev job daily, it's like having a knowledgeable intern who sometimes impresses you with their knowledge but need a lot of guidance.
watch out; i learned the hard way in an interview that i do this so much that i can no longer create terraform & ansible playbooks from scratch.
even a basic api call from scratch was difficult to remember and i'm sure i looked like a hack to them since they treated me as such.
In addition, there have been these studies released (not so sure how well established, so take this with a grain of salt) lately, indicating a correlation with increased perceived efficiency/productivity, but also a strongly linked decrease in actual efficiency/productivity, when using LLMs for dev work.
After some initial excitement, I’ve dialed back using them to zero, and my contributions have been on the increase. I think it just feels good to spitball, which translates to heightened sense of excitement while working. But it’s really just much faster and convenient to do the boring stuff with snippets and templates etc, if not as exciting. We’ve been doing pair programming lately with humans, and while that’s slower and less efficient too, seems to contribute towards rise in quality and less problems in code review later, while also providing the spitballing side. In a much better format, I think, too, though I guess that’s subjective.
I mean, interviews have always been hell for me (often with multiple rounds of leetcode) so there's nothing new there for me lol
Same here but this one was especially painful since it was the closest match with my experience I've ever encountered in 20ish years and now I know that they will never give me the time of day again and; based on my experience in silicon valley; may end up on a thier blacklist permanently.
Blacklists are heavily overrated and exaggerated, I'd say there's no chance you're on a blacklist. Hell, if you interview with them 3 years later, it's entirely possible they have no clue who you are and end up hiring you - I've had literally that exact scenario happen.
The only way you'd end up on a blacklist is if you accidentally step on the owners dog or something like that.
Being on the other side of the interviewing table for the last 20ish years and being told that we're not going to hire people that everyone unanimously loved and we unquestionably needed more times that I want to remember makes me think that blacklists are common.
In all of the cases I've experienced in the last decade or so: people who had faang and old silicon on their resumes but couldn't do basic things like creating an ansible playbook from scratch were either an automatic addition to that list or at least the butt of a joke that pervades the company's cool aide drinker culture for years afterwards; especially so in recruiting.
Yes they'll eventually forget and I think it's proportional to how egregious or how close to home your perceived misrepresentation is to them.
I think I've probably only ever been blacklisted once in my entire career, and it's because I looked up the reviews of a company I applied to and they had some very concerning stuff so I just ghosted them completely and never answered their calls after we had already begun to play a bit of phone tag prior to that trying to arrange an interview.
In my defense, they took a good while to reply to my application and they never sent any emails just phone calls, which it's like, come on I'm a developer you know I don't want to sit on the phone all day like I'm a sales person or something, send an email to schedule an interview like every other company instead of just spamming phone calls lol
Agreed though, eventually they will forget, it just needs enough time, and maybe you'd not even want to work there.
AI as we know it does have its uses, but I would definitely agree that 90% of it is just marketing hype
The image generation features are fun, even though you have to browbeat the idiot AI into following the description.
You just haven't tried OpeningAI's latest orione model. A company employee said it is soooo smart, can you believe it?
And the government is like, goddamn we are so scareded of it.
Im telling you AGI december 2024, you'll will see!
Edit:
Is it so hard for people to see sarcasm?
Year of the Linux Deskto....oh wait wrong thread, same same though. If we just wait one more year, we'll have FULL FSD!
Next year, I promise, is the year we all switch to crypto, just wait!
In just two years, no one will be driving 4,000lb cars anymore, everyone just needs a Segway.
We're going to have "just walk out" grocery stores in two years, where you pick items off the shelf, and 10,000 outsourced Indians will review your purchase and complete your CC transaction in about a half hour. our awesome technology will handle everything, charging you for your groceries as you leave the store, in just two more years!
I really thought by making intentional mistakes in my comment people would be able to see the OBVIOUS sarcasm, but I guess not....
I think when the hype dies down in a few years, we'll settle into a couple of useful applications for ML/AI, and a lot will be just thrown out.
I have no idea what will be kept and what will be tossed but I'm betting there will be more tossed than kept.
I recently saw a video of AI designing an engine, and then simulating all the toolpaths to be able to export the G code for a CNC machine. I don't know how much of what I saw is smoke and mirrors, but even if that is a stretch goal it is quite significant.
An entire engine? That sounds like a marketing plot. But if you take smaller chunks let's say the shape of a combustion chamber or the shape of a intake or exhaust manifold. It's going to take white noise and just start pattern matching and monkeys on typewriter style start churning out horrible pieces through a simulator until it finds something that tests out as a viable component. It has a pretty good chance of turning out individual pieces that are either cheaper or more efficient than what we've dreamed up.
AI is like the calculator for the mathematician. A very useful tool that allows you to be more efficient but is completely useless without someone capable of handling it.
and then simulating all the toolpaths to be able to export the G code for a CNC machine. I don’t know how much of what I saw is smoke and mirrors, but even if that is a stretch goal it is quite significant.
Damn, I ascended to become an AI and I didn't realise it.
AI is very useful in medical sectors, if coupled with human intervention. The very tedious works of radiologists to rule out normal imaging and its variants (which accounts for over 80% cases) can be automated with AI. Many of the common presenting symptoms can be well guided to diagnosis with some meticulous use of AI tools. Some BCI such as bioprosthosis can also be immensely benefitted with AI.
The key is its work must be monitored with clinicians. As much valuable the private information of patients is, blindly feeding everything to an AI can have disastrous consequences.
A Market place, where people can generate their ideas of jewellery and order them after. Makes life of goldsmiths and customers way more easy. I do not think aI will leave this project, for example.
Snort might actually be a good real world application that stands to benefit from ML, so for security there's some sort of hopefulness.
What happened to Linus? He looks so old now...
He got old.
Not especially old, though; he looks like a 54yo dev. Reminds me of my uncles when they were 54yo devs.
As a 46 year old dev I'm starting to look that way too.
I guess having 3 kids will do that to you.
That, and developing software for 30+ years.
That and leading an open source project for 30 years.
THE open source project.
Whether you're leading a project or not, time will have pretty much the same impact. He's in his mid-50s, and he looks pretty good for that age.
I mean he's aging quite well given his position... Many people burn out way earlier.
I told him not to go to that beach.
[citation needed]^/s^
That's an excessive amount of aging is what folks are seeing. Not that he's just old.
He's lost a lot of weight in 4 years so that's probably exacerbating the wtf.
He's 54, I think he looks pretty average for that age. He looks like an old dad, because he is.
he aged
Source?
What happened to he is happening now to you.
If you find out what happened, let me know, because I think it's happening to me too.
People age. You don't look the same as in 2010 either, I know that without having any idea what you look like.
He's 54 years old
Oxidative stress is a bitch
Time
Wow, yeah that's a big difference from how I remember him
He has a real Michael McKean vibe
It's like he aged 10 years in the past 2 years... damn
I am thinking of deploying a RAG system to ingest all of Linus's emails, commit messages and pull request comments, and we will have a Linus chatbot.
Hold on there Satan... let's be reasonable here.
The only time I've seen AI work well are for things like game development, mainly the upscaling of textures and filling in missing frames of older games so they can run at higher frames without being choppy. Maybe even have applications for getting more voice acting done... If the SAG and Silicon Valley can find an arrangement for that that works out well for both parties..
If not for that I'd say 10% reality was being.... incredibly favorable to the tech bros
^^
^^^
he isn't wrong
If anything he's being a bit generous.
I play around with the paid version of chatgpt and I still don't have any practical use for it. it's just a toy at this point.
I used chatGPT to help make looking up some syntax on a niche scripting language over the weekend to speed up the time I spent working so I could get back to the weekend.
Then, yesterday, I spent time talking to a colleague who was familiar with the language to find the real syntax because chatGPT just made shit up and doesn't seem to have been accurate about any of the details I asked about.
Though it did help me realize that this whole time when I thought I was frying things, I was often actually steaming them, so I guess it balances out a bit?
I use shell_gpt with OpenAI api key so that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for their web interface which is way too expensive. I topped up my account with 5$ back in March and I still haven't use it up. It is OK for getting info about very well established info where doing a web search would be more exhausting than asking chatgpt. But every time I try something more esoteric it will make up shit, like non existent options for CLI tools
ugh hallucinating commands is such a pain
It's useful for my firmware development, but it's a tool like any other. Pros and cons.
Like with any new technology. Remember the blockchain hype a few years back? Give it a few years and we will have a handful of areas where it makes sense and the rest of the hype will die off.
Everyone sane probably realizes this. No one knows for sure exactly where it will succeed so a lot of money and time is being spent on a 10% chance for a huge payout in case they guessed right.
There's an area where blockchain makes sense!?!
Git is a sort of proto-blockchain -- well, it's a ledger anyway. It is fairly useful. (Fucking opaque compared to subversion or other centralized systems that didn't have the ledger, but I digress...)
Cryptocurrencies can be useful as currencies. Not very useful as investment though.
It has some application in technical writing, data transformation and querying/summarization but it is definitely being oversold.
Yep, Ik ai should die someday.
Oh please. Wait until they release double-sided, double-density 128bit AI quantum blockchain that runs on premises/in the cloud edge hybrid.
I'm waiting for the part that it gets used for things that are not lazy, manipulative and dishonest. Until then, I'm sitting it out like Linus.
AI has been used for these things for decades, they are just in the background and not noticed by laypeople
Though the biggest issue is that when people say "AI" today, they mean specifically LLMs, but the world of AI is so much larger than that
I’m waiting for the part that it gets used for things that are not lazy
Replacing menial or boring tasks is like 90% of what I'm hoping from it.
This is where I'm at. The push right now has nft pump and dump energy.
The moment someone says ai to me right now I auto disengage. When the dust settles, I'll look at it seriously.
Just chiming in as another guy who works in AI who agrees with this assessment.
But it's a little bit worrisome that we all seem to think we're in the 10%.
it's a little bit worrisome that we all seem to think we're in the 10%.
A bit like how when you poll drivers on how good they think they are at driving, the vast majority say they're better than average lol
That's possible though, if there are some really bad drivers screwing the average.
Edit: it's probably even true in this case, it just depends on how you define 'good'. For example if you define it by getting tickets, only 36% of drivers are issued tickets. The average number of tickets issued is > 0 but the majority of drivers aren't issued tickets, the average is skewed, because most drivers are at 0.
I don't know how you'd measure driving "goodness", but I expect the distribution would be something like exponential (there are billions of non-drivers, and only a few rally/stunt drivers). So the average is likely to be higher than the median.
Linus is known for his generosity.
Linus is a generous man.
Dude...
What?
True. 10% is very generous.
Decided to say something popular after his snafu, I see.
Ai bad gets them every time.
No AI is a very real thing... just not LLMs, those are pure marketing
The latest llms get a perfect score on the south Korean SAT and can pass the bar. More than pure marketing if you ask me. That does not mean 90% of business that claim ai are nothing more than marketing or the business that are pretty much just a front end for GPT APIs. llms like claud even check their work for hallucinations. Even if we limited all ai to llms they would still be groundbreaking.
Korean SAT are highly standardized in multiple choice form and there is an immense library of past exams that both test takers and examiners use. I would be more impressed if the LLMs could show also step by step problem work out...
Claud 3.5 and o1 might be able to do that; if not, they are close to being able to do that. Still better than 99.99% of earthly humans
You seem to be in the camp of believing the hype. See this write up of an apple paper detailing how adding simple statements that should not impact the answer to the question severely disrupts many of the top model's abilities.
In Bloom's taxonomy of the 6 stages of higher level thinking I would say they enter the second stage of 'understanding' only in a small number of contexts, but we give them so much credit because as a society our supposed intelligence tests for people have always been more like memory tests.
Exactly... People are conflating the ability to parrot an answer based on machine-levels of recall (which is frankly impressive) vs the machine actually understanding something and being able to articulate how the machine itself arrived at a conclusion (which, in programming circles, would be similar to a form of "introspection"). LLM is not there yet
100% hyped by the people who've watched a few youtube videos and now claim they're an expert
And then people will complain about that saying it’s almost all hype and no substance.
Then that one tech bro will keep insisting that lemmy is being unfair to AI and there are so many good use cases.
No one is denying the 10% use cases, we just don’t think it’s special or needs extra attention since those use cases already had other possible algorithmic solutions.
Tech bros need to realize, even if there are some use cases for AI, there has not been any revolution, stop trying to make it happen and enjoy your new slightly better tool in silence.
Hi! It's me, the guy you discussed this with the other day! The guy that said Lemmy is full of AI wet blankets.
I am 100% with Linus AND would say the 10% good use cases can be transformative.
Since there isn't any room for nuance on the Internet, my comment seemed to ruffle feathers. There are definitely some folks out there that act like ALL AI is worthless and LLMs specifically have no value. I provided a list of use cases that I use pretty frequently where it can add value. (Then folks started picking it apart with strawmen).
I gotta say though this wave of AI tech feels different. It reminds me of the early days of the web/computing in the late 90s early 2000s. Where it's fun, exciting, and people are doing all sorts of weird,quirky shit with it, and it's not even close to perfect. It breaks a lot and has limitations but their is something there. There is a lot of promise.
Like I said else where, it ain't replacing humans any time soon, we won't have AGI for decades, and it's not solving world hunger. That's all hype bro bullshit. But there is actual value here.
Hi! It's me, the guy you discussed this with the other day! The guy that said Lemmy is full of AI wet blankets.
Omg you found me in another post. I’m not even mad; I do like how passionate you are about things.
Since there isn't any room for nuance on the Internet, my comment seemed to ruffle feathers. There are definitely some folks out there that act like ALL AI is worthless and LLMs specifically have no value. I provided a list of use cases that I use pretty frequently where it can add value. (Then folks started picking it apart with strawmen).
What you’re talking about is polarization and yeah, it’s a big issue.
This is a good example, I never did any strawman nor disagree with the fact that it can be useful in some shape or form. I was trying to say its value is much much lower than what people claim to be.
But that’s the issue with polarization, me saying there is much less value can be interpreted as absolute zero, and I apologize for contributing to the polarization.
Mr. Torvalds is truly a generous man, giving the current AI market an analysis of 10% usefulness is probably a decimal or two more than will end up panning out once the hype bubble pops.
I agree with Mr. Torvalds
That's my usual feeling with Linus takes.
Well, I agree, but he could be nicer about it.
Seems generous, might be more like 5% reality.
Just like Furbys
That's probably true about all new technology that VCs throw billions at.
We lived more than a decade of those decisions, when borrowing money was cheap, and VC was investing in startups selling juice machines.
game devs gonna have to use different language to describe what used to be simply called "enemy AI" where exactly zero machine learning is involved
Logic and Path-finding?
CPU
AI is nothing more than a way for big businesses to automate more work and fire more people.
and do that at the expense of 30+ years of power reduction and efficiency gains, to the point that private companies are literally buying/building/restarting old power plants just to cover the insane power demand, because literally operating a power plant is cheaper than paying the energy costs.
For the common every day person its 3d tv and every other bullshit fad that burned brilliantly for all of 3 seconds before snuffing itself out, leaving people to have had paid for overpriced garbage thats no longer useful.
AI is nothing more than a way for big businesses to automate more work and fire more people.
All technology in human history has done that. What are you proposing? Reject technology to keep people employed on inefficient tasks?
At some point people need to start thinking that is better to end capitalism that to return to monke.
There was a great article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results years ago about the development of Artificial Stupidity (AS). I always do a mental translation to AS when ever I see AI.
Yeah, he's right. AI is mostly used by corps to enshittificate their products for just extra profit
I admit I understand nothing about ai and haven't used it in any way nor do I plan to. It feels wrong for me and I believe it might fuck us harder than social media ever could.
But the pictures it creates, the stories and conversations don't seem like hot air. And I guess, compared to the internet we are at the stage where the modem is still singing the songs of its people. There is more to come.
I heard it can code at a level where entry positions might be in danger to be swapped for ai. It detects cancer visually, recognizes people by the way they walk in China.
Also I fear that vulnerable persons might fall for those conversation bots in a world where there is less and less personal contact.
Gotta admit I'm a little afraid it will make most of us useless in the future.
It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like "delve"). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn't alive. It isn't even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.
Don't worry, human toil isn't going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of "enhanced" products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn't the same as having power over other humans. We won't let computers make us all useless.
Thanks for easing my mind a little. You definetly did in perspective to labor.
You also reminded me I already had my first encounter with a callcenter AI by telekom and it was just as useless as the human equivalent, they seem to get similar training!
I just hope it won't hinder or replace interhuman connection on a larger scale cause in this sphere mediocrity might be enough and we are already lacking there.
The albeit small but present virtual girlfriend culture in Japan really shocked me and I feel we are not far away from things like AI-droid wives for example.
In a way he’s right, but it depends! If you take even a common example like Chat GPT or the native object detection used in iPhone cameras, you’d see that there’s a lot of cool stuff already enabled by our current way of building these tools. The limitation right now, I think, is reacting to new information or scenarios which a model isn’t trained on, which is where all the current systems break. Humans do well in new scenarios based on their cognitive flexibility, and at least I am unaware of a good framework for instilling cognitive flexibility in machines.
and that 10% isnt really real, just a gabbier dr.sbaitso
Idk man, my doctors seem pretty fucking impressed with AI's capabilities to make diagnoses by analyzing images like MRI's.
then you are a fortunate rarity. most posts about the tech complain about ai just rearranging what it is told and regurgitating it with added spice
I think that is because most people are only aware of its use as what are, effectively, chat bots. Which, while the most widely used application, is one of its least useful. Medical image analysis is one of the big places it is making strides in. I am told, by a friend in aerospace, that it is showing massive potential for a variety of engineering uses. His firm has been working on using it to design, or modify, things like hulls, air frames, etc. Industrial uses, such as these, are showing a lot of promise, it seems.
thats good. be nice if all the current ai developers would aim that way
That makes sense. He's old enough and close enough thematically to have seen a few of these tech hype cycles.
I dunno about him; but genuinely I'm excited about AI. Blows my mind each passing day ;)
it is basically like how self improvement folks are using quantum
He is correct. It is mostly people cashing out on stuff that isn't there.
"duh."
Nice replacement topic after the maintainer drama last week
Yea this is so blatant I'm not even going to click on that shit.
I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow. I've used AI image generators to put something I wanted into the concept stage before I paid an artist to do the work with the revisions I wanted that I couldn't get AI to produce properly.
And first and foremost, they're a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it. They are terrible at deducing things themselves, because they can't 'think', or coming up with solutions that others haven't already - but so long as people are aware of those limitations, then they're a pretty good tool to have.
It's a reactionary opinion when people jump to the 'but they're stealing art!' -- isn't your brain also stealing art when it's inspired by others art? Artists don't just POOF, and have the capability to be artists. They learn slowly over time, using others as inspiration or as training to improve. That's all stable diffusors do - just a lot faster.
How’s he wrong?
Did you actually listen to what he said or are you just reading the headline and making it fit another narrative to respond to?
Because he also said he thinks it’s going to change the world, he just hates the marketing BS that’s overhyping it.
Probably because, as anyone who’s actually used AI knows, it has some core weaknesses. But the marketers are happy to gloss over that lie and just say that it will be able to do nearly anything.
He said it’s interesting, but to give it five years to see how it’s actually useful, which is probably the most sane take you can have about AI imo.
It will be interesting when the bubble pops, because that's probably when we'll see the useful things it is actually good at
Summarizing documents, writing documents you don't want to (within reason), and... whatever the hell Neuro-sama is doing on Vedal's channel, are like the only ones i've found so far that kind of work. And I guess image generation.
It's amazingly good at moderating user content to flag for moderator review. Existing text analysis completely falls down beyond keyword filtering tbh.
It's really good at sentiment analysis. Which is great for things like user reviews. The Amazon ai notes on products are actually brilliant at summarizing the pros and cons of a product. I work for a holiday let company and we experimented with using it to find customers we need to follow up with and the results were amazing.
It smashes other automated translating services as well.
I use it a lot as a programmer to very quickly learn new topics. Also as an interactive docs that you can ask follow up questions to. I can pick up a new language as I go much faster than with traditional resources.
It's honestly a complete game changer.
It’s honestly a complete game changer.
It is, both in good and bad ways. The problem, as Linus and others here are pointing out, is that marketing pushes the good and downplays/ignores the bad, so there's going to be a rough adjustment period as people eventually see through the BS and find the issues, and the longer that takes, the harder things will crash.
There are plenty of good uses of modern AI approaches, they're just far fewer than the ones being marketed these days.
The one place where I sincerely hope it takes root and succeeds is in medicine. Having better drugs, helping to identify potential problems or diseases, identifying health patterns (all with human review and proper trials, naturally)...
It's not even close to the magical AGI that tech bros are promising, but it is good at digesting data, and science and medicine are full of that. Plus, given how overworked doctors and nurses can be, having a preliminary analysis from a computer that doesn't get tired or overworked seems like it would probably help with accurate diagnosis.
Which is how new technologies tend to go see what sticks after exploring what is possible. So it shouldn't be surprising that ai is goong through the motions, but it is getting annoying how fast it is ruining functioning systems by being jammed in with no guardrails.
But, it also means we get Sam Altman as the next Elon Musk if he cashes in before the pop. And whatever other tech bros do the same. More filthy-rich men with the emotional maturity of a 12 year old.
ah yes it's reactionary to checks notes not support the righteous biggest bubble since dotcom era
you okay out there bud?
You might want to look up the definition of reactionary. Because that's...exactly what it means. To oppose reform/advancements.
You okay there bud?
In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante—the previous political state of society—which the person believes possessed positive characteristics that are absent from contemporary society.
Congratulations -- Currently you and 18 others are not smarter than an average high schooler.
Opposing actual fraud isn't what reactionary means.
You've got a pretty high bar of proof for proving "actual fraud"...
You can't provably say that this is a "bubble" as claimed. The tools do what they purport to do. Where's the fraud?
It's not remotely within the realm of plausibility that Sam Altman genuinely believes any of the horseshit he spews. (And that's ignoring that they gained their funding by lying about the core intent of their organization by pretending to be serving the public interest and not profiteering.)
It's not remotely within the realm of plausibility that Sam Altman genuinely believes any of the horseshit he spews.
Welcome to earth. That's basically every business ever, and you'll quite literally never be able to prove that in court; which is the litmus test for this claim.
Speaking as someone who worked on AI, and is a fervent (local) AI enthusiast... it's 90% marketing and hype, at least.
These things are tools, they spit out tons of garbage, they basically can't be used for anything where the output could likely be confidently wrong, and the way they're trained is still morally dubious at best. And the corporate API business model of "stifle innovation so we can hold our monopoly then squeeze users" is hellish.
As you pointed out, generative AI is a fantastic tool, but it is a TOOL, that needs some massive changes and improvements, wrapped up in hype that gives it a bad name... I drank some of the kool-aid too when llama 1 came out, but you have to look at the market and see how much fud and nonsense is flying around.
As another (local) AI enthusiast I think the point where AI goes from "great" to "just hype" is when it's expected to generate the correct response, image, etc on the first try.
For example, telling an AI to generate a dozen images from a prompt then picking a good one or re-working the prompt a few times to get what you want. That works fantastically well 90% of the time (assuming you're generating something it has been trained on).
Expecting AI to respond with the correct answer when given a query > 50% of the time or expecting it not to get it dangerously wrong? Hype. 100% hype.
It'll be a number of years before AI is trustworthy enough not to hallucinate bullshit or generate the exact image you want on the first try.
Its great at brainstorming, fiction making, a unreliable intern-like but very fast assistant and so on... but none of that is very profitbable.
Hence you get OpenAI and such trying to sell it as an omiscient chatbot and (most profitably) an employee replacement.
I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow.
Half of the people here linus included must have never use stable diffusion
they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it
This is what I've seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn't that same effort have been invested in Google Search?
If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn't that same effort have been invested in Google Search?
I'd rather a world where 10 companies can compete with google search with AIs, than where they dump money into a monopoly.
If you don't feel like discussing this and won't do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don't have to reply to me at all.
The content is not unavailable to search engines. AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it. I don't know what point you were trying to make that I missed, it wasn't on purpose, I assure you.
AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it
Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?
Yeah. Money. Google has an incentive to make search results less accurate to get you to click around and interact with more ads. As it currently stands, AI models aren't inserting advertisements; though I suspect that's only a matter of time.
And that's more or less what I was aiming for, so we're back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:
it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines
The point is that there isn't something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven't found AI to be superior at all, but that's a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.
That's kind of how things work you know.
AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.
Yeah, would you say the original iPhone is any good today? No. Because everything got better. That's how things work. AI of today, in 20 years is probably going to be considered to suck.
That's how that works. When things are better than other things, we consider them good.
If you are just blatantly copying art, well yeah you're stealing it.
He isnt wrong. This comes from somebody who technically uses ai daily to help develop ( github copilot in visual studio to assist in code prediction based on the code base of the solution ), but AI is marketed even worse than blockchain back in 2017. Its everywhere, in every product, even if it doesnt have ai or has nothing to do with it. Monitor ai shit? Mouse with ai? Hell, ive seen a sketch of a fucking toaster with 'ai'.
There is shit like microsoft recall, apple intelligence, bing co pilot, office co pilot, ...
All of those are just... Nothing special or useful.
There are also chatbots which bring nothing new to the table either.
Everyone and everything wants to market there stuff with ai and its disgusting.
Does that mean that current ai tech cant bring anything to the table? No, it totally can, but 90% of ai stuff out there is, just like linus says, marketing bullshit.
Let me guess. Dumped by an art girl and anxious about the $600 you invested?
AI can give me a blueprint for my logic. Then I, as a developer, make the code run. Cuts my scripting time in half.
Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.
I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.
Sure, when you're doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it's pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That's great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.
But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.
And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn't yet triggered update notifications, etc... well, now we're in the red, AND I'm pissed off.
So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it's more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we're going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.
So basically just like linux. Except linux has no marketing.....So 10% reality, and 90% uhhhhhhhhhh.......
What
Some Linux bad Windows good troll
Did I fall into a 1999 Slashdot comment section somehow?
That says more about your ignorance than anything about AI or Linux.
Never heard of Android I guess?
So basically just like linux. Except linux has no marketing
Except for the most popular OS on the Internet, of course.
You're aware Linux basically runs the Internet, right?
You’re aware Linux basically runs the Internet World, right?
Billions of devices run Linux. It is an amazing feat!
90% angry nerds fighting each other over what answer is “right”
As a fervent AI enthusiast, I disagree.
...I'd say it's 97% hype and marketing.
It's crazy how much fud is flying around, and legitimately buries good open research. It's also crazy what these giant corporations are explicitly saying what they're going to do, and that anyone buys it. TSMC's allegedly calling Sam Altman a 'podcast bro' is spot on, and I'd add "manipulative vampire" to that.
Talk to any long-time resident of localllama and similar "local" AI communities who actually dig into this stuff, and you'll find immense skepticism, not the crypto-like AI bros like you find on linkedin, twitter and such and blot everything out.
For real. Being a software engineer with basic knowledge in ML, I'm just sick of companies from every industry being so desperate to cling onto the hype train they're willing to label anything with AI, even if it has little or nothing to do with it, just to boost their stock value. I would be so uncomfortable being an employee having to do this.
For sure, it seems like 90% of ai startups are nothing more than front end wrappers for a gpt instance.
They're all built on top of OpenAI which is very unprofitable at the moment. Feels like the whole industry is built on a shaky foundation.
Putting the entire fate of your company in a different company (OpenAI) is not a great business move. I guess the successful AI startups will eventually transition to self-hosted models like Llama, if they survive that long.
As someone who was working really hard trying to get my company to be able use some classical ML (with very limited amounts of data), with some knowledge on how AI works, and just generally want to do some cool math stuff at work, being asked incessantly to shove AI into any problem that our execs think are “good sells” and be pressured to think about how we can “use AI” was a terrible feel. They now think my work is insufficient and has been tightening the noose on my team.
This. Exactly.
TSMC are probably making more money than anyone in this goldrush by selling the shovels and picks, so if that's their opinion, I feel people should listen...
There's little in the AI business plan other than hurling money at it and hoping job losses ensue.
TSMC doesn't really have official opinions, they take silicon orders for money and shrug happily. Being neutral is good for business.
Altman's scheme is just a whole other level of crazy though.
Seriously, I'd love to be enthusiastic about it because it's genuinely cool what you can do with math.
But the lies that are shoved in our faces are just so fucking much and so fucking egregious that it's pretty much impossible.
And on top of that LLMs are hugely overshadowing actual interesting approaches for funding.
I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:
A set of securities fraud charges.
8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.
He's out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there's a good chance that they won't be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?
So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he's telling the truth, he's endangering us all. If he's lying, then he's committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.
"When you're rich, they let you do it."
I really want to like AI, I’d love to have an intelligent AI assistant or something, but I just struggle to find any uses for it outside of some really niche cases or for basic brainstorming tasks. Otherwise, it just feels like alot of work for very little benefit or results that I can’t even trust or use.
It's useful.
I keep Qwen 32B loaded on my desktop pretty much whenever its on, as an (unreliable) assistant to analyze or parse big texts, to do quick chores or write scripts, to bounce ideas off of or even as a offline replacement for google translate (though I specifically use aya 32B for that).
It does "feel" different when the LLM is local, as you can manipulate the prompt syntax so easily, hammer it with multiple requests that come back really fast when it seems to get something wrong, not worry about refusals or data leakage and such.
Attractive. You got some pretty solid specs?
Rue the day I cheaped out on RAM. soldered RAMmmm
Soldered is better! It's sometimes faster, definitely faster if it happens to be lpddr.
But TBH the only thing that really matters his "how much VRAM do you have," and Qwen 32B slots in at 24GB, or maybe 16GB if the GPU is totally empty and you tune your quantization carefully. And the cheapest way to that (until 2025) is a used MI60, P40 or 3090.
I receive alerts when people are outside my house, using security cameras, Blue Iris, CodeProject AI, Node-RED and Home Assistant, using a Google Coral for local AI. Entirely local - no cloud services apart from Google's notification system to get notifications to my phone while I'm not home (which most Android apps use). That's a good use case for AI since it avoids false positives that occur with regular motion detection.
I've been curious about google coral, but their memory is so tiny I'm not sure what kinds of models you can run on them
A lot of people use them for the use case I described (object detection for security cameras), using either Blue Iris or Frigate. They work pretty well for that use case.
Wake word detection is a good use case too (eg if you're making your own smart assistant).
The Coral site lists a few use cases.
The saddest part is, this is going to cause yet another AI winter. The first few ones were caused by genuine over-enthusiasm but this one is purely fuelled by greed.
The AI ecosystem is flooded, we need a good bubble pop to slow down the massive waste of resources that our current info-remix-based-on-what-you-will-likely-react-positively-to shit-tier AI represents.
Agreed that’s why it’s so dangerous. These tech bros are going to do damage with their shitty products. It seems like it's Altman's goal, honestly.
He wants money/power, and he is getting it. The rest of the AI field will forever be haunted by his greed.
After getting my head around the basics of the way LLMs work I thought "people rely on this for information?", the model seems ok for tasks like summarisation though
I don’t love it for summarization. If I read a summary, my takeaway may be inaccurate.
Brainstorming is incredible. And revision suggestions. And drafting tedious responses, reformatting, parsing.
In all cases, nothing gets attributed to me unless I read every word and am in a position to verify the output. And I internalize nothing directly, besides philosophy or something. Sure can be an amazing starting point especially compared to a blank page.
It's good for coding if you train it on your own code base. Not great for writing very complex code since the models tend to hallucinate, but it's great for common patterns, and straightforward questions specific to your code base that can be answered based on existing code (eg "how do I load a user's most recent order given their email address?")
It's wild when you only know how to use SELECT in SQL, but after a dollar worth of prompting and 10 minutes of your time, you can have a significantly complex query you end up using multiple times a week.
That and retrieval and the business use cases so far, but even then only if the results can be wrong somewhat frequently.
It's selling the future, but nobody knows if we can actually get there
It's selling an anticompetitive dystopia. It's selling a Facebook monopoly vs selling the Fediverse.
We dont need 7 trillion dollars of datacenters burning the Earth, we need collaborative, open source innovation.
The first part is true .... no one cares about the second part of your statement.
What's the source for that? It sounds hilarious
https://web.archive.org/web/20240930204245/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-electricity.html
Ya, it's like machine learning but better. That's about it IMO.
Edit: As I have to spell it out: as opposed to (machine learning with) neural networks.
I mean... it is machine learning.
It's also neural networks, and probably some other CS structures.
AI is a category, and even specific implementations tend to use multiple techniques.
Well there is a very specific architecture "rut" the LLMs people use have fallen into, and even small attempts to break out (like with Jamba) don't seem to get much interest, unfortunately.
Sure, but LLMs aren't the only AI being used, nor will they eliminate the other forms of AI. As people see issues with the big LLMs, development focus will change to adopt other approaches.
There is real risk that the hype cycle around LLMs will smother other research in the cradle when the bubble pops.
The hyperscalers are dumping tens of billions of dollars into infrastructure investment every single quarter right now on the promise of LLMs. If LLMs don't turn into something with a tangible ROI, the term AI will become every bit as radioactive to investors in the future as it is lucrative right now.
Viable paths of research will become much harder to fund if investors get burned because the business model they're funding right now doesn't solidify beyond "trust us bro."
Well you say that, but somehow crypto is still around despite most schemes being (IMO) a much more explicit scam. We have politicans supporting it.
Sure, but those are largely the big tech companies you're talking about, and research tends to come from universities and private orgs. That funding hasn't stopped, it just doesn't get the headlines like massive investments into LLMs currently do. The market goes in cycles, and once it finds something new and promising, it'll dump money into it until the next hot thing comes along.
There will be massive market consequences if AI fails to deliver on its promises (and I think it will, because the promises are ridiculous), and we get those every so often. If we look back about 25 years, we saw the same thing w/ the dotcom craze, where anything with a website got obscene amounts of funding, even if they didn't have a viable business model, and we had a massive crash. But important websites survived that bubble bursting, and the market recovered pretty quickly and within a decade we had yet another massive market correction due to another bubble (the housing market, mostly due to corruption in the financial sector).
That's how the market goes. I think AI will crash, and I think it'll likely crash in the next 5 years or so, but the underlying technologies will absolutely be a core part of our day-to-day life in the same way the Internet is after the dotcom burst. It'll also look quite a bit different IMO than what we're seeing today, and within 10 years of that crash, we'll likely be beyond where we were just before the crash, at least in terms of overall market capitalization.
It's a messy cycle, but it seems to work pretty well in aggregate.
Well, that's because the hyperscalers are the only ones who can afford it at this point. Altman has said ChatGPT 4 training cost in the neighborhood of $100M (largely subsidized by Microsoft). The scale of capital being set on fire in the pursuit of LLMs is just staggering. That's why I think the failure of LLMs will have serious knock-on effects with AI research generally.
To be clear: I don't disagree with you re: the fact that AI research will continue and will eventually recover. I just think that if the LLM bubble pops, it's going to set things back for years because it will be much more difficult for researchers to get funded for a long time going forward. It won't be "LLMs fail and everyone else continues on as normal," it's going to be "LLMs fail and have significant collateral damage on the research community."
I'm guessing you weren't around in the 90s then? Because the amount of money set on fire on stupid dotcom startups was also staggering. Yet here we are, the winners survived and the market is completely recovered now (took about 15 years because 2008 happened).
Maybe. Or if the research is promising enough, investors will dump money into it just like they did with LLMs, and we'll be right back where we are now with ridiculous valuations.
The scale is very different. OpenAI needs to raise capital at a valuation far higher than any other startup in history just to keep the doors open another 18-24 months. And then continue to do so.
There's also a very large difference between far ranging bad investments and extremely concentrated ones. The current bubble is distinctly the latter. There hasn't really been a bubble completely dependent on massive capital investments by a handful of major players like this before.
There's OpenAI and Anthropic (and by proxy MS/Google/Amazon). Meta is a lesser player. Musk-backed companies are pretty much teetering at the edge of also rans and there's a huge cliff for everything after that.
It's hard for me to imagine investors that don't understand the technology now but getting burned by it being enthusiastic about investing in a new technology they don't understand that promises the same things, but is totally different this time, trust me. Institutional and systemic trauma is real.
I mean, that's kind of exactly what I'm saying? Not that it's irrecoverable, but that losing a decade plus of progress is significant. I think the disconnect is that you don't seem to think that's a big deal as long as things eventually bounce back. I see that as potentially losing out on a generation worth of researchers and one of the largest opportunity costs associated with the LLM craze.
The only difference is the concentration of wealth. Whether you spread the eggs across a dozen baskets or put them all in one doesn't matter if the farm producing the eggs has a salmonella outbreak. It's the same underlying problem whether it impacts a handful of companies or hundreds, investors are investing way too much in the same thing.
That said, the investment is still somewhat spread out among OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon (leaving Nvidia out intentionally here since their risk is limited). Each of those is investing a ton into AI, so if there's a problem in management instead of the underlying tech, then there will be winners and losers among that bunch, but if there's a problem with the underlying tech, all of them are going to get hit.
But that's just it, they'll market it differently. Apple has the "Apple intelligence" brand they're going for, and they're trying to distance themselves a bit from the rest of the pack. Amazon is largely betting on AI processing hardware, so they're a bit less exposed if consumers shift from one incarnation to another, provided they still use similar hardware for whatever that replacement is. One of those players will capitalize on the hysteria going the other direction and rebrand successfully to attract investors.
So if LLMs end up being a liability, we'll see a bunch of rebranding of similar tech (say, "real intelligence" or "intelligent digital assistant" or whatever). Some companies will transition successfully, others won't, but tech companies will find a way to keep the funding flowing.
But it's not real progress, it's inflated progress. If you look at average, inflation-adjust returns (CAGR, not simple average) over the past 30 years, from the start of the dotcom (1993 -> 2023), average returns are 7.5%/year. 20 years (1993 -> 2013) is 6.7%.
If you look at innovations, smartphones started coming out right after the dotcom bust, "Web 2.0" was coined in 1999 (peak of the dotcom bubble) and became a thing in the early 2000s, etc. There was a lot of innovation in tech, which seemed largely unaffected by the dotcom bubble.
So I'm really not worried about it. We had a massive tech correction in 2000, yet the decade following had some of the biggest changes in tech, a lot of it coming from the companies that survived the dotcom bubble. Likewise after the 2008 crash, the financial sector had a massive run. I don't see any reason for the AI bubble to be any different.
That's like saying breathing is like turning oxygen into carbon dioxide but better...
It is. It's that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.
Yep the current iteration is. But should we cross the threshold to full AGI… that’s either gonna be awesome or world ending. Not sure which.
Current LLMs cannot be AGI, no matter how big they are. The fundamental architecture just isn't right.
You’re absolutely right. LLMs are good at faking language and sometimes not even great at that. Not sure why I got downvoted but oh well. But AGI will be game changing if it happens.
Based on what I've witnessed so far, people will play with their AGI units for a bit and then put them down to continue scrolling memes.
Which means it is neither awesome, nor world-ending, but just boring/business as usual.
There are people way smarter than me that claim it will be a threshold and would likely grow exponentially after it’s crossed. I guess we won’t know for sure until it happens. I do agree most people get bored easily but if this thing is possible to think for itself without interaction it won’t matter if the humans get bored.
I know nothing about anything, but I unfoundedly believe we're still very far away from the computing power required for that. I think we still underestimate the power of biological brains.
Very likely. But 4 years ago I would have said we weren’t close to what these LLMs can do now so who knows.
What makes you think there's a threshold?
I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.
Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they're just tools we use without thinking about them.
I'm sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it's just the keyboard app on my phone.
The approach of LLMs without some sort of symbolic reasoning layer aren't actually able to hold a model of what their context is and their relationships. They predict the next token, but fall apart when you change the numbers in a problem or add some negation to the prompt.
Awesome for protein research, summarization, speech recognition, speech generation, deep fakes, spam creation, RAG document summary, brainstorming, content classification, etc. I don't even think we've found all the patterns they'd be great at predicting.
There are tons of great uses, but just throwing more data, memory, compute, and power at transformers is likely to hit a wall without new models. All the AGI hype is a bit overblown. That's not from me that's Noam Chomsky https://youtu.be/axuGfh4UR9Q?t=9271.
I've often thought LLMs could replace all of the C-suites and upper and middle management.
Funny how no companies push that as a possibility.
I almost expect that we’ll see some company reveal it has been letting an AI control the top level decision making for the business itself, including if and when to reveal the AI.
But the funny thing will be that all the executives and board members still have jobs and huge stock awards. They will all pat each other on the back for getting paid more money to do less work, by being bold and taking a risk to let the computer do half their job for them.
There's a name for it the phenomenon: the AI effect.
Yup.
I don't know why. The people marketing it have absolutely no understanding of what they're selling.
Best part is that I get paid if it works as they expect it to and I get paid if I have to decommission or replace it. I'm not the one developing the AI that they're wasting money on, they just demanded I use it.
That's true software engineering folks. Decoupling doesn't just make it easier to program and reuse, it saves your job when you need to retire something later too.
Their goal isn't to make AI.
The goal of both the VCs and the startups is to make money. That's why.
It’s not even to make money, they already do that. They need GROWTH. More money this quarter than last or the stockholders don’t get paid.
Growth doesn't mean revenue over cost anymore, it just means number go up. The easiest way to create growth from nothing is marketing tulips to venture capital and retail investors.
Has it ever been any different? Like, I'm not in tech, I build signs for a living, and the people selling our signs have no idea what they're selling.
The worrying part is the implications of what they're claiming to sell. They're selling an imagined future in which there exists a class of sapient beings with no legal rights that corporations can freely enslave. How far that is from the reality of the tech doesn't matter, it's absolutely horrifying that this is something the ruling class wants enough to invest billions of dollars just for the chance of fantasizing about it.
I make DNNs (deep neural networks), the current trend in artificial intelligence modeling, for a living.
Much of my ancillary work consists of deflating/tempering the C-suite's hype and expectations of what "AI" solutions can solve or completely automate.
DNN algorithms can be powerful tools and muses in scientific endeavors, engineering, creativity and innovation. They aren't full replacements for the power of the human mind.
I can safely say that many, if not most, of my peers in DNN programming and data science are humble in our approach to developing these systems for deployment.
If anything, studying this field has given me an even more profound respect for the billions of years of evolution required to display the power and subtleties of intelligence as we narrowly understand it in an anthropological, neuro-scientific, and/or historical framework(s).
Sounds about right. There are some valid and good use cases for "AI", but the majority is just buzzword marketing.
I have lots of uses for Attack Insects….
im down for arm improvements
That's about right. I've been using LLMs to automate a lot of cruft work from my dev job daily, it's like having a knowledgeable intern who sometimes impresses you with their knowledge but need a lot of guidance.
watch out; i learned the hard way in an interview that i do this so much that i can no longer create terraform & ansible playbooks from scratch.
even a basic api call from scratch was difficult to remember and i'm sure i looked like a hack to them since they treated me as such.
In addition, there have been these studies released (not so sure how well established, so take this with a grain of salt) lately, indicating a correlation with increased perceived efficiency/productivity, but also a strongly linked decrease in actual efficiency/productivity, when using LLMs for dev work.
After some initial excitement, I’ve dialed back using them to zero, and my contributions have been on the increase. I think it just feels good to spitball, which translates to heightened sense of excitement while working. But it’s really just much faster and convenient to do the boring stuff with snippets and templates etc, if not as exciting. We’ve been doing pair programming lately with humans, and while that’s slower and less efficient too, seems to contribute towards rise in quality and less problems in code review later, while also providing the spitballing side. In a much better format, I think, too, though I guess that’s subjective.
I mean, interviews have always been hell for me (often with multiple rounds of leetcode) so there's nothing new there for me lol
Same here but this one was especially painful since it was the closest match with my experience I've ever encountered in 20ish years and now I know that they will never give me the time of day again and; based on my experience in silicon valley; may end up on a thier blacklist permanently.
Blacklists are heavily overrated and exaggerated, I'd say there's no chance you're on a blacklist. Hell, if you interview with them 3 years later, it's entirely possible they have no clue who you are and end up hiring you - I've had literally that exact scenario happen.
The only way you'd end up on a blacklist is if you accidentally step on the owners dog or something like that.
Being on the other side of the interviewing table for the last 20ish years and being told that we're not going to hire people that everyone unanimously loved and we unquestionably needed more times that I want to remember makes me think that blacklists are common.
In all of the cases I've experienced in the last decade or so: people who had faang and old silicon on their resumes but couldn't do basic things like creating an ansible playbook from scratch were either an automatic addition to that list or at least the butt of a joke that pervades the company's cool aide drinker culture for years afterwards; especially so in recruiting.
Yes they'll eventually forget and I think it's proportional to how egregious or how close to home your perceived misrepresentation is to them.
I think I've probably only ever been blacklisted once in my entire career, and it's because I looked up the reviews of a company I applied to and they had some very concerning stuff so I just ghosted them completely and never answered their calls after we had already begun to play a bit of phone tag prior to that trying to arrange an interview.
In my defense, they took a good while to reply to my application and they never sent any emails just phone calls, which it's like, come on I'm a developer you know I don't want to sit on the phone all day like I'm a sales person or something, send an email to schedule an interview like every other company instead of just spamming phone calls lol
Agreed though, eventually they will forget, it just needs enough time, and maybe you'd not even want to work there.
AI as we know it does have its uses, but I would definitely agree that 90% of it is just marketing hype
The image generation features are fun, even though you have to browbeat the idiot AI into following the description.
You just haven't tried OpeningAI's latest orione model. A company employee said it is soooo smart, can you believe it? And the government is like, goddamn we are so scareded of it. Im telling you AGI december 2024, you'll will see!
Edit:
Is it so hard for people to see sarcasm?
Year of the Linux Deskto....oh wait wrong thread, same same though. If we just wait one more year, we'll have FULL FSD!
Next year, I promise, is the year we all switch to crypto, just wait!
In just two years, no one will be driving 4,000lb cars anymore, everyone just needs a Segway.
We're going to have "just walk out" grocery stores in two years, where you pick items off the shelf, and
10,000 outsourced Indians will review your purchase and complete your CC transaction in about a half hour.our awesome technology will handle everything, charging you for your groceries as you leave the store, in just two more years!I really thought by making intentional mistakes in my comment people would be able to see the OBVIOUS sarcasm, but I guess not....
I think when the hype dies down in a few years, we'll settle into a couple of useful applications for ML/AI, and a lot will be just thrown out.
I have no idea what will be kept and what will be tossed but I'm betting there will be more tossed than kept.
I recently saw a video of AI designing an engine, and then simulating all the toolpaths to be able to export the G code for a CNC machine. I don't know how much of what I saw is smoke and mirrors, but even if that is a stretch goal it is quite significant.
An entire engine? That sounds like a marketing plot. But if you take smaller chunks let's say the shape of a combustion chamber or the shape of a intake or exhaust manifold. It's going to take white noise and just start pattern matching and monkeys on typewriter style start churning out horrible pieces through a simulator until it finds something that tests out as a viable component. It has a pretty good chance of turning out individual pieces that are either cheaper or more efficient than what we've dreamed up.
AI is like the calculator for the mathematician. A very useful tool that allows you to be more efficient but is completely useless without someone capable of handling it.
Damn, I ascended to become an AI and I didn't realise it.
AI is very useful in medical sectors, if coupled with human intervention. The very tedious works of radiologists to rule out normal imaging and its variants (which accounts for over 80% cases) can be automated with AI. Many of the common presenting symptoms can be well guided to diagnosis with some meticulous use of AI tools. Some BCI such as bioprosthosis can also be immensely benefitted with AI.
The key is its work must be monitored with clinicians. As much valuable the private information of patients is, blindly feeding everything to an AI can have disastrous consequences.
Maybe in some places, but I just found this:
https://www.arcade.ai/
A Market place, where people can generate their ideas of jewellery and order them after. Makes life of goldsmiths and customers way more easy. I do not think aI will leave this project, for example.
Snort might actually be a good real world application that stands to benefit from ML, so for security there's some sort of hopefulness.
What happened to Linus? He looks so old now...
He got old.
Not especially old, though; he looks like a 54yo dev. Reminds me of my uncles when they were 54yo devs.
As a 46 year old dev I'm starting to look that way too.
I guess having 3 kids will do that to you.
That, and developing software for 30+ years.
That and leading an open source project for 30 years.
THE open source project.
Whether you're leading a project or not, time will have pretty much the same impact. He's in his mid-50s, and he looks pretty good for that age.
I mean he's aging quite well given his position... Many people burn out way earlier.
I told him not to go to that beach.
[citation needed]^/s^
That's an excessive amount of aging is what folks are seeing. Not that he's just old.
He's lost a lot of weight in 4 years so that's probably exacerbating the wtf.
He's 54, I think he looks pretty average for that age. He looks like an old dad, because he is.
he aged
Source?
What happened to he is happening now to you.
If you find out what happened, let me know, because I think it's happening to me too.
People age. You don't look the same as in 2010 either, I know that without having any idea what you look like.
He's 54 years old
Oxidative stress is a bitch
Time
Wow, yeah that's a big difference from how I remember him
He has a real Michael McKean vibe
It's like he aged 10 years in the past 2 years... damn
I am thinking of deploying a RAG system to ingest all of Linus's emails, commit messages and pull request comments, and we will have a Linus chatbot.
Hold on there Satan... let's be reasonable here.
The only time I've seen AI work well are for things like game development, mainly the upscaling of textures and filling in missing frames of older games so they can run at higher frames without being choppy. Maybe even have applications for getting more voice acting done... If the SAG and Silicon Valley can find an arrangement for that that works out well for both parties..
If not for that I'd say 10% reality was being.... incredibly favorable to the tech bros
^^
^^^
he isn't wrong
If anything he's being a bit generous.
I play around with the paid version of chatgpt and I still don't have any practical use for it. it's just a toy at this point.
I used chatGPT to help make looking up some syntax on a niche scripting language over the weekend to speed up the time I spent working so I could get back to the weekend.
Then, yesterday, I spent time talking to a colleague who was familiar with the language to find the real syntax because chatGPT just made shit up and doesn't seem to have been accurate about any of the details I asked about.
Though it did help me realize that this whole time when I thought I was frying things, I was often actually steaming them, so I guess it balances out a bit?
I use shell_gpt with OpenAI api key so that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for their web interface which is way too expensive. I topped up my account with 5$ back in March and I still haven't use it up. It is OK for getting info about very well established info where doing a web search would be more exhausting than asking chatgpt. But every time I try something more esoteric it will make up shit, like non existent options for CLI tools
ugh hallucinating commands is such a pain
It's useful for my firmware development, but it's a tool like any other. Pros and cons.
Like with any new technology. Remember the blockchain hype a few years back? Give it a few years and we will have a handful of areas where it makes sense and the rest of the hype will die off.
Everyone sane probably realizes this. No one knows for sure exactly where it will succeed so a lot of money and time is being spent on a 10% chance for a huge payout in case they guessed right.
There's an area where blockchain makes sense!?!
Git is a sort of proto-blockchain -- well, it's a ledger anyway. It is fairly useful. (Fucking opaque compared to subversion or other centralized systems that didn't have the ledger, but I digress...)
Cryptocurrencies can be useful as currencies. Not very useful as investment though.
It has some application in technical writing, data transformation and querying/summarization but it is definitely being oversold.
Yep, Ik ai should die someday.
Oh please. Wait until they release double-sided, double-density 128bit AI quantum blockchain that runs on premises/in the cloud edge hybrid.
I'm waiting for the part that it gets used for things that are not lazy, manipulative and dishonest. Until then, I'm sitting it out like Linus.
AI has been used for these things for decades, they are just in the background and not noticed by laypeople
Though the biggest issue is that when people say "AI" today, they mean specifically LLMs, but the world of AI is so much larger than that
Replacing menial or boring tasks is like 90% of what I'm hoping from it.
This is where I'm at. The push right now has nft pump and dump energy.
The moment someone says ai to me right now I auto disengage. When the dust settles, I'll look at it seriously.
Just chiming in as another guy who works in AI who agrees with this assessment.
But it's a little bit worrisome that we all seem to think we're in the 10%.
A bit like how when you poll drivers on how good they think they are at driving, the vast majority say they're better than average lol
That's possible though, if there are some really bad drivers screwing the average.
Edit: it's probably even true in this case, it just depends on how you define 'good'. For example if you define it by getting tickets, only 36% of drivers are issued tickets. The average number of tickets issued is > 0 but the majority of drivers aren't issued tickets, the average is skewed, because most drivers are at 0.
I don't know how you'd measure driving "goodness", but I expect the distribution would be something like exponential (there are billions of non-drivers, and only a few rally/stunt drivers). So the average is likely to be higher than the median.
Linus is known for his generosity.
Linus is a generous man.
Dude...
What?
True. 10% is very generous.
Decided to say something popular after his snafu, I see.
Ai bad gets them every time.
No AI is a very real thing... just not LLMs, those are pure marketing
The latest llms get a perfect score on the south Korean SAT and can pass the bar. More than pure marketing if you ask me. That does not mean 90% of business that claim ai are nothing more than marketing or the business that are pretty much just a front end for GPT APIs. llms like claud even check their work for hallucinations. Even if we limited all ai to llms they would still be groundbreaking.
Korean SAT are highly standardized in multiple choice form and there is an immense library of past exams that both test takers and examiners use. I would be more impressed if the LLMs could show also step by step problem work out...
Claud 3.5 and o1 might be able to do that; if not, they are close to being able to do that. Still better than 99.99% of earthly humans
You seem to be in the camp of believing the hype. See this write up of an apple paper detailing how adding simple statements that should not impact the answer to the question severely disrupts many of the top model's abilities.
In Bloom's taxonomy of the 6 stages of higher level thinking I would say they enter the second stage of 'understanding' only in a small number of contexts, but we give them so much credit because as a society our supposed intelligence tests for people have always been more like memory tests.
Exactly... People are conflating the ability to parrot an answer based on machine-levels of recall (which is frankly impressive) vs the machine actually understanding something and being able to articulate how the machine itself arrived at a conclusion (which, in programming circles, would be similar to a form of "introspection"). LLM is not there yet
100% hyped by the people who've watched a few youtube videos and now claim they're an expert
And then people will complain about that saying it’s almost all hype and no substance.
Then that one tech bro will keep insisting that lemmy is being unfair to AI and there are so many good use cases.
No one is denying the 10% use cases, we just don’t think it’s special or needs extra attention since those use cases already had other possible algorithmic solutions.
Tech bros need to realize, even if there are some use cases for AI, there has not been any revolution, stop trying to make it happen and enjoy your new slightly better tool in silence.
Hi! It's me, the guy you discussed this with the other day! The guy that said Lemmy is full of AI wet blankets.
I am 100% with Linus AND would say the 10% good use cases can be transformative.
Since there isn't any room for nuance on the Internet, my comment seemed to ruffle feathers. There are definitely some folks out there that act like ALL AI is worthless and LLMs specifically have no value. I provided a list of use cases that I use pretty frequently where it can add value. (Then folks started picking it apart with strawmen).
I gotta say though this wave of AI tech feels different. It reminds me of the early days of the web/computing in the late 90s early 2000s. Where it's fun, exciting, and people are doing all sorts of weird,quirky shit with it, and it's not even close to perfect. It breaks a lot and has limitations but their is something there. There is a lot of promise.
Like I said else where, it ain't replacing humans any time soon, we won't have AGI for decades, and it's not solving world hunger. That's all hype bro bullshit. But there is actual value here.
Omg you found me in another post. I’m not even mad; I do like how passionate you are about things.
What you’re talking about is polarization and yeah, it’s a big issue.
This is a good example, I never did any strawman nor disagree with the fact that it can be useful in some shape or form. I was trying to say its value is much much lower than what people claim to be.
But that’s the issue with polarization, me saying there is much less value can be interpreted as absolute zero, and I apologize for contributing to the polarization.
Mr. Torvalds is truly a generous man, giving the current AI market an analysis of 10% usefulness is probably a decimal or two more than will end up panning out once the hype bubble pops.
I agree with Mr. Torvalds
That's my usual feeling with Linus takes.
Well, I agree, but he could be nicer about it.
Seems generous, might be more like 5% reality.
Just like Furbys
That's probably true about all new technology that VCs throw billions at.
We lived more than a decade of those decisions, when borrowing money was cheap, and VC was investing in startups selling juice machines.
game devs gonna have to use different language to describe what used to be simply called "enemy AI" where exactly zero machine learning is involved
Logic and Path-finding?
CPU
AI is nothing more than a way for big businesses to automate more work and fire more people.
and do that at the expense of 30+ years of power reduction and efficiency gains, to the point that private companies are literally buying/building/restarting old power plants just to cover the insane power demand, because literally operating a power plant is cheaper than paying the energy costs.
For the common every day person its 3d tv and every other bullshit fad that burned brilliantly for all of 3 seconds before snuffing itself out, leaving people to have had paid for overpriced garbage thats no longer useful.
All technology in human history has done that. What are you proposing? Reject technology to keep people employed on inefficient tasks?
At some point people need to start thinking that is better to end capitalism that to return to monke.
There was a great article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results years ago about the development of Artificial Stupidity (AS). I always do a mental translation to AS when ever I see AI.
Yeah, he's right. AI is mostly used by corps to enshittificate their products for just extra profit
I admit I understand nothing about ai and haven't used it in any way nor do I plan to. It feels wrong for me and I believe it might fuck us harder than social media ever could.
But the pictures it creates, the stories and conversations don't seem like hot air. And I guess, compared to the internet we are at the stage where the modem is still singing the songs of its people. There is more to come.
I heard it can code at a level where entry positions might be in danger to be swapped for ai. It detects cancer visually, recognizes people by the way they walk in China. Also I fear that vulnerable persons might fall for those conversation bots in a world where there is less and less personal contact.
Gotta admit I'm a little afraid it will make most of us useless in the future.
It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like "delve"). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn't alive. It isn't even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.
Don't worry, human toil isn't going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of "enhanced" products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn't the same as having power over other humans. We won't let computers make us all useless.
Thanks for easing my mind a little. You definetly did in perspective to labor.
You also reminded me I already had my first encounter with a callcenter AI by telekom and it was just as useless as the human equivalent, they seem to get similar training!
I just hope it won't hinder or replace interhuman connection on a larger scale cause in this sphere mediocrity might be enough and we are already lacking there.
The albeit small but present virtual girlfriend culture in Japan really shocked me and I feel we are not far away from things like AI-droid wives for example.
In a way he’s right, but it depends! If you take even a common example like Chat GPT or the native object detection used in iPhone cameras, you’d see that there’s a lot of cool stuff already enabled by our current way of building these tools. The limitation right now, I think, is reacting to new information or scenarios which a model isn’t trained on, which is where all the current systems break. Humans do well in new scenarios based on their cognitive flexibility, and at least I am unaware of a good framework for instilling cognitive flexibility in machines.
and that 10% isnt really real, just a gabbier dr.sbaitso
Idk man, my doctors seem pretty fucking impressed with AI's capabilities to make diagnoses by analyzing images like MRI's.
then you are a fortunate rarity. most posts about the tech complain about ai just rearranging what it is told and regurgitating it with added spice
I think that is because most people are only aware of its use as what are, effectively, chat bots. Which, while the most widely used application, is one of its least useful. Medical image analysis is one of the big places it is making strides in. I am told, by a friend in aerospace, that it is showing massive potential for a variety of engineering uses. His firm has been working on using it to design, or modify, things like hulls, air frames, etc. Industrial uses, such as these, are showing a lot of promise, it seems.
thats good. be nice if all the current ai developers would aim that way
That makes sense. He's old enough and close enough thematically to have seen a few of these tech hype cycles.
I dunno about him; but genuinely I'm excited about AI. Blows my mind each passing day ;)
it is basically like how self improvement folks are using quantum
He is correct. It is mostly people cashing out on stuff that isn't there.
"duh."
Nice replacement topic after the maintainer drama last week
Yea this is so blatant I'm not even going to click on that shit.
Honestly, he's wrong though.
I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow. I've used AI image generators to put something I wanted into the concept stage before I paid an artist to do the work with the revisions I wanted that I couldn't get AI to produce properly.
And first and foremost, they're a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it. They are terrible at deducing things themselves, because they can't 'think', or coming up with solutions that others haven't already - but so long as people are aware of those limitations, then they're a pretty good tool to have.
It's a reactionary opinion when people jump to the 'but they're stealing art!' -- isn't your brain also stealing art when it's inspired by others art? Artists don't just POOF, and have the capability to be artists. They learn slowly over time, using others as inspiration or as training to improve. That's all stable diffusors do - just a lot faster.
How’s he wrong?
Did you actually listen to what he said or are you just reading the headline and making it fit another narrative to respond to?
Because he also said he thinks it’s going to change the world, he just hates the marketing BS that’s overhyping it.
Probably because, as anyone who’s actually used AI knows, it has some core weaknesses. But the marketers are happy to
gloss over thatlie and just say that it will be able to do nearly anything.He said it’s interesting, but to give it five years to see how it’s actually useful, which is probably the most sane take you can have about AI imo.
It will be interesting when the bubble pops, because that's probably when we'll see the useful things it is actually good at
Summarizing documents, writing documents you don't want to (within reason), and... whatever the hell Neuro-sama is doing on Vedal's channel, are like the only ones i've found so far that kind of work. And I guess image generation.
It's amazingly good at moderating user content to flag for moderator review. Existing text analysis completely falls down beyond keyword filtering tbh.
It's really good at sentiment analysis. Which is great for things like user reviews. The Amazon ai notes on products are actually brilliant at summarizing the pros and cons of a product. I work for a holiday let company and we experimented with using it to find customers we need to follow up with and the results were amazing.
It smashes other automated translating services as well.
I use it a lot as a programmer to very quickly learn new topics. Also as an interactive docs that you can ask follow up questions to. I can pick up a new language as I go much faster than with traditional resources.
It's honestly a complete game changer.
It is, both in good and bad ways. The problem, as Linus and others here are pointing out, is that marketing pushes the good and downplays/ignores the bad, so there's going to be a rough adjustment period as people eventually see through the BS and find the issues, and the longer that takes, the harder things will crash.
There are plenty of good uses of modern AI approaches, they're just far fewer than the ones being marketed these days.
The one place where I sincerely hope it takes root and succeeds is in medicine. Having better drugs, helping to identify potential problems or diseases, identifying health patterns (all with human review and proper trials, naturally)...
It's not even close to the magical AGI that tech bros are promising, but it is good at digesting data, and science and medicine are full of that. Plus, given how overworked doctors and nurses can be, having a preliminary analysis from a computer that doesn't get tired or overworked seems like it would probably help with accurate diagnosis.
Which is how new technologies tend to go see what sticks after exploring what is possible. So it shouldn't be surprising that ai is goong through the motions, but it is getting annoying how fast it is ruining functioning systems by being jammed in with no guardrails.
But, it also means we get Sam Altman as the next Elon Musk if he cashes in before the pop. And whatever other tech bros do the same. More filthy-rich men with the emotional maturity of a 12 year old.
ah yes it's reactionary to checks notes not support the righteous biggest bubble since dotcom era
you okay out there bud?
You might want to look up the definition of reactionary. Because that's...exactly what it means. To oppose reform/advancements.
You okay there bud?
Congratulations -- Currently you and 18 others are not smarter than an average high schooler.
Opposing actual fraud isn't what reactionary means.
You've got a pretty high bar of proof for proving "actual fraud"...
You can't provably say that this is a "bubble" as claimed. The tools do what they purport to do. Where's the fraud?
It's not remotely within the realm of plausibility that Sam Altman genuinely believes any of the horseshit he spews. (And that's ignoring that they gained their funding by lying about the core intent of their organization by pretending to be serving the public interest and not profiteering.)
Welcome to earth. That's basically every business ever, and you'll quite literally never be able to prove that in court; which is the litmus test for this claim.
Speaking as someone who worked on AI, and is a fervent (local) AI enthusiast... it's 90% marketing and hype, at least.
These things are tools, they spit out tons of garbage, they basically can't be used for anything where the output could likely be confidently wrong, and the way they're trained is still morally dubious at best. And the corporate API business model of "stifle innovation so we can hold our monopoly then squeeze users" is hellish.
As you pointed out, generative AI is a fantastic tool, but it is a TOOL, that needs some massive changes and improvements, wrapped up in hype that gives it a bad name... I drank some of the kool-aid too when llama 1 came out, but you have to look at the market and see how much fud and nonsense is flying around.
As another (local) AI enthusiast I think the point where AI goes from "great" to "just hype" is when it's expected to generate the correct response, image, etc on the first try.
For example, telling an AI to generate a dozen images from a prompt then picking a good one or re-working the prompt a few times to get what you want. That works fantastically well 90% of the time (assuming you're generating something it has been trained on).
Expecting AI to respond with the correct answer when given a query > 50% of the time or expecting it not to get it dangerously wrong? Hype. 100% hype.
It'll be a number of years before AI is trustworthy enough not to hallucinate bullshit or generate the exact image you want on the first try.
Its great at brainstorming, fiction making, a unreliable intern-like but very fast assistant and so on... but none of that is very profitbable.
Hence you get OpenAI and such trying to sell it as an omiscient chatbot and (most profitably) an employee replacement.
https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html
How dare you bring sources into this opinion!
Half of the people here linus included must have never use stable diffusion
This is what I've seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn't that same effort have been invested in Google Search?
I'd rather a world where 10 companies can compete with google search with AIs, than where they dump money into a monopoly.
If you don't feel like discussing this and won't do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don't have to reply to me at all.
The content is not unavailable to search engines. AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it. I don't know what point you were trying to make that I missed, it wasn't on purpose, I assure you.
Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?
Yeah. Money. Google has an incentive to make search results less accurate to get you to click around and interact with more ads. As it currently stands, AI models aren't inserting advertisements; though I suspect that's only a matter of time.
And that's more or less what I was aiming for, so we're back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:
The point is that there isn't something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven't found AI to be superior at all, but that's a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.
That's kind of how things work you know.
Yeah, would you say the original iPhone is any good today? No. Because everything got better. That's how things work. AI of today, in 20 years is probably going to be considered to suck.
That's how that works. When things are better than other things, we consider them good.
If you are just blatantly copying art, well yeah you're stealing it.
He isnt wrong. This comes from somebody who technically uses ai daily to help develop ( github copilot in visual studio to assist in code prediction based on the code base of the solution ), but AI is marketed even worse than blockchain back in 2017. Its everywhere, in every product, even if it doesnt have ai or has nothing to do with it. Monitor ai shit? Mouse with ai? Hell, ive seen a sketch of a fucking toaster with 'ai'.
There is shit like microsoft recall, apple intelligence, bing co pilot, office co pilot, ...
All of those are just... Nothing special or useful. There are also chatbots which bring nothing new to the table either.
Everyone and everything wants to market there stuff with ai and its disgusting.
Does that mean that current ai tech cant bring anything to the table? No, it totally can, but 90% of ai stuff out there is, just like linus says, marketing bullshit.
Let me guess. Dumped by an art girl and anxious about the $600 you invested?
AI can give me a blueprint for my logic. Then I, as a developer, make the code run. Cuts my scripting time in half.
Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.
I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.
Sure, when you're doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it's pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That's great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.
But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.
And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn't yet triggered update notifications, etc... well, now we're in the red, AND I'm pissed off.
So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it's more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we're going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.
So basically just like linux. Except linux has no marketing.....So 10% reality, and 90% uhhhhhhhhhh.......
What
Some Linux bad Windows good troll
Did I fall into a 1999 Slashdot comment section somehow?
That says more about your ignorance than anything about AI or Linux.
Never heard of Android I guess?
Except for the most popular OS on the Internet, of course.
You're aware Linux basically runs the Internet, right?
Billions of devices run Linux. It is an amazing feat!
90% angry nerds fighting each other over what answer is “right”