And everybody in the chain can even justify their improved efficiency! It‘s capitalism endgoal. A massive Goldberg machine, where each piece can be optimized, but overall does produce close to no value compared to its cost and effort
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I have a hard time looking at the world around me and thinking "close to no value"
Besides technological progress which has nothing to do with this effect and would have happened anyway, what's the value that we didn't have 30 years ago?
It’s so incredible to me that now we have a chat interface we can ask about anything in any language and get really great answers, something literally considered science fiction a few years ago, and people still act like that is no big deal at all. No value in something like that! Don’t tell me it’s inaccurate, I strongly believe it’s way more accurate than if you could ask an expert in each topic , which of course you couldn’t and even if you did, you would most likely not want to since you would get a lot of “you don’t actually want that, you want this unrelated thing, trust me I am better than you”. Just remember StackOverflow (depending on how young you are perhaps you never even heard of that given how much AI has eclipsed it)!
>It’s so incredible to me that now we have a chat interface we can ask about anything in any language and get really great answers, something literally considered science fiction a few years ago, and people still act like that is no big deal at all.
Because the importance of this is all about perspective. It wasn't like these systems created this information out of thin air. They were trained on something. That means the answers they are giving you have been available for decades. You just needed the know-how to find that information and synthesize the answers yourself. To many of us, it's like going from the old physical card catalogs to a modern digital system that would have seemed like sci-fi to a prior generation too. It's definitely more efficient and easier to use, but people acting like it's revolutionary seem to be suggesting that the old system didn't exist or wasn't usable with a little effort.
> You just needed the know-how to find that information and synthesize the answers yourself.
So easy , right?? No one needs a machine that can do that automatically over huge amounts of data and that can clearly communicate results in a way the user can clearly understand in their preferred language!
> I strongly believe it’s way more accurate than if you could ask an expert in each topic
You can believe anything you want. I can also believe that the only thing that has gone up in the last 30 years is billionaires' worth, and amount of idiots saying things they don't know anything about.
I strongly believe this. Don't tell me it's inaccurate.
At least you acknowledge you believe in absurdities. My belief is not absurd , it’s what I have seen myself in the last year or so.
It gives wrong answers.
I’m talking specifically about the AI industry
Well, how does it compare to the internet industry?
Let me know, I personally don’t see meaningful comparisons to make between the 2
The meaningful comparison is that technologies are not industries. What even is the internet industry? There was a brief time in the 1990’s when that was a thing, just like AI will be subsumed as a technology in actual industries in the next decade.
This is no one's end goal. It's just the market being irrational longer than sane people can stay solvent.
It's greed at the top pushing the market into insanity. "AI" vendors are dangling the carrot of "eliminate manpower" in front of the manpower-owning class and they are throwing everything they have at it. The wealth that's been thrown into this hole could have payed for a couple million work-years of developers.
Insanity in the market is drawing in profit-seekers. "Greed at the top pushing the market into insanity" isn't really something that can happen: greedy folks are adept at leveraging incentive structures that have already emerged, but very bad at trying to purposefully shift macro-level incentives at a grand scale (which is something that humans in general are quite bad at).
There are, what, about 50 million developers worldwide?
So instead of AI that pretty much everyone can use, we could have had 3 or 4 weeks of business as usual?
If AGI is the next evolutionary goal, its the difference between being stuck and not.
Wealth is also only relevant in a capitalistic system, which we invented. It could easily be that all other species never created capitalism and are therefore waiting for us somewere which we will not reach because we are stuck on 'wealth'.
And if we are stuck in a local minimum, it might seem that GPT-2 broke us out of there.
Or LLMs will end up being the local optimum we organize society around and sacrifice everything to, and end up not being the child dream of infinite wealth and benefits the AI boosters believe in. laissez-faire capitalism tends to result in power concentration and the creation of a distinct class of hyper-wealthy and powerful individuals with close to infinite power to dictate the future. That’s pretty much the situation we are in.
If the current AI bet turns out to not be the next revolution, what’s the plan? What will be the pivot? What happens to all the capex and commitments, the reputation of all the people who promised that was the journey to the holly land? The answer is that there is no plan, AI has to work to justify the system itself. It’s almost a natural result of the economical and ideological system we conceived.
It’s really not that different from blockchains, though at least LLMs have some actual use cases. But there is a complete disconnect between the actual ROI and the vision sold by the AI folks
The key is machine learning.
All this massive massive massive compute can be used for different types of machine learning. Nuclear Fusion physics simulation, neural networks for every other use case etc.
I'm not sure if we needed AI/ML for breaking the memory wall.
But yeah we will see how the society will respond to more and more and more automatisation.
ML/AI/Robotics is for sure the next automatisation revolution.