I’m a pretty staunch skeptic about AIs utility - I think the executive class bought into the hype and were seduced by the prospect of big waves of delicious redundancies with the attendant stock boosts, without ever actually bothering to find out if it works.
That said the article refers to that MIT study that is quite dated, and (like many) somewhat mis-characterize its findings.
For anyone who’s tried to solve linguistic processing tasks with traditional methods (or even tried to write a text adventure!), it’s clear there’s huge potential of LLMs for /something/, but the idea that there’s a way to pay for the operating costs and absurd levels of investment that has already happened is laughable.
it’s clear there’s huge potential of LLMs for /something
Current generations of AI are amazing as long as the results don’t matter in any way.
For hobby stuff where a human can throw out the useless bits, AI can be great.
Of course, even then it can be a problem. There’s a hilarious meme going around about taking up “vibe electronics”. Electricity doesn’t care about intentions. Crcuits often catch on fire when done wrong. Vibing electronics would be hilariously expensive, because the costs of things catching on fire can’t be quietly left for someone else to learn about later.
Many things that don’t seem to matter have proven to matter. One might think writing a movie script could good be a great use of AI - but AI can only remix mediocre inputs, and mediocre movies lose money and get people un-invited from making movies.
Of course, one use case that billionaires seem very comfortable using AI for is too provide
public services to non-billionaires…
I’m a pretty staunch skeptic about AIs utility - I think the executive class bought into the hype and were seduced by the prospect of big waves of delicious redundancies with the attendant stock boosts, without ever actually bothering to find out if it works.
That said the article refers to that MIT study that is quite dated, and (like many) somewhat mis-characterize its findings.
For anyone who’s tried to solve linguistic processing tasks with traditional methods (or even tried to write a text adventure!), it’s clear there’s huge potential of LLMs for /something/, but the idea that there’s a way to pay for the operating costs and absurd levels of investment that has already happened is laughable.
Current generations of AI are amazing as long as the results don’t matter in any way.
For hobby stuff where a human can throw out the useless bits, AI can be great.
Of course, even then it can be a problem. There’s a hilarious meme going around about taking up “vibe electronics”. Electricity doesn’t care about intentions. Crcuits often catch on fire when done wrong. Vibing electronics would be hilariously expensive, because the costs of things catching on fire can’t be quietly left for someone else to learn about later.
Many things that don’t seem to matter have proven to matter. One might think writing a movie script could good be a great use of AI - but AI can only remix mediocre inputs, and mediocre movies lose money and get people un-invited from making movies.
Of course, one use case that billionaires seem very comfortable using AI for is too provide public services to non-billionaires…