This strikes me as babbling. 70 percent fever dream.
To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers. Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake. Whatever substance there is to chatting with a corpse or corpus is unknowable. So it amounts to playing with dolls.
I think for a living. I would LIKE AI to help. But it doesn’t. On balance, any benefit is drowned out by the effort it takes me to check its work.
I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves, or who have crippling impostor syndrome.
It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.
The article keeps referring to "AI" as if it's a coherent, agreed-upon thing.
It's not. "AI" is a marketing term that's been applied to whatever happens to
look impressive at the moment---right now, that's LLMs. There's no settled
definition, no unified discipline, and lumping everything from generative text
models to actual robotics under the same label just obscures the discussion.
If we're talking about LLMs, let's call them LLMs.
And let's be real: we're in a bubble. There's zero evidence that LLMs have
produced a measurable productivity boom. If anything, they're net negative in
many contexts---encouraging shallow engagement, short-circuiting the learning
process, and making knowledge workers more dependent on stochastic parrots that
frequently hallucinate. We've replaced "look it up" with "ask the oracle," and
the oracle can't reliably tell fact from fiction.
The hype cycle will keep burning cash until someone admits the emperor's
wardrobe is ... speculative at best.
It's also been a coherent academic discipline since at least Turing's 1950 paper introducing the Turing test and with a history going back well beyond that.
AI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing. We see the escalating effects of climate change impacting day-to-day life in ways we were told would only happen in the far future, witnessing genocide become a normal part of the news critique of which can mean serious personal consequences, we're watching the United States transform into State Capitalism [0] making our country far more like modern day China than many of us would have ever imagined possible.
And we deeply need to believe something wonderous, whether delightful or terrifying, is also happening. I honestly think AI is largely mass hallucination which is supported by a system that is able to extract tremendous wealth from this hallucination continuing.
We can no longer believe that everything happening is normal, so we need to inject some, slightly less horrific, explanation for what we're experiencing.
These are poor examples:
> Why do I need to know what quarks are, or how steam engines work? Why do I need to know anything about anything? I can just look it up with AI
I recently saw a good example of how LLM's can be really useful.
A friend of mine, who always found learning difficult, now works as a plumber and installer with his own one-person company.
One of his clients is the local community pool. He took over the job from an older man who showed him how everything worked. My friend noticed a lot of inefficient (manual) use of energy and resources, but the previous installer told him it would cost too much to automate, so nothing was done.
The other day we talked about AI, and he said he had never tried it. I asked him to think of some questions from his daily work. He came up with questions about the pool system and how to automate it.
ChatGPT answered his questions correctly, and after a few follow-ups, it even provided a list of the parts he would need and a plan to make it work. Last weekend he told me that, together with the previous installer, he made improvements that should save the pool thousands of euros over the next few years.
Of course, an experienced pool expert might have come up with the same solution, but it is often difficult to convince a committee to hire someone when nothing is broken, the budget is already set, and the inefficiencies are not obvious.
My friend now uses ChatGPT several times a day to solve practical problems. It helps him learn new things and explore possibilities he might not have considered otherwise.
I do not mind if ChatGPT makes the occasional mistake or gives an answer based on outdated information. As long as it is used as a tool to improve your own abilities, the subscription is worth the cost.
When I worked with colleagues, I sometimes relied on advice that turned out to be wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, even when working to the best of their abilities, and I find that my AI 'colleagues' make fewer of them.
> What’s going to happen in the next 5 years? Will my skills be relevant? How do I truly add value with AI getting smarter in every way? How does it change life for me and my family?
Here is how I approach this - this might be a coping mechanism, but it’s certainly helped me personally.
LLMs are hugely impressive, no-one is denying that. But they have already been out for nearly 3 years at this point, and there are still massive gaps in their functionality that mean, in their current state, they are nowhere near being able to take over highly skilled work (e.g. software engineering at senior+ levels) from humans. They can handle grunt work well, but are unable to go beyond that: they operate at the level of a (poor) junior.
LLMs remind me to some extent of journalists and the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. When I ask an LLM a question in an area I am not an expert in, I’m impressed. On the other hand, when I ask it something I am an expert in, I am almost always disappointed. I don’t bother using them for complex work any more, because they lie and hallucinate too much.
Furthermore, the rate of progress appears to be slowing.
All of this gives me some hope that my own life will not be completely ruined as a result of this technology.
This statement and similar ones along the line have a very bitter taste to me. Someone has to create the knowledge. Someone has to create the actual training data for others to be received in dumbed down and stripped out version through AI. You will always be late to the game when you try to gain knowledge that way. I really really don't understand why people overhype the learning part of AI so much. Yes, it's a neat tool, but in my opinion rather bad for __actual in depth__ learning
It's more than another new tech. It's a fundamental change in the nature of complexity on earth.
For the last 4bn or so years we've had reproducing DNA which led onto thinking humans but they get born, thinking and then drop dead a 14 millionth of a bn years later. Now we will have AI mind children that live on indefinitely. It's the biggest change since the evolution of life.
19 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 41.8 ms ] threadTo take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers. Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake. Whatever substance there is to chatting with a corpse or corpus is unknowable. So it amounts to playing with dolls.
I think for a living. I would LIKE AI to help. But it doesn’t. On balance, any benefit is drowned out by the effort it takes me to check its work.
I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves, or who have crippling impostor syndrome.
And let's be real: we're in a bubble. There's zero evidence that LLMs have produced a measurable productivity boom. If anything, they're net negative in many contexts---encouraging shallow engagement, short-circuiting the learning process, and making knowledge workers more dependent on stochastic parrots that frequently hallucinate. We've replaced "look it up" with "ask the oracle," and the oracle can't reliably tell fact from fiction.
The hype cycle will keep burning cash until someone admits the emperor's wardrobe is ... speculative at best.
It's also been a coherent academic discipline since at least Turing's 1950 paper introducing the Turing test and with a history going back well beyond that.
> Customer service automation, Agentic coding, Content creation
Fucking hell. Customer service automation. Auto-spaghetti code. Brainrot as a service. Truly what society needs.
And we deeply need to believe something wonderous, whether delightful or terrifying, is also happening. I honestly think AI is largely mass hallucination which is supported by a system that is able to extract tremendous wealth from this hallucination continuing.
We can no longer believe that everything happening is normal, so we need to inject some, slightly less horrific, explanation for what we're experiencing.
0. https://www.wsj.com/economy/the-u-s-marches-toward-state-cap...
Literally all possible with Google and YouTube.
A friend of mine, who always found learning difficult, now works as a plumber and installer with his own one-person company.
One of his clients is the local community pool. He took over the job from an older man who showed him how everything worked. My friend noticed a lot of inefficient (manual) use of energy and resources, but the previous installer told him it would cost too much to automate, so nothing was done.
The other day we talked about AI, and he said he had never tried it. I asked him to think of some questions from his daily work. He came up with questions about the pool system and how to automate it.
ChatGPT answered his questions correctly, and after a few follow-ups, it even provided a list of the parts he would need and a plan to make it work. Last weekend he told me that, together with the previous installer, he made improvements that should save the pool thousands of euros over the next few years.
Of course, an experienced pool expert might have come up with the same solution, but it is often difficult to convince a committee to hire someone when nothing is broken, the budget is already set, and the inefficiencies are not obvious.
My friend now uses ChatGPT several times a day to solve practical problems. It helps him learn new things and explore possibilities he might not have considered otherwise.
I do not mind if ChatGPT makes the occasional mistake or gives an answer based on outdated information. As long as it is used as a tool to improve your own abilities, the subscription is worth the cost.
When I worked with colleagues, I sometimes relied on advice that turned out to be wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, even when working to the best of their abilities, and I find that my AI 'colleagues' make fewer of them.
Here is how I approach this - this might be a coping mechanism, but it’s certainly helped me personally.
LLMs are hugely impressive, no-one is denying that. But they have already been out for nearly 3 years at this point, and there are still massive gaps in their functionality that mean, in their current state, they are nowhere near being able to take over highly skilled work (e.g. software engineering at senior+ levels) from humans. They can handle grunt work well, but are unable to go beyond that: they operate at the level of a (poor) junior.
LLMs remind me to some extent of journalists and the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. When I ask an LLM a question in an area I am not an expert in, I’m impressed. On the other hand, when I ask it something I am an expert in, I am almost always disappointed. I don’t bother using them for complex work any more, because they lie and hallucinate too much.
Furthermore, the rate of progress appears to be slowing.
All of this gives me some hope that my own life will not be completely ruined as a result of this technology.
This statement and similar ones along the line have a very bitter taste to me. Someone has to create the knowledge. Someone has to create the actual training data for others to be received in dumbed down and stripped out version through AI. You will always be late to the game when you try to gain knowledge that way. I really really don't understand why people overhype the learning part of AI so much. Yes, it's a neat tool, but in my opinion rather bad for __actual in depth__ learning
https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...
For the last 4bn or so years we've had reproducing DNA which led onto thinking humans but they get born, thinking and then drop dead a 14 millionth of a bn years later. Now we will have AI mind children that live on indefinitely. It's the biggest change since the evolution of life.