Understand AI for what it is, not what it might become.
  • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I don’t trust any of these types. If you haven’t noticed by now morally decent people are never in charge of a any large organization. The type of personality suited to claw their way to the top usually lack any real moral compass that doesn’t advance their pursuit of power.

  • very_well_lost@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    It’s time to stop taking any CEO at their word.

    Edit: scratch that, the time to stop taking any CEO at their word was 100 years ago.

  • sketelon@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Really? The guy behind the company called “Open” AI that has contributed the least to the open source AI communities, while constantly making grand claims and telling us we’re not ready to see what he’s got. We’re supposed to stop taking that guys word?

    Wow, thanks journalists, what would we do without you.

    • MouseKeyboard@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      People talk a lot about the genericisation of brand names, but the branding of generic terms like this really annoys me.

      I’ll use the example I first noticed. A few years ago, the Conservative government was under criticism for the minimum wage being well under a living wage. In response, they brought in the National Living Wage, which was an increase to the minimum wage, but still under the actual living wage. However, because of the branding, it makes criticising it for not meeting the actual living wage more difficult, as you have to explain the difference between the two, and as the saying goes, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”.

  • sartalon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    When that major drama unfolded with him getting booted then re-hired. It was super fucking obvious that it was all about the money, the data, and the salesmanship He is nothing but a fucking tech-bro. Part Theranos, part Musk, part SBF, part (whatever that pharma asshat was), and all fucking douchebag.

    AI is fucking snake oil and an excuse to scrape every bit of data like it’s collecting every skin cell dropping off of you.

    • Rogers@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I’d agree the first part but to say all Ai is snake oil is just untrue and out of touch. There are a lot of companies that throw “Ai” on literally anything and I can see how that is snake oil.

      But real innovative Ai, everything to protein folding to robotics is here to stay, good or bad. It’s already too valuable for governments to ignore. And Ai is improving at a rate that I think most are underestimating (faster than Moore’s law).

      • kaffiene@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I think part of the difficulty with these discussions is that people mean all sorts of different things by “AI”. Much of the current usage is that AI = LLMs, which changes the debate quite a lot

        • Rogers@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          No doubt LLMs are not the end all be all. That said especially after seeing what the next gen ‘thinking models’ can do like o1 from ClosedAI OpenAI, even LLMs are going to get absurdly good. And they are getting faster and cheaper at a rate faster than my best optimistic guess 2 years ago; hell, even 6 months ago.

          Even if all progress stopped tomorrow on the software side the benefits from purpose built silicon for them would make them even cheaper and faster. And that purpose built hardware is coming very soon.

          Open models are about 4-6 months behind in quality but probably a lot closer (if not ahead) for small ~7b models that can be run on low/med end consumer hardware locally.

          • kaffiene@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            I don’t doubt they’ll get faster. What I wonder is whether they’ll ever stop being so inaccurate. I feel like that’s a structural feature of the model.

            • keegomatic@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              1 month ago

              May I ask how you’ve used LLMs so far? Because I hear that type of complaint from a lot of people who have tried to use them mainly to get answers to things, or maybe more broadly to replace their search engine, which is not what they’re best suited for, in my opinion.

                • keegomatic@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  1 month ago

                  Personally, I’ve found that LLMs are best as discussion partners, to put it in the broadest terms possible. They do well for things you would use a human discussion partner for IRL.

                  • “I’ve written this thing. Criticize it as if you were the recipient/judge of that thing. How could it be improved?” (Then address its criticisms in your thing… it’s surprisingly good at revealing ways to make your “thing” better, in my experience)
                  • “I have this personal problem.” (Tell it to keep responses short. Have a natural conversation with it. This is best done spoken out loud if you are using ChatGPT; prevents you from overthinking responses, and forces you to keep the conversation moving. Takes fifteen minutes or more but you will end up with some good advice related to your situation nearly every time. I’ve used this to work out several things internally much better than just thinking on my own. A therapist would be better, but this is surprisingly good.)
                  • I’ve also had it be useful for various reasons to tell it to play a character as I describe, and then speak to the character in a pretend scenario to work out something related. Use your imagination for how this might be helpful to you. In this case, tell it to not ask you so many questions, and to only ask questions when the character would truly want to ask a question. Helps keep it more normal; otherwise (in the case of ChatGPT which I’m most familiar with) it will always end every response with a question. Often that’s useful, like in the previous example, but in this case it is not.
                  • etc.

                  For anything but criticism of something written, I find that the “spoken conversation” features are most useful. I use it a lot in the car during my commute.

                  For what it’s worth, in case this makes it sound like I’m a writer and my examples are only writing-related, I’m actually not a writer. I’m a software engineer. The first example can apply to writing an application or a proposal or whatever. Second is basically just therapy. Third is more abstract, and often about indirect self-improvement. There are plenty more things that are good for discussion partners, though. I’m sure anyone reading can come up with a few themselves.