Those corporations are about to find out the fun way that these algorithms, in their current and near-future states, cannot replace human beings.
Well, except for maybe lazy copywriters who pump out pointless listicles and executives who do - whatever it is they do - but any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools.
“When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages.”
Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.
Your grandmother (or great grandmother depending how old you are) had to spend hours of hard labour every day to wash clothes dishes and rooms with just a tub of water a broom and a mop. Now all that takes maybe 20 minutes of light labour with a vacuum, dishwasher and washing machine. Technology absolutely has reduced drudgery
Mate, the horse whip and the wheel were Technology back when they got invented.
It’s a massivelly generic word.
Absolutelly some Technology has reduced drudgery. Meanwhile some Technology has managed to increase it (for example: one can make the case that the mobile phone, by making people be always accessible, has often increased pressure on people, though it depends on the job), some Technology has caused immense Environmental destruction, some Technology has even caused epidemics of psychological problems and so on.
Not only is there a lot of stuff in the big umbrella called Technology, but the total effect of one of those things is often dependent on how its its used and Capitalism seems especially prone to inventing and using Technology that’s very good for a handful of people whilst being bad for everybody else.
One can’t presume that just because something can be classified as Technology it will reduce drudgery or in even that it will be overall a good thing, even if some past Technologies did.
Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn’t see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.
Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn’t rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.
Not the best analogy. The glue factory was a thing while horses were a primary tool for transport and heavy labour. And horses were treated appallingly. Now that they’ve been made redundant, living standards for horses have improved dramatically and the glue factory is long gone (though their population has also reduced significantly).
We can only hope for a similar outcome for ourselves.
Phone operators weren’t call center staff, they were literally routers in human form. Secretaries were your email program, calendar, and your folders full of word documents.
I’m well aware of switchboard operators. Computers were originally a profession as well.
Secretaries are still all that, both using digital tools as well as physical. They weren’t replaced by any of those programs. They just changed how they do their job. They schedule your meetings for you now in their cell phone instead of on a desk-sized paper calendar mat.
The underlying point misses why people have problems with the current AI bubble. I’ll cheer when they replace CEOs with AI - it seems like the best job to be replaced with LLMs and would save companies billions of dollars that could be used to improve the lives of workers. There’s tons of AI being used for all kinds of cool things already like spotting cancer in MRIs.
The issue people have with AI isn’t the tech. It’s who’s making it and why. It’s not being used to make life easier and better, it’s being used to cut decent paying jobs and commodify part of the human experience, all while making big profits without paying the people whose work was stolen to make those profits.
It’s just a different flavor of the fast fashion industry stealing high fashion designs and churning out their cheap knockoffs from factories in China where they don’t have to worry about things like safety standards or paying their workers a living wage.
It would depend upon the type of business. Modern office buildings filled with “information workers” weren’t a thing 50 years ago so it is kind of difficult to compare.
It’s not related to the technology, is the venture industry trying tp figure out the next unicorn, which they have been trying to find for the last ten years.
I wouldn’t say “the cloud” is exactly in the same realm. It’s broad and definitely had its heyday being thrown around in marketing, but it’s a very real facet in modern software. More specialized and actually useful AI will probably end up in a similar place eventually.
I think I’m talking myself out of my original point though lol. Kind of conflated LLMs and AI at first. I just wish LLMs weren’t the only things with money behind them.
I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.
I feel like the last few months have been an inflection point, at least for me. Qwen 2.5, and the new Command-R, really make a 24GB GPU feel “dumb, but smart,” useful enough so I pretty much always keep Qwen 32B loaded on the desktop for its sheer utility.
It’s still in the realm of enthusiast hardware (aka a used 3090), but hopefully that’s about to be shaken up with bitnet and some stuff from AMD/Intel.
Altman is literally a vampire though, and thankfully I think he’s going to burn OpenAI to the ground.
What do you think about the possibility of decentralized AI through blockchain so that you could pay some tokens or something like that to rent the GPUs to run your AI for as long as you wish to instead of having to buy all the hardware and assemble it yourself?
Tbh it’s just hard to see the value proposition in the age of cloud computing. I think aspects of the underlying technology are cool but basically every crypto project that comes to mind has been an actual scam. Sure there’s eth and RDNR that was built on top of it but why should i spend what will ultimately be more money in periods of high demand (gas goes up when more people use the network) when i can just plug my credit card into amazon or microsoft AND get the benefit of infosec regulation like PCI-DSS. Crypto just doesn’t ever inspire confidence because bad actors consistently shit in the punch bowl while providing no extra utility over existing cloud providers.
When distilled down crypto-compute just seems like cloud compute with extra steps, which is already just using a computer with extra steps.
We already can rent GPUs to run AIs with tokens - those tokens are just managed by govt instead of some random.
I somehow didnt’ get a notification for its post, but thats a terrible idea lol.
We already have AI horde, and it has nothing to do with blockchain. We also have APIs and GPU services… that have nothing to do with blockchain, and have no need for blockchain.
Someone apparently already tried the scheme you are describing, and absolutely no one in the wider AI community uses it.
Maybe that explains it. Because I am blind, pictures mean very little to me. I think image memes were one of the most abhorrent things to ever exist. Because I miss out on so much because of that.
It doesn’t matter. Just understand that there are people who get paid way more than the average joe to hype the shit out these companies to attract investor value. Then get mad at capitalism like the rest of us.
MBA degrees are way too easy to obtain. And the federal government bailing things out for a few decades has taught the market that they can take huge risks without much direct risk.
It’s just the new grift. There’s probably some value in there somewhere, some elements of it that will evolve into useful tools that get used a lot and presumably make a bunch of money for someone but yeah. Grifters gonna grift.
That’s because we’re using it wrong. It’s not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it’s mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it’s wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it’s great
For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you’re looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains
Those are some projects I’ve used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I’m looking to build a new one
I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like “build a class to represent this db object”. I don’t trust it to do anything that’s not straightforward - I don’t trust myself to do anything tedious
The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it’s flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible
As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let’s you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer
That’s my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo “rampancy”, a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job
This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn’t have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don’t know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool
I really don’t understand the hype about AI in it’s current state.
It’s not for you. Its for corporations who want to fire half their staff and replace them with an algorithm. That’s why it has such a high valuation.
Those corporations are about to find out the fun way that these algorithms, in their current and near-future states, cannot replace human beings.
Well, except for maybe lazy copywriters who pump out pointless listicles and executives who do - whatever it is they do - but any non-trivial task requiring creativity and understanding is beyond these tools.
You’re assuming that they care about running a viable service or product.
The hope is that their customers care. Or their customer’s customers.
The “corporation” might care. The Senior Vice Director of Data Intelligence who made the decision and got $50k bonus for it does not
“When I was young, they told me that one day, AI would do the menial labor so that we would have more time to do what we love - like art, music, and poetry. Today, the AI does art, music, and poetry so that I can work longer hours at my menial labor job for lower wages.”
Also, on point one, I still see a lot of job hirings for personal secretaries and people for data entry and to take minutes at meetings, and plenty of people complaining about not being able to actually talk to somebody on the phone to get their problem solved.
Your grandmother (or great grandmother depending how old you are) had to spend hours of hard labour every day to wash clothes dishes and rooms with just a tub of water a broom and a mop. Now all that takes maybe 20 minutes of light labour with a vacuum, dishwasher and washing machine. Technology absolutely has reduced drudgery
Mate, the horse whip and the wheel were Technology back when they got invented.
It’s a massivelly generic word.
Absolutelly some Technology has reduced drudgery. Meanwhile some Technology has managed to increase it (for example: one can make the case that the mobile phone, by making people be always accessible, has often increased pressure on people, though it depends on the job), some Technology has caused immense Environmental destruction, some Technology has even caused epidemics of psychological problems and so on.
Not only is there a lot of stuff in the big umbrella called Technology, but the total effect of one of those things is often dependent on how its its used and Capitalism seems especially prone to inventing and using Technology that’s very good for a handful of people whilst being bad for everybody else.
One can’t presume that just because something can be classified as Technology it will reduce drudgery or in even that it will be overall a good thing, even if some past Technologies did.
Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn’t see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.
Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn’t rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.
Be glad we’re not the horses. The glue factory might be coming next.
Not the best analogy. The glue factory was a thing while horses were a primary tool for transport and heavy labour. And horses were treated appallingly. Now that they’ve been made redundant, living standards for horses have improved dramatically and the glue factory is long gone (though their population has also reduced significantly).
We can only hope for a similar outcome for ourselves.
Before the car there were three to four people per horse
There are currently about 140 people per horse.
So if you want to cheer on taking the world population from 8.6 billion to about 188 million, treating us better, I can’t say I’m a big fan.
When did I say that?
We kid… We kid… 👀
Phone operators weren’t call center staff, they were literally routers in human form. Secretaries were your email program, calendar, and your folders full of word documents.
I’m well aware of switchboard operators. Computers were originally a profession as well.
Secretaries are still all that, both using digital tools as well as physical. They weren’t replaced by any of those programs. They just changed how they do their job. They schedule your meetings for you now in their cell phone instead of on a desk-sized paper calendar mat.
Alright, since you find this such an important issue, consider the first bullet point cropped off of my humorous list of milestones.
Doesn’t change the underlying point.
The underlying point misses why people have problems with the current AI bubble. I’ll cheer when they replace CEOs with AI - it seems like the best job to be replaced with LLMs and would save companies billions of dollars that could be used to improve the lives of workers. There’s tons of AI being used for all kinds of cool things already like spotting cancer in MRIs.
The issue people have with AI isn’t the tech. It’s who’s making it and why. It’s not being used to make life easier and better, it’s being used to cut decent paying jobs and commodify part of the human experience, all while making big profits without paying the people whose work was stolen to make those profits.
It’s just a different flavor of the fast fashion industry stealing high fashion designs and churning out their cheap knockoffs from factories in China where they don’t have to worry about things like safety standards or paying their workers a living wage.
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Dude, secretaries and assistants still exist.
Yeah we have one for a building of 100+ people. I wonder how many we would’ve needed 50 years ago.
It would depend upon the type of business. Modern office buildings filled with “information workers” weren’t a thing 50 years ago so it is kind of difficult to compare.
Good one. Did you use an LLM to generate it?
Too good for a human to have written so it must have been AI? I guess I’ll take it as a compliment that I’m writing at that level.
No…?
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You forgot maintenance and security. They need constant surveillance and maintenance.
I would argue that there’s neither understanding nor creativity happening. It’s guessing, aping, remixing, which is impressive enough.
It’s a machine that knows everything, but understands nothing.
And yet it’s accomplishing those tasks. I guess that means “understanding” wasn’t necessary for them after all.
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos_bot
The future portion of this list reads like something produced from ChatGPT.
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Nah that’s what they’re saying. That people used to say that and they were proved wrong.
Lol I figured that out shortly after typing my comment, hence deleting it
The point isn’t that we’ll never get there. The point is we sure as shit aren’t there yet.
They could fire 3 layers of management without spending a dime while increasing productivity.
Honestly the easiest people to replace with a bot.
An AI chatbot for a cloud service I use helped me find the right documentation for setting up SSO. It’s not all bad. But the way it’s pushed is bad.
It’s all leading to one final product: VR sex robots
It better.
I saw a documentary about that.
Like your optimism, but unlikely
It’s not related to the technology, is the venture industry trying tp figure out the next unicorn, which they have been trying to find for the last ten years.
Cloud? Neva heard of it! AI is where the money is at now.
Buzzwords, that’s all they are.
Server farms are the real money maker. Doesn’t matter the fad, they’ll need processing power from somewhere.
As always when someone looks for gold, sell them the shovel.
I wouldn’t say “the cloud” is exactly in the same realm. It’s broad and definitely had its heyday being thrown around in marketing, but it’s a very real facet in modern software. More specialized and actually useful AI will probably end up in a similar place eventually.
I think I’m talking myself out of my original point though lol. Kind of conflated LLMs and AI at first. I just wish LLMs weren’t the only things with money behind them.
Honestly, I can say I don’t really get it either. I would only use the open source models anyway, but it just seems rather silly from what I can tell.
I feel like the last few months have been an inflection point, at least for me. Qwen 2.5, and the new Command-R, really make a 24GB GPU feel “dumb, but smart,” useful enough so I pretty much always keep Qwen 32B loaded on the desktop for its sheer utility.
It’s still in the realm of enthusiast hardware (aka a used 3090), but hopefully that’s about to be shaken up with bitnet and some stuff from AMD/Intel.
Altman is literally a vampire though, and thankfully I think he’s going to burn OpenAI to the ground.
What do you think about the possibility of decentralized AI through blockchain so that you could pay some tokens or something like that to rent the GPUs to run your AI for as long as you wish to instead of having to buy all the hardware and assemble it yourself?
I cannot tell if you are being serious or just having fun with buzzwords
I stopped at block chain
Oh, I’m being completely serious. I’ve been interested in crypto since about 2013.
crypto fizzled years ago without a major use case. source: check google trend history.
bitcoin wouldn’t be useful for tracking the rental of cpu/gpu assets.
Yeah, no Bitcoin would be the wrong chain for that. But there are other chains that would work better for such a use case.
how do you suppose?
There is no need to use Blockchain for this. Computing pools like this have been used for ages
The solution to all the world’s computing issues is not “blockchain.”
you mean a computing pool, like SETI@home since the late 90s?
absolutely no need to make this idea stink of a crypto scam.
You can already do it but there isn’t really any need for a blockchain. I personally use runpod but there’s vast.ai and a few others.
It’s usually quite cheap.
Isn’t that just cloud computing but with extra steps?
Tbh it’s just hard to see the value proposition in the age of cloud computing. I think aspects of the underlying technology are cool but basically every crypto project that comes to mind has been an actual scam. Sure there’s eth and RDNR that was built on top of it but why should i spend what will ultimately be more money in periods of high demand (gas goes up when more people use the network) when i can just plug my credit card into amazon or microsoft AND get the benefit of infosec regulation like PCI-DSS. Crypto just doesn’t ever inspire confidence because bad actors consistently shit in the punch bowl while providing no extra utility over existing cloud providers.
When distilled down crypto-compute just seems like cloud compute with extra steps, which is already just using a computer with extra steps.
We already can rent GPUs to run AIs with tokens - those tokens are just managed by govt instead of some random.
I somehow didnt’ get a notification for its post, but thats a terrible idea lol.
We already have AI horde, and it has nothing to do with blockchain. We also have APIs and GPU services… that have nothing to do with blockchain, and have no need for blockchain.
Someone apparently already tried the scheme you are describing, and absolutely no one in the wider AI community uses it.
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Are you trying to solve science with it or something? You are supposed to turn carefully worded sentences into funny pictures and show people.
Maybe that explains it. Because I am blind, pictures mean very little to me. I think image memes were one of the most abhorrent things to ever exist. Because I miss out on so much because of that.
Have you tried music generation? That’s also fun. There are a bunch.
It doesn’t matter. Just understand that there are people who get paid way more than the average joe to hype the shit out these companies to attract investor value. Then get mad at capitalism like the rest of us.
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MBA degrees are way too easy to obtain. And the federal government bailing things out for a few decades has taught the market that they can take huge risks without much direct risk.
It’s just the new grift. There’s probably some value in there somewhere, some elements of it that will evolve into useful tools that get used a lot and presumably make a bunch of money for someone but yeah. Grifters gonna grift.
That’s because we’re using it wrong. It’s not a genie you go to for answers to your problems, it’s mighty putty. You could build a house out of it, but it’s wildly expensive and not at all worth it. But if you want to stick a glass bottle to a tree, or fix a broken plastic shell back together, it’s great
For example, you can have it do a web search, read through the results to see if it actually contains what you’re looking for, then summarize what it found and let you jump right there to evaluate yourself. You could have it listen to your podcasts and tag them by topic. You could write a normal program to generate a name and traits of a game character, then have the AI write flavor text and dialog trees for quest chains
Those are some projects I’ve used AI for - specifically, local AI running on my old computer. I’m looking to build a new one
I also use chat gpt to write simple but tedious code on a weekly basis for my normal job - things like “build a class to represent this db object”. I don’t trust it to do anything that’s not straightforward - I don’t trust myself to do anything tedious
The AI is not an expert, I am. The AI is happy to do busy work, every second of it increases my stress level. AI is tireless, it can work while I sleep. AI is not efficient, but it’s flexible. My code is efficient, but it is not flexible
As a part of a system, AI is the link between unstructured data and code, which needs structure. It let’s you do things that would have required a 24/7 team of dozens of employees. It also is unable to replace a single human - just like a computer
That’s my philosophy at least, after approaching LLMs as a new type of tool and studying them as a developer. Like anything else, I ran it on my own computer and poked and prodded it until I saw the patterns. I learned what it could do, and what it struggled to do. I learned how to use it, I developed methodologies. I learned how to detect and undo “rampancy”, a number of different failure states where it degrades into nonsense. And I learned how to use it as another tool in my toolbox, and I pride myself on using the right tool for the job
This is a useful tool - I repeatedly have used it to do things I couldn’t have done without it. This is a new tool - artisans don’t know how to use it yet. I can build incredible things with this tool with what I know now, and other people are developing their own techniques to great effect. We will learn how to use this tool, even in its current state. It will take time, its use may not be obvious, but this is a very useful tool
You’re doing it wrong, you’re only allowed to hate AI and if you don’t you’re a crypto shill or something idk
You must not be feeling the AGI.
I like it. I use it every day. Much faster and better than sifting through garbage websites to find answers.
How’s the glue on your pizza working out?
Possibly correct answers lol