No. Don’t be afraid of a tool. But be cautious of those who wield it and how they use it. People pushing it usually don’t have your best interest. Its a product. A vehicle for profit. Own your tools and don’t fear the man behind the curtains.

Nah. I was at first then realized its a HUGEEE marketing hype train with billions behind it and that is why it proliferated. If it didnt have that no one would give a fuck. It doesn’t do anything we havent had tools to do for 20 years. It made some things a little easier for dumb people.

Read up some Ed Ziteron to clear your head. They (the altmans of the world) want you to think this way and give up so you stop learning, atrophy your brain, and pay a knowledge subscription to use their inaccurate summarizing bot. Thats the end goal, a grift, as usual, and why right wing fascists love it so much.

Really nothing has changed.

Not really. If anything, I’m frustrated how slowly it’s improving. Most new models are just made by pouring more money into the same problem instead of actually inventing anything new.

We have this glorified autocomplete feature and we are treating it for some reason like it would be an artificial general intelligence only because it outputs human like sentences. At the same time, it weakens the quality of the school system, products and services, raises the prices of consumer electronics, fills my internet with slop and destroys natural resources. We are living in a some kind of transitional phase and there are still many problems that have not yet been solved and it’s really frustrating.

Anytime I ask it about things I’m knowledgeable about, it falls on it’s face. It only seems smart on topics I don’t know shit about (this red flag has spotlights on it!). Given this, I cannot trust it on anything lest I be led down false paths. Given how LLMs work, I don’t see this problem as fixable.

I have found them useful for search term generation. (Using a topic I know things about) If I need a more powerful drill for screwing lag bolts into hardwood and I’m not finding what I need, asking it and and getting back the keyword ‘impact driver’ is helpful, as it lets me go search for what that is and if it is the solution to my need for a more powerful drill. Note: I do not let it teach me about impact drivers (as it falls on it’s face all the fucking time), only use it to get the keyword to then use to search the internet.

To circle back to your question, I’m not scared with how fast they are advancing. I’m scared by how many people think they are good at everything and put them in places they don’t belong.

No, so stop being freaked out for christ sake.

You and people like you, are making it sound like AI is capable of initiating Skynet-level of capability. At worst, AM-capability (I have no mouth and I must scream). That may be true in the beginning, but AI has been sharply nerfed to where it is just simply a talking search engine, calculator, number cruncher .etc that just so happens to also talk to you about other things.

So while you live in your worry caves, we’re all over here being unimpressed with what art it spits out with extra limbs and inconsistency.

No I’m not. It’s been impressive but it seems to have plateaued. It’s not particularly reliable, and we’re at the point of diminishing returns with the current technology and scalability. We’re not seeing big jumps in models capabilities in the ways we did at the start, and the investment needed to get incremental increases in power are now looking insane.

We’re in the middle of a stock market bubble, where everyone is hyping up their products and speculators have been throwing money at AI, desperate to have a slice of the “winner”. But the productivity gains we’ve been promised haven’t followed. If you use the products even a little, you really see the limitations - they “hallucinate”, they don’t reliably produce the most efficient answers, they often tell you what you want to hear.

A lot of products have been badged as “AI” but they’re really either LLMs or more targetted generative AI. They are certainly useful, and some are undoubtedly going to be profitable, but they’re not anywhere as near useful or powerful as the proponents are trying to make out. Companies like OpenAI for example are burning through money at an alarming rate, and not really producing much gains now. Companies like Microsoft, Meta and Google have deep pockets and have thrown many $100s of billions at AI, yet to what end? Little chat bots, tools that help you make emails briefer/concise, tools that sort-of help you search the internet? It’s not as revolutionary as it first seemed.

It’s telling that companies are quietly backing away from hyped up mega-deals with OpenAI (Microsoft, Nvidia), and that Microsoft has pivoted away from Copilot due to backlash and lack of user uptake. Their own stats shows only 3% of users were using Copilot, yet they’ve rammed it into almost every corner of Windows and Office, and to the detriment of their actual core product and users.

General AI is likely on the way, but not from this initial burst of technology, and probably not from any of these companies. LLMs and other current techniques are interesting and have their uses, but the idea that we just scale it up and have General AI is seemingly nonsense. The biggest proponents of that idea are companies like OpenAI that are desperate that the technology they have is the one that dominates. Instead I suspect it’s the researchers and companies quietly working on technology that better mimics the actual biological brain that will get us to something like General AI, and that seems to be quite a way off.

Complex ideas like this are not just about throwing money at the problem; there is plenty of resource going in to AI development but what you actually need is good quality research and time. Much of the money is very likely being wasted on duplication, pointless infrastructure (like more data centres for current models to scale), bloated salaries of research staff due to competition, bloated salaries of non-research staff and of course the stock-market shenanigans and deals that really produce nothing for AI research.

Don’t be worried about AI; be worried about this stock market bubble popping.

Not really…

… but you know what else is advancing? Lemmy! The 1.0 beta is out :D

It is scary, less because of AI itself and more because of corporate greed and regular people without critical thinking skills that will blindly trust anything AI tells them. AI is and can be a really useful tool for a lot of scenarios. I use it as a coding assistant for my job almost daily. But I dont blindly accept what it tells me or programs. I test, debug, and research things. Its good for summarization, easy, repetitive tasks, and taking suggestions from the internet.

AI is a tool, and like any tool, it can be really dangerous if you don’t use it in a smart way.

I’m only scared of how much bosses can be convinced to fire workers (even if they rehire later, which has happened a few times already); how self-driving vehicles are being allowed on our public roads and sidewalks when they are not proven safe; how they get used for critical info gathering and treatment in medicine with very little regulation; how they get used to track and surveil us; their uses in war; and of course the impact on the planet.

In a society after capitalism and other hierarchies, I think some amount of AI could be used much more responsibly, consciously, safely, and for the public good.

Its all smoke and mirrors.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-what-if-were-in-an-ai-bubble-part-1/

I genuinely believed that AI this capable would be available in 2010 from 1990,
as sci-fi movies were showing flying cars, skyscraper cities and space travel.
Things slowed down a lot in the 2000s and got weird.

The feeling of constant acceleration is valid. It will only get more intense in the coming years, so consider this your practice round.

In spite of the marginal results a lot of current LLMs can deliver, they are making a difference in some areas of work. I’m a data engineer and working with an agent over the last few months has been a revelation. You have to wrangle it just so, but with an adequate context well-defined, you can plow through months of tedious due-diligence and fine-tuning in days.

I wouldn’t trust it for medical advice… yet… but the time will come when it stops being “ai” and becomes like autofocus or voice transcription or shopping cart suggestions, just another tool. Something else will take on that mantle, and be a different, even more disconcerting mixed bag.

There was a book that came out about 20 years ago by Ray Kurzweil, named The Singularity is Near that discussed this phenomenon in detail, and so far has been prophetic. It will help you understand what’s happening and what’s coming next.

You should stop reading marketing junk. Several of the newer models have benchmarked as worse then original releases. Many firms roll back AI deployments, some models create more errors then it would take to fire and intern and some can’t even run a vending machine business

Also, it helps to take a break from technology if this worries you. Read a book. Do some woodworking.

Llms arent going to plant a garden, build houses, fix a leaky faucet, install a new outlet, mount and balance tires, paint a house, dig a hole. It never will. It may be able to give you an inaccurate guide that allows less intelligent to electrocute themselves or poison themselves though.

no, it’s a glorified calculator. it doesn’t think.