this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

"Today" AI is Over hyped, Wildy expensive and unreliable. This is like the quote about the Internet not catching on, or how nobody would ever need more than 640kb of ram. honestly y'all make me chuckle.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (3 children)

You're right. Once it settles into its niches and the hype dies down, it won't be overhyped anymore because everyone will have moved on.

I've been working with generative AI for years now and we still struggle to solve real world problems with it. It isn't useless or anything. It's way too unreliable, and this isn't one of those things where time will solve it - it's being used to solve problems that have no perfect solutions, like human interfacing and generating culturally-appropriate and visually-accurate images. I'd expect it to improve at those tasks over time, but the scope needs to drop from every problem humanity has ever faced to the problems that these models are good at solving.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Correct. Dress it up however you like, but LLM and ML programs are probability gamblers all the way down. We’re building a conversation tool, that doesn’t truly comprehend the language because it’s a calculator at its core - it’s like asking your eyeballs to see in UHF frequencies.

They’re called “computers” for a reason, and we are deep in the myopic tech tree of further and further complexity. The current wave of AI has solid potential, but not globally for all applications. It is a great at ‘digital assistant’ roles and is already killing it in CCTV monitoring software. Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art. ChatGPT can write, but it’s a terrible author or speechwriter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art.

Mostly because you're defining "art" in such a way that being produced by MidJourney disqualifies it automatically.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

This is the same middlebrow dismissal that AI advocates have been using for years.

"It's just a stochastic parrot." "How do you know that you aren't just a stochastic parrot?"

Well we do know. There are experts on human cognition. They have been studying it for decades. We may not know enough about it to know how to make a computer do it. But we certainly know enough about it to know when a computer chatbot is not doing it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Sorry to break it to you but there is no defining art without disqualifying ai, the subject is so old it's hardly an opinion at this point. Even the most imaginative mating rituals animals can do barely qualifies... And mind you, these have emotions and cognitive capabilities, so something as barebone as the kind of "ai" we make now.. nothing more than a joke art wise.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

You sound like a teacher from the 80s telling a student that they won't always have a calculator with them. Your lack of imagination solving problems with AI is and will remain yours. Automation and AI is going to change the entire world much like the automobile devastated the Horse transportation industry. Just as the Amazon killed the Malls. You just fail to see how you fit into this new strange future, and surprise you just perhaps don't.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Your lack of imagination

I don't know why you think these ideas were mine, but I do work for a rather large company that has invested a lot of resources looking for solutions using these models. These ideas came from people far smarter than I.

The rest of your comment has so little to do with what I said that I'm inclined to believe it's AI generated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Lol your last line made me giggle. Nice. Are these Super smart people who thought apple vision was worth 3500.00?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Your insult is a math teacher wanting students to understand math?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

If it changes the "entire world", I would very much prefer it not to change the world for the worse, but that's the current trend.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

^ guy who thought the Apple Newton would catch on as-was

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I agree with this. Its wildly misunderstood and it's the name. AI is absolutely the most amazing marketing name for it but its only a thin veneer of our sci fi dreams. Over time that veneer might get a bit thicker but it wont be what people think it will be. It is good at certain things, like you know, being a large language model, but it is a (very) limited subset of what human intelligence is.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's not "widely misunderstood", it's been widely hyped by the people actively selling it. The tech bros are pumping and dumping it, just like with every other tech panacea.

It's not the public, it's the snake oil salesmen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's what I am saying. The buyers wildly misunderstand it. The seller presents it with a very effective and misleading pitch.

Look at the Intuit CEO who just fired 10% of their labor to pivot to AI to um, "give financial advise." And then goes on to say any other company who doesn't do the same will fall behind and fail. Time will tell but I am going to go with, people will laugh when Intuit is on fire.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I suspect Intuit fired those workers for other reasons (free file) and are using AI as an excuse because to admit that free-file is an existential threat to their business is to admit that their company has no long term business prospects.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

That seems entirely plausible for the staffing change. But Intuit is more than their tax software for example Quickbooks isn't going anywhere. I am sure they do other stuff, probably payment processing and I don't know what else. So they will survive at some level, it would be hard to kill Quickbooks.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The internet is a funny analogue!

Because it experienced the dot com crash under almost the same sort of circumstances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah thank God after the dot com crash, the Internet completely disappeared. That was a close one it almost destroyed society. Lol

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The internet as the internet companies percieved it would look like and sold it as absolutely and completely vanished, yeah.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not sure why you're equating "overhyped, expensive, and unreliable" with "this thing will never exist." Nobody is arguing that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I'm not sure how anyone can miss the "TODAY" meaning currently which was my only argument.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not really comparable.

AI has lots of potential for the future, and Goldman Sachs continues to invest in that sector.

They are specifically talking about the bubble of Generative AI startups, none of which have any long term viability as they either produce a novelty, or they produce something so inaccurate that nobody would trust it after using it.

They aren't the people saying that the Internet won't catch on. They're the ones warning you that dot com is a bubble.

They're right.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I find comments like these on places like Beehaw almost amusing in a way. It's like watching a drunk person stumble from a bar all the way to a courthouse and getting upset the clerk won't sell them more liquor.

Seriously though, I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish here. Just about everybody here disagrees and isn't keen on a take like this, and I'd figure you'd have been able to tell as much before posting. So... are you just here to argue?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I look at it more like autonomous driving which we've been told is just around the corner for close to a decade now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Let me propose how will anyone get rich with automatic cars?