this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

I like my project manager, they find me work, ask how I'm doing and talk straight.

It's when the CEO/CTO/CFO speaks where my eyes glaze over, my mouth sags, and I bounce my neck at prompted intervals as my brain retreats into itself as it frantically tosses words and phrases into the meaning grinder and cranks the wheel, only for nothing to come out of it time and time again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 45 minutes ago* (last edited 44 minutes ago)

Right, that sweet spot between too less stimuli so your brain just wants to sleep or run away and enough stimuli so you can't just zone out (or sleep).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

Current big tech is going to keeping pushing limits and have SM influencers/youtubers market and their consumers picking up the R&D bill. Emotionally I want to say stop innovating but really cut your speed by 75%. We are going to witness an era of optimization and efficiency. Most users just need a Pi 5 16gb, Intel NUC or an Apple air base models. Those are easy 7-10 year computers. No need to rush and get latest and greatest. I’m talking about everything computing in general. One point gaming,more people are waking up realizing they don’t need every new GPU, studios are burnt out, IPs are dying due to no lingering core base to keep franchise up float and consumers can't keep opening their wallets. Hence studios like square enix going to start support all platforms and not do late stage capitalism with going with their own launcher with a store. It’s over.

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

Good let them waste all their money

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

The actual survey result:

Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed. 

So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe

Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.

[–] cantstopthesignal 13 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It's becoming clear from the data that more error correction needs exponentially more data. I suspect that pretty soon we will realize that what's been built is a glorified homework cheater and a better search engine.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 hours ago

what's been built is a glorified homework cheater and an ~~better~~ unreliable search engine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I agree that it's editorialized compared to the very neutral way the survey puts it. That said, I think you also have to take into account how AI has been marketed by the industry.

They have been claiming AGI is right around the corner pretty much since chatGPT first came to market. It's often implied (e.g. you'll be able to replace workers with this) or they are more vague on timeline (e.g. OpenAI saying they believe their research will eventually lead to AGI).

With that context I think it's fair to editorialize to this being a dead-end, because even with billions of dollars being poured into this, they won't be able to deliver AGI on the timeline they are promising.

[–] cantstopthesignal 3 points 2 hours ago

AI isn't going to figure out what a customer wants when the customer doesn't know what they want.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 hours ago

There are some nice things I have done with AI tools, but I do have to wonder if the amount of money poured into it justifies the result.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago

It's because customers don't want it or care for it, it's only the corporations themselves are obsessed with it

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Me and my 5.000 closest friends don't like that the website and their 1.300 partners all need my data.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Why so many sig figs for 5 and 1.3 though?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 hours ago (4 children)

Some parts of the world (mostly Europe, I think) use dots instead of commas for displaying thousands. For example, 5.000 is 5,000 and 1.300 is 1,300

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Yes. It's the normal Thousands-separator notation in Germany for example.

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

But usually you don't put three 000 because that becomes a hint of thousand.

Like 2.50 is 2€50 but 2.500 is 2500€

Is there an ISO standard for this stuff?

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

No, 2,50€ is 2€ and 50ct, 2.50€ is wrong in this system. 2,500€ is also wrong (for currency, where you only care for two digits after the comma), 2.500€ is 2500€

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

Says the country where every science textbook is half science half conversion tables.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

We (in Europe) probably should be thankful that you are not using feet as thousands-separator over there in the USA... Or maybe separate after each 2nd digit, because why not... ;)

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

It makes sense from typographical standpoint, the comma is the larger symbol and thus harder to overlook, especially in small fonts or messy handwriting

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

I knew the context, was just being cheesy. :-D

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Too late... You started a war in the comments. I'll proudly fight for my country's way to separate numbers!!! :)

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Technology in most cases progresses on a logarithmic scale when innovation isn't prioritized. We've basically reached the plateau of what LLMs can currently do without a breakthrough. They could absorb all the information on the internet and not even come close to what they say it is. These days we're in the "bells and whistles" phase where they add unnecessary bullshit to make it seem new like adding 5 cameras to a phone or adding touchscreens to cars. Things that make something seem fancy by slapping buzzwords and features nobody needs without needing to actually change anything but bump up the price.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 9 hours ago (4 children)

Optimizing AI performance by “scaling” is lazy and wasteful.

Reminds me of back in the early 2000s when someone would say don’t worry about performance, GHz will always go up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 27 minutes ago

I miss flash players.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Thing is, same as with GHz, you have to do it as much as you can until the gains get too small. You do that, then you move on to the next optimization. Like ai has and is now optimizing test time compute, token quality, and other areas.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

To be fair, GHz did go up. Granted, it's not why modern processors are faster and more efficient.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 9 hours ago (23 children)

They're throwing billions upon billions into a technology with extremely limited use cases and a novelty, at best. My god, even drones fared better in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I mean it's pretty clear they're desperate to cut human workers out of the picture so they don't have to pay employees that need things like emotional support, food, and sleep.

They want a workslave that never demands better conditions, that's it. That's the play. Period.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

And the tragedy of the whole situation is that they can‘t win because if every worker is replaced by an algorithm or a robot then who‘s going to buy your products? Nobody has money because nobody has a job. And so the economy will shift to producing war machines that fight each other for territory to build more war machine factories until you can’t expand anymore for one reason or another. Then the entire system will collapse like the Roman Empire and we start from scratch.

[–] thatKamGuy 1 points 1 hour ago

producing war machines that fight each other for territory to build more war machine factories until you can’t expand anymore for one reason or another.

As seen in the retro-documentary Z!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

If this is their way of making AI, with brute forcing the technology without innovation, AI will probably cost more for these companies to maintain infrastructure than just hiring people. These AI companies are already not making a lot of money for how much they cost to maintain. And unless they charge companies millions of dollars just to be able to use their services they will never make a profit. And since companies are trying to use AI to replace the millions they spend on employees it seems kinda pointless if they aren't willing to prioritize efficiency.

It's basically the same argument they have with people. They don't wanna treat people like actual humans because it costs too much, yet letting them love happy lives makes them more efficient workers. Whereas now they don't want to spend money to make AI more efficient, yet increasing efficiency would make them less expensive to run. It's the never ending cycle of cutting corners only to eventually make less money than you would have if you did things the right way.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Absolutely. It's maddening that I've had to go from "maybe we should make society better somewhat" in my twenties to "if we're gonna do capitalism, can we do it how it actually works instead of doing it stupid?" in my forties.

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