Technology

Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything, all in the name of the environment, while at the same time in some datacenter they are burning kwh’s by the bucket loads generating pictures of cats in space suits.

That's, #1, fashion and not about environment, #2, fashion promoted because it's cheaper for the industry.

And yes, power saved somewhere will just be spent elsewhere. Cheaper. Cause that means reduced demand for power (or grown not as fast as otherwise).

Well I'm on board for fuck intellectual property. If openai doesn't publish the weights then all their datacenter get visited by the killdozer

Seconded. LLMs are neat - but they're fundamentally not oracles. They belong in video games, not in fucking Google.

They've served their purpose demonstrating that data and training will suffice to perform the impossible. We need to move on to better questions than 'what's the next word?' Text diffusion models should be better, but their metric remains 'that looks about right,' so their repeated adjustments will be wrong in fascinating new ways.

most LLM's for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.

As for practical use, the things can't do math so they're useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can't imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.

I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it's reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.

I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.

If gigantic amounts of capital weren't available, then the focus would be on improving the models so they don't need GPU farms running off nuclear reactors plus the sum total of all posts on the Internet ever.

And a third intrinsic problem is that the current models with infinite training data have been proven to never approach human language capability, from papers written by OpenAI in 2020 and Deepmind in 2022, and also a paper by Stanford which proposes AI simply have no emergent behavior and only convergent behavior.

So yeah. Lots of problems.

Training is transformative use.

I don't even care about actual piracy. A gigabyte of linear algebra having memories of all popular culture is a non-issue, for me.

Eh I’m fine with the illegal harvesting of data. It forces the courts to revisit the question of what copyright really is and hopefully erodes the stranglehold that copyright has on modern society.

Let the companies fight each other over whether it’s okay to pirate every video on YouTube. I’m waiting.

Oh, and it also hallucinates.

Oh, and people believe the hallucinations.

It varies massivelly depending on the ML.

For example things like voice generation or object recognition can absolutelly be done with entirelly legit training datasets - literally pay a bunch of people to read some texts and you can train a voice generation engine with it and the work in object recognition is mainly tagging what's in the images on top of a ton of easilly made images of things - a researcher can literally go around taking photos to make their dataset.

Image generation, on the other hand, not so much - you can only go so far with just plain photos a researcher can just go around and take on the street and they tend to relly a lot on artistic work of people who have never authorized the use of their work to train them, and LLMs clearly cannot be do without scrapping billions of pieces of actual work from billions of people.

Of course, what we tend to talk about here when we say "AI" is LLMs, which are IMHO the worst of the bunch.

I mean, it's our work the result should belong to the people.

The real issues are capitalism and the lack of green energy.

If the arts where well funded, if people where given healthcare and UBI, if we had, at the very least, switched to nuclear like we should've decades ago, we wouldn't be here.

The issue isn't a piece of software.