Technology

It’s all the bullshitting going on in both.

This technology requires finance. You can't train a model without millions of dollars.

If the money goes the technology is dead until the cost of the training machines comes down a few orders of magnitude.

Oh your a dirty eigenvector arnt you! I'm going to transpose you so hard they won't know you from a probability matrix!

Yeah the only innovation here is that OpenAI had the balls to use the entire internet as a training set. The underlying algorithms aren't really new, and the limitations have been understood by data scientists, computer scientists, and mathematicians for a long time.

I mean if you ignore all the papers that point out how dubious the gen AI benchmarks are, then it is very impressive.

No one believed that it could work except some japanese guy

There is a difference in not knowing how to do a thing and someone coming out doing the thing, and knowing how something works, knowing it's by design limitations, and still hoping it may work out.

There are millions of people devoting huge amounts of time and energy into improving AI capabilities, publishing paper after paper finding new ways to improve models, training, etc. Perhaps some companies are using AI hype to get free money but that doesn’t discredit the hard work of others.

Given AI’s energy needs, it’s already helping to take us out.

Not with the current tech. It can go faster, have more detailed output, maybe consume less too, but there seems to be a ceiling on what LLM and their derivative can do. There has been no improvement in that regard, and people that look into it are pretty confident that it won't happen at this point.

Sure.

GPT4 is not that. Neither will GPT5 be that. They are language models that marketing is calling AI. They have a very specific use case, and it's not something that can replace any work/workers that requires any level of traceability or accountability. It's just "the thing the machine said".

Marketing latched onto "AI" because blockchain and cloud and algorithmic had gotten stale and media and CEOs went nuts. Samsung is now producing an "AI" vacuum that adjusts suction between hardwood and carpet. That's not new technology. That's not even a new way of doing that technology. It's just jumping on the bandwagon.

That's the thing though, that's not comparable, and misses the point entirely. "AI" in this context and the conversations regarding it in the current day is specifically talking about LLMs. They will not improve to the point of general intelligence as that is not how they work. Hallucinations are inevitable with the current architectures and methods, and they lack a inherent understanding of concepts in general. It's the same reason they can't do math or logic problems that aren't common in the training set. It's not intelligence. Modern computers are built on the same principals and architectures as those calculators were, just iterated upon extensively. No such leap is possible using large language models. They are entirely reliant on a finite pool of data to try to mimic most effectively, they are not learning or understanding concepts the way "Full-AI" would need to to actually be reliable or able to generate new ideas.

Oh, I'm not saying that there won't one day come a better technology that can do a lot more. What I'm saying is that the present technology will never do much more than it is already doing. This is not an issue of refining the technology for more applications. It's a matter of completely developing a new type of technology.

In areas of generative text, summarizing articles and books, as well as writing short portions of code in order to assist humans, creating simple fan art, and meaningless images like avatars, and those stock photos at the top of articles, Perhaps creating short animations, Improving pattern recognition of things like speech and facial recognition… In all of these areas, AI was very rapidly revolutionary.

Generative AI will not become capable of doing things that it's not already doing. Most of what it's replacing are just worse computer programs. Some new technology will undoubtedly be revolutionary in the way that computers were a completely new revolution on top of basic function calculators. People are developing quantum computers, and mapping the precise functions of brain cells. If you want, you can download a completely mapped actual nematode brain right now. You can buy brain cells online, even human brain cells, and put them into computers. Maybe they can even run Doom. I have no idea what the next computing revolution will be capable of, but this one has mostly run its course. It has given us some very incredible tools in a very narrow scope, and those tools will continue to improve incrementally, but there will be no additional revolution.