Oh surprise surprise, looks like generative AI isn’t going to fulfill Silicon Valley and Hollywood studios’ dream of replacing artist, writers, and programmers with computer to maximize value for the poor, poor shareholders. Oh no!
As I said here before, generative AIs are not universal solution to everything that has ever existed like they are hyped up to be, but neither are they useless. At the end of the day, they are ultimately tools. Complex, powerful, useful tools, but tools nonetheless. A good artist can create better work faster with the help of a diffusion model, the same way LLM code generation can help a good programmer finish their project faster and better. (I think). All of these AI models are trained on data from data from everyone on Internet, which is why I think its reasonable that everyone should have access to these generative AI models for the benefit of humanity and not profit, and not just those who took other people’s work for free to trained the models. In other words, these generative AI models should belong to everyone.
And here lies my distaste for Sam Altman: OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit for the benefit of humanity, but at the first chance of money he immediately started venture capitalisting and put anything from GPT-2 onwards under locks and keys for money, and now it looks like that they are being crushed under the weight of their own operating costs while groups like Facebook and Stability catches up with actual open models, I will not be sad if "Open"AI fails.
(For as much crap as I give Zuck for the other awful things they do, I do admire their commitment to open source.)
I have to admit, playing with these generative models is pretty fun.
Hm. I think you should zoom out a bit and try to recognize that AI isn’t stagnant.
Voice recognition and translation programs to years before they were appropriate for real-world applications. AI is also going to require years before it’s ready. But that time is coming. We haven’t reached a ‘ceiling’ for AI’s capabilities.
Breakthrough technological development usually can be described as a sigmoid function (s-shaped curve), while there is an exponential progress in the beginning, it usually hit a climax then slow down and plateau until the next breakthrough.
There are certain problem that are not possible to resolve with the current level of technology for which development progress has slowed to a crawl, such as level 5 autonomous driving (by the way, better public transport is a way less complex solution.), and I think we are hitting the limit of what far transformer based generative AI can do since training has become more and more expensive for smaller and smaller gains, whereas hallucination seems to be an inherent problem that is ultimately unfixable with the current level of technology.
Oh surprise surprise, looks like generative AI isn’t going to fulfill Silicon Valley and Hollywood studios’ dream of replacing artist, writers, and programmers with computer to maximize value for the poor, poor shareholders. Oh no!
It really is incredible how much this rhymes with the crypto hype. To be fair, the technology does actually have uses but, as someone in the latter category, after I saw it in action, I quickly felt less worried about my job prospects.
Fortunately, enough people in charge of staffing seem to have listened to people with technical knowledge to not make my earlier prediction (mass layoffs directly due to LLMs, followed by mass, panicked re-hirings when said LLMs ruined the business) come true. But, the worry itself, along with the RTO pushes (not to mention exploitation of contractors and H1B holders) really underscore his desperately the industry needs to get organized. Hopefully, what’s going on in the games industry with IATSE gets more traction and more of my colleagues on the same page but, that’s one area where I’m not as optimistic as I’d like to be - I’ll just have to cheer on SAG, WGA, and UAW for the time being.
(For as much crap as I give Zuck for the other awful things they do, I do admire their commitment to open source.)
Absolutely agreed. There’s a surprising amount of good in the open source world that has come from otherwise ethically devoid companies. Even Intuit donated the Argo project, which has evolved from a cool workflow tool to a toolkit with far more. There is always the danger of EEE, however, so, we’ve got to stay vigilant.
A powerful tool maybe, but useless
If your drill needs a nuclear plant and monthly subcription to drill a hole, it’s a shitty tool
Going to have to disagree with you there. I’ve gotten plenty of use out of chat GPT in multiple scenarios. I find it difficult to imagine what exactly you think is useless about it because it seems so indispensable to me at this point.
Indispensable, nothing less. lmao
Have fun when they decide to multiply the price x10 and you are too dependant to have an alternative, or when it becomes stupid or malevolent 👍
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand how that makes it useless. I get the feeling that you just want to feel smug, so if it makes you feel better go ahead, I guess.
Because it’s too fragile and not ready to be use at scale without causing massive damage
Not useless for now (even if i’d like to know more about the domains where it’s really “indispensable”), but as useless as a drill with a dead battery the day they decide to cut it.
I don’t find it future-proof, as impressive as some results are
Nowdays LLM can be ran on consumer hardware, so the “dead battery” analogy fall short here too.
With the same efficiency ? I’m interested in an example
Why everyone using these crappy SaaS then ?
You sound like the people who thought credit cards would never replace cash.
And you sound like the people who thought cryptos would replace credit cards ;)
Silicon like usual thinking these things are as big as the invention as the internet, and trying to get their money in there the first place. AI was and still is a massive game changer, but nothing can live up to the hype of which they throw a stupid amount of money at these things. They didn’t learn their lesson after crypto or the “metaverse” either lol. I see AI being a tool, an incredibly useful one. That also means it has a lot of jobs it simply can’t do. It can’t replace artists, but artists can use it as a tool to help them work off of things.
So far I’ve only seen AI being used to fire employees that a company totally absolutely still needs but just doesn’t want to pay wages to. Companies are dumb as fuck, that’s my conclusion, but what else can you expect by organizations run by ladder-climbing CEO figures?
There’s utility in keeping workers desperate, it depresses wages.
Think about the coordinated tech layoffs that happened and now the tech industry has a labor surplus.
Saves them money.
The company that laid me off is paying me 4 months of wages without any work, this is the severance package I get in exchange for them not being forced to try to find me another suitable position in the company or “prove” that there no tasks at the company that I could do with my existing skill set (that’s how the law works where I live).
Was it really worth it?
My point was it’s not dumb, it’s malicious and self serving.
It’s not worth it.
Are you in the states? I’m surprised you have those protections.
No, Sweden
Things will live up to the hype and easily surpass it. That’s not the issue. The issue is that people take the world of today and imagine how much better/faster/richer they could become if they had AI. The crux is by the time they have AI, everybody else has it too. Thus it loses its competitive advantage. It just raises the baseline.
If I had to create the thousands of images I have generated with AI three years ago it would have costs thousands if not millions of dollar, a gigantic almost insurmountable task. But that doesn’t mean they have any value today. Everybody can produce similar images with a few clicks.
The whole point of AI is after all that it makes work that used to be difficult and expensive, cheap and easy, and nobody is going to pay huge amounts of money for a task that has become trivial.
What I’m curious is what’s going to happen to all these companies that went all-in on building data centers when they weren’t doing it previously. Places like Meta and Amazon are huge enough that it’s always been a sound investment but with this hype there are other companies trying to set up server farms with no real prize in sight.
I mean A100s don’t exactly break that quickly and they’re specialised enough hardware so that they will continue to be able to rent them out. They’re also overpriced AF though which might cut into the bottom line but they’re probably not going to end up with a giant loss, I don’t really doubt they will break even. Opportunity costs are stellar, but OTOH there’s so much billionaire capital floating around screaming for opportunities to park itself in that macro-economically it’s negligible. Also I’m not exactly in the habit of crying about billionaires having a low ROI.
Ever since the Internet Bubble crashed around 2000 that the business community in the Valley has been repeatedly trying to pump up a new bubble, starting with what they called Web 2.0 which started being hyped maybe even before the dust settled on tha crash after the first Tech bubble.
And if you think about it, it makes sense: the biggest fortunes ever made in Tech are still from companies which had their initial growth back then, such as Google, Amazon and even Paypal (Microsoft and Apple being maybe the most notable exceptions, both predating it).
Sounds like the internet in the 90s.
Or computers decades before that.
Many of these advances are incredibly recent.
And also many of the things we use in our day to day are ai powered without people even realising.
It also reminds me of crypto. Lots of people made money from it, but the reason why the technology persists has more to do with the perceived potential of it rather than its actual usefulness today.
There are a lot of challenges with AI (or, more accurately, LLMs) that may or may not be inherent to the technology. And if issues cannot be solved, we may end up with a flawed technology that, we are told, is just about to finally mature enough for mainstream use. Just like crypto.
To be fair, though, AI already has some very clear use cases, while crypto is still mostly looking for a problem to fix.
What I don’t like about the article is that the phrasing ‘paying off’ can apply to making investors money OR having worthwhile use cases. AI has created plenty of use cases from language learning to code correction to companionship to brainstorming, etc.
It seems ironic that a consumer-facing website is framing things from a skeptical “But is it making rich people richer?” perspective
In my case, I still want to know if it’s not making rich people richer, because a) fuck rich people, and b) I don’t want to buy into things that will disappear in a year when the hype dies down. As a “consumer” my purchasing decisions impact my life, and the actions of the wealthy affect that more than you’d like.
Wait, R&D doesn’t research and develop dollar bills into existence?
AI is a tool to assist creators, not a full on replacement. Won’t be long until they start shoving ads into Bard and ChatGPT.
AI is a tool to
assistplagiarize the work of creatorsFixed it
LOL OK it’s a super-powerful technology that will one day generate tons of labor very quickly, but none of that changes that in order to train it to be able to do that, you have to feed it the work of actual creators- and for any of that to be cost-feasible, the creators can’t be paid for their inputs.
The whole thing is predicated on unpaid labor, stolen property.
At what line does it become stolen property? There are plenty of tools which artists use today that use AI. Those AI tools they are using are more than likely trained on some creation without payment. It seems the data it’s using isn’t deemed important enough for that to be an issue. Google has likely scraped billions of images from the Internet for training on Google Lens and there was not as much of an uproar.
Honestly, I’m just curious if there is an ethical line and where people think it should be.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You’d think at this point that investors would wait for a thing to fill out the question mark second step in their business plan before investing in it, but you’d be way, way wrong.
Every new tech company comes to the investor panel with:
-
build expressive to run new tool and give it away to end users for free
-
???
-
profit!
And somehow they keep falling for it.
Because people assume all these investors know what they are doing. They don’t. Now, some investors are good, but they usually don’t go for shit like this. At lot of investors are VCs, rich upper class twits, who can afford to lose money. Pure and simple. It’s like a bunch of lotto winners telling people they know how to pick numbers, betting outside bets once in a while, get lucky, and have selective bias.
Plus, they have enough money to hedge their bets. For example, say you invest $1mil in companies A, B, C, D, E, and F. All lose everything except A and B, which earn you $3mil each. You put in $6mil, got back $6mil. You broke even, tell people you knew what you were doing because you picked A and B, and conveniently never mention the rest. Then rich twits people invest in what YOU invest in. So you invest in H, others invest in H because you did, drives up the value. Now magnify this by a lot of investors, hundreds of letters, and it’s all like some weird game of luck and timing.
But a snapshot in time leads to your 2) ??? Point. Many know this is a confidence game, based on luck, charm, and timing. Some just stumble through it, and others are fleeced, but who cares? Daddy’s got money.
Money works different for rich people. It’s truly puzzling.
They sure as hell are doing a good job of making me reliant on AI though. Soon I’ll probably be payinf 200$ a month because i cant remember how to do things without AI. I think thats the plan anyway.
Soon I’ll probably be payinf 200$ a month because i cant remember how to do things without AI.
Sounds like a problem TBH, I’d get that checked out by a professional.
Okay, ill ask ChatGPT
-
Goood. Gooooooooooood.
It should also worry investors open-source AI is only months behind the big tech leaders. I looked into AI voice cloning lately. There’s a few really pricey options. Like $25 a month for a couple of hours voice cloning.
However, there’s already an open-source version of what they’re selling.
Great, now factor in the cost of data collection if not subsidizing usage that you are effectively getting free RLHF from…
The one thing that’s been pretty much a guarantee over the last 6 months is that if there’s a mainstream article with ‘AI’ in the title, there’s going to be idiocy abound in the text of it.
Yeah, so far. It’s super early in the modern incarnation of AI that actually has the chance to pay off, LLMs.
This isn’t like Bitcoin where there’s huge hype for a pretty small market opportunity. We all realize the promise, we are just still figuring out how to get rid of hallucinations and making it consistent and tuned to a certain business usage.
Well, and also navigating the minefields that the LLMs absolutely have copyrighted material in them that wasn’t paid for or licensed. E.G. Dall-E can produce a full image of Fresh Cut Grass, a character owned by Critical Role.
And that the stuff they produce isn’t copyright-able.
And that the stuff they produce isn’t copyright-able.
Even if that were true, is there no value in public domain art resources?
Not to the companies looking to use AI.
Exhibit A, Disney, a giant megacorp whose most famous works are literally founded on public domain material.
Bear in mind that public domain is not like a copyleft license, it’s not “viral.” If I make a movie and the Mona Lisa shows up in it, that movie is still copyright to me even though there’s a public domain element in it. It’s even easier with unique AI-generated stuff because you can’t even tell what’s public domain and what isn’t.
Something has to be ownable to be public domain. AI produced items are un-ownable, since the AI is the owner, but it can’t own them since it’s a legally a “tool”.
You are deeply confused about what “public domain” means. Something that is un-ownable (in an intellectual property sense) is public domain.
You may be referring to the Thaler v. Perlmutter case when you say “AI is the owner?” That’s a widely misunderstood case that’s gone through quite the game of telephone in the media. The judge in it ruled that an AI cannot own copyright, but that doesn’t mean that AI-produced art is uncopyrightable. Just that AIs aren’t people, from a legal perspective, and you need to be a legal person to own copyright. If Thaler had claimed copyright for himself, as a person, things might have gone differently. But he didn’t.
deleted by creator
Tough shit. It’s the Next Big Thing so everyone has to have it.It doesn’t matter that it’s not useful for most use cases (yet.)
deleted by creator
