Are you talking specifically about LLMs or Neural Network style AI in general? Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem, and tbh the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap

I disagree, there are loads of white papers detailing applications of AI in various industries, here’s an example, cba googling more links for you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7577280/

I don’t mean it’s like the dotcom bubble in terms of context, I mean in terms of feel. Dotcom had loads of investors scrambling to “get in on it” many not really understanding why or what it was worth but just wanted quick wins.

This has same feel, a bit like crypto as you say but I would say crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.

They are not the ones we are being fed in the mainstream like it replacing coders or artists, it can help in those areas but it’s just them trying to keep the hype going. Realistically it can be used very well for some medical research and diagnosis scenarios, as it can correlate patterns very easily showing likelyhood of genetic issues.

The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it’s only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn’t getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.

Its not going to do much for the end consumer outside of the guff you currently use siri or alexa for etc, but inside the industries AI is very useful.

A lot of the AI boom is like the DotCom boom of the Web era. The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.

AI feels a lot like that, it’s here to stay, maybe not in th ways investors are touting, but for voice, image, video synthesis/processing it’s an amazing tool. It also has lots of applications in biotech, targetting systems, logistics etc.

So I can see the bubble bursting and a lot of money being lost, but that is the point when actually useful applications of the technology will start becoming mainstream.

Most companies can’t even give decent requirements for humans to understand and implement. An AI will just write any old stuff it thinks they want and they won’t have any way to really know if it’s right etc.

They would have more luck trying to create an AI that takes whimsical ideas and turns them into quantified requirements with acceptance criteria. Once they can do that they may stand a chance of replacing developers, but it’s gonna take far more than the simpleton code generators they have at the moment which at best are like bad SO answers you copy and paste then refactor.

This isn’t even factoring in automation testers who are programmers, build engineers, devops etc. Can’t wait for companies to cry even more about cloud costs when some AI is just lobbing everything into lambdas 😂

AI has some useful applications, just most of them are a bit niche and/or have ethical issues so while it’s worth having the tools and functionality to do things, no one can do much with them.

Like for example we pretty much have AIs that could generate really good audio books using your favourite actors voi e likeness, but it’s a legal nightmare, and audio books are a niche already.

In game development being able to use AI for texture generation, rigging, animations are pretty good and can save lots of time, but it comes at the cost of jobs.

Some useful applications for end users are things like noise removal and dynamic audio enhancement AIs which can make your mic not sound like you are talking from a tunnel under a motorway when in meetings, or being able to do basic voice activation of certain tools, even spam filtering.

The whole using AI to sidestep being creative or trying to pretend to collate knowledge in any meaningful way is a bit out of grasp at the moment. Don’t get me wrong it has a good go at it, but it’s not actually intelligent it’s just throwing out lots of nonsense hoping for the best.

I don’t really see phones as a problem, it’s the rampant social media and ads that are the problem and unfortunately it’s too intertwined with society/technology to undo it at this point.

All people who think this is a good read should Google about the Bitcasa saga, that was a wild ride.

Maybe but I don’t know how they can realistically do anything worthwhile. As forcing companies to keep staff on and not automate isn’t a good outcome and isn’t fixing the societal issues that make this a problematic scenario.

If a robot/ai/machine can do a job safer, more efficiently, quicker than a person, it should 1000000% be automated by the given thing. This has been happening for hundreds of years in all industries.

In isolation the automation of roles is a great thing, but the way society is currently run your entire quality of existence is tied to your job, and retraining and getting a new job is harder than ever and costs a lot.

If society made it easier for people to retrain and get better jobs and slowly replaced all those bad jobs with an automated workforce it would be better for everyone.

Can’t see it happening though…

Same as above, as a kid (80s) games were new and interesting, even shovelware games you would get for free on C64 mags were interesting.

Over the years games have just become more and more streamlined, and action focused, it’s basically like Hollywood now where they just churn out nice looking mediocre films to make money.

The 2nd point though js why I responded as I really agree with the point on something new being what makes games interesting now. They don’t even have to be amazing, just offer a new experience.

For example when Dayz came out, that was a nice breath of fresh air, every time I loaded up the game with friends I never knew what was going to happen. Same sort of thing with Phasmophobia, was genuinely amazing for the first week we played it, just nothing else like it. Now you can’t move for DayZ style games or Phasmo ripoffs.

I am bored of playing the same sort of stuff, like I’m bored watching super hero movies, I want new experiences (VR has some good experiences).