The value is in the “what about China tho”
Now do net profit, it’s funnier.
Claude did the valuation.
Because Claude told him to, my recently retired family member is trying to convince a nearby university to open an AI data centre/research centre/community hub in his town. It is proposing that the heat generated will be used to warm some buildings and a swimming pool, Claude likes the water and power availability from a nearby river with a hydroelectric plant. The man is calling city councillors and deans with Claude as his source.
For all I know, maybe it’s a good proposal. I am automatically skeptical when the entire proposal is a bunch of AI yes-man stuff. But really, I wish he had taken up painting or tennis in retirement instead.
Heating is one (dumb) thing, but is he aware of the noise?
I think he is envisioning a utopian society in which humans swim and share ideas in a centre benevolently powered by AI. Maybe it’s possible, but I’m not hopeful with the number of bad players in control of much of the programs
i… actually using the heat water as a byproduct and diverting the water from a hydro dam’s spillway and then back into the river might be one of the more environmentally responsible ways I’ve heard dreamt up to deal with one of those bullshit centers. slap it right next to the dam (which are already noisy as fuck) and you’ve just created a minor ecological disaster instead of a superfund site. i mean i think he’s onto something, i just don’t think it’s ready for publishing. “it’s a good idea that now needs a human polish” like shoe polish not Poland Polish i know i’m irresponsible with my capitals but not that bad anyways this might be the thing to get him to step back.
AI investors:
It’s not about the money, it’s about the joy of gambling with generational wealth that physically can’t run out.
Xai valuation before Elmo let his company purchase itself: $200 billion
Xai profit that year: -6.4 billion
The capitalist class is salivating at the prospect of replacing middle management and any other sort of mid to low level workforce wit “ai”
As time rolls on im increasingly confused by the growing chasm between the lovers and the haters.
FWIW im firmly team fuckai. I find the implications for the future and for my children kinda terrifying.
The part I dont really understand is that to me it just seems SO inescapably terrible for any specific purpose, but people still seem to think ita useful.
People also think praying is useful.
It makes more sense when you realize that you are not the target customer. C-suite people are the target customer. They have no idea what real work looks like, so whatever it barfs out looks perfect to them.
The only thing it’s really good at is generating bull shit with a very confident tone. So, ironically, the best candidate for its use to replace an entire industry of “jobs” is for replacing CEOs.
But, I say we just get rid of AI and CEOs.
But we don’t need replacing them. At all. With anything.
They also have big dreams of finally being able to get rid of all the peasants.
It’s because AI is such a huge umbrella of things, some of it genuinely useful and others just a pure detriment to the world, and the discourse has become so vitriolic that there isn’t room for nuance or discussion.
For example, I have a friend working in bioinformatics and a huge number of people in his field love AI. It’s incredibly useful for their research. These aren’t out of touch boomers, they’re multi-doctorate holding, cutting-edge researchers with intimate knowledge of both neural nets and their field of expertise and they find AI (typically not the commercial-facing generative AI, but sometimes that, too) useful for what they’re doing. It’s anecdotal, but the actual experts I’ve talked to have said it sped up their work and opened new avenues of research.
That said, it’s pretty obvious all of the absolute fuckery that is coming along with these companies; the slop, the job loss, the enshittification, the privacy nightmares, the theft of art and literature, the literal damage it’s doing to people’s ability to think–I could go on. It’s easy to find reasons to be against AI in totality.
If you go into AI spaces, the vast majority of fans aren’t fans of the slop or companies, either. They’re mostly just optimistic that the improvements of AI will be so destabilizing that we all have to remake basically all of our systems and we’ll only be left with the benefits. If AI figures out a cure for every disease, healthcare is going to be destabilized, but you’ll still have every cure. If AI takes every job, you can’t really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?
Again, it’s anecdotal, and at this point I’m fully atop my soap box, but my experience has been that people who are AI “fans” actually hate the companies and the way that AI is being used. What they’re hoping for is the world that comes after ‘the big breakthrough’ that breaks all the systems.
I think there’s room for nuance. For the record, I’m a writer and game dev every time I see someone pop into my social media talking about using AI to write or make a game (or replace human creativity in any real way), I wanna beat them to death with my laptop, but when I see a new application for AI in cancer research, or a nearly century old math conjecture proven, I do feel a little optimistic, too.
If AI figures out a cure for every disease, healthcare is going to be destabilized, but you’ll still have every cure
Why are we assuming that if we acquire the knowledge of how to cure a disease that the cure will be made accessible to all?
If AI takes every job, you can’t really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?
What they’re hoping for is the world that comes after ‘the big breakthrough’
we’ll only be left with the benefits
Why are we assuming anything positive would happen for the vast majority of humanity? Is our allegiance to the tech billionaire’s verbatim propaganda completely predicated on optimistic vibes?
These aren’t out of touch boomers, they’re multi-doctorate holding, cutting-edge researchers
It is extremely important for everyone to understand that intelligent people are not necessarily less likely to be deceived. In fact, without specialized training, a more intelligent person may in fact be better at compartmentalizing their beliefs, and have a very robust ability to internalize false beliefs without letting it decay their ability to function within their field of specialization.
Indeed, if we observe cult recruiting tactics, being an extremely capable high achiever often just puts a bigger target on your back, attracting more robust efforts to indoctrinate you into the fold.
All of which is to say, you are not immune to propaganda, regardless of being a phd researcher.
when I see a new application for AI in cancer research
We had an absolute flood of reporting about “ai” breakthroughs across different fields of science. There have been countless examples of these stories being investigated, and it turns out the “breakthrough” was either unrelated to AI or blatantly fabricated. I myself work in one of these cutting edge industries and I personally know of two major international companies who have heavily marketed and sold “AI” systems, complete with public press releases detailing the breakthroughs, when in reality the systems are literally and totally unrelated to anything AI. In one case they simply affixed an “AI” sticker to an existing device without changing the programming or capabilities whatsoever.
Just be careful out there friend. This whole affair is rotten to the core. Have optimism that we can protect one another from what’s coming. Don’t be optimistic that the billionaires are simply waiting until the right moment, when they are satisfied with the power they have amassed, to finally share their prosperity with us
Why are we assuming that if we acquire the knowledge of how to cure a disease that the cure will be made accessible to all?
We aren’t. I was answering the point of the OP about why there is such a divergence in beliefs. Just illustrating what the other side thinks as I’ve seen it. To your question, though, I don’t think it will. I think it’ll be about the same distribution it currently is.
Why are we assuming anything positive would happen for the vast majority of humanity? Is our allegiance to the tech billionaire’s verbatim propaganda completely predicated on optimistic vibes?
Again we aren’t. I know that I wouldn’t trust the billionaire salesman’s pitch. But I would argue that having zero access to a medication is worse than having some access to it, though. There’s definitely room for a conversation about an unequal distribution of resources to be had, but I don’t know if that can be blamed on AI, specifically.
All of which is to say, you are not immune to propaganda, regardless of being a phd researcher.
Couldn’t agree more. Being educated doesn’t preclude being stupid.
We had an absolute flood of reporting about “ai” breakthroughs across different fields of science. There have been countless examples of these stories being investigated, and it turns out the “breakthrough” was either unrelated to AI or blatantly fabricated…
I mean, these examples aren’t really a mark against AI so much as the industry and the state of research, isn’t it? Fabricating research, lying about AI use, or scamming is kinda just… people, right?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for skepticism. Most AI is just garbage and not useful, and even less of it is useful for actual research, but the idea that there is nothing good being developed at all, that it has zero benefit, strikes me as the inverse of the pure, unadulterated optimists have where they think that a total system collapse from ‘the big breakthrough’ wouldn’t be absolutely catastrophic for a ton of people, too.
I just think it is more complex than the current discussion around AI. That’s all.
Again we aren’t
I know friend, I’m addressing the people you are speaking for, regardless of who amongst us here agrees with them. I apologize for the confusion
but the idea that there is nothing good being developed at all, that it has zero benefit, strikes me as the inverse
This comes up a lot.
Are you familiar with the story of The Lorax?
To summarize briefly, a billionaire creates a comfortable scarf, made from felled trees. He aggressively markets this fashion item to the point where it becomes a worldwide sensation, and all the trees are felled in the pursuit of manufacturing more scarves. In the end, without any trees, there is no more fresh air to breathe. Ah but, worry not, the billionaire rises to the occasion, and graciously begins selling the populace canned air so they can survive.
In this story, do you consider the many objectively good qualities of the scarf to be relevant in any way? How comfortable it is? How warm? How stylish? Would you dismiss the pleas of environmentalists for being too narrow minded in their denial of these many clear benefits?
In this story, do you consider the many objectively good qualities of the scarf to be relevant in any way? How comfortable it is? How warm? How stylish? Would you dismiss the pleas of environmentalists for being too narrow minded in their denial of these many clear benefits?
This comes across a bit condescendingly. I obviously think that destroying the environment is a bad thing.
But I think you’re misreading my point entirely. I’m not advocating for AI wholesale or saying the ends justify the means, so I don’t see how the Lorax is relevant here.
We’re currently in the beginning of the story, the alarm is sounding, and instead of firmly rejecting it, we find ourselves trying to balance the discussion by reminding ourselves of the many positive things people like about AI
Everyone agrees destroying the environment is bad, just like everyone agrees Hitler was bad. But when we find ourselves in modern parallels of these situations it seems like decisive action is often derailed for the sake of nuance.
I apologize for any condescending air, I am not accusing you of vehemently supporting the scarf industry. I think this discussion is just a bit tough to keep grounded as we shift between addressing each other, ideas in general, and the people we know who hold them. I appreciate your posts and bringing forward the perspectives you’ve encountered and your thoughts about them
I think The Lorax comparison is warranted for LLMs, hyping the race for AGI, and AI as marketing/branding, but the AI umbrella includes a lot of Machine Learning that’s just practical, applied statistics.
A lot of ML applications aren’t anymore resource intensive then using Lemmy. So I think the discussion about harms v. benefits of ai-- beyond hypers and doomers-- often diverges from conflating “AI” with these AI companies that are all-in on LLMs vs AI as a field that contains an over-hyped, over-invested, resource-intensive, subcategory bubble that needs to pop already as well as subcategories that make it easy and efficient to classify and cluster data.
I agree, I think the conflation of machine learning, which has existed and benefited us for decades, with “AI” is an unfortunately effective marketing strategy. In fact most of the “benefits of AI” being discussed above are just classic machine learning applications being rebranded as AI purely for the sake of allowing the media to have headlines like “AI cures cancer!”
Right like in this metaphor we’re now lumping scarves in with jackets (classic style, normal manufacturing and impact on the environment) and saying that jackets are good so we should be careful when addressing the field of clothing as a whole. I think the critical thing to understand is that clothing is not under the scarf umbrella, it’s the other way around. It’s not a condemnation of pants to oppose the scarf industry, regardless of how desperately the scarf industry wants to inherit the legacy of pants
I wanna beat them to death with my laptop, but when I see a new application for AI in cancer research, or a nearly century old math conjecture proven, I do feel a little optimistic, too.
I feel like these are such divergent types of machine learning that they have nearly nothing in common with the generative AI used in chatbots and code generators (especially that used to predict disease). Even if they may use some of the same underlying technologies and theory.
Which is why the overloading of the word AI to mean literally all of it is frustrating. So I guess I don’t have a problem with using machine learning to target narrowly defined problems to gain new knowledge, versus outsourcing all of our thoughts and actions to chatbots and AI agents.
Couldn’t agree more. It makes me yearn for the days when AI meant NPC pathfinding in games, but deep in my bones I know that’s where the problem started. My personal conspiracy theory is that basically every AI marketing department intentionally muddies the water to make the conversation more difficult so people can’t just decide to massively regulate LLM services.
Agreed, except I’m not frustrated by AI being overloaded-- it makes sense to me that a well-known, two-letter acronym be highly inclusive-- it’s frustrating that market dominance and marketing can just take over that acronym. LLM is a more accurate description than AI, but it would hurt their sales if most people understood it’s a statistical model and didn’t mistake it for a kind of intelligence.
I’m starting to think that those of us who understand this will probably fair better by forfeiting the semantics battle and making the distinction between LLM-AI and ML.
I’m starting to think that those of us who understand this will probably fair better by forfeiting the semantics battle and making the distinction between LLM-AI and ML.
I’m now picturing a future where the word AI truly becomes universally hated, and LLM lovers start calling it ML again:
No, no it’s not AI it’s machine learning
Or we all just call it applied statistics, that ought to take the magic out of it, since normal people consider statistics to be boring and mundane and certainly not intelligent.
It’s because AI is such a huge umbrella of things
In reality, yes, but in common discourse people mean LLM slop and image/video generation because that is what is being marketed to the general public. The acronym has been coopted by techbros.
TL;DR: AI isn’t just LLMs. Hell, LLMs aren’t even bad. Big AI (aka capitalism) is where the problems lie. If you’re gonna be mad, be mad at the right thing - capitalism, enshittification, copyright abuse, surveillance, hype, influencers.
It’s still the same bad thing as it always was, just wearing a shinier hat now.
Agree. And let me screed about it even more -
By common discourse, I think you mean “…by chronically online experts”. As backed by…what? Vibes in echo chambers?
A surprising number of people who speak confidently about AI appear not to understand the thing they’re criticising.
We’ve seen this shit before and we never learn.
30 years ago, everyone knew that MSG was bad and video games caused increased violence. Both turned out to be manufactured consensus - speculative letters and mouse-injection studies boosted by “experts” into public panic.
I’d wager a dollar that most rabidly anti-AI people don’t grok that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (yes, that recent) was awarded for machine learning in protein folding - cracking a 50-year-old problem with real applications to drug discovery for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
I use AI (image analysis, folding, STT, clinical audits…yes, even LLMs) every day. They’re useful. But the online discourse around AI has become cartoonishly one-dimensional.
AI = GPTs = slop = bad is a category error, perpetuated either in partisan bad faith or simple lack of examination.
And just to tank the down votes even more -
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
If AI takes every job, you can’t really have capitalism anymore, so what happens next?
The rich send out AI bots to hunt us down and exterminate us, now that they no longer need us for labor.
Hahaha, I mean yeah, there’s definitely some horrible ‘what if’ scenarios out there. I won’t presume to know anywhere near enough to make anything more than a guess at it, but I’ve seen some polar opposite takes on what would happen.
My big question is “why would they do that?” Like, if money no longer matters and you have infinite labor, why does killing everyone else even matter? There are more resources than anyone could ever use in our solar system that would be trivial to get with infinite robots. Fixing climate change (or at least reversing course) becomes a matter of setting aside some of your infinitely reproducing robots to make efficiency improvements.
The constraints humans have dealt with since evolving just cease to exist if robots can be made to replace labor. Like, the moment a robot can do what a human can do, the entire concept of what even matters as a species completely goes out the window. I’m not saying billionaires will suddenly turn heel and become good if that happens, I’m saying that everything billionaires have been chasing since the invention of currency ceases to have meaning if it does.
Nuance about AI? On Lemmy? On FuckAI? What? GTFO.
PS: I work with AI in health care; it’s really useful to me. In my personal life, I’m also a fan of self hosting local models. I’d like to think there’s room for nuanced discussion but there usually isn’t, because wagons have been circled and frankly, people have pegged their identities to x or y. There are better things to do than argue with the righteous on the interwebs.
Anyway, I liked your post, fellow meat popsicle. I recommend using a Thinkpad for hitting with - more satisfying thump.
A lot of people only say they are supporting AI because they feel they have to. If somebody would mention anything critical about the tech in my workplace or e.g. linkedin, they would definitely tank their career chances. Our managing director is a huge fan (or says he is, so the board likes him, who knows), so nobody would darw to go against the direction he sets.
I am required to use AI. It is literally part of my annual review accounting for 25% of my evaluation “grade”
Spend that money!
There is a vast gap between casual AI usage (chatbots, meme images) and AI-based coding / agentic engineering. There’s also nuances between “vibe coding” and using AI as a tool to write code.
Most engineers I know are basically not writing code. They know good code practice, they understand software architecture, and the core drive for coding environments / IDEs has been “help programmers type less / be more efficient.” AI in coding is a big evolution of that, especially because of the mechanisms humans use to read & write. We cannot read faster than we write, so it’s faster to read. The AI can write much faster than we can. Therefore, you use the AI to write & execute the plan, with engineers reviewing the output.
For my own industry (game development), AI has been kinda nuts the last few months in terms of rapid acceleration of development. It’s amazing for prototyping concepts that won’t go to market in their prototype form, and that cuts down on risk, downstream impacts to actual engineering requests, art, etc.
This creates the potential for a captured market (software development) with AI-usage seen as human speedups. It’s unclear whether people are in fact more productive right now, but it’s humans fumbling around with new tools. I’m kind of afraid how far AI could advance in a very short period of time. Many of my friends are using recursive techniques to improve their AI workflows (asking the AI “how could we do this better?”).
C- & D- level have massive amounts of their portfolio in AI tech while spurring on employees, “you must use this!” That part is an ouroboros / inflationary bubble.
This is putting aside all the ethics for stealing literally everyone’s stuff, the water usage, problems with capitalism, and so on. Please don’t take what I say as, “AI is good!” It’s just more complicated than that.
This gap is so hard to explain. A lot of common folks are seeing chatbots screw up counting R’s in strawberry, but I can talk to a rock & a game comes out built on web frameworks I barely know because knowing the language isn’t super important compared to what comes out.
There’s a in-build assumption that the LLMs are going to advance; people assume all tech always advances forever.
It can’t, not really. All LLMs hallucinate, no matter how much compute and how much data we feed them. It can be good for making quick and dirty slop, but that’s the limit of what it can ever achieve because of fundamental limitations of the technology.
That isn’t to say generative AI won’t get better, but there’s nothing to fear from this particular dead-end technology.
They want you afraid.
I don’t think there’s some poison pill or fundamental flaw. It regresses to the mean for the context of the problem.
I think you’re writing something off too quickly, but that’s your life to live. No judgment.
Have a good one.
I really hope you’re right.
Investors have fully embraced the sunken cost fallacy.
Ah, but Anthropic might could maybe make more money in the future, possibly. Just imagine if they made ten times more money than they do now.
They will… Very temporarily, and only if they don’t have major competitors by the time they raise prices considerably.
It’s pretty clear what all these fucks are doing. They’re making it cheap now to get as many users as possible and make sure companies are completely dependent on their technology. And when they are, payday! Token prices go up, AI prices start looking crazy, separation of products into Claude, Claude Plus, Claude Plus Ad Free, Claude Enterprise, etc.
And the companies pay for it, very temporarily, until shit normalizes and enshittification ensues.
My point was that ten times what they make now isn’t even half of what Walmart makes.
Valuation is merely a prediction on how valuable the company is now and how much they will grow in the future, it’s basically a hype train with money in mind. FTX is valued at $32billions in 2022, we all know what happened to the company that year. Same goes for NFT. It is still impressive Antropic’s revenue is at $20 billions though, if you ignore the expenses and the cash they burned so far.
Revenue != profit but profit cannot outscale revenue.
Came to say the exact same thing; to top it all off - as a (currently) private company - Anthropic doesn’t need to publish gross/net operating profits. However, they did for the most recent quarter - highlighting their first ever quarterly profit - so up until now, they’ve been burning investors’ money hand-over-fist.
So you’re so you’re saying there’s a profit.,…
Calls on dc infrastructure. Up up and away…
You’re not taking into account how much anthropic will save on headcount after replacing their workers with ai.
/S
This song is AI’s new theme song
I don’t like how SPY and other indexes are loosening the rules in favor of allowing IPOs to get onto their indexes quicker, it makes it so even more capital of people who don’t even give a shit about these industries are more even more wrapped up in them
Would you mind explaining how the rules have been loosened? First I’m hearing of this.
