Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
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Smoking indoors, child labor and slavery are all still here, just transformed and under a different coat of paint
Can you elaborate?
- smoking indoors is done a lot via electronic cigarettes which produce no noticeable smoke
- slavery is still widely practiced through a loophole; in many countries it’s legal if it’s part of prison work, and many big corporations “rent” convicts for cheap
- child labor is also still very active in certain countries, which many western companies outsource their work to
Fair point on the last one, and also the second one if you’re from the U.S. But cigarettes being replaced with vapes, and being banned from many places (like airplanes for example, or whole countries like Sweden recently) does not fit into the picture. Second hand smoke and stink is severely reduced with the bans.
no where as celebrated as bragging openly.
While there are landlords, there will be landlord specials.
AI will eventually enable a society without wage slavery. Everyone will have enough and some extra. No one will need to work.
And there literally is no other option to get a society without the need to work. AI really is the only way.For that to happen, society needs to be structured in a way that the benefits of greater productivity is distributed to everyone, particularly those most in need.
I sure as hell don’t see that happening anywhere at the moment. Productivity has grown steadily since I entered the workforce - my paycheck sure as hell hasn’t reflected that.
Yes, society will adapt. If it doesn’t, civil war will force it to. There is no way that 90% of the population of an industrialized nation with a second amendment will just watch their children starve to death because some rich guy sits on food he can’t sell because no one has any money.
So much wrong with this line of thinking.
First, it relies on societal progress as a given when in reality it is not. We have more slaves now than at anytime in history. We have greater wealth inequality than at any time in history. We have not ended systemic racism, sexism, or ableism.
Second, you highly overestimate the positive effects of the 2nd amendment. So far guns have not solved a single major US problem and instead have contributed to a climate of massive human suffering. From the million people dead from gun violence in the last twenty years in the US to the highest rates of child death by firearm in the world.
While most modern countries have next to zero child related deaths due to guns, in the US it has become the number one killer of children. Guns have not been an effective tool for any major human rights movements and instead have been a tool of oppression. It is important to point out most 2nd amendment gun nutters would be on the side of the government and more than willing to kill agitators demanding equality or equity.
Third, class consciousness is at an all time low as evidenced by lack of organized labor and a nearly universal rule by the wealthy in every major country. Believing that starving is going to suddenly create this instead of delivering more chaos and death is frankly ridiculous.
We have more slaves now than at anytime in history. We have greater wealth inequality than at any time in history.
Lul
Not a fan of reality I see.
There are more slaves than ever before, but they are a smaller proportion of the human race
Of course if you’re going for absolute numbers, it’s hard to beat our 8B population, but it makes more sense to be speaking in percentages.
Doesn’t cover anything more than the past couple of decades. That’s not ‘any time in history’, just a very minute and cherry picked segment of it. Go back to the medieval era and before and see what wealth inequality looked like then.
Yes absolutely absolute numbers. Furthermore, if you consider underemployed people as wage slaves this number is easily ten times the estimated 50 million modern day slaves.
Wealth inequality has been increasingly dramatically for at least the last 8 decades.
You harken back to a mythical era where we don’t have actual economic data operating in an entirely different economic system. Sorry, but that is about as convincing as a wet fart.
What we do know is since we have been gathering statistical information on economies the wealth gap has continued to grow. With only a couple of eastern block countries in the post-soviet era that had a brief reprieve from an ever increasing wealth gap, which has long since gone away.
If we were to get the fantasy version of AI you’re talking about, the civil war will be more like Dune.
Asbestos is already in all the buildings, we can’t remove it. All the cars already require leaded gasoline, we can’t unlead it.
Fun fact I didn’t know until recently: if you have a classic car that requires leaded gasoline, they actually sell lead substitute that you mix with modern unleaded gas
Isn’t the problem now the ethanol and not the octane?
Lead helped with the valves not getting as much wear because of specific metallurgy that depended on it. It wasn’t strictly needed, the change occured after cars were already mainstream.
I don’t know the exact mechanisms at play that make it necessary, but they sell the additive at automotive stores!
Depending on where you live, you can also install a conversion kit to run your older car on natural gas instead of gasoline
Except it is more like “your nudes have already leaked, there is no going back”.
This is one of the cases where you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t uninvent something and delete the knowledge from everyone’s mind.
You can regulate it, which is exactly like the comic.
That doesn’t prevent it from happening. It’s a useful reaction to, for example, smoking, because you can ban smoking (indoors, or whatever) and so prevent your population from being exposed to (second-hand) smoke. But banning AI is not going to protect your citizens from the effects of AI, because AI is still going to be available in other countries.
Well, kinda. But the internet is global and you can hook a data center up to it anywhere. There’s plans to build them literally in space. And I run local models on my own machine at home, that’s not going away either. So the impact of regulation will be limited and local. AI as a whole isn’t going away.
A more apt comparison is probably atomic energy or the internet. If AI had no utility like smoking, you could make that comparison. Once we knew how little upside there was to smoking it was easy to ban, but a billion+ people still do it. Until AI provides no benefit for whatever reason, it will be used.
You could look at the popularity of smoking and think either “There must be an appeal here that I’m just not seeing” or “Billions of people are just feckless idiots, I guess.”
I’ve never been a smoker. But experience has taught me that when I have that second impulse, I’ve always been wrong.
Well, it has initial utility with a bad trade-off and the utility dereases as addiction sets in. There’s a point at which smoking a cigarette is reducing stress, but eventually it increases the baseline stress before having a cigarette to the point that it’s a net loss. Eventually it’s not smoking reducing stress from other sources, it’s pushing back against the mountain of stress of addiction.
If it didn’t initially reduce stress in the first phase, you wouldn’t do it enough to get to addiction.
Personally, one of the things I found most useful for quitting was the idea that smoking another cigarette would never fix the desire to smoke, only not smoking could do that.
it has initial utility with a bad trade-off
It’s not that I disagree, but this is your own personal judgement for your own situation. Not everyone is in your situation and not everyone would agree with your judgement if they were. I’m glad you’ve quit smoking, I’m happy you’re sharing your experience, but generalizing your experiences to “everyone” is dicey.
I’ve never heard “stress relief” as a reason for smoking. I have heard that it can improve concentration and stave off hunger. And that it is a pleasure, pure and simple. There are people living in situations where those benefits may be more valuable than they might be to you and me. The highest rates of smoking are in the third world, for example.
As a 20 year smoker who quit, I agree with @hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone . The only thing it gives you is relief from the craving of the addiction that it causes itself. As for how people start, they start when they are kids trying to look cool in front of other kids. No one starts smoking because they enjoy it, it’s disgusting. They start “enjoying” it more the more addicted they get, and it doesn’t take long.
It would be funnier if they listed things that don’t exist anymore though.
Compering technologies with ways of living, aren’t we?
Yes AI is crap now.
Yes it is driven by oligarchs who want all the pie for themselves.
Yes it is a bubble.
Yes it is over-hyped and presented as the holy grail.
Yes it fucks our planet.
But it is a new technology that its gonna get integrated in our lives.
…
Well until we make an AGI and it fucks us all.
As much as I hate ai/llm’s, here we’re conflating new technologies with bad practices. This is a fallacy.
However much we hate llm’s they definitely aren’t going away anytime soon. You can’t make laws or policies to make ideas/technologies go away.
It is like the machine in industrial revolution stayed and flourished, yet the child labor and unfair labor practice are being fight against.
Clearly, this is not a justification for current LLM system or feeding the beast, but I find it more important to think about what do we need to do to keep LLM working for humanity, and organize to make that a reality. If that requires complete removal of LLM as a technology, so be it; but I am not entirely convinced we even need to go that far.
I’m not sure you can really draw a clean bright line between a “technology” and a “practice.”
I think you could call the American practice of slavery – which required a network of infrastructure, culture, agricultural conditions and market opportunities, and government policies – a “technology.” As surely as the Internet is, anyway.
Luddites completely failed to prevent industrialisation. But through successive incremental efforts, child labour was banned in most countries.
Trying to prevent AI is like trying to prevent factories.
Whatever you have to tell yourself, man.
I don’t “have to tell myself” anything. Forgive me if I misinterpreted your extremely vague reply, but it sounds like you think anyone who says that AI is going to continue to be used must be some kind of AI-hyping techbro fanboi, which is idiotic.
I have no interest in trying to convince you that AI is likely going to remain in use, but you really need to make at least a minimal amount of effort at understanding (not agreeing with) other people’s positions, if only for the sake of your own blood pressure.
But you are an AI hyping fanboi. Like, just own it man.
I’m not that upset, either; when AI has finished tricking people into becoming dependent on it before summarily dropping them into the dark pit of unemployment, I will be one of the few remaining capable of doing any work.
What makes you think I am hyping it or a fanboi?
You can’t make laws or policies to make ideas/technologies go away.
Yes you can. You write a bill saying AI data centers are banned. That’s it. That’s the bill.
Ah yeah, that’ll stop China. Or the UK. Or India, or whatever other country wants a piece of the pie.
Pushing back isn’t like trying to ban child labour, it’s like trying to ban factories.
This would make sense if I believe AI was even valuable to have.
Legit, I do not care if China has the monopoly.
Cool. But it still means that AI will be out there and being used.
No one can stop me from using chat IRC—no one!
About as effective as writing a bill saying war is banned.
Thats not how it works.
A better example would be “nuclear arms are already here, theres no going back”
Its not a capitalism thing, its an arms race thing.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Same goes for AI, once one country starts doing it, everyone else is gonna need to keep up so they dont lose the arms race.
^
The AI “arms race” as you put it is absolutely capitalism at its core. Replace humans with shitty robots so they don’t have to continue paying wages to actual humans. Its just the the first person that makes it work will be able to set the rules for the ones that follow. Getting paid for those rules and making further entrenched in capitalism.
It’s a tool, use it as you wish but you either have it or not.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.
There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad
I don’t think this is quite how the world works. The reason people need to work to survive is because we can’t survive if everyone stopped working. We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn’t there is too great a risk they wouldn’t work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society. How many people would quit their job tomorrow if they won the lottery? Sure some would find work doing something they preferred, but not all of them, and often the thing they prefer doing is not the job that actually needs doing the most. If it’s something they even are good at. Loads of people would love to be an actor, but how many actually have both the talent and the skills needed to do that?
In a society where most people actually don’t need to work because most work can be handled by machines without significant negative consequences things would change to be very different. People like to think rich people or politicians or kings control the world by themselves but the reality is there are always limits on what they can actually do. If you dick around too much even in an absolute monarchy you will be overthrown one way or another. Typically by your own military, underlings, or family, sometimes by revolution or insurrection. The same thing applies today to liberal democracy. In fact it applies even more so. Anyone who tried to kill off the working class as a whole would find themselves very quickly dead or dethroned one way or another.
We have to make people work under threat of homelessness because if we didn’t there is too great a risk they wouldn’t work at all and that would eventually mean the collapse of society
No, people want to work. Look at Wikipedia, SCP, Minecraft, all those job simulator games, Linux, the Fediverse. The drive to create something that benefits people is fundamental to the human experience.
I think we may very well be on the precipice of the world you imagine, or something like it. But the old world dies hard and takes effort to abolish. We didn’t get where we are because we were given what we have - we fought for it. I think we’re seeing the beginning stages of people demanding that the benefits of AI and automation flow to them, rather than to just the elite. Won’t be without pain, but I think we get there. Partly because we kind of have to. People get over their fear of socialism and collectivism really fast when they get desperate yet there’s people making huge piles of money off the automation that stole their job. I can’t say for sure what the future looks like, but I don’t think we stay locked here forever. To think so is to look at the situation during the first gilded age and say nothing can change. Well, it did and we got the progressive age.
The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time.
Either the collapse of civilization or a literal uprising.
Seeing as we’re already heading down the nightmare route, it seems poor risk management.
We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.
I dont think this is true.
Space mining is only for resources to use in space. The economics of transporting resources back to earth will never stack up.
I dont think any significant number of humans will spend any amount of time in space in any practical time scale.
I don’t mean people actually being in space. Perhaps a better word choice would be place, eg “we could be in a place where…”
I think we could be seeing a shift in the economics if humans can reliably live off world anyway.
I think NASAs SR-1 can show a reliable link to mars via what amounts to automated space trucks, but really only time will tell if we can kick off a new age of humanity or just keep letting neo-aristocrats take over again and again.
Nah.
It would be infinitely better to go live in a box in your back yard for several years. At least that way you avoid the chronic health issues arising from “living off world”.
Even with a lot of yet-to-be-theorised physics, I just cant see the motivation for humans to leave earth in significant numbers.
IMO space will be populated almost exclusively by machines.
Maybe that’s the end use for AI.
Edit: i think of space as like this infinite ocean depth. There is eventually gonna be like this massive pocket of new world down there, but until there is, there just isn’t any reason to go ourselves unless you’re one of those types of people.
I’d also like to invoke the cautions of 2001 Space Odyssey as food for thought
I suppose my time as a submariner may skew my view of life out there some.
Actually I’m interested to hear your perspective because I have no experience of anything like that.
I just feel like star trek has romanticised space exploration to the point where most people can’t conceptualise the hardships that would be involved.
Just as an example, on the ISS, just outside earth’s atmosphere, ive heard that the air smells putrid. Astronauts just deal with it because they’re passionate about the project.
I guess my pessimistic view is that “life on Mars” would basically be very similar to life on a submarine but with no ports or shore leave or furlough.
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
The unemployment explosion is obviously also happening. But that’s actually a pretty good thing in the long run as a society with 90% unemployment and the need to work to live is absolutely unsustainable. AI will basically force the end of capitalism by increasing the system’s volatility until it adapts.
The thing, western governments fear is AI-powered terminators. They want the tech first, so they can win the war when someone attacks them. That is the arms race part.
I think you’re right that this is what they are thinking, but they are being idiots.
My bash script terminators will easily destroy any AI terminators.
My bash scripts don’t hallucinate, and aren’t so bloated that they require an always-available link to a data center.
What we call “AI” today is not remotely close to being a good combat-ready solution.
The winners of any coming AI war won’t win it with the bullshit slop-peddling tools being pushed by con artists, today.
LLMs will never be able to be terminators. This is just an expensive exercise in futility.
I thought, LLMs would never become able to write code. And now, I use Claude Code as the always available senior on coke.
LLMs have a reliability problem. If that gets solved somehow, they can actually drive a worker bot - or a terminator.And the big money pits also don’t only do LLMs. Those just get all the press because they are usable by normal users right now. Of course, some of those money pits are just investor scams. It’s a fully corrupted society after all.
Except 90% of what people talk about when they refer to AI is LLMs which have no direct military applications other than vague productivity boost claims. You could say the same thing about sending kids to the mines, “our society is more productive sending kids to dig out coal instead of playing. If we don’t send our kids to the mines China will and then we’ll really be behind”.
… no I am talking about actual AI as a field as a whole, not just LLMs…
Yall forgetting about Boston dynamics or something?
We got fuckin guns strapped to the back of autonomous robot dogs that can run at over 60 km/h
We got autonomous drones with facial recognition that can fly through dense forests at 90 km/h+
The fuck you think Im talking about lol…
Boston dynamics isn’t building countless data centers and (poorly) replacing peoples’ jobs. OP’s comic is obviously about ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc.
Are you conflating robotics with intelligence?
To be fair, we tried robots without much intelligence and they sucked. They couldn’t figure out how to balance on two legs so they just fell over a lot. Robots are just better now that they have more intelligence.
The biggest strength of LLMs is in processing a huge amount of text very quickly. I imagine that contributes a lot to military intelligence.
Again that’s a use case with entirely speculative applications at best. It can “process info”, but the answers it gives from them could be hallucinated. So if it’s analyzing nuclear threats, what if it “hallucinates” one? This isn’t Comcast ticket support, the military can’t afford LLMs making up bad info.
Implying that the only way to use LLMs is with 0 human oversight.
It would also apply to child labour and slavery. We may have outlawed it locally, but that doesn’t change the fact that companies who make use of it will be at an advantage, so we just ended up outsourcing it.
Even before there was an atomic weapon, the utility, the effectiveness, of atomic weapons was never in doubt.
“AI” isn’t like that.
pushes glasses up um actually the usefulness of AI has never been in doubt, we’ve been using it for years, what actually isn’t like that is specificly generative AI.
We’ve been calling the good stuff “machine learning” since forever, and we’ve overwhelmingly been calling the new generative stuff “AI,” however inadvisable that may be. If we can just stop insisting that machine learning is AI, actually, we’ll have no trouble of this kind. This is an unforced error, it’s just muddying the waters for no benefit at all.
The only people who think ML isn’t AI are science fiction nerds who play too many video games and think AI means Cortana.
Once one country starts making nukes you cant stop everyone from following suit to protect themselves.
Except we did stop. We ended nuclear testing. We downsized our arsenal. We never deployed the high yield, neutron bombs, or other “tactical” variants in subsequent wars. And neither did the French or the Russians or the Chinese. Or even the Israelis.
Our nuclear program is derelict. It belongs in a museum. There’s an outstanding question as to how many of the bombs currently in circulation are duds.
Unlike with the F-35 or the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or the Predator Drone or even the Virginia class submarine, we’re just not putting any more money into nuclear proliferation and improved first strike capabilities like we were 60 years ago.
Mutually Asssured Destruction is an easily technolngically achievable goal, that’s why we don’t see much development past that point. You only need to exterminate an enemy’s population once.
The lesson learned by the world, at this point, is that nukes are the only way to guarantee your country isn’t invaded and that agreeing to unilateral nuclear disamament is downright idiotic. Expect more countries gettng nukes this century.
Yes, but at least at the end of the day you can use nukes to blow stuff up. Presumably your enemies.
If your enemies win the generative AI “arms” race they can use it to, uh…
???
(Yes, I am aware there are military/governmental applications for neural net learning technologies but they’re the types of pattern recognition and signals analysis stuff we already do without needing to build a football stadium sized datacenter every 50 miles and burn the entire nation’s GDP on electricity generation. Most of the other applications appear to revolve around a regime using it solely to shoot themselves in the foot, e.g. powering a fantasy army of likely to be highly defective murder robots or using it to propagandize at and spy upon their own population in order to ensure a ready supply of destabilizing internal dissent always exists.)
They can use it to do a lot of things. AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people. Arguably there’s substantially more value in training inexperienced humans to get better in their fields than in settling for AI as a cheap alternative that starts with a maybe slightly higher or similar but cheaper baseline, but that doesn’t eliminate all value they create. You can make arguments about the long term benefits socially or for individual organizations that leverage AI, but spend a couple hours playing with Claude and it becomes extremely evident that they’re not anything resembling useless.
Even if we completely throw chat bots out the window, there are some instances of general utility for thinking models. This comic is making a moral argument that’s more compelling, but arguing that they’re actually totally useless doesn’t really reflect reality
As someone who’s used Claude and most other big LLMs as part of my job, they’re all absolutely useless. They don’t have the capacity for thought or care, all they are is a word generation algorithm similar to Cleverbot. So you can’t rely on them for useful information, you can’t rely on them for remembering info you told them, half the time it feels like talking to a brick wall (because you essentially are), and their only actual value is to CEOs as something they can blame layoffs on, even when it’s bullshit.
Sorry, I’m curious: what’s your workflow looking like when you’re dealing with LLMs?
Because I‘m just tinkering with them as a hobby and while I consider them erratic and certainly limited in many regards, I still find them useful. Even fun, but on the other hand I’m not forced to use them.
I’m with you: the experiences people have with these tools are just dramatically different from mine. They are quite good. By no means even close to perfect, but they’re just so much faster than me at pulling up some random information that would be hard to find with an Internet search myself and very good at going from nothing to something that works with code. I don’t particularly enjoy using them because I find the whole industry abhorrent, but their usefulness isn’t in question to me.
What do you use them for? I use them day to day for significant automation hooked into a rag tool and several custom mcp services. They are absolutely amazing but with some serious flaws that do require significant guard rails and human in the loop points.
They are obviously over hyped and being used as an excuse by shitty CEOs but to call them useless is a mistake I think
Laughable to call an LLM a thinking machine. It’s glorified auto-complete built on stolen data. I work in the industry and the fact that any of this can impress anyone is fairly depressing to me.
That’s not what “thinking model” means. It’s not a statement about cognition, it means it takes steps in which it explains itself to itself to check if it’s missing something.
Whoever coined that is using those words wrong, then.
The people no longer review their broken code the catch is that if they do it would negate all the gains.
AI is far from perfect and makes all sorts of weird mistakes, but so do people.
I gotta pull you up on this one. Realistically, they’re not in the same ballpark. The mistakes made by people are so minor and infrequent they can be trusted to perform brain surgery, and the kinds of mistakes made are things like ‘we miscounted the sponges on 1 out of 1000 surgeries,’ or ‘I took too little tissue and didn’t get all the red cancer out of the identically red tissue because I was trying to conserve quality of life,’ while LLMs are doing the equivalent of hallucinating a spleen inside someone’s head or ignoring the cancer to look for cankers.
When it’s really important to get something right, we have a person double check the work of the first person, which they can do, because they are grounded in reality. When you want to check the output of AI, you use a person for the same reason. AI has no grounding in reality, only words, which are famously not the same thing as reality if you have an intellectual age greater than seven.
If you’d like to take the next sentence into consideration and respond to the context of what I was actually saying there, feel free.
The rest of it is just as silly, albeit differently. The point is not that AI is useless, but that it is being used and will be used in ways that make things worse. You, as a person who seems like they have more than two braincells, can tell AI can be used by smart people to do smart things. But that’s not how they’re used. Most people are stupid. Many of them are staggeringly stupid. They will also use the AI, and they will use it to do staggeringly stupid things. They will replace humans with LLMs where they can because they are stupid and don’t care when the eggheaded nerds tell them it’s a bad idea because it makes them feel smart. We are at the whims of idiots with money and power who now have automated even the position of sycophant who tells them they are right.
LLMs are not the final state of AI
But LLMs are not the path to the final state of AI, either. And that’s assuming only if — and this is a very big “if” — a true general artificial intelligence can even be created using traditional silicon computing methods in the first place. Blithely assuming that it can be is really rather asking past the sale.
Yep, by design LLM cannot become ‘inteligent’, you can only make it more believable but it’s still copying humans not really thinking by itself. No amount of development or money invested will change that, it’s not a pokemon it won’t just evolve into something different one day.
And it’s worth reiterating, the current crop of generative “AI” is incapable of producing anything new or novel. All it can do is reassemble existing strings, tokens, and patterns in slightly different ways. Innovation can never come from such a machine. That will have to come from a human.
The current push is the notion that “hyperscaling,” i.e. throwing even more hardware and space and power and money at the same concept, will magically make it something it isn’t. Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Obviously that’s not going to work. It’ll allow grifters to make a ton of money over it, though!
Well said.
Depends on your definition of novel.
From TFA:
The AI did not prove that its approach is the best anyone can do, though. In fact, mathematician Will Sawin has already improved upon the AI’s grid.
OpenAI privately contacted Litt, Sawin, Gowers and a number of other mathematicians to verify the LLM’s proof. Together (and without the company’s direct involvement), they wrote up their individual takeaways. (No external experts have seen the AI’s original output, however—just an edited version of its train of thought.)
What stood out, they said, was the AI’s preternatural patience and focus.
…
“AIs have an edge: It’s not just that they can try all known methods,” says Jacob Tsimerman, a mathematician at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work but was part of the companion paper solicited by OpenAI. “They can play for longer and in more treacherous waters than mathematicians without getting overwhelmed.”
…
The mathematical tools the AI used here are not novel, although their application in this domain appears to be. “The model did not invent something fundamentally new that nobody saw coming,” says Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician leading OpenAI’s mathematical explorations. “It just executed like an amazing mathematician.”
So, it’s a monkeys-on-typewriters situation with the computer able to try and reject the hammering of who knows how many square pegs into round holes until it finally arrives at a workable conclusion, which a human has already bested. And we’re not allowed to see its homework.
This is categorically failing to set the world on fire, except possibly in the literal sense.
I think LLMs are intelligent. They’re at least as intelligent as My pocket calculator, and My calculator is intelligent.
I think you’re setting the bar too low. A tiny amount of intelligence is super easy to program.
To strongman your argument, “LLMs with a supervised training pipeline cannot become intelligent”.
RL training pipelines are much more open-ended, and experts still unsure one way or the other if an LLM + RL could lead to intelligence.
Such a fallacy. Anything that falls under the umbrella of machine learning will contribute to future AI. We certainly won’t improve LLMs such that they become AGI, but all of it contributes.
And, whether or not future AI even uses traditional silicon computing is also irrelevant.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc. That all happens each step of the way, even if the next technology is completely different.
What matters is improved understanding of mathematics, neurons, chemistry, electronics, etc.
All of which have absolutely nothing to do with what we are currently calling AI.
Doing with it, sure, but the creation of LLMs, and the algorithms behind them, especially the training, are what I’m talking about. It’s a lot of very impressive, complicated math
I think it’s pretty pathetic that “fuck AI” has become the trendy, cool thing. It really misses the mark. It should be fuck capitalism and the sociopathic CEOs abusing AI and shoving it down our throats. AI is not the problem.
It’s actually just a lot of pretty simple maths from decades ago, but it’s a lot of it. The big changes in those decades have been the feasibility of doing enough of that simple maths to achieve anything useful, and domain-specific network architecture stuff that’s rarely transferable, e.g. LLMs are possible because of the invention of the transformer architecture in 2017, and that’s also turned out to be useful for a few things like image generation and protein folding simulation, but not for all neural network based techniques, and then most of the things that have made successive LLMs better haven’t also been useful for the few other transformer-architecture-based neural networks. Most not-LLM AI isn’t going to be meaningfully easier to create than it would have been had the world got bored after GPT-2 and we’d only focussed on doing image and video generation.
Then you’re well aware of the massive power that AGI will bring to any nation that can harness it. And no, LLMs alone are not the path, and possibly not the path at all.
Not only that, it’s basically eating all the resources that could go into making AGI.
There is nooooo way for companies to invest in actual innovation when they are throwing everything at this dead end.
GenAI is really fucking useful for propaganda and disinformation warfare.
That may sound like a compliment to GenAI, it’s not.
Making a better LLM isn’t the point of all this, it’s taking what they have and building on it until they create a true AGI.
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
In a world where the organisations that are blazing the trail are in private hands, this is very bad news for everyone who isn’t in the winning organisation.
That’s essentially the arms race: who gets to be king of the world.
The slim chance of it not being monumentally detrimental to humanity is basically tied to us abandoning capitalism wholesale and uniting the world, so I’m not holding my breath.
Nobody’s making AGI anytime soon. LLMs do not have any of the baselines required for this. They’re expensive predictive text algorithms, more or less the same ones used in mobile keyboards, but upscaled to an absurd degree. Anyone truly worried about other companies or nations developing AGI has no idea how our current “AI” works. You’re never going to get there by building on them.
I’d like to believe too, but it doesn’t really track when you watch what these companies are actually doing.
Of course an LLM on its own isn’t going to become an AGI. Anyone with a braincell can see that. These orgs aren’t so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
Nearly all of the actual uses today aren’t just the LLM, but the tooling built on top of it, the LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
That’s what’s happening in parallel to the model development, tooling and harnesses that make the overall system more capable. If it can be done by a computer (or by extension a sufficiently advanced robot), the LLM can do it too with a bit of integration work (which it is very able to do on its own today, with minimal steering). If you can test for something being correct in any way, that too can be ultimately hooked up to an LLM as another input to push it back onto the desired path when it veers off.
Frankly I’m starting to feel like for most people it’ll feel like it’s years off until the day it happens. I don’t see remotely enough people taking the risk seriously in time to do anything.
It’s true to say an LLM in isolation isn’t going to become AGI, but it’s also looking very likely that an AGI will feature an LLM as a key component.
Wheels are a key component of my car I guess.
You know what, that’s actually a very good example.
The wheels are the interface between the engine and any kind of° surface, with no prior knowledge of those surfaces
We’ve got an engine of basically everything that followed the industrial revolution until now.
An LLM can very much function as the wheel to marry a surface to that engine.
°Horizontal, don’t be a smart ass
LOL.
In my “analogy” you just invented all of the actual complexity of the car in the same hand wavy way you claim AGI will just coalesce from the ether.
These orgs aren’t so high on their own farts that they ignore this.
You make some interesting points.
But…the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
LLM is the bit that you can plug into the past century of computing developments to enable much greater autonomy.
Interesting point. But the folks giving these things autonomy are mostly just creating huge messes, right now, and then claiming victory and taking a quick bow before the stage caves in.
The places we do see success are where no human could be patient enough - which is the stuff computers were already better at, than us.
As you point out, all that can be fixed.
But it’s all already not worth the money invested, before they build dozens more data centers in the hope that they can fix it. There’s just massive amounts of magic thinking going on, by investors.
I do agree with your point that there’s probably somethings that are useful and some that are dangerous on the other side of this.
But…the vast majority of corporate decision making for the last ten years is solid evidence that they are 100% high on their own farts.
Completely agree, but in the gap left by “vast majority”, these guys don’t seem to be behaving entirely like your conventional consumer squeezing companies, they seem to be playing a much more collusive game at the very least
But it’s all already not worth the money invested
That’s the flaw in the common view of this. You’re looking too short term. The second someone can offer to replace a business owners employees for half price, it’s basically infinite money.
That is what they’re pouring all the money in for: a chance at that prize. A chance at replacing all paid work with an automation they own.
True AGI is not happening within the lifetime of anyone or anything alive today.
See my other comments
Whoever gets there first, makes basically everything else obsolete in an instant.
TechBros repeat this constantly, but it just isn’t true.
Plenty of second-on-the-scene solutions have emerged as most popular, or most impactful.
But Tech Bros need the fear of missing out (fear of arriving second) to justify huge investments with no worthwhile results.
I’m answering the question of what the arms race is
The goal is a technology that replaces the need for humans in any job.
The FOMO is different now because they don’t give a shit about the consumer. The FOMO is versus the other competitors because it’s a winner takes all scenario.
They will keep accelerating to the detriment of literally everything else.
Whether you believe they’ll make it is almost moot. They’re going to burn the world down trying.
Whether you believe they’ll make it is almost moot. They’re going to burn the world down trying.
That is a really good point.
That was a very misleading comparison I think. There are obvious bad things related to AI but claiming it’s something similar to slavery ou smoking indoors is just crazy.
As usual a bunch of cowards downvoting without arguments. You are as simpleminded as the author of this shitty comic.
Lemmy often hates on other platforms because the users there are in a bubble. Yet Lemmy itself is a bubble, just a different one.
Look, I get pissed off at AI and the AI industry every day. I definitely don’t hate it as much as some people, but I’m not a fan either.
That said, it seems like there’s not many comic artists out there who are able to actually articulate a coherent and rational criticism AI. 90% of anti-AI comics end up being weak, strawman, or just generally sort of confused and vague. It’s shocking to me because it seems like the problems and ways to criticize it are so plain. But comics like this and many others show how silly, reactionary, and unthinking a lot of these complaints are. There can be such thing as overreacting to a bad thing, there can be such thing as being confused about what’s bad about a bad thing, etc. And in the case of this comic we have confusion about the nature of the problem and about its solution.
Ngl, it really irritates me seeing these artists think they’ve served up epic poignant AI ownage when they’ve really just demonstrated their own poor thinking ability.
And I never cease to get amazed how many upvotes they get despite being logically incoherent.
Yeah, for most people the only gate something needs to pass is whether it expresses a view they agree with. It’s certainly a minority that imposes additional constraints. I don’t know to what extent this is educational, cultural, vs. just human.
I may as well explain this because apparently I can read better than everyone else.
The comparison to chattel slavery,
is relevant
because we ended chattel slavery.
We . can . change . society . if . we . want . to.
That was not the issue I took with it actually
What, then?
The comic is, specifically, a response to the faux defeatism of pro-AI sentiments, and is perfectly cogent.
As others have pointed out, AI is a technology. It is an understanding of a certain way to program a computer. It’s not a behavior, but rather it’s a piece of information. That makes it different from the other three things, which are behaviors more than being technologies.
The reason why this matters and isn’t just some pointless nitpick is because the comic is conflating the sentiment of not being able to go back from AI with having a bunch of pollution and gigantic data centers. In the other images, for instance, they depict smoking indoors, and say smoking indoors is already here. what they depict and what they say is already here and can’t be gone back from are one in the same thing. But data centers and pollution are not the same thing as AI because AI is a technology, not a behavior. It would be fully possible to develop the same AI models without expanding the data centers or polluting any more than we already did. In fact, it would even have been possible to train AI models with sustainably sized data centers and recoverable amounts of normal pollution. It would just take longer. but the comic draws a false equivalence between the technology and the way that the technology is currently being implemented.
It’s wrong because there really is no going back from AI. We’ve never, ever, ever, ever gone back from a piece of technology. It’s always known how to create it. And regulations to stop it don’t really work, as we’ve seen with nuclear weapons. Because once knowledge of how to do something is out there, it’s pretty hard to stop people from, at the very least, knowing how to do it. And AI models can even be trained on a local computer, though obviously not very powerful ones
But just because there’s no going back from AI doesn’t mean that we can’t build a better world where there’s not irresponsibly gigantic data centers creating irreparable pollution, and all these other problems that we see with AI today. In the same way that just because there’s truly no going back from nuclear weapons doesn’t mean that we need to constantly be living in a cold war situation. We can indeed build better behaviors that regulate that technology.
But conflating the two is a serious mistake because it leads people to think that the only way to fix one problem is to get rid of the other and that’s going to produce a lot of pointless hopelessness and confusion because it’s just not true.
We’ve never, ever, ever, ever gone back from a piece of technology.
Bitcoin, NFTs, asbestos, CFCs, leaded substances, the metaverse, 3D TVs like the 7 or 8 different times they’ve tried to make that a thing, VR gaming, wearable computers, segways, ubiquitous RFID tags, google search (considering they are fucking up their own service, this absolutely counts), the iSmell?, folding-glass phones (culturally insignificant), modular phones (culturally insignificant), gesture control devices for your PC (culturally insignificant), the Internet of Things (culturally insignificant), paper clothing (wtf?), sailors forgetting and rediscovering the cure for scurvy several times, self-healing concrete had to be rediscovered, …
I imagine you think this list is making the same mistake, but you don’t understand this as a cultural issue.
It’s not a behavior,
The choice to use it is a behavior.
You, while claiming it is other people who are doing this, are conflating the existence of a technology with the acceptance of it.
Using your own interpretation, we can’t go back from cigarettes either. The technology is known. They still exist. People still smoke them. They still give people lung cancer. If we shut down tobacco companies, people can still roll their own. There’s no stopping it. It’s a societal pitfall we can’t climb out of.
And yet, somehow, I can go into a restaurant today without being assaulted by a Counter Strike smoke bomb.
that’s going to produce a lot of pointless hopelessness
Let’s review something else you’ve said.
It’s wrong because there really is no going back from AI.
In the absolute sense? Like, one person in the middle of Utah won’t let it go? Do you really think that I care about them?
This sentiment damages hope for our cause.
You are either doing so deliberately, or do not understand the goal.
Please, spare me the pedantic lecture about what “going back” is supposed to mean.
Maybe I can restate my point more succinctly and spare you a pedantic lecture while still having a useful conversation.
-
In the other panels, the act depicted (smoking indoors) is fully identical with the act discussed (smoking indoors).
-
In the AI panel, the act depicted (pollution) is not fully identical with the act discussed (AI). It is closely related, but not identical.
-
The comic therefore undeniably conflates two separate (but indeed closely related) things. This alone is a mistake in the artist’s thinking.
-
In your counter-argument with smoking, you make the same sort of mistake. The comic discusses smoking indoors, and then you discuss cigarettes. Cigarettes and smoking indoors are related, but not identical things.
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We cannot go back from cigarettes, as you agreed. But we can go back from smoking indoors. Similarly: We cannot go back from AI, but we can go back from polluting to produce it.
-
Because the comic conflates the cessation of pollution to produce AI, which is possible, with the ability to go back from AI, which is not possible, the comic mistakenly implies that it is not possible to stop polluting, contrary to its own purpose, hence why I say the artist is confused and makes a flawed case.
I would love it if you could specify what sentiment exactly it is that damages hope for our cause, and what exactly our cause is. My post, in my opinion, expresses a positive sentiment that would increase hope that there can be a future where there’s not pollution for the sake of AI. The comic is what damages hope, according to my reasoning above - Although I would never assume the comic was made in bad faith.
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None of those things were new technology. The assembly line didn’t go away when people were angry about being laid off.
If you’re talking about a specific product of AI (“art” for example), you might want to make that clearer. If you’re talking about AI in general, you’re treating this one thing like it’s a reason to try turning back the clock.
The rational thing to do would be getting politically involved to get AI out of corporate ownership.
Is there something about new technology that affects economic incentives in a way unlike anything else before it?
If you light a cigar in a room, the smoke makes people cough, but if you start your crank-engine car next to a picnic table, the gas just doesn’t exist?
Slavery is so lucrative a deal that we still do it.
If you want to try to get rid of it, I can’t stop you. I’m unaware of an example of that ever working, though. I think it’s better to seize that tech from the people who would likely use it to make people’s lives worse.
Okay, this:
If you want to try to get rid of it, I can’t stop you. I’m unaware of an example of that ever working, though.
And this:
I think it’s better to seize that tech from the people who would likely use it to make people’s lives worse.
Are irreconcilable positions.
If you don’t believe we can stop it, how are we going to seize it? Do you think that “seize” means “have access to”? Merely having access is not going to stop anyone from using it to make your life worse.
They’re not irreconcilable when you read them, lol. I’m saying you have a choice between two options, but one is guaranteed not to work (trying to get rid of AI).
I don’t know how to seize AI, but I imagine you’d have to break the law to some extent. Maybe get comfortable with that, for starters.
Yes, they are. You simultaneously believe that we cannot do anything and that we are capable of assuming control of it.
Since we’re just speaking in vague probabilities anyway, you know what else is “not going to happen”? You panic rolling out from underneath Sam Altman’s thumb. This is oligarch technology, and it will stay oligarch technology. Netflix will cost $40 a month, gas prices will rise to $25 a gallon, Nintendo will make $170 video games an industry standard, Reddit will always be more popular than Lemmy, there will never be a year of the Linux desktop, and there is nothing you can do about any of it.
I think another reasonable thing is for our justice systems to tie human responsibility/culpability to the actions of AI (or whatever we may be calling these computing advancements in the future).
Wish in one hand…
American justice isn’t a guarantee, and until political action comes back into style we can’t expect good outcomes.
Sigh. This comic is as delusional as the rambling of Sam Altman about AGI.
AI is a tool and despite all its shortcomings not a disease. It’s important to wrestle it out of the hands of the techbros and give it back to the people.
But it’s going to stay and no yelling at the clouds will change it.
It’s also a fundamental misunderstanding of why people say “there’s no going back”.
Practically anyone with a gaming computer can download Ollama today and run a decent open source model and do stuff locally, download it, take their computer offline, then use AI without touching any billionaire’s SaaS products.
You can get some productivity out of those models. You can use LLM, generate images, use computer vision, get help coding with local offline agents. It might not be as clean as using some of the paid tools and closed source models, but they work.
And that’s what people mean by, “there’s no going back”. What the technology does is going to keep being a thing. It might dissipate a bit as the bubble pops, but it’s not going away just like it’d be weird to try and make the internet technology go away at this point, even after the dot com bust.
It doesn’t mean we can’t regulate data centers and their construction. It means the technology is developed and open source and usable by practically anyone, and the tooling will stay around.
Exactly. I run some local models on my graphics card for fun and honestly, those things getting kinda good.
But I guess if you’re on Lemmy, have a hateboner for LLMs and are full in your media confirmation bubble, then you probably don’t care. A bit disappointing, I always thought the metaverse is full of people that are interested in new things. I really can’t blame them however, the techbros do a good job to push everyone away from their technology.
99.99999999% of people (ie, normies) have no clue about any words you are saying, will blindly keep using shitty chatbots shoved in their faces (while generating lazy slop that poisons the internet/our brains), all while destroying land/earth to build data centers to push us to full fascist surveillance state.
thats the problem. Bobby Linux on his local ollama is of 0 concern.
Destroy all data centers.
Somebody voted you down, let me upvote you for balance.
Well I say: put the development of AI in the hands of academia and put regulations in place for the building of data centers. Consider environmental impact, force the use of renewable energy and prevent hardware shortage on the market. Let companies and organisations host their own models. Ban the use of phones in schools and shift the weight of exams in colleges and universities to oral questionnaires that confirm the student actually knows this stuff.
Yeah lol. That could be done in Europe, I’m skeptical about the US.
Please send me some looted hardware if you are destroying data centers.
Very much agree.
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