Come on now, next you’ll be saying the tech industry consistently overplays its incremental improvements as Earth-shattering paradigm shifts purely for the investment money!
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Yup. As someone who works in tech, I was baffled by the number of people in my field who started freaking out about it. AI isn’t some magic panacea, it’s just another tool that needs to be designed for the task at hand. It’s cool that ChatGPT can get 80% of the way there in so many fields, but that last 20% is where all the hard work is (see the pareto principle).
Some of the skepticism is just a reaction to the excessive hype with which generative AI has been pushed over the past few months. If you’ve seen tech hype cycles before, the hype itself can generate some skepticism. Plus there are many dubious cases where companies are shoving ChatGPT or similar into their products just so they can advertise them as “AI powered”, and these poorly thought out, marketing-driven moves deserve criticism.
It’s anecdotal but I have found that the people who are “skeptical” (to use your word) about generative AI often turn out to be financially dependent on something that generative AI can do.
That it to say, they’re worried it will replace them at their job and so they very much want it to fail.
3 months ago: Everyone’s going to lose their jobs!
Today: Generative AI’s dead!
More realistically: Generative AI is a tool that will gradually get better over time. It is not universally applicable, but it does have a lot of potential applications. It is not going to take over the world, nor will it just suddenly go away.
IMO it’ll be more like internet: society will take years to adapt to it and democratise its use. It took 30 years for Internet to bloom and it is now a primary service in Europe. I’m pretty sure AI will take this road.
You’re both right. The Internet is about 50 years old counting from first conception.
That’s pretty much been my take from the beginning. My main concerns were and still are:
- IP law, specifically copyright infringement
- correctness - ChatGPT makes stuff up
- detection - esp for school
My main fear was that it would be more useful for scammers and fraudsters than legitimate uses because of the above issues. I still have those concerns.
With any new technology that people say well change the world overnight, take a step back and think it through. For example:
- self driving cars - we still have taxis, Uber, etc, so it hasn’t taken over despite being here for years
- robotics in manufacturing - it’s incredibly expensive to put together and end to end robotic factory, so there are still plenty of manufacturing jobs
- automated fast food - again, the most I’ve seen is increased number of kiosks, that’s it
And so on. People freak out about new tech, then a couple years later they realize that it’s not “finished” and there will be plenty of time to adapt. Unless we recover an alien spaceship or something, that’s just not how technology progresses. Eventually generative AI will redically change our society, but it’ll take decades, so by the time your job is threatened, you’ll be ready to retire.
In the early 1980s, a teacher refused to let me word-process my homework (my penmanship was shit) on the grounds that I shouldn’t be able to produce a paper at the touch of a button.
Upper management look at AI end results and imagine a similar scenario: they don’t see the human effort behind the dumb-waiter and imagine a clerk can just tell an LLM to make me a sequel to Dumbo without getting very specific and then having a team of reviewers watch hundreds of terrible elephant films to curate the few good ones.
But what is telling is how our corporate bosses responded to the prospect of automated art. Much like the robot pizza company who did not automate the process and pass the savings on to you! (his offerings were typical pizza at typical prices and he kept all the savings for himself) our senior execs imagine ways to replace workers with cheaper automation rather than producing better stuff or cheaper movie tickets for their customers.
So maybe we should growl at them and change the system before they figure out how to actually pay fewer people while keeping more profits.
Companies will always keep all the savings and pass on all the expenses. That’s just how they operate. You’re not going to be able to change that system short of a revolution.
“If hallucinations aren’t fixable, generative AI probably isn’t going to make a trillion dollars a year,” he said. “And if it probably isn’t going to make a trillion dollars a year, it probably isn’t going to have the impact people seem to be expecting,” he continued. “And if it isn’t going to have that impact, maybe we should not be building our world around the premise that it is.”
Well he sure proves one does not need an AI to hallucinate…
Clearly nothing can change the status quo if it doesn’t also make trillions
The assertion that our Earth orbits the sun is as audacious as it is perplexing. We face not one, but a myriad of profound, unresolved questions with this idea. From its inability to explain the simplest of earthly phenomena, to the challenges it presents to our longstanding scientific findings, this theory is riddled with cracks!
And, let us be clear, mere optimism for this ‘new knowledge’ does not guarantee its truth or utility. With the heliocentric model, we risk destabilizing not just the Church’s teachings, but also the broader societal fabric that relies on a stable cosmological understanding.
This new theory probably isn’t going to bring in a trillion coins a year. And if it probably isn’t going to make a trillion coins a year, it probably isn’t going to have the impact people seem to be expecting. And if it isn’t going to have that impact, maybe we should not be building our world around the premise that it is.
Imagine if someone had said something like this about the 1st generation iPhone… Oh wait, that did happen and his name was Steve Ballmer.
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maybe we should not be building our world around the premise that it is
I feel like this is a really important bit. If LLMs turn out to have unsolvable issues that limit the scope of their application, that’s fine, every technology has that, but we need to be aware of that. A fallible machine learning model is not dangerous; AI-based grading, plagiarism checking, resume-filtering, coding, etc. without skepticism is dangerous.
LLMs probably have very good applications that could not be automated in the past but we should be very careful of what we assume those things to be.