No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.
So true, but especially true of ai. Previous rounds of hype for ai tended to turn into boring things that just worked, and the hype moved on. Even automated driving, where ai really hasn’t delivered yet, has turned into boring everyday ho hum features common to cars, and the hype moved on to generative ai
ever? thats a long time. remotely-efficient LLMs have only been around a few years.
i would say ‘yes, inevitably’
inevitably can be 100 years from now, or 1000 years from now when we setup a dyson sphere. Inevitably is too vague.
Then so is the question. The answer is yes. The specifics and timeline are what people disagree on.
You’re just being anal about phrasing. “in a reasonable amount of time” or “before this bubble bursts” are clearly implied
Will companies ever stop selling snake oil?
No.
Warning, here’s the cynic in me coming out.
The NY times has a vested interest in discrediting AI, specifically LLMs (what they seem to be referring to) since journalism is a huge target here since it’s pretty easy to get LLMs to generate believable articles. So how I break down this article:
- Lean on Betterridge’s law of headlines to cast doubt about the long term prospects of LLMs
- Further the doubt by pointing out people don’t trust them
- Present them as a credible threat later in the article
- Juxtapose LLMs and cryptocurrencies while technically dismissing such a link (then why bring it up?)
- Leave the conclusion up to the reader
I learned nothing new about current or long term LLM viability other than a vague “they took our jerbs!” emotional jab.
AI is here to stay, and it’ll continue getting better. We’ll adapt to how it changes things, hopefully as fast or faster than it eliminates jobs.
Or maybe my tinfoil hat is on too tight.
The NY times has a vested interest in discrediting AI, specifically LLMs (what they seem to be referring to) since journalism is a huge target here since it’s pretty easy to get LLMs to generate believable articles.
The writers and editors may be against AI, but I’m betting the owners of the NYT would LOVE to have an AI that would simply re-phrase “news” (ahem) “borrowed” from other sources. The second upper management thinks this is possible, the humans will be out on their collective ears.
I’m betting the owners of the NYT would LOVE to have an AI that would simply re-phrase “news” (ahem) “borrowed” from other sources
No way. NYT depends on their ability to produce high quality exclusive content that you can’t access anywhere else.
In your hypothetical future, NYT’s content would be mediocre and no better than a million other news services. There’s no profit in that future.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This would actually explain a lot of the negative AI sentiment I’ve seen that’s suddenly going around.
Some YouTubers have hopped on the bandwagon as well. There was a video posted the other day where a guy attempted to discredit AI companies overall by saying their technology is faked. A lot of users were agreeing with him.
He then proceeded to point out stories about how Copilot/ChatGPT output information that was very similar to a particular travel website. He also pointed out how Amazon Fresh stores required a large number of outsourced workers to verify shopping cart totals (implying that there was no AI model at all and not understanding that you need workers like this to actually retrain/fine-tune a model).
I would say that 90% of AI companies are fake. They are just running API calls to ChatGP-3, and calling themselves “AI” to get investors. Amazon even has an entire business to help companies pretend their AI works by crowdsourcing cheap labor to review data.
I don’t think that “fake” is the correct term here. I agree a very large portion of companies are just running API calls to ChatGPT and then patting themselves on the back for being “powered by AI” or some other nonsense.
Amazon even has an entire business to help companies pretend their AI works by crowdsourcing cheap labor to review data.
This is exactly the point I was referring to before. Just because Amazon is crowdsourcing cheap labor to backup their AI doesn’t mean that the AI is “fake”. Getting an AI model to work well takes a lot of man hours to continually train and improve it as well as make sure that it is performing well.
Amazon was doing something new (with their shopping cart AI) that no model had been trained on before. Training off of demo/test data doesn’t get you the kind of data that you get when you actually put it into a real world environment.
In the end it looks like there are additional advancements needed before a model like this can be reliable, but even then someone should be asking if AI is really necessary for something like this when there are more reliable methods available.
I’m just here for the claymation hotdog man.
