I’m just praying people will fucking quit it with the worries that we’re about to get SKYNET or HAL when binary computing would inherently be incapable of recreating the fast pattern recognition required to replicate or outpace human intelligence.
Moore’s law is about similar computing power, which is a measure of hardware performance, not of the software you can run on it.
Unfortunately it’s part of the marketing, thanks OpenAI for that “Oh no… we can’t share GPT2, too dangerous” then… here it is. Definitely interesting then but now World shattering. Same for GPT3 … but through exclusive partnership with Microsoft, all closed, rinse and repeat for GPT4. It’s a scare tactic to lock what was initially open, both directly and closing the door behind them through regulation, at least trying to.
The more you bAI
A.I., Assumed Intelligence
More like PISS, a Plagiarized Information Synthesis System
Wall Street has already milked “the pump” now they short it and put out articles like this
I find it insane when “tech bros” and AI researchers at major tech companies try to justify the wasting of resources (like water and electricity) in order to achieve “AGI” or whatever the fuck that means in their wildest fantasies.
These companies have no accountability for the shit that they do and consistently ignore all the consequences their actions will cause for years down the road.
It’s research. Most of it never pans out, so a lot of it is “wasteful”. But if we didn’t experiment, we wouldn’t find the things that do work.
I agree, but these researchers/scientists should be more mindful about the resources they use up in order to generate the computational power necessary to carry out their experiments. AI is good when it gets utilized to achieve a specific task, but funneling a lot of money and research towards general purpose AI just seems wasteful.
I mean general purpose AI doesn’t cap out at human intelligence, of which you could utilize to come up with ideas for better resource management.
Could also be a huge waste but the potential is there… potentially.
I don’t think I’ve heard a lot of actual research in the AI area not connected to machine learning (which may be just one component, not really necessary at that).
Most of the entire AI economy isn’t even research. It’s just grift. Slapping a label on ChatGPT and saying you’re an AI company. It’s hustlers trying to make a quick buck from easy venture capital money.
Is it really a grift when you are selling possible value to an investor who would make money from possible value?
As in, there is no lie, investors know it’s a gamble and are just looking for the gamble that everyone else bets on, not that it l would provide real value.
I would classify speculation as a form of grift. Someone gets left holding the bag.
You can probably say the same about all fields, even those that have formal protections and regulations. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people that have PhD’s in the field and are trying to improve it for the better.
Sure but typically that’s a small part of the field. With AI it’s a majority, that’s the difference.
No, it is the majority in every field.
Specialists are always in the minority, that is like part of their definition.
What’s funny is that we already have general intelligence in billions of brains. What tech bros what is a general intelligence slave.
Well put.
I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to be a personal assistant for searching, summarizing, and compiling information, as long as they were adequately paid for it.
Thank fucking god.
I got sick of the overhyped tech bros pumping AI into everything with no understanding of it…
But then I got way more sick of everyone else thinking they’re clowning on AI when in reality they’re just demonstrating an equal sized misunderstanding of the technology in a snarky pessimistic format.
I’m more annoyed that Nvidia is looked at like some sort of brilliant strategist. It’s a GPU company that was lucky enough to be around when two new massive industries found an alternative use for graphics hardware.
They happened to be making pick axes in California right before some prospectors found gold.
And they don’t even really make pick axes, TSMC does. They just design them.
Go ahead and design a better pickaxe than them, we’ll wait…
Go ahead and design a better pickaxe than them, we’ll wait…
Same argument:
“He didn’t earn his wealth. He just won the lottery.”
“If it’s so easy, YOU go ahead and win the lottery then.”
My fucking god.
“Buying a lottery ticket, and designing the best GPUs, totally the same thing, amiriteguys?”
His engineers built it, he didn’t do anything there
In the sense that it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time, yes. Exactly the same thing. Opportunities aren’t equal - they disproportionately effect those who happen to be positioned to take advantage of them. If I’m giving away a free car right now to whoever comes by, and you’re not nearby, you’re shit out of luck. If AI didn’t HAPPEN to use massively multi-threaded computing, Nvidia would still be artificial scarcity-ing themselves to price gouging CoD players. The fact you don’t see it for whatever reason doesn’t make it wrong. NOBODY at Nvidia was there 5 years ago saying “Man, when this new technology hits we’re going to be rolling in it.” They stumbled into it by luck. They don’t get credit for forseeing some future use case. They got lucky. That luck got them first mover advantage. Intel had that too. Look how well it’s doing for them. Nvidia’s position over AMD in this space can be due to any number of factors… production capacity, driver flexibility, faster functioning on a particular vector operation, power efficiency… hell, even the relationship between the CEO of THEIR company and OpenAI. Maybe they just had their salespeople call first. Their market dominance likely has absolutely NOTHING to do with their GPU’s having better graphics performance, and to the extent they are, it’s by chance - they did NOT predict generative AI, and their graphics cards just HAPPEN to be better situated for SOME reason.
they did NOT predict generative AI, and their graphics cards just HAPPEN to be better situated for SOME reason.
This is the part that’s flawed. They have actively targeted neural network applications with hardware and driver support since 2012.
Yes, they got lucky in that generative AI turned out to be massively popular, and required massively parallel computing capabilities, but luck is one part opportunity and one part preparedness. The reason they were able to capitalize is because they had the best graphics cards on the market and then specifically targeted AI applications.
Imo we should give credit where credit is due and I agree, not a genius, still my pick is a 4080 for a new gaming computer.
They didn’t just “happen to be around”. They created the entire ecosystem around machine learning while AMD just twiddled their thumbs. There is a reason why no one is buying AMD cards to run AI workloads.
I feel like for a long time, CUDA was a laser looking for a problem.
It’s just that the current (AI) problem might solve expensive employment issues.
It’s just that C-Suite/managers are pointing that laser at the creatives instead of the jobs whose task it is to accumulate easily digestible facts and produce a set of instructions. You know, like C-Suites and middle/upper managers do.
And NVidia have pushed CUDA so hard.AMD have ROCM, an open source cuda equivalent for amd.
But it’s kinda like Linux Vs windows. NVidia CUDA is just so damn prevalent.
I guess it was first. Cuda has wider compatibility with Nvidia cards than rocm with AMD cards.
The only way AMD can win is to show a performance boost for a power reduction and cheaper hardware. So many people are entrenched in NVidia, the cost to switching to rocm/amd is a huge gambleOne of the reasons being Nvidia forcing unethical vendor lock in through their licensing.
They just design them.
It’s not trivial though. They also managed to lock dev with CUDA.
That being said I don’t think they were “just” lucky, I think they built their luck through practices the DoJ is currently investigating for potential abuse of monopoly.
Yeah CUDA, made a lot of this possible.
Once crypto mining was too hard nvidia needed a market beyond image modeling and college machine learning experiments.
As I job-hunt, every job listed over the past year has been “AI-drive [something]” and I’m really hoping that trend subsides.
“This is an mid level position requiring at least 7 years experience developing LLMs.” -Every software engineer job out there.
That was cloud 7 years ago and blockchain 4
Yeah, I’m a data engineer and I get that there’s a lot of potential in analytics with AI, but you don’t need to hire a data engineer with LLM experience for aggregating payroll data.
there’s a lot of potential in analytics with AI
I’d argue there is a lot of potential in any domain with basic numeracy. In pretty much any business or institution somebody with a spreadsheet might help a lot. That doesn’t necessarily require any Big Data or AI though.
Reminds me of when I read about a programmer getting turned down for a job because they didn’t have 5 years of experience with a language that they themselves had created 1 to 2 years prior.
The tech bros had to find an excuse to use all the GPUs they got for crypto after they bled that dry
The tech bros had to find an excuse to use all the GPUs they got for crypto after they
bled that dryupgraded to proof-of-stake.I don’t see a similar upgrade for “AI”.
And I’m not a fan of BTC but $50,000+ doesn’t seem very dry to me.
No, it’s when people realized it’s a scam
If that’s the reason, I wouldn’t even be mad, that’s recycling right there.
I don’t think AI is ever going to completely disappear, but I think we’ve hit the barrier of usefulness for now.
Welp, it was ‘fun’ while it lasted. Time for everyone to adjust their expectations to much more humble levels than what was promised and move on to the next sceme. After Metaverse, NFTs and ‘Don’t become a programmer, AI will steal your job literally next week!11’, I’m eager to see what they come up with next. And with eager I mean I’m tired. I’m really tired and hope the economy just takes a damn break from breaking things.
I just hope I can buy a graphics card without having to sell organs some time in the next two years.
If there is even a GPU being sold. It’s much more profitable for Nvidia to just make compute focused chips than upgrading their gaming lineup. GeForce will just get the compute chips rejects and laptop GPU for the lower end parts. After the AI bubble burst, maybe they’ll get back to their gaming roots.
Don’t count on it. It turns out that the sort of stuff that graphics cards do is good for lots of things, it was crypto, then AI and I’m sure whatever the next fad is will require a GPU to run huge calculations.
I’m sure whatever the next fad is will require a GPU to run huge calculations.
I also bet it will, cf my earlier comment on rendering farm and looking for what “recycles” old GPUs https://lemmy.world/comment/12221218 namely that it makes sense to prepare for it now and look for what comes next BASED on the current most popular architecture. It might not be the most efficient but probably will be the most economical.
AI is shit but imo we have been making amazing progress in computing power, just that we can’t really innovate atm, just more race to the bottom.
——
I thought capitalism bred innovation, did tech bros lied?
/s
I’d love an upgrade for my 2080 TI, really wish Nvidia didn’t piss off EVGA into leaving the GPU business…
My RX 580 has been working just fine since I bought it used. I’ve not been able to justify buying a new (used) one. If you have one that works, why not just stick with it until the market gets flooded with used ones?
move on to the next […] eager to see what they come up with next.
That’s a point I’m making in a lot of conversations lately : IMHO the bubble didn’t pop BECAUSE capital doesn’t know where to go next. Despite reports from big banks that there is a LOT of investment for not a lot of actual returns, people are still waiting on where to put that money next. Until there is such a place, they believe it’s still more beneficial to keep the bet on-going.
But if it doesn’t disrupt it isn’t worth it!
/s
My only real hope out of this is that that copilot button on keyboards becomes the 486 turbo button of our time.
Meaning you unpress it, and computer gets 2x faster?
Actually you pressed it and everything got 2x slower. Turbo was a stupid label for it.
That’s… the same thing.
Whops, I thought you were responding to the first child comment.
I could be misremembering but I seem to recall the digits on the front of my 486 case changing from 25 to 33 when I pressed the button. That was the only difference I noticed though. Was the beige bastard lying to me?
Lying through its teeth.
There was a bunch of DOS software that runs too fast to be usable on later processors. Like a Rouge-like game where you fly across the map too fast to control. The Turbo button would bring it down to 8086 speeds so that stuff is usable.
Damn. Lol I kept that turbo button down all the time, thinking turbo = faster. TBF to myself it’s a reasonable mistake! Mind you, I think a lot of what slowed that machine was the hard drive. Faster than loading stuff from a cassette tape but only barely. You could switch the computer on and go make a sandwich while windows 3.1 loads.
Oh, yeah, a lot of people made that mistake. It was badly named.
I was thinking pressing it turns everything to shit, but that works too. I’d also accept, completely misunderstood by future generations.
Well now I wanna hear more about the history of this mystical shit button
Back in those early days many applications didn’t have proper timing, they basically just ran as fast as they could. That was fine on an 8mhz cpu as you probably just wanted stuff to run as fast as I could (we weren’t listening to music or watching videos back then). When CPUs got faster (or it could be that it started running at a multiple of the base clock speed) then stuff was suddenly happening TOO fast. The turbo button was a way to slow down the clock speed by some amount to make legacy applications run how it was supposed to run.
Most turbo buttons never worked for that purpose, though, they were still way too fast Like, even ignoring other advances such as better IPC (or rather CPI back in those days) you don’t get to an 8MHz 8086 by halving the clock speed of a 50MHz 486. You get to 25MHz. And practically all games past that 8086 stuff was written with proper timing code because devs knew perfectly well that they’re writing for more than one CPU. Also there’s software to do the same job but more precisely and flexibly.
It probably worked fine for the original PC-AT or something when running PC-XT programs (how would I know our first family box was a 386) but after that it was pointless. Then it hung on for years, then it vanished.
I’ve noticed people have been talking less and less about AI lately, particularly online and in the media, and absolutely nobody has been talking about it in real life.
The novelty has well and truly worn off, and most people are sick of hearing about it.
Yeah, now we are gonna get the reality of deep fakes; fun times.
The hype is still percolating, at least among the people I work with and at the companies of people I know. Microsoft pushing Copilot everywhere makes it inescapable to some extent in many environments, there’s people out there who have somehow only vaguely heard of ChatGPT and are now encountering LLMs for the first time at work and starting the hype cycle fresh.
It’s like 3D TVs, for a lot of consumer applications tbh
Oh fuck that’s right, that was a thing.
Goddamn
3D has been a thing every 15 years or so
3D TVs were a commercial fad once and I haven’t seen them in forever.
2016 may have been the end of them
Yes but 3D is always a thing periodically.
I used shutter glasses with two voodoo2 cards…
I used shutter glasses with the sega master system back in 87. They were rad af
Well, they also kept telling investors all they need to simulate a human brain was to simulate the amount of neurons in a human brain…
The stupidly rich loved that, because they want computer backups for “immortality”. And they’d dump billions of dollars into making that happen
About two months ago tho, we found out that the brain uses microtubules in the brain to put tryptophan into super position, and it can maintain that for like a crazy amount of time, like longer than we can do in a lab.
The only argument against a quantum component for human consciousness, was people thought there was no way to have even just get regular quantum entanglement in a human brain.
We’ll be lucky to be able to simulate that stuff in 50 years, but it’s probably going to be even longer.
Every billionaire who wanted to “live forever” this way, just got aged out. So they’ll throw their money somewhere else now.
I used to follow the Penrose stuff and was pretty excited about QM as an explanation of consciousness. If this is the kind of work they’re reaching at though. This is pretty sad. It’s not even anything. Sometimes you need to go with your gut, and my gut is telling me that if this is all the QM people have, consciousness is probably best explained by complexity.
https://ask.metafilter.com/380238/Is-this-paper-on-quantum-propeties-of-the-brain-bad-science-or-not
Completely off topic from ai, but got me curious about brain quantum and found this discussion. Either way, AI still sucks shit and is just a shortcut for stealing.
That’s a social media comment from some Ask Yahoo knockoff…
Like, this isn’t something no one is talking about, you don’t have to solely learn about that from unpopular social media sites (including my comment).
I don’t usually like linking videos, but I’m feeling like that might work better here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kpkksf3k
But that PBS video gives a really good background and then talks about the recent discovery.
some Ask Yahoo knockoff…
AskMeFi predated Yahoo Answers by several years (and is several orders of magnitude better than it ever was).
And that linked accounts last comment was advocating for Biden to stage a pre-emptive coup before this election…
https://www.metafilter.com/activity/306302/comments/mefi/
It doesn’t matter if it was created before Ask Yahoo or if it’s older.
It’s random people making random social media comments, sometimes stupid people make the rare comment that sounds like they know what they’re talking about. And I already agreed no one had to take my word on it either.
But that PBS video does a really fucking good job explaining it.
Cuz if I can’t explain to you why a random social media comment isn’t a good source, I’m sure as shit not going to be able to explain anything like Penrose’s theory on consciousness to you.
It doesn’t matter if it was created before Ask Yahoo or if it’s older.
It does if you’re calling it a “knockoff” of a lower-quality site that was created years later, which was what I was responding to.
Great.
So the social media site is older than I thought, and the person who made the comment on that site is a lot stupider than it seemed.
Like, Facebooks been around for about 20 years. Would you take a link to a Facebook comment over PBS?
My man, I said nothing about the science or the validity of that comment, just that it’s wrong to call Ask MetaFilter “some Ask Yahoo knockoff”. If you want to get het up about an argument I never made, you do you.
The fact that is is from LA Times shows that it’s still significant though
A lot of the AI boom is like the DotCom boom of the Web era. The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.
AI feels a lot like that, it’s here to stay, maybe not in th ways investors are touting, but for voice, image, video synthesis/processing it’s an amazing tool. It also has lots of applications in biotech, targetting systems, logistics etc.
So I can see the bubble bursting and a lot of money being lost, but that is the point when actually useful applications of the technology will start becoming mainstream.
I’m glad someone else is acknowledging that AI can be an amazing tool. Every time I see AI mentioned on lemmy, people say that it’s entirely useless and they don’t understand why it exists or why anyone talks about it at all. I mention I use ChatGPT daily for my programming job, it’s helpful like having an intern do work for me, etc, and I just get people disagreeing with me all day long lol
Google Search is such an important facet for Alphabet that they must invest as many billions as they can to lead the new generative-AI search. IMO for Google it’s more than just a growth opportunity, it’s a necessity.
I guess I don’t really see why generative AI is a necessity for a search engine? It doesn’t really help me find information any faster than a Wikipedia summary, and is less reliable.
So far…
Obviously still has fair share of dumb stuff happening with these systems today, but there have been some big steps in just the last few years. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was much spookier a decade from now.
In general, good to use as a tool to be taken with grain of salt and further review.
The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.
The DotCom bubble was built around the idea of online retail outpacing traditional retail far faster than it did, in fact. But it was, at its essence, a system of digital book keeping. Book your orders, manage your inventory, and direct your shipping via a more advanced and interconnected set of digital tools.
The fundamentals of the business - production, shipping, warehousing, distribution, the mathematical process of accounting - didn’t change meaningfully from the days of the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. Online was simply a new means of marketing. It worked well, but not nearly as well as was predicted. What Amazon did to achieve hegemony was to run losses for ten years, while making up the balance as a government sponsored series of data centers (re: AWS) and capitalize on discount bulk shipping through the USPS before accruing enough physical capital to supplant even the big box retailers. The digital front-end was always a loss-leader. Nobody is actually turning a profit on Amazon Prime. It’s just a hook to get you into the greater Amazon ecosystem.
Pivot to AI, and you’ve got to ask… what are we actually improving on? It’s not a front-end. It’s not a data-service that anyone benefits from. It is hemorrhaging billions of dollars just at OpenAI alone (one reason why it was incorporated as a Non-Profit to begin with - THERE WAS NO PROFIT). Maybe you can leverage this clunky behemoth into… low-cost mass media production? But its also extremely low-rent production, in an industry where - once again - marketing and advertisement are what command the revenue you can generate on a finished product. Maybe you can use it to optimize some industrial process? But it seems that every AI needs a bunch of human babysitters to clean up all the shit is leaves. Maybe you can get those robo-taxis at long last? I wouldn’t hold my breath, but hey, maybe?!
Maybe you can argue that AI provides some kind of hook to drive retail traffic into a more traditional economic model. But I’m still waiting to see what that is. After that, I’m looking at AI in the same way I’m looking at Crypto or VR. Just a gimmick that’s scaring more people off than it drags in.
The funny thing about Amazon, is we are phasing it out of our home now. Because it has become an online 7Eleven. You don’t pay for shipping and it comes fast, but you are often paying 50-100% more for everything. If you use AliExpress, 300-400% more… just to get it a week or two faster. I would rather go to local retailers that are increasing Chinese goods for a 150% profit, than Amazon and pay 300%. It just means I have to leave the house for 30 minutes.
would rather go to local retailers that are increasing Chinese goods for a 150% profit, than Amazon and pay 300%
A lot of the local retailors are going out of business in my area. And those that exist are impossible to get into and out of, due to the fixation on car culture. The Galleria is just a traffic jam that spans multiple city blocks.
The thing that keeps me at Amazon, rather than Target, is purely the time visit of shopping versus shipping.
I don’t mean it’s like the dotcom bubble in terms of context, I mean in terms of feel. Dotcom had loads of investors scrambling to “get in on it” many not really understanding why or what it was worth but just wanted quick wins.
This has same feel, a bit like crypto as you say but I would say crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.
They are not the ones we are being fed in the mainstream like it replacing coders or artists, it can help in those areas but it’s just them trying to keep the hype going. Realistically it can be used very well for some medical research and diagnosis scenarios, as it can correlate patterns very easily showing likelyhood of genetic issues.
The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it’s only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn’t getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.
Its not going to do much for the end consumer outside of the guff you currently use siri or alexa for etc, but inside the industries AI is very useful.
crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.
Crypto has a very real niche use for money laundering that it does exceptionally well.
AI does not appear to do anything significantly more effectively than a Google search circa 2018.
But neither can justify a multi billion dollar market cap on these terms.
The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it’s only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn’t getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.
Voice actors simply don’t cost that much money. Procedural world building has existed for decades, but it’s generally recognized as lackluster beside bespoke design and development.
These tools let you build bad digital experiences quickly.
For logistics and finance, a lot of what you’re exploring is solved with the technology that underpins AI (modern graph theory). But LLMs don’t get you that. They’re an extraneous layer that takes enormous resources to compile and offers very little new value.
I disagree, there are loads of white papers detailing applications of AI in various industries, here’s an example, cba googling more links for you.
there are loads of white papers detailing applications of AI in various industries
And loads more of its ineffectual nature and wastefulness.
Are you talking specifically about LLMs or Neural Network style AI in general? Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem, and tbh the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap
Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem
Idk if I’d point at a supercomputer system and suggest it was constructed “without much problem”. Cray has significantly lagged the computer market as a whole.
the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap
Again, I would not consider anything in the LLM marketplace particularly cheap. Seems like they’re losing money rapidly.
I just want computer parts to stop being so expensive. Remember when gaming was cheap? Pepperidge farm remembers. You used to be able to build a relatively high end pc for less than the average dogshit Walmart laptop.
To be honest right now is a relatively good time to build a PC, except for the GPU, which is heavily overpriced. I think if you are content with last gen AMD, this can also be turned to somewhat acceptable levels.
