COO > Return.
“Biggest” maybe. But it’s not the only relevant problem. I think AI is gonna pan out like social media did, which is to say it’s gonna be a shit show for society. And that would be the same no matter who owned it.
Both AI and social media are a shit show because it’s owned by a few people.
Unironically, the best social media is Fetlife. Not that it’s perfect by any means–not by far–but it is designed to facilitate bringing people together.
100%. People treat AI like some all knowing god figure. It can and will be manipulated just like every other social media site or search engine.
That’s why we need the weights, right now! Before they figure out how to do this. It will happen, but at least we can prevent backsliding from what we have now.
He’s not wrong.
brian eno is cooler than most of you can ever hope to be.
Dunno, the part about generative music (not like LLMs) I’ve tried, I think if I spent a few more years of weekly migraines on that, I’d become better.
That’s… just not true? Current frontier AI models are actually surprisingly diverse, there are a dozen companies from America, Europe, and China releasing competitive models. Let alone the countless finetunes created by the community. And many of them you can run entirely on your own hardware so no one really has control over how they are used. (Not saying that that’s a good thing necessarily, just to point out Eno is wrong)
Ollama and stable diffusion are free open source software. Nobody is forcing anybody to use chatGPT
Ollama is FOSS, SD has a proproprietary but permissive, source-available license, but it is not what most people would associate with “open-source”
For some reason the megacorps have got LLMs on the brain, and they’re the worst “AI” I’ve seen. There are other types of AI that are actually impressive, but the “writes a thing that looks like it might be the answer” machine is way less useful than they think it is.
most LLM’s for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.
As for practical use, the things can’t do math so they’re useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can’t imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.
I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it’s reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.
I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.
The delusional maniacs are going to be surprised when they ask the Super AI “how do we solve global warming?” and the answer is “build lots of solar, wind, and storage, and change infrastructure in cities to support walking, biking, and public transportation”.
Which is the answer they will get right before sending the AI back for “repairs.”
As we saw with Grock already several times.
They absolutely adore AI, it makes them feel in-touch with the world and able to feel validated, since all it is is a validation machine. They don’t care if it’s right or accurate or even remotely neutral, they want a biased fantasy crafting system that paints terrible pictures of Donald Trump all ripped and oiled riding on a tank and they want the AI to say “Look what you made! What a good boy! You did SO good!”
AI has a vibrant open source scene and is definitely not owned by a few people.
A lot of the data to train it is only owned by a few people though. It is record companies and publishing houses winning their lawsuits that will lead to dystopia. It’s a shame to see so many actually cheering them on.
So long as there are big players releasing open weights models, which is true for the foreseeable future, I don’t think this is a big problem. Once those weights are released, they’re free forever, and anyone can fine-tune based on them, or use them to bootstrap new models by distillation or synthetic RL data generation.
Reading the other comments, it seems there are more than one problem with AI. Probably even some perks as well.
Shucks, another one or these complex issues huh. Weird how everything you learn something about turns out to have these nuances to them.
most of the replies can be summarized as “the biggest problem with AI is that we live under capitalism”
I don’t really agree that this is the biggest issue, for me the biggest issue is power consumption.
Large power consumption only happens because someone is willing to dump lots of capital into it so they can own it.
Oh you’re right, let me just tally up all the days where that isn’t the case…
carry the 2…
don’t forget weekends and holidays…
Oh! It’s every single day. It’s just an always and forever problem. Neat.
It’s nothing of the sort. If nobody had the capital to scale it through more power, then the research would be more focused on making it efficient.
That is a big issue, but excessive power consumption isn’t intrinsic to AI. You can run a reasonably good AI on your home computer.
The AI companies don’t seem concerned about the diminishing returns, though, and will happily spend 1000% more power to gain that last 10% better intelligence. In a competitive market why wouldn’t they, when power is so cheap.
Either the article editing was horrible, or Eno is wildly uniformed about the world. Creation of AIs is NOT the same as social media. You can’t blame a hammer for some evil person using it to hit someone in the head, and there is more to ‘hammers’ than just assaulting people.
Eno does strike me as the kind of person who could use AI effectively as a tool for making music. I don’t think he’s team “just generate music with a single prompt and dump it onto YouTube” (AI has ruined study lo fi channels) - the stuff at the end about distortion is what he’s interested in experimenting with.
There is a possibility for something interesting and cool there (I think about how Chuck Pearson’s eccojams is just like short loops of random songs repeated in different ways, but it’s an absolutely revolutionary album) even if in effect all that’s going to happen is music execs thinking they can replace songwriters and musicians with “hey siri, generate a pop song with a catchy chorus” while talentless hacks inundate YouTube and bandcamp with shit.
Yeah, Eno actually has made a variety of albums and art installations using generative simple AI for musical decisions, although I don’t think he does any advanced programming himself. That’s why it’s really odd to see comments in an article that imply he is really uninformed about AI…he was pioneering generative music 20-30 years ago.
I’ve come to realize that there is a huge amount of misinformation about AI these days, and the issue is compounded by there being lots of clumsy, bad early AI works in various art fields, web journalism etc. I’m trying to cut back on discussing AI for these reasons, although as an AI enthusiast, it’s hard to keep quiet about it sometimes.
Eno is more a traditional algorist than “AI” (by which people generally mean neural networks)
I could see him using neural networks to generate and intentionally pick and loop short bits with weird anomalies or glitchy sounds. Thats the route I’d like AI in music to go, so maybe that’s what I’m reading in, but it fits Eno’s vibe and philosophy.
AI as a tool not to replace other forms of music, but doing things like training it on contrasting music genres or self made bits or otherwise creatively breaking and reconstructing the artwork.
John Cage was all about ‘stochastic’ music - composing based on what he divined from the I Ching. There are people who have been kicking around ideas like this for longer than the AI bubble has been around - the big problem will be digging out the good stuff when the people typing “generate a three hour vapor wave playlist” can upload ten videos a day…
Sure. I worked in the game industry and sometimes AI can mean ‘pick a random number if X occurs’ or something equally simple, so I’m just used to the term used a few different ways.
Totally fair
That it’s controlled by a few is only a problem if you use it… my issue with it starts before that.
My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto: It’s out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.
Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything
lol, sucker. none of that does shit and industry was already destroying the planet just fine before ai came along.
Dare I assume you are aware we have “industry” because we consume?
yes. we are cancer. i live on as little as possible but i don’t delude myself into thinking my actions have any effect on the whole.
i spent nearly 20 years not using paper towels until i realized how pointless it was. now i throw my trash out the window. we’re all fucked. if we want to change things, there’s only one tool that will fix it. until people realize that, i really don’t fucking care any more.
now i throw my trash out the window.
You don’t believe not using paper towels was a net positive so now you choose to create and by extention live in a pigsty? I’m not following.
My biggest gripe with AI is the same problem I have with anything crypto crypto: It’s out of control power consumption relative to the problem it solves or purpose it serves.
Don’t thrown all crypto under the bus. Only bitcoin and other proof of work protocols are power hungry. 2nd and 3rd generation crypto use mostly proof of stake and ZKrollups for security. Much more energy efficient.
Sure, but despite all the crypto bros assurances to the contrary, the only real-world applications for it is buying drugs, paying ransoms and getting scammed. Which means that any non-zero amount of energy is too much energy.
I’m aware of this, but it still mostly just something for people speculate on. Something people buy, sit on, and then hopefully sell with a profit.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized money alternative, but the amount of people actually, legitimately, buying things with crypto are highly negligible. And honestly even if it did serve it’s actual purpose, the cumulative power consumption would still be a point of debate.
Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything, all in the name of the environment, while at the same time in some datacenter they are burning kwh’s by the bucket loads generating pictures of cats in space suits.
That’s, #1, fashion and not about environment, #2, fashion promoted because it’s cheaper for the industry.
And yes, power saved somewhere will just be spent elsewhere. Cheaper. Cause that means reduced demand for power (or grown not as fast as otherwise).
No brian eno, there are many open llm already. The problem is people like you who have accumulated too much and now control all the markets/platforms/medias.
Totally right that there are already super impression open source AI projects.
But Eno doesn’t control diddly, and it’s odd that you think he does. And I assume he is decently well off, but I doubt he is super rich by most people’s standards.
Majors
The government likes concentrated ownership because then it has only a few phonecalls to make if it wants its bidding done (be it censorship, manipulation, partisan political chicanery, etc)
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