letsbuild.ai
I built letsbuild.ai over the weekend. This is a link site dedicated to AI and can be edited via Github.
There is well over 50 links already as a start. If you got interesting AI related links/ categories, would welcome any PR.
AI seems to be the ultimate example of "shoot first, ask questions later". We have no idea how AI will effect society, the marginal benefits to people are near-zero (measred in terms of the difference before any adoption to widespread adoption, not incremental intermediate stages), and most of the effects will likely be disastrous (much more efficient propaganda, much more efficient drug-in-the-form-of-media production to distract us from the true ills of the world to prevent a true revolution for good, and a huge wealth concentration towards tech companies).
This wanton development of AI seems exceptionally reckless...
You know, you say this, but we had massive changes after personal computers and the Internet and the iPhone became a thing, and no studies to my knowledge were produced before any of these things were introduced. All of the predicted effects were only positive, because only good actors were involved in creating them, but as we now know, a lot of downsides also resulted, mainly because of bad actors and perverse incentives and simple human psychology.
The progress of the last 40 years seems to be a validation of "Be careful what you wish for"
I used to bike 5 miles to a library in the 80's (as a teen) in order to learn anything. Now it's all on a device in my pocket that I might have killed for were it available then. But of course, it's not just the phone, it's the ubiquitous cell network, the (wired) Internet, display/memory/cpu tech and everything else that all makes it possible. Can I spend "too much time" on my phone? Sure, but I'm also hyper-aware of that tendency now. I've learned to cope with the downsides, while gaining the advantages.
I tend to believe that tech becomes available when we're ready for it, and that the positives always outweigh the negatives. (I'm still on the fence here regarding arms.)
But if you use your local models, it's more like running a linux box, it is private, customizable and unfiltered. LLMs will reverse the centralization trend we have seen with search and social. They can create a "safe space", "a room of one's own" where we can be creative and unrestricted.
LLMs promise the privacy internet never gave us, anyone, remember how we felt private online 20 years ago? You can't download a Google or FB but you can download a Mistral and even run it on a normal laptop.
i really like this idea too. Running LLMs locally reminds me of running Linux locally, it wasn't full on UNIX but it as close to a real operating system regular people could get. Maybe the LLMs you can run at home aren't the bleeding edge but they're as close as you can get. Notice how the technology companies are already lobbying authorities hard to try and keep LLMs only under their control. ..hosted in their 'cloud' and accessible only by paying their subscription. The generation that created the OSS movement and the best success stories, GNU and Linux, are doing their best to make sure it never happens again.
edit: fixed some bad grammar
Let me transpose your sentence back to 1980:
"The amount of people that will run their own computers is negligible at the scale of the society"
(I was 8 in 1980. People literally said this.)
All someone needs to do is to productize a whole-house LLM that does voice to text, runs the LLM, does text back to voice (possibly mimicking whatever voice you want), and you'd have an Alexa replacement that is far smarter. I'd buy it in a heartbeat just so that I wouldn't have to do maintenance on it.
And the latter is more likely. Because the willpower of an AI is just the mimicked willpower of the people who made it, and there will always be more good people than bad people.
How do you personally distinguish between "this is an apocalyptic mistake" and "this is a step in the right direction" ?
Good question. The first step is to analyze each technology individually, rather than usual analogies :)
It took decades for mass adoption and wider use cases to evolve. Sure, there were many cracks that had to fixed along the way (malware, botnets, privacy, piracy, distribution channel for illicit materials, environmental cost, etc.), but none of those things manifest in a timeline remotely close to what we see with gen AI seemingly reaching widespread adoption in a short ~24 mo. time period. The advancement has been so fast, that the real-world guardrails haven't had any time to catch up before the next advancement completely changes the playing field. Prime example is that Will Smith spaghetti video to Sora within months.
Now we have AI denying care[0] to patients and generating deepfake porn[1] of celebrities, coworkers, and even minors. What are the lines we should draw as a society? It moves so fast that even knowing what the right discussion context is can be a challenge because the endpoints have shifted by the time we even understand the problem enough to have a constructive conversation.
The socioeconomic impacts in some industries where AI can replaces workers will be tremendously negative for real-world, flesh-and-blood human beings who may not be ready or in a position to adapt to those changes. There is some postulation that the Arab Spring arose out of the effects of climate change on crop failures[3]. How will such a sudden and massive shift in employment and household income combined with other macroeconomic factors like inflation and housing costs affect the stability of society and social unrest?
Don't get me wrong: this is not an argument against AI because certainly, if AI can do those jobs better, faster, and more efficiently, then why not? But rather as a community and society, we also need to understand the wider consequences of wiping out employment of 90% of the people in a given field of industry and what that looks like for our friends, families, neighbors.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...
[1] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/03/04/deepfake-porn-video...
This is exactly what has happened with humanity.
I think that at the end of the day, the dinos will get resurrected. What you can decide is what part you want of it.
Or, you can build a revolution to take it down...
What you're right about is that we might try, nevertheless. I mean, we have things like the Geneva Convention or the United Nations, however debatable their effectiveness is. We wouldn't know unless we tried. But it's important to note that even though these things exist, violating them is always just an inch away. And then we're basically back to where I started: what you can decide is what part you want in the thing. But I don't think you can make the thing go away.
But I mean, it's not that I invented this myself. It's basically the concept of Pandora's box.
Would you mind sharing what sort of programming you have skills in?
Suppose we had this AI at the dawn of internet, we would have google using this tech to search internet back then. We would have saved countless hours of search to fix a bug.
AI is having an Einstein in our pocket. Any one who had to develop/research on any topic, he has an Einstein level assistance ready to help you out. We are just at the dawn of the sci-fi era we always have imagined for. And AI will be our companion in this fast changing world: "Jarvis explain me how that thing works" , and you get somewhat of an idea about any new or complex subject, which otherwise would have taken days to comprehend.
The courses:
https://lazyprogrammer.me/deep-learning-courses/
The order in which to take the courses:
https://deeplearningcourses.com/course_order
A video summary:
Tangential question I am not sure where else to ask: Would it be possible to train AI at home on a book? I was thinking about how sometimes I start reading a book and then get distracted for a month or two. Summarizing chapters and characters up to a point in the book sounds like a good fit for GPT AI. I could possibly find and extract PDF or epub of the current book I am reading and I have RTX 4080 at home I am barely using.
Edit: Everything is local. This is not training, it takes a standard LLM and gives it extra context based on what text the tool finds in the vector DB related to the topic.
Is this a need people have? I would use letsbuild.ai to discover projects and check their homepage/documentation, but once I know a given project I know where to find its docs (or search for "<project> docs" on Google).
Which UX improvements are you thinking of exactly? This is a website I would personally not use because all I see is a list of links without context nor explanation about which tool is better than another for which task.