Pivot to AI: Hallucinations worsen as the money runs out
davidgerard.co.uk
davidgerard.co.uk
I don’t buy this at all.
Sure loads of ChatGPT wrappers will die but there is definitely money to be made. Robotics is going to be big. Companies are firing customer service people. Etc
Sure that last one is perhaps not desirable but it does prove both practical value and feasibility
And as the price per token plummets and context increases more application will open up.
Just because VC money is keeping some shops open that should die doesn’t mean that’s true for the entire field
You mean "sexbots"? Too niche and expensive. For industrial automation you don't need "AI".
> Companies are firing customer service people.
They don't need "AI" to do this.
> They don't need "AI" to do this.
No but it sure helps:
https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/02/28/klarnas-ai-bot-is-d...
And they're starting to reap the rewards:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-ai...
AI customer service chatbots are just as prone to hallucination as any other AI chatbot, and companies are finding out that they're liable when their AIs lie to their customers. As we see more companies replacing humans with AIs, we're going to start to see more companies being found liable for the claims that their AIs spun out of whole cloth.
We haven't seen an AI yet which can consistently reproduce the truth, rather than something that sounds a lot like something that could be the truth. When someone makes an AI which is reliably just a knowledge engine, which can take an input, process it, and accurately convey the knowledge available in that input, then that will be a killer app; when an AI can take a company's documentation and summarize and condense it for easier consumption, that AI will be insanely popular in business cases both internal and external. Until then, these customer-service-replacing AI chatbots are going to prove to be more and more of a maintenance and liability headache.
I mean... If the VC's start funding AI companies with crypto is it incest or cannibalism.
Can someone come up with an idea for computing that doesn't involve wasting electricity with GPU's on pictures of cats and dogs?
nothing new. https://pessimistsarchive.org/
Of course being able to call that doesn't at all automatically translate into also being right about AI.
There's lots of people that have successfully predicted one particular bubble, but all of their other predictions have completely failed to materialize (to say nothing of all the wrong ones they made before striking gold). That's just how selection/survivorship bias works.
In this particular case, I actually suspect that both things can be true at the same time: We're in the middle of an AI hype bubble and >90% of current startups will not survive the next 3 years, but AI will still profoundly change the way we work.
There's even a nice historical analogy: We once had the dot com bubble, in which lots of people lost lots of money, but ultimately, the Internet did turn out to be kind of a big deal. It's just hard to go from that general bet on vibes to one that identifies actual companies that are going to bring about all of that.
That said, I do think that LLMs, while not the "final form of AI" by any means, are already somewhat of a revolution in human-machine interfaces. Being able to look up facts (or make up convincing lies) is neat, but to me, their real power lies in how good they are in summarizing and translating.
Remember when Siri and Google Assistant were having a very hard time understanding even the simplest commands if they weren't formulated in the exact way they understood, and the "aboutness" problem seemed unsurmountable without AGI?
Now we're suddenly way past that (without any AGI). Even if AI completely plateaus out with LLMs at their present-day strength, I think we could spend years, if not decades, of getting good at meaningfully integrating them into previously very manual workflows. Even an "AI winter" of that shape feels significantly more disruptive than many of the more optimistic crypto scenarios.
We're doing an absolute shit job of it and basing our foundations on piles of sand. We're gonna have to throw it all away and do it right the second time if we ever decide to do something useful.
AI will quickly pollute itself, but the infrastructure will survive. That most of it will be thrown away is perfectly ok, the ideas will live on.
What infrastructure? Massively inefficient corporate rent-seeking attempts aren't infrastructure.
There is no AI "Linux" in 2024, all AI tools are closed-source and proprietary.
Maybe sometime in the future a commodity manufacturer of massively parallel CPUs for stupidly parallel tasks appears, but Nvidia ain't it.
Ampere has 320 core chips as a dual socket, although a 4090 might still be cheaper.
AI is not as blitheringly useless as crypto - ML is real and does things! - but those guys are zeroing in on the applications that really are that useless.
Also, the AI guys are making the same excuses for their ghastly power usage that the coiners used to.
Really? You can't think of one single practical use for a non-centrally controlled system for sending -basically money- to others without gatekeepers being able to effortlessly interfere or debase? You completely dismiss the very real cases (all bubble hype uses and scams aside) of people using crypto to escape the worst parts of certain countries horrible inept, corrupt banking and financial systems?
If you flatly deny that any of these uses cases do exist and could become larger, I'd argue that you're speaking from ideological blindness against crypto instead of from a reasoned, thoughtful notion of its problems.
Do you have another example?
Further examples, since you're apparently too lazy to even do a google search:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliasferrerbreda/2024/03/06/ven...
https://cepa.org/article/crypto-boosts-ukraine-and-russia/
There are many more outside the privileged bubble of reliable financial services that many tech people on this site live in. Even if there weren't, the existence of a mechanism for sending others money without easy blocking by arbitrary gatekeepers is an innately valuable thing in an increasingly controlled society.
Maybe you thought I was someone else who deserved it more?
I appreciate you being willing to go find actual material to cite, though. That's valuable.
By the way, what positive effect has crypto had so far? Other than redistributing between some people and wasting enormous amounts of energy?
Personally I use AI all the time, but hallucinations are a problem, data is always a problem in all of machine learning, and it's always good to stay away from the cult-like behavior of people who can find absolutely nothing wrong with new technology.