> The OpenAI chief told White House officials that A.I. data centers would be a catalyst for the re-industrialization of America, creating as many as half a million jobs
Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking.
Would love to hear OpenAI's explanation behind this line of thinking.
Would have to be energy. Data centres have light human footprints. And Altman wants to fabricate the chips in the Middle East, not America [1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/openai-s-...
e: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-...
There's all manner of insane, ambitious things being worked on in the open right now, if you are able to muster the discernment necessary to ignore the natural, unavoidable pile of grift that follows any new technology or hype cycle.
And in your opinion, these are...?
With AI, I don't even know where to start. Have you used the internet recently? We have multimodal transformer models which can input and output images, video and text. We can create music and images using diffusion techniques. We have world-class text generation systems, which of course still need a lot of infrastructural support, but the viability is already being proven. We have cutting-edge translation tools which blow anything previous out the water. We have code generation and introspection tools, which work well enough to majorly augment my engineering workflow. We are developing ways to "speak" with your data, turning natural language into advance query, analysis and synthesis tasks. We have neural radiance fields. Lip syncing and voice translation tech to automate localization in powerful new ways.
And we have open models! Anyone can dive in, fine-tune a model and get viable results today. We can already start creating new pipelines today, so that we aren't wasting our time doing that once models get better at not hallucinating. The individuals and organizations who wait for this new technology to be perfectly reliable will get left in the dust by those who took the chance and did the pioneering work.
This is still barely scratching the surface. It seems like there's at least one ground-breaking paper a month, often more than that. It's certainly easier to bash these technologies and communities from afar, but that attitude will only hinder you in the future once the tech has caught up. What we have already created through experimentation just since 2015 is stuff that I grew up reading about in science fiction.
Could we hit an AI winter instead? Will decentralization ultimately be a dead end? Maybe. But it would be considerate to not bash those who are spending time and money to find out, and to not let grifters whom they cannot control co-opt the space and the narrative around it.
Beautifully put, thanks for writing my thoughts out.
Music generation is just mangled music from some popular band with custom lyrics, how can you think that you are creating something here?
This is good enough for 90% of image use cases, which is mildly relevant filler between and next to text.
If an artist enjoys using a tool to make something, and their patron enjoys the creative output, do you or I have any right to judge or admonish their process? Visionaries see what is possible, they don't spend their time critiquing things that aren't perfect and instead recognize and engage with novel, paradigm-shifting tools. I understand not wanting to interact with low-effort VC-driven bullshit, but there's a lot of amazing work being done in the open by scientists and enthusiasts.
The endgame, after these tools are developed and ironed out, will be a wealth of highly creative content like we've never experienced. We can shit on these tools or grab a shovel and try to improve them, which is what a huge community of people is doing right now despite the criticism.
It is my understanding that artists up in arms over AI are merely a noisy minority.
Artists who couldn't be chuffed or who like AI and perhaps even use it as a tool are not per capita likely to scream quite as loudly about their positions or try as hard to dominate the narrative.
Reading the headlines 200+ years ago it would have been easy to assume that all weavers hated Jacquard looms, as well. Especially in light of the fuming Luddites that had a tendency to break into shops and smash them up.
But at the end of the day, a person really has to pick a side: Is AI imagery worthless slop or is it a dangerous force that will replace human artists? I'd suggest that anyone legitimately unable to compete against worthless slop must be vastly overestimating the quality of their own work.
You say it's more efficient but I think if artists were fairly compensated for their work, or at the very least had a say in the process, it would be too expensive or not have good enough output to compete. On top of that, it uses A LOT more energy - which should be enough to exclude it as an option considering the current trajectory of climate change.
Aside from that we need to consider the more philosophical question of whether we want to make creative dream jobs even more impossible to find. Should we degrade the public space even more with an avalanche of "good enough" imagery simply to improve margins for the executive class? Computers have already made every level of developed economies significantly more productive and yet individuals are worse off financially than they were in the 90s. All this pipedream of replacing workers with AI will do is relegate them to manual labour or lock them into some barely-enough universal basic income scheme.
[1] https://www.dacs.org.uk/news-events/artificial-intelligence-...
Additionally, as an artist myself I don't really much care what "the majority" of artists I think, I didn't become an artist to follow trends and outsource my own critical thinking. As a software engineer, I have a level of understanding behind these models that far surpasses the average artist. As a technological visionary, I understand where the technology will lead, as well as its inevitability. The cat's out of the bag. So I don't very much value the average uninformed opinion.
> Aside from that we need to consider the more philosophical question of whether we want to make creative dream jobs even more impossible to find
Technological progress always leads to the destruction and creation of jobs. People similarly bashed the loom, the printing press, calculators, computers, the internet, cars, planes, you name it. There's no benefit in being a Luddite. Intelligent and aware engineers and artists are incorporating these tools into their workflows today, or at least staying informed, so that they find themselves still employed in whatever future is ahead of us.
This isn't ludditism. Ethical ML artistic tools do exist but none of these prompt-based generators fall into that category. None of the tools you mentioned are directly equivalent because they don't depend on a collection of existing work to produce derivatives.
All I will say about the climate is that emissions have to peak next year, and be halved by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement goal. I have to assume from your casual dismissal that you're not aware of the consequences of missing it.
A) The courts are deciding this now, and B) we already live in a sick reality distorted by the DMCA and we need a major copyright reform.
> I have to assume from your casual dismissal that you're not aware of the consequences of missing it.
You managed to completely ignore what I said about diminishing energy requirements for compute. You're arguing disingenuously and now you're attempting to insult my intelligence instead of focusing on the argument.
It's really telling that this is the typical fashion in which these argument play out. I have no interest in continuing a conversation like this if you can't make good-faith assumptions in your argument as per the Hacker News guidelines.
The reason we love them is the same reason we love art… To create something out of nothing with the resources at hand.
Most artist love and hate, xor love to hate while simultaneously hating to love ai.
hysterical. exact same shit as always, folks
In many ways, the amount of money being put into cryptocurrency is antithetical to its development
But still, there is a major difference between AI and Bitcoin. With AI, the more power we put in the more we get out. That might be in the form of more accurate output, longer output, or larger context windows. With Bitcoin, more power going into the calculations just makes the calculations harder so the amount of useful work stays exactly the same. The calculations themselves have no use other than to waste time and power.
only after they are already built
There will therefore be a sudden supply of half a million such factories.
Think the Matrix, only the futuristic artificial intelligence isn't harvesting human brainpower/heat -- instead most people work at power plants.
My assumption is that the data centers would mostly be staffed by those who will have to manually audit data going in and out of the LLMs on a daily basis. There would also be a need to generate/curate the test data that the LLMs will have train on. There is potential for half a million jobs, but is that what you would want to have human effort invested in, is the real question.
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I should have a machine that peels my potatoes. I should have a machine that cooks me my favorite meal at the push of a button. I should have a machine that I can feed fabric into and it will sew me a shirt. All of these things are doable, but they don't make economic sense or they need to handle too many unforeseen cases.
A machine that sews shirts doesn't make sense to have at home, but if you're selling millions of shirts then it does. Same for all the rest.
A machine that runs all the cables etc needs to be too complicated to handle all the eventualities that there isn't enough scale (yet) to justify its existence. Basically, we don't build enough data centers.