Who Asked for This?
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
> They are built to make VCs and companies rich.
That, and the concomitant terror of incessant breathless shilling and astroturfing. These wankers make so much noise, I can't hear myself think. Which of course is on purpose. Once I get to thinking, I might not buy what they want me to.
> This isn’t sustainable.
I so hope this is true. But the market can stay drowned in propaganda longer than my patience lasts.
Making companies rich is how society functions. It’s not zero sum. LLMs aren’t going anywhere.
In 5 years LLMs are here to stay and their usage will increase and not decrease. You aren’t able to face this fact and instead hide behind slurs like shills and astrotrufers.
The spin doctor's favorite move: Make your opponents look like they're irrational.
The ability to move funds without government authorization serves as a valuable hedge to many.
No matter. Miss me with these 3 month old LLM accounts shilling the latest tech snake oil.
Lots of economies and industries are volatile too, or subject to volatile politics.
Lolwut? What are you talking about?
Parking somme $$ in bitcoin in case you have government problems is no different than shoving money into land or gold in case you have stock market problems. The return is beside the point, it could be crap for all you care. The point is at least all your assets won't go to shit at the same time. It's damn near the opposite of gambling.
This got a smirk out of me.
It's ind of like how you can mockingly invoke politically correct language in certain contexts.
Anyone who thinks any force on earth can stop this train is just really out of touch. It’s coming so make the best of it and contribute to making this ship land as softly as we can.
> As Lopatto points out: “Normal people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to automate every single part of their lives.“ Their biggest exposure to AI is using a tool like ChatGPT as a more verbose Google, or perhaps occasionally formatting an event itinerary. This is cool, and even useful, but at the moment it is probably less positively impactful in their lives than, say, the arrival of the iPod in the early 2000s.
If this was written in 2022 it would be half coherent. To write that paragraph with a straight face today requires an impressive amount of ignorance
is not really how it works. They are invented by inventors / scientists who think hey this would be cool.
The amount of money then invested then depends a bit on markets / vcs / hucksters but developing neural nets say was done in accademia without much thought of markets or VCs. I do think the amount of money now being invested now is kind of crazy and a bubble and should be scaled back somehow.
I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market. Companies that invent product generally can not predict all the uses. That’s what the free market exists for - push your product and see how people use them, get feedback and improve. I find that beautiful.
Does the author want planned RCTs to understand how they might be useful and slowly release them only every dimension of utility is confirmed? This reeks of euopilled mindset - a perverse parental kind of mindset where the state decides how products may be used.
The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted. Who knew NVIDIA might be used for LLMs when they first started producing chips for gaming?
The author (I assume) is feeling some latent anxiety over the extreme speed in which things are progressing. They are grieving by finding reasons to stall this progress by falsely claiming that people don’t care about LLMs until there is confirmed proof that LLMs can help them improve their lives.
But this is fundamentally a childish mindset, and flat out wrong. People do care - there are always enthusiasts who are top of the game and who the broader public follow.
I don’t want to be snarky but your line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products should enter market.
> The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted.
Unpredictability is a very good argument for slowing down data center construction and AI deployments until the tech can pay for itself.
Now all "order effects" are heavily subsidized with no end in sight, and they needlessly drain too much precious capital out of the rest of the economy. When the "effects" come slower, we'll have a better chance of evaluating them without exposing the economy to the excessive drain and risk it's subjected now.
If you remove the hype and exaggerations, the whole show looks like just another market bubble for extracting money via losing ventures in a negative-sum game.
Here are other "Cal Newportisms" to prove a point. - "Nobody cares about which bone is the hyoid bone." - "Who cares what happens when you slam two atoms together at high speed? Nobody was asking for this." - "Normal people aren't running around trying to prove things mathematically."
hence it's a vicious self-deluding bubble that has massive reinforcement. likewise the talent/capital that could be going to useful impactful opportunities in society doesn't.
hence we get money & labor being pumped into non-problems and solutions seeking problems like LLMs and the massive propaganda going into it as if the propaganda is going to cause behavior change.
which is why diversity of thought, experiences, culture is very important.