• brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    As a fervent AI enthusiast, I disagree.

    …I’d say it’s 97% hype and marketing.

    It’s crazy how much fud is flying around, and legitimately buries good open research. It’s also crazy what these giant corporations are explicitly saying what they’re going to do, and that anyone buys it. TSMC’s allegedly calling Sam Altman a ‘podcast bro’ is spot on, and I’d add “manipulative vampire” to that.

    Talk to any long-time resident of localllama and similar “local” AI communities who actually dig into this stuff, and you’ll find immense skepticism, not the crypto-like AI bros like you find on linkedin, twitter and such and blot everything out.

    • falkerie71@sh.itjust.works
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      26 days ago

      For real. Being a software engineer with basic knowledge in ML, I’m just sick of companies from every industry being so desperate to cling onto the hype train they’re willing to label anything with AI, even if it has little or nothing to do with it, just to boost their stock value. I would be so uncomfortable being an employee having to do this.

      • Mikelius@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        For sure, it seems like 90% of ai startups are nothing more than front end wrappers for a gpt instance.

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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      26 days ago

      Seriously, I’d love to be enthusiastic about it because it’s genuinely cool what you can do with math.

      But the lies that are shoved in our faces are just so fucking much and so fucking egregious that it’s pretty much impossible.

      And on top of that LLMs are hugely overshadowing actual interesting approaches for funding.

    • paddirn@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      I really want to like AI, I’d love to have an intelligent AI assistant or something, but I just struggle to find any uses for it outside of some really niche cases or for basic brainstorming tasks. Otherwise, it just feels like alot of work for very little benefit or results that I can’t even trust or use.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        It’s useful.

        I keep Qwen 32B loaded on my desktop pretty much whenever its on, as an (unreliable) assistant to analyze or parse big texts, to do quick chores or write scripts, to bounce ideas off of or even as a offline replacement for google translate (though I specifically use aya 32B for that).

        It does “feel” different when the LLM is local, as you can manipulate the prompt syntax so easily, hammer it with multiple requests that come back really fast when it seems to get something wrong, not worry about refusals or data leakage and such.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            26 days ago

            Soldered is better! It’s sometimes faster, definitely faster if it happens to be lpddr.

            But TBH the only thing that really matters his “how much VRAM do you have,” and Qwen 32B slots in at 24GB, or maybe 16GB if the GPU is totally empty and you tune your quantization carefully. And the cheapest way to that (until 2025) is a used MI60, P40 or 3090.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

      1. A set of securities fraud charges.

      2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

      He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

      So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.

    • Evotech@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      It’s selling the future, but nobody knows if we can actually get there

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        It’s selling an anticompetitive dystopia. It’s selling a Facebook monopoly vs selling the Fediverse.

        We dont need 7 trillion dollars of datacenters burning the Earth, we need collaborative, open source innovation.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      Ya, it’s like machine learning but better. That’s about it IMO.

      Edit: As I have to spell it out: as opposed to (machine learning with) neural networks.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          26 days ago

          It’s also neural networks, and probably some other CS structures.

          AI is a category, and even specific implementations tend to use multiple techniques.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            26 days ago

            Well there is a very specific architecture “rut” the LLMs people use have fallen into, and even small attempts to break out (like with Jamba) don’t seem to get much interest, unfortunately.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              26 days ago

              Sure, but LLMs aren’t the only AI being used, nor will they eliminate the other forms of AI. As people see issues with the big LLMs, development focus will change to adopt other approaches.

              • commandar@lemmy.world
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                26 days ago

                There is real risk that the hype cycle around LLMs will smother other research in the cradle when the bubble pops.

                The hyperscalers are dumping tens of billions of dollars into infrastructure investment every single quarter right now on the promise of LLMs. If LLMs don’t turn into something with a tangible ROI, the term AI will become every bit as radioactive to investors in the future as it is lucrative right now.

                Viable paths of research will become much harder to fund if investors get burned because the business model they’re funding right now doesn’t solidify beyond “trust us bro.”

                • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                  26 days ago

                  Sure, but those are largely the big tech companies you’re talking about, and research tends to come from universities and private orgs. That funding hasn’t stopped, it just doesn’t get the headlines like massive investments into LLMs currently do. The market goes in cycles, and once it finds something new and promising, it’ll dump money into it until the next hot thing comes along.

                  There will be massive market consequences if AI fails to deliver on its promises (and I think it will, because the promises are ridiculous), and we get those every so often. If we look back about 25 years, we saw the same thing w/ the dotcom craze, where anything with a website got obscene amounts of funding, even if they didn’t have a viable business model, and we had a massive crash. But important websites survived that bubble bursting, and the market recovered pretty quickly and within a decade we had yet another massive market correction due to another bubble (the housing market, mostly due to corruption in the financial sector).

                  That’s how the market goes. I think AI will crash, and I think it’ll likely crash in the next 5 years or so, but the underlying technologies will absolutely be a core part of our day-to-day life in the same way the Internet is after the dotcom burst. It’ll also look quite a bit different IMO than what we’re seeing today, and within 10 years of that crash, we’ll likely be beyond where we were just before the crash, at least in terms of overall market capitalization.

                  It’s a messy cycle, but it seems to work pretty well in aggregate.

                  • commandar@lemmy.world
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                    26 days ago

                    Sure, but those are largely the big tech companies you’re talking about, and research tends to come from universities and private orgs.

                    Well, that’s because the hyperscalers are the only ones who can afford it at this point. Altman has said ChatGPT 4 training cost in the neighborhood of $100M (largely subsidized by Microsoft). The scale of capital being set on fire in the pursuit of LLMs is just staggering. That’s why I think the failure of LLMs will have serious knock-on effects with AI research generally.

                    To be clear: I don’t disagree with you re: the fact that AI research will continue and will eventually recover. I just think that if the LLM bubble pops, it’s going to set things back for years because it will be much more difficult for researchers to get funded for a long time going forward. It won’t be “LLMs fail and everyone else continues on as normal,” it’s going to be “LLMs fail and have significant collateral damage on the research community.”

                • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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                  26 days ago

                  the term AI will become every bit as radioactive to investors in the future as it is lucrative right now.

                  Well you say that, but somehow crypto is still around despite most schemes being (IMO) a much more explicit scam. We have politicans supporting it.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          25 days ago

          It is. It’s that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.

    • billwashere@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      Yep the current iteration is. But should we cross the threshold to full AGI… that’s either gonna be awesome or world ending. Not sure which.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        Current LLMs cannot be AGI, no matter how big they are. The fundamental architecture just isn’t right.

        • billwashere@lemmy.world
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          26 days ago

          You’re absolutely right. LLMs are good at faking language and sometimes not even great at that. Not sure why I got downvoted but oh well. But AGI will be game changing if it happens.

      • Naz@sh.itjust.works
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        26 days ago

        Based on what I’ve witnessed so far, people will play with their AGI units for a bit and then put them down to continue scrolling memes.

        Which means it is neither awesome, nor world-ending, but just boring/business as usual.

        • billwashere@lemmy.world
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          26 days ago

          There are people way smarter than me that claim it will be a threshold and would likely grow exponentially after it’s crossed. I guess we won’t know for sure until it happens. I do agree most people get bored easily but if this thing is possible to think for itself without interaction it won’t matter if the humans get bored.