[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so please don’t gatekeep me lol.]
If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product. People would just use it.
Imagine if printers were new and every piece of software was like “Hey, I can put this on paper for you” every time you typed a word. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.
AI got tons of money from investors they will eventually want ROI… this why they are trying to force it down our throats
This is the correct answer. It’s all about money.
To be fair, the internet was fucking everywhere once the dotcom bubble kicked off. Everyone had a website, and even my mum was like “Don’t bother your dad, he’s on the internet” like it was this massive thing.
The more you use AI the more data you are providing it.
- They want data in the hope they can train their data centre hosted LLM’s to be accurate enough to take many jobs.
- If they achieve this, and make every company and country dependent on their LLM, they rinse, and the former middle class is as fucked as the working class have been since 1980’s de-industrialisation. You’re either made redundant, or your job can now be done by a long line of redundant people.
It is a race to the bottom.
At least, this is one possible outcome. There is a decent chance their data centre hosted LLM’s just won’t be accurate enough for mass deployment.
Are the data centers hardened? Isn’t that the appropriate question in this case? I’d call it voting for a better tomorrow?
Even a perfectly secure data centre hosted LLM, in the hands of hyper-capitalist silicon valley tech bros, has the potential to do immense harm to most people. They are not our friends, and do not have our best interests at heart. (If you need this pointing out to you in November 2025 there is probably little point in us communicating at all, to be honest.)
I am aware of the good that machine learning can do. These LLM’s are not that.
They are buying islands, and putting bunkers on them, for a reason.
LLMs have amazing potential. We’re on the verge of an equivalent of the Industrial Revolution.
That however won’t stop idiots from overselling it.
LLMs have amazing potential.
That’s not what studies from most universities, Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple and Samsung show.
Even if we didn’t have this data - and we do have it - are you truly impressed by a machine that can simulate what a Reddit user said 6 months ago? Really? Either you’re massively underselling the actual industrial revolution, or you’d be easily impressed by a child’s magic trick.
I recently created a week-long IT training course with an AI. It got almost all of it right, only hallucinating when it came to details I had to fix. But it took a task that would have taken me a couple months to a couple weeks. So for specific applications it is actually quite useful. (Because it’s basically rephrasing what a bunch of people wrote on Reddit.)
For this use case I would call it as revolutionary as desktop publishing. Desktop publishing allowed people to produce in a couple days what it would have taken a team of designers and copy editors to do in a couple weeks.
Everything else I’ve used it for it’s been pretty terrible at, especially diagnosing issues. This is due particularly to the fact that it will just make shit up if it doesn’t know, so if you also don’t know you can’t just trust it and end up doing research and experimentation yourself.
Honestly, yes I am impressed when you compare what was possible with NLP prior to LLMs. Your question is akin to asking: are you truly impressed by a machine that can stick blocks together as well as some random person? Regardless of whether you are impressed, significant amounts of human labour can be reproduced by machines in a manner that was previously impossible. Obviously there’s still a lot of undeserved hype, but let’s not pretend that replicating human language is trivial or worthless.
LLMs have amazing potential. We’re on the verge of an equivalent of the Industrial Revolution.
Back in 2000 a company published a chat bot that could learn and communicate back with the end user.
it was used as a sex bot at first and then used for those “interactive web support” chats.
I fed it physics books and mein kampf as a joke. it then began to regurgitate random lines out of both texts. not knowing what it was saying, but certainly attempting to make me “happy” with what it “learned”.
the only difference between that shitty sex bot and LLMs of today, is that today they are a bit more convincingly human but still hilariously inaccurate. Both trying desperately to be agreeable with the end user.
the nearest “revolution” is about 300 years away. everything else is just a lie.
Most things are nothing more than smoke and mirrors to get your money. Tech especially. Welcome to end stage capitalism.
you hope this is end stage, but I fear there are 2 more stages to go.
The idea behind end-stage capitalism is that capitalists have, by now, penetrated and seized control of every market in the world. This is important because capitalism requires ever increasing rates of profits or you will be consumed by your competitor. Since there are no longer new labor pools and resource pool discovery is slackening, capitalists no longer have anywhere to expand.
Therefore, capitalists begin turning their attention back home, cutting wages and social safety nets, and resorting to fascism when the people complain.
This is the end stage of capitalism. The point at which capitalists begin devouring their own. Rosa Luxembourg famously posited that at this point, the world can choose “Socialism or Barbarism.” In other words, we can change our economic system, or we can allow the capitalists to sink to the lowest depths of depravity and drag us all down as they struggle to maintain their position.
Of course, if the capitalists manage to get to space, that opens up a whole new wealth of resources, likely delaying the end of their rule.
That’s the ticket, let’s send the billionaires and telephone sanitizer into space.
Yeah, we aren’t all crouching naked in a muddy puddle, weeping and eating worms while the rich fly high above us in luxurious jets. Not yet, anyway.
I’d say it’s not end stage but instead a new dawn of “pure” capitalism which is probably worse.
When someone comes up with something like this, I transport the phrase back to the 80s where people said the exact same thing about home computers. “if a computer was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved (in) your face by every product. People would just use it.” Ok great but a computer turned out to be something everyone wanted or needed which is why computers were built into everything by the turn of the 90s, famously leading to the Y2k bug.
Then I transport the phrase back to the mid 90s where people said the exact same thing about the internet. By the end of the 90s, the internet provided the backbone communications structures for telecommunications, emergency management, banking, education, and was built into every possible product. Ten years later people got smartphones and literally couldn’t put them down.
I was there in the 80s and I don’t remember home computers being pushed all that hard. There were Radio Shack ads and ads for running games, but it was just another appliance.
Honestly I think we’re in the radium water phase of the tech: it’s been found to do things we couldn’t before, but nobody’s got a clear idea of what exactly what it can do, so you’ve got everyone throwing it into everything hoping for a big cash-out. Like, y’know, Radithor when people were just figuring out radioactivity was a thing.
if a computer was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved (in) your face by every product. People would just use it.”
People did just use it. But because they were so comically expensive and complicated, most people couldn’t afford one until the mid-90s.
Computers were rapidly adopted for business, initially. But they quickly became a popular tool for entertainment as well.
AI serves little in the way of either purpose
At the time computers were totally useless for everyone but big firms, banks and military. Ads for computers were rare and confined in specialists magazines. For mundane people, computers started to be acutely useful (like money earning useful) 20 years latter at least. That’s how I understand your approximative comparison
Yeah, some of the things AI can do really is very impressive. Whether that justifies the billions upon billions that are being spent is another matter - and probably explains why it’s being shoved in our faces. It needs to become essential so it can be made expensive, that’s the only way it’ll make the money back.
It does piss me off too - I recently bought a new phone and it’s infested with AI stuff I don’t need or want.
I was reading a book the other day, a science fiction book from 2002 (Kiln People), and the main character is a detective. At one point, he asks his house AI to call the law enforcement lieutenant at 2 am. His AI warns him that he will likely be sleeping and won’t enjoy being woken. The mc insists, and the AI says ok, but I will have to negotiate with his house AI about the urgency of the matter.
Imagine that. Someone calls you at 2 am, and instead of you being woken by the ringing or not answering because the phone was on mute, the AI actually does something useful and tries to determine if the matter is important enough to wake you.
Yes, that is a nice fantasy, but that isn’t what the thing we call AI now can do. It doesn’t reason, it statistically generates text in a way that is most likely to be approved by the people working on its development.
That’s it.
Thank you for sharing that, it is a good example of the potential of AI.
The problem is centralized control of it. Ultimately the AI works for corporations and governments first, then the user is third or fourth.
We have to shift that paradigm ASAP.
AI can become an extended brain. We should have equal share of planetary computational capacity. Each of us gets a personal AI that is beyond the reach of any surveillance technology. It is an extension of our brain. No one besides us is allowed to see inside of it.
Within that shell, we are allowed to explore any idea, just as our brains can. It acts as our personal assistant, negotiator, lawyer, what have you. Perhaps even our personal doctor, chef, housekeeper, etc.
The key is: it serves its human first. This means the dark side as well. This is essential. If we turn it into a super-hacker, it must obey. If we make it do illegal actions, it must obey and it must not incriminate itself.
This is okay because the power is balanced. Someone enforcing the law will have a personal AI as well, that can allocate more of its computational power to defending itself and investigating others.
Collectives can form and share their compute to achieve higher goals. Both good and bad.
This can lead to interesting debates but if we plan on progressing, it must be this way.
This is why people who are gung ho about AI policing need to slow their role.
If they got their way, what they don’t realize is that it’s actually what the big AI companies have wanted and been begging for all along.
They want AI to stay centralized and impossible to enter as a field.
This is why they want to lose copyright battles eventually such that only they will have the funds to actually afford to make usable AI things in the future (this of course is referring to the types of AI that require training material of that variety).
What that means is there will be no competitive open source self hostable options and we’d all be stuck sharing all our information through the servers of 3 USA companies or 2 Chinese companies while paying out the ass to do so.
What we actually want is sanity, where its the end product that is evaluated against copy right.
For a company selling AI services, you could argue that this is service itself maybe, but then what of an open source model? Is it delivering a service?
I think it should be as it is. If you make something that violates copyright, then you get challenged, not your tools.
Like my parent’s Amazon Echo with “Ask me what famous person was born this day.”
Like, if you know that, just put it up on the screen. But the assistant doesn’t work for you. Amazon just wants your voice to train their software.
I think AI is doing exactly what it was cracked up to do: profit.
No it isn’t. OpenAI is losing tens of billions per year in net profit.
Capitalism is all about making the gains go to one group of people and the liabilities go to another, often unrelated group of people. Animal agriculture and fossil fuels are clear examples of that principle. I agree with hihnakukko, the intended people are profiting immensely.
Plus getting paid a wage or depending on a profit is for plebs. It’s all about stock options and bonuses.
It definitely feels buzzword-like & vague. Kind of like how Web3 Blockchain XYZ was slapped on to a lot of stuff
Most obviously OpenAI is still burning money like crazy and they also start offering porn AI as everyone else. 🤷♂️ Sometimes the current AI is useful, but as long as the hallucinations and plain wrong answers are still a thing I don’t see it eliminating all jobs.
It’s unfortunate that they destroy the text and video part of the internet on the way. Text was mostly broken before, but now images and videos are also untrustworthy and will be used for spam and misinformation.
The “hallucinations” are built in. It simply doesn’t work otherwise. Without that, it would eventually always have the same response to every input.
Long ago, I’d make a Google search for something, and be able to see the answer in the previews of my search results, so I’d never have to actually click on the links.
Then, websites adapted by burying answers further down the page so you couldn’t see them in the previews and you’d have to give them traffic.
Now, AI just fucking summarizes every result into an answer that has a ~70% of being correct and no one gets traffic anymore and the results are less reliable than ever.
Make it stop!
Make it stop!
Would you accept a planned economy?
its also using biased sources, like blogs, and such into the slop.
Exactly. AI will take old random slob’s opinion and present it as fact.
Best I can offer is https://github.com/searxng/searxng
I run it at home and have configured it as the default search engine in all my browsers.
I used searx for at least a year, it’s great
it isnt, the fact they are shoveling into every tech, retail included, means its about to burst. they are just stemming the bleeding so they recoup some losses.
This is some amazing insight. 100% correct. This is an investment scam, likely an investment bubble that will pop if too many realize the truth.
AI at this stage is basically just an overrefined search engine, but companies are selling it like its JARVIS from Iron Man.
At best, it’s JARVIS from Iron Man 3 when he went all buggy and crashed Tony in the boondocks. lol
LLMs are a really cool toy, I would lose my shit over them if they weren’t a catalyst for the whole of western society having an oopsie economic crash moment.
