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I think the nomenclature of calling generative AI an "AI" is just hype and that leads to disappointment. After all, it's much more exciting for investors than c

I think the nomenclature of calling generative AI an "AI" is just hype and that leads to disappointment. After all, it's much more exciting for investors than calling it the world's most expensive textual/audio/visual autocomplete. But that's really what this generatoon currently is. And it can feel like magic, because we're pattern-seeking and pattern-matching creatures, so something that seems to intuit the pattern we're looking for (even if imperfectly) can feel quite a bit like reasoning with another human. To be a bit less generous to humans, it's often the same as talking with another human, because we spend much of our lives writing boilerplate or making small talk or otherwise just kind of on autopilot and answering patterns with expected responses without seriously engaging our complex reasoning. (Do you have to really think about how to map-filter-reduce a dataset anymore? Or think seriously about how you really are when someone says "how are you"? We don't usually expect other people to, and most of the time we're satisfied by exchanging recognizable / somewhat coherent language patterns which we can count on each other to fill in the gaps of. But this is not the intelligence in human intelligence). The corporate hype machine works overtime to hype it as a solution, but that's just what they do. That's all spin. We see through it now, and we're getting to the point where people are asking the only important question about this tech, which is, how much will you pay for a nerfed autocomplete to do X?

tylerchilds 2y ago
“how much will you pay for a needed autocomplete to do X?” i think this is a super important for anyone playing in the LLM space to calculate. currently “AI” providers are selling electricity at a loss to demonstrate product “value”, so even while asking questions is “free” today, there’s actually a finite resource under the hood that needs to have the bill paid in the end. an estimate, but from historic trends, free bills come due in around 7 years
- eru 2y ago
  Even _if_ we don't see our current 'AIs' become more intelligent, I am very certain that we will see the amount of electricity needed to produce 2024-state-of-the-art results drop dramatically over the next few years. People are only just figuring out how any of this works, and they are happy to get any reasonable results at all. They aren't really competing on costs like energy efficiency, yet. --- However I don't really think that 'if' will come to pass: I expect that we will still see lots of advances in the 'intelligence' of these models, so people will compete on these, and worry about electricity usage afterwards.
mistrial9 2y ago
> The corporate hype machine works overtime to hype it as a solution, but that's just what they do. the CoPilot product has billed hundreds of millions of dollars, and is billing right now. Secondly they copied all the GPL code and put it into a mixer, like a bitcoin mixer in a legal way. Sage words about "what they do" ring hollow while the only measure that counts is money. This situation needs legal action.

tylerchilds 2y ago

“how much will you pay for a needed autocomplete to do X?” i think this is a super important for anyone playing in the LLM space to calculate. currently “AI” providers are selling electricity at a loss to demonstrate product “value”, so even while asking questions is “free” today, there’s actually a finite resource under the hood that needs to have the bill paid in the end. an estimate, but from historic trends, free bills come due in around 7 years

eru 2y ago
Even _if_ we don't see our current 'AIs' become more intelligent, I am very certain that we will see the amount of electricity needed to produce 2024-state-of-the-art results drop dramatically over the next few years. People are only just figuring out how any of this works, and they are happy to get any reasonable results at all. They aren't really competing on costs like energy efficiency, yet. --- However I don't really think that 'if' will come to pass: I expect that we will still see lots of advances in the 'intelligence' of these models, so people will compete on these, and worry about electricity usage afterwards.

mistrial9 2y ago

> The corporate hype machine works overtime to hype it as a solution, but that's just what they do. the CoPilot product has billed hundreds of millions of dollars, and is billing right now. Secondly they copied all the GPL code and put it into a mixer, like a bitcoin mixer in a legal way. Sage words about "what they do" ring hollow while the only measure that counts is money. This situation needs legal action.