5 ms·

Oprah will screw up the AI story

46 points by LorenDB 2y ago

combray 2y ago
Betting against Oprah with out any information seems foolish. Bo hate from me if you delete this after you listen to her
- chrisweekly 2y ago
  "Bo hate" -- typo for "No hate"?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
lettergram 2y ago
I regularly attend conferences regarding AI in the legal field, particularly intellectual property. My goodness, I absolutely hate listening to these IP attorneys attempt to explain AI and it's pitfalls. 50% of the time, what they describe as AI could simply be auto correct, the other half of the time it's this fictional all knowing machine. I actually got t-shirts for an upcoming conference that just say "Ask me about AI" so I can explain to these IP attorneys what it's actually about. Luckily I've been increasing my participation(s) on these panels so hopefully we can start to dispel some classic pitfalls. For a bit of context, here's my startup https://ipcopilot.ai/ https://ipcopilot.ai/
- jclulow 2y ago
  Is this... a service for spamming patent applications as fast as you can without paying lawyers as much as we used to? Can't see how that could exacerbate all of the deep problems with the patent system!
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Did a quick browse of their site, just going off that, it made me wince, it sounds like you wrote quite a negative strawman. It's quite plainly research aid software for attorneys, as we can also see from their comment re: listening to lawyers talk about AI as talisman. Do you have anything to cite about this company that leads you to believe this?
- hakfoo 2y ago
  Honestly, that's one thing that makes me optimistic about the current AI omnishambles: we now have ALL THE MONEY aggressively incentivized towards weakening IP protections, because it stands to sabotage their big bubble in trained model systems. As someone who'd love to see the whole blasted IP paradigm flattened from orbit, I couldn't be happier. One of my many problems with IP as a whole was that it creates a metadata burden: you have to be very aware of what your source material is, who owns it, and under what terms they offer it, because there's always the risk you're pulling in enough material to create a risk of legal action. This was always a risk for scalability, but it was easy to pooh-pooh for human-made productions. "If you write the Great American Novel/Codebase, you can always hire a few lawyers to manage clearance or redaction as necessary." A human probably has a modest possible pool of source material to work with. The typical developer hasn't read everything on GitHub so there's little risk of incidental infringement against 99.99% of the projects. In contrast, the current nature of GenAI is explicitly a product with tens and hundreds of millions of pieces of source material, and there's no way to negotiate clearances on that scale on an individual, human-centric way. Hopefully, what we'll get out of it is the mechanism for large scale mandatory licensing. OpenAI might pay a kajillion dollars to keep their models online, but the same tools might be available for someone who just wants to create smaller scale derivative works without having to fight with some author's estate who considers it a personal affront.
fsndz 2y ago
you get an AI, you get an AI, you get an AI, but all of you won't get any AGI: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-no-agi-openai https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-no-agi-openai
- tim333 2y ago
  That article seems to say roughly we don't have AGI now, I'm not sure what it even is, therefore you will never get it. Which seems a little flawed logically.
  - fsndz 2y ago
    More like: we don't have AGI yet, and LLMs are not AGI. But what exactly is AGI? Apart from being a useful tool, after considering every possible definition of AGI, it can't be more than human. It can't be superhuman and general, though it may become superhuman at narrow tasks. What does AGI mean to you?
andrewstuart 2y ago
>> mostly those where Sam Altman and Bill Gates have a direct financial interest Does Bill Gates have a big financial interest in AI? He does own 1.3% of Microsoft which is of course alot of money but people seem to still equate Bill Gates and Microsoft - Bill has sold down most of his Microsoft ownership.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Bill Gates' financial interest would depend on what % of his assets are invested in Microsoft, not what % of Microsoft his investments represent.
ProAm 2y ago
[flagged]
photochemsyn 2y ago
There also won't be any discussion of replacing the C-suite with LLM assistants at a fraction of the cost - the compute cost must be less than all the 8-figure yearly payouts. Maybe LLM assitants would also be vastly more reliable managers of pension funds, too? I'd be surprised to hear a word mentioned about that.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > There also won't be any discussion of replacing the C-suite with LLM assistants at a fraction of the cost - the compute cost must be less than all the 8-figure yearly payouts. Well, what's her show like? Covering why popular but terrible ideas are terrible is a thing, but I have no idea if it's her sort of thing. > Maybe LLM assitants would also be vastly more reliable managers of pension funds, too? I'd be surprised to hear a word mentioned about that. Various forms of passive fund are already a thing, and AIUI do approximately as well as most actively managed funds. From what I understand, things unique to pension funds are that they tend to have too little money put into them in the first place, and that they have regulatory constraints about sticking to safe (and therefore lower-performing) investments.
yosito 2y ago
> As I write this, we’ve just heard news that Oprah is planning to do a big broadcast special about AI and society. Despite the fact that it hasn’t aired, and I haven’t seen it or talked to anyone who’s seen it Stopped reading right there.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  It's a generic complaint about how The News in general doesn't view things in the particular way that a particular subset of the tech crowd views them. Just, a complaint that's trying to name-drop for extra views.
joegibbs 2y ago
> There will be no mention of the repeated attacks on labor that have been systematically funded as “tech innovation” in recent years, including the gig economy, blockchain and crypto hype, and attempts to push the metaverse and thoughtless return to work. Blockchain and crypto an attack on labour? Pointless and wasteful I could see, but I don't think they really have much to do with any kind of job or work at all, the whole appeal is that you get rich from not doing anything, they have no relation to anything tangible, it's entirely based off hype.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  Part of the whole blockchain thing was smart contracts, which were supposed to do away with contract lawyers because "code is law". But I don't think lawyers are usually considered part of the "labor" bucket in that worldview.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    That is a single application that could be developed. What got developed was an entire lending, borrowing and decentralized exchange ecosystem. I found it pretty fascinating to learn about.
scudsworth 2y ago
no click zone
jarsin 2y ago
I wake up to Mark Cuban every morning on Bloomberg pumping Gemini AI. These AI companies are going all out. Cuban is also a big crypto pumper.
KTibow 2y ago
For context this guy is affiliated with the EFF (not that that's bad, just thought this was relevant)
- wmf 2y ago
  I think Anil and EFF are on opposite sides of this one.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    His about page says he's on the board.
- waveywaves 2y ago
  Is that Economic Freedom Fighters ?
casebash 2y ago
Will Oprah screw up the AI story? Quite possibly, but likely not as bad as this article. Complete clickbait title, assumes that the author's hobby horses are the most important thing in the world, bizarrely argues that crypto hype is an "attack on labour".
- tim333 2y ago
  I agree the article's pretty bad. There's a description of the show's content here https://deadline.com/2024/08/oprah-winfrey-host-ai-abc-special-sam-altman-bill-gates-artificial-intelligence-1236073176/ https://deadline.com/2024/08/oprah-winfrey-host-ai-abc-speci... And Oprah talking about AI a Reid Hoffman + GPT4 book here https://youtu.be/bOXRjnXp3-s https://youtu.be/bOXRjnXp3-s Quote from Oprah: >I am just in this moment where I'm fascinated by how this technology AI is going to be a resource for change and improvements and making the world better and yet the other side of it who's in control of it and what happens when the bad guys get it.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
tbrownaw 2y ago
> The only tools and technologies that will be described as “AI” will be recent, commercial, large-scale generative AI systems built around LLMs, mostly those where Sam Altman and Bill Gates have a direct financial interest. > The intentional blurring of lines around the definition of “AI” — encompassing everything from improving lighting in camera phone photos to drone targeting for missile strikes — will be ignored as if it’s an unimportant consideration. These are a bit odd to see in the same list. > no discussion of public models of ownership or control of AI technologies Is this talking about the ability to run models locally, or about government restrictions on permitted models? From his association with the EFF I'd think the former, but reading it gives more of a feeling of the latter. > repeated attacks on labor that have been systematically funded as “tech innovation” in recent years, What exactly is Total Factor Productivity, anyway, and what's the mechanism behind how technology leads to economic growth? > not one voice representing labor will be quoted Really? That's be like discussing the social impact of automated looms without mentioning Mr. Ludd. Seems quite the oversight to preemptively accused someone of without evidence. > fact that young workers are adopting labor organizing faster than they’re adopting AI. That sounds interesting enough to want a link for. > The word “consent” will never be mentioned, let alone the concept, when it comes to training data and surveillance data used to build large-scale models The justifications I've seen for demanding that model training on public data require consent seen to be less about "having 'your' data included will harm you in particular in ways that data from other people won't" and more about "these models are bad in general and here's a good way to obstruct them". > Errors, confabulations, and intentional lies and distortions produced by generative AI products will not be described as bugs or defects, but by the false marketing term of “hallucinations”, with no mention of any legal or moral obligation to make commercial software that functions in reliable ways. Calling these things "hallucinations" is (usually - there are exceptions like the early intentional nonsense from Google Gemini when it first started doing images) less inaccurate than the terms he's asking to use. Also if you're building something with accuracy requirements there are long-standing techniques for building reliable systems out of components that are unreliable in various ways. > There will be no mention of the fact that large learning models are being used as a method of determining who gets killed in military (and militarized policing) engagements today What is this referring to? > or how “the AI makes the decision” is a tool for avoiding accountability Um, "computer says no" isn't new and isn't specific to AI. > Not one person who has had a loved one targeted for sentencing, violence or death will be quoted or spoken to in any context. What is this referring to? > In short, Oprah is making a commercial for some AI vendors, without disclosing whether she has any financial interest This is quite a statement to make about a specific individual with no evidence whatsoever.
pbreit 2y ago
Dash has gone so far off the deep end. His concerns are all mostly phony.

46 points by LorenDB 2y ago

Betting against Oprah with out any information seems foolish. Bo hate from me if you delete this after you listen to her

chrisweekly 2y ago
"Bo hate" -- typo for "No hate"?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

lettergram 2y ago

I regularly attend conferences regarding AI in the legal field, particularly intellectual property. My goodness, I absolutely hate listening to these IP attorneys attempt to explain AI and it's pitfalls. 50% of the time, what they describe as AI could simply be auto correct, the other half of the time it's this fictional all knowing machine. I actually got t-shirts for an upcoming conference that just say "Ask me about AI" so I can explain to these IP attorneys what it's actually about. Luckily I've been increasing my participation(s) on these panels so hopefully we can start to dispel some classic pitfalls. For a bit of context, here's my startup https://ipcopilot.ai/ https://ipcopilot.ai/

jclulow 2y ago
Is this... a service for spamming patent applications as fast as you can without paying lawyers as much as we used to? Can't see how that could exacerbate all of the deep problems with the patent system!
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Did a quick browse of their site, just going off that, it made me wince, it sounds like you wrote quite a negative strawman. It's quite plainly research aid software for attorneys, as we can also see from their comment re: listening to lawyers talk about AI as talisman. Do you have anything to cite about this company that leads you to believe this?
hakfoo 2y ago
Honestly, that's one thing that makes me optimistic about the current AI omnishambles: we now have ALL THE MONEY aggressively incentivized towards weakening IP protections, because it stands to sabotage their big bubble in trained model systems. As someone who'd love to see the whole blasted IP paradigm flattened from orbit, I couldn't be happier. One of my many problems with IP as a whole was that it creates a metadata burden: you have to be very aware of what your source material is, who owns it, and under what terms they offer it, because there's always the risk you're pulling in enough material to create a risk of legal action. This was always a risk for scalability, but it was easy to pooh-pooh for human-made productions. "If you write the Great American Novel/Codebase, you can always hire a few lawyers to manage clearance or redaction as necessary." A human probably has a modest possible pool of source material to work with. The typical developer hasn't read everything on GitHub so there's little risk of incidental infringement against 99.99% of the projects. In contrast, the current nature of GenAI is explicitly a product with tens and hundreds of millions of pieces of source material, and there's no way to negotiate clearances on that scale on an individual, human-centric way. Hopefully, what we'll get out of it is the mechanism for large scale mandatory licensing. OpenAI might pay a kajillion dollars to keep their models online, but the same tools might be available for someone who just wants to create smaller scale derivative works without having to fight with some author's estate who considers it a personal affront.

fsndz 2y ago

you get an AI, you get an AI, you get an AI, but all of you won't get any AGI: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-no-agi-openai https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-no-agi-openai

tim333 2y ago
That article seems to say roughly we don't have AGI now, I'm not sure what it even is, therefore you will never get it. Which seems a little flawed logically.
- fsndz 2y ago
  More like: we don't have AGI yet, and LLMs are not AGI. But what exactly is AGI? Apart from being a useful tool, after considering every possible definition of AGI, it can't be more than human. It can't be superhuman and general, though it may become superhuman at narrow tasks. What does AGI mean to you?

andrewstuart 2y ago

>> mostly those where Sam Altman and Bill Gates have a direct financial interest Does Bill Gates have a big financial interest in AI? He does own 1.3% of Microsoft which is of course alot of money but people seem to still equate Bill Gates and Microsoft - Bill has sold down most of his Microsoft ownership.

zamadatix 2y ago
Bill Gates' financial interest would depend on what % of his assets are invested in Microsoft, not what % of Microsoft his investments represent.

ProAm 2y ago

[flagged]

photochemsyn 2y ago

There also won't be any discussion of replacing the C-suite with LLM assistants at a fraction of the cost - the compute cost must be less than all the 8-figure yearly payouts. Maybe LLM assitants would also be vastly more reliable managers of pension funds, too? I'd be surprised to hear a word mentioned about that.

tbrownaw 2y ago
> There also won't be any discussion of replacing the C-suite with LLM assistants at a fraction of the cost - the compute cost must be less than all the 8-figure yearly payouts. Well, what's her show like? Covering why popular but terrible ideas are terrible is a thing, but I have no idea if it's her sort of thing. > Maybe LLM assitants would also be vastly more reliable managers of pension funds, too? I'd be surprised to hear a word mentioned about that. Various forms of passive fund are already a thing, and AIUI do approximately as well as most actively managed funds. From what I understand, things unique to pension funds are that they tend to have too little money put into them in the first place, and that they have regulatory constraints about sticking to safe (and therefore lower-performing) investments.

yosito 2y ago

> As I write this, we’ve just heard news that Oprah is planning to do a big broadcast special about AI and society. Despite the fact that it hasn’t aired, and I haven’t seen it or talked to anyone who’s seen it Stopped reading right there.

tbrownaw 2y ago
It's a generic complaint about how The News in general doesn't view things in the particular way that a particular subset of the tech crowd views them. Just, a complaint that's trying to name-drop for extra views.

joegibbs 2y ago

> There will be no mention of the repeated attacks on labor that have been systematically funded as “tech innovation” in recent years, including the gig economy, blockchain and crypto hype, and attempts to push the metaverse and thoughtless return to work. Blockchain and crypto an attack on labour? Pointless and wasteful I could see, but I don't think they really have much to do with any kind of job or work at all, the whole appeal is that you get rich from not doing anything, they have no relation to anything tangible, it's entirely based off hype.

tbrownaw 2y ago
Part of the whole blockchain thing was smart contracts, which were supposed to do away with contract lawyers because "code is law". But I don't think lawyers are usually considered part of the "labor" bucket in that worldview.
- latchkey 2y ago
  That is a single application that could be developed. What got developed was an entire lending, borrowing and decentralized exchange ecosystem. I found it pretty fascinating to learn about.

scudsworth 2y ago

no click zone

jarsin 2y ago

I wake up to Mark Cuban every morning on Bloomberg pumping Gemini AI. These AI companies are going all out. Cuban is also a big crypto pumper.

KTibow 2y ago

For context this guy is affiliated with the EFF (not that that's bad, just thought this was relevant)

wmf 2y ago
I think Anil and EFF are on opposite sides of this one.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  His about page says he's on the board.
waveywaves 2y ago
Is that Economic Freedom Fighters ?

casebash 2y ago

Will Oprah screw up the AI story? Quite possibly, but likely not as bad as this article. Complete clickbait title, assumes that the author's hobby horses are the most important thing in the world, bizarrely argues that crypto hype is an "attack on labour".

tim333 2y ago
I agree the article's pretty bad. There's a description of the show's content here https://deadline.com/2024/08/oprah-winfrey-host-ai-abc-special-sam-altman-bill-gates-artificial-intelligence-1236073176/ https://deadline.com/2024/08/oprah-winfrey-host-ai-abc-speci... And Oprah talking about AI a Reid Hoffman + GPT4 book here https://youtu.be/bOXRjnXp3-s https://youtu.be/bOXRjnXp3-s Quote from Oprah: >I am just in this moment where I'm fascinated by how this technology AI is going to be a resource for change and improvements and making the world better and yet the other side of it who's in control of it and what happens when the bad guys get it.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

tbrownaw 2y ago

> The only tools and technologies that will be described as “AI” will be recent, commercial, large-scale generative AI systems built around LLMs, mostly those where Sam Altman and Bill Gates have a direct financial interest. > The intentional blurring of lines around the definition of “AI” — encompassing everything from improving lighting in camera phone photos to drone targeting for missile strikes — will be ignored as if it’s an unimportant consideration. These are a bit odd to see in the same list. > no discussion of public models of ownership or control of AI technologies Is this talking about the ability to run models locally, or about government restrictions on permitted models? From his association with the EFF I'd think the former, but reading it gives more of a feeling of the latter. > repeated attacks on labor that have been systematically funded as “tech innovation” in recent years, What exactly is Total Factor Productivity, anyway, and what's the mechanism behind how technology leads to economic growth? > not one voice representing labor will be quoted Really? That's be like discussing the social impact of automated looms without mentioning Mr. Ludd. Seems quite the oversight to preemptively accused someone of without evidence. > fact that young workers are adopting labor organizing faster than they’re adopting AI. That sounds interesting enough to want a link for. > The word “consent” will never be mentioned, let alone the concept, when it comes to training data and surveillance data used to build large-scale models The justifications I've seen for demanding that model training on public data require consent seen to be less about "having 'your' data included will harm you in particular in ways that data from other people won't" and more about "these models are bad in general and here's a good way to obstruct them". > Errors, confabulations, and intentional lies and distortions produced by generative AI products will not be described as bugs or defects, but by the false marketing term of “hallucinations”, with no mention of any legal or moral obligation to make commercial software that functions in reliable ways. Calling these things "hallucinations" is (usually - there are exceptions like the early intentional nonsense from Google Gemini when it first started doing images) less inaccurate than the terms he's asking to use. Also if you're building something with accuracy requirements there are long-standing techniques for building reliable systems out of components that are unreliable in various ways. > There will be no mention of the fact that large learning models are being used as a method of determining who gets killed in military (and militarized policing) engagements today What is this referring to? > or how “the AI makes the decision” is a tool for avoiding accountability Um, "computer says no" isn't new and isn't specific to AI. > Not one person who has had a loved one targeted for sentencing, violence or death will be quoted or spoken to in any context. What is this referring to? > In short, Oprah is making a commercial for some AI vendors, without disclosing whether she has any financial interest This is quite a statement to make about a specific individual with no evidence whatsoever.

pbreit 2y ago

Dash has gone so far off the deep end. His concerns are all mostly phony.