Ed Zitron's writing is inflamatory, but his points are extremely easy to grasp. I always find those reads very therapeutic, as looking at too much genAI discuss

Ed Zitron's writing is inflamatory, but his points are extremely easy to grasp. I always find those reads very therapeutic, as looking at too much genAI discussion can make it seem like I'm the crazy one. GenAI has all of the media attention in the world, all the capital in the world, and a huge amount of human resources put into it. I think (or at least hope) that this fact isn't controversial to anyone, be they for or against it. We can then ask ourselves if having models that can write an e-shop API really is an acceptable result, when looking at the near-incomprehensible amounts spent into it. One could say "It has also led to advances in [other field of expertise]", but couldn't a fraction of that money have achieved greater results if invested directly in that field? To build actual specialized tools and structures? That's an unfalsifiable hypothetical, but reading Sam Altman's "Gentle Singularity[1]" blogpost, it seems like wild guesses are a perfectly fair arguing ground. On a small tangent about "Gentle Singularity", I think it's not fair to scoff at Ed's delivery when Sam Altman also pulls a lot of sneaky tricks when addressing the public: > being amazed that it can make live-saving medical diagnoses The classification model that spots tumor has nothing to do with his product category, I find it very dishonest to sandwich this one example between to examples of generative AI. > A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. "the world wants a lot more of both" doesn't quite justify the flood of slop on every single art-sharing platform. That's like saying the world wants a lot more of communication to hand wave the 10s of spam calls you get each day. "As long as they embrace the new tools" is just parroting the "adapt or die Luddite!" argument. As the CEO of the world's foremost AI company I expect more than the average rage bait comment you'd see on a forum, the fact that it's somehow an "improvement" is taken for granted, even though Sam is talking about fields he's never even dabbled in. The statement probably doesn't weigh much since my biases are transparent, but I believe there's just so much more intellectual honesty in Ed's arguments than in much of what Sam Altman says. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity