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Nobody says LLMs aren't impressive. But there is a subtle difference an impressive trick and being something worth throwing 1% of GDP at. Proponents say that if
by tliltocatl 1y ago
Nobody says LLMs aren't impressive. But there is a subtle difference an impressive trick and being something worth throwing 1% of GDP at. Proponents say that if we keep throwing more money at it, it will improve, but this is far from certain.
- glimshe 1y agoWe've thrown fantastical amounts on some very uncertain things, like the moon landing. I think that the willingness of betting big at a potentially transformative technology such as AI is a good thing and a bit of a return to the old days when humanity still engaged in big infrastructure bets. Yes, it may fail, but that's intrinsic of any ambitious project.
- Mountain_Skies 1y agoDoubt many would have supported the Apollo program if it meant Sam Altman got to be King of the Moon.
- mhh__ 1y agoSome people definitely think they aren't impressive. > 1 % of GDP LLMs are basically the only thing genuinely new in decades , that have someone excited in basically every dept in the entirely world, why is it so bad that we spend money on them? The alternative is going back to shovelling web3 crap. There's definitely a new generation of bullshit merchants to go with LLMs but I think they (the models) target a very different part of the brain to normal tech so in some ways they're much more resilient to usual fad archetypes (this is also why some people who are a bit jittery socially hate them)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nextaccountic 1y ago> why is it so bad that we spend money on them? This money (and more importantly, this electricity and this amount of silicon) is diverted from other stuff.
- mhh__ 1y agoSuch as? Dumping money into private equity?
- overgard 1y agoWe could be spending that money on real problems instead of trying to automate away half the population
- SR2Z 1y agoName one "real problem" that isn't easier to solve if humans are spending less time on bullshit (read: easily automated) jobs.
- immibis 1y agoThis is an underrated fact. We spend so much money on stupid hype because our system is built to keep giving more and more money to promising technologies, but we're running out of actually promising technologies, so the system is (a) focusing the exponentially growing money into just a few techs, and (b) falling for snake oil.
- mrits 1y agoThe alternative is to not throw money at AI. The amount that we spend could be justified just under a national security budget and not even increased GDP
- smohare 1y ago[dead]
- b33j0r 1y agoI get the sense that people might mean that the transformer paradigm might not scale. But I do not understand the argument that AI in general is hype, and that investing in it is cult-like. It’s just a technology; one that will improve, sometimes stagnate, sometimes accelerate. Like anything else, right? I don’t see a time when we’ll just stop using AI because it “feels so trite.”
- nominallyfree 1y agoWhen software mangles data this badly, it is considered garbage and scrapped. But if it is a half decent chatbot and has the label "AI", it gets another iteration with 10x the resources. This has happened a few times already. It is a neat tool. It is very unreliable. Teams saying "just give us 10x as much resources so we can insist on this approach" is the hateful thing here.