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by pwillia7 8mo ago
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- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dcre 8mo agoIt's a response to this: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening The post is silly, but I do not expect Zitron's commentary to be particularly illuminating as he is a charlatan himself. I could point to many examples, but here is a blog post I wrote about one case of him trying very hard to not understand a simple and familiar situation: https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/ https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/.
- gjsman-1000 8mo agoEveryone's a charlatan until their claims come true. For that matter, your rebuttal comes with its own statements of faith, "I just don’t buy it."
- dcre 8mo agoEveryone is free to make their own judgment about who is offering a genuine analysis that clarifies reality rather than obscuring it.
- meowface 8mo agoSomeone who predicts 15 of the last 2 recessions is a charlatan even when their claims come true.
- gjsman-1000 8mo agoBut who was the charlatan? The person predicting the recession, or the government who stopped the predicted recession by adding another $5T to the debt pile, to almost inevitably cause a recession later, at a more politically convenient time for those in power today? The recession happened, as predicted, the government absorbed it for another day.
- meowface 8mo agoThe person predicting the recession. Even if the government were preventing each new recession through historically unrivalled foresight, the predictor should eventually start incorporating that into the prediction. If the prediction is "there will be a recession within the next 20 years", then, okay. If it's https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-a-i-bubble-is-bursting-with-ed-zitron/id1463460577?i=1000661003189 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-a-i-bubble-is-burs... every single month...
- dcre 8mo agoI'm going with the pathologically incurious guy who is wrong in essentially every detail.
- paulryanrogers 8mo ago> ...as he is a charlatan himself. What's the evidence for that?
- dcre 8mo agoSee edit. Tens of thousands of lines of borderline gibberish for the gullible.
- paulryanrogers 8mo agoThanks for the link. You make some good points. I still fear for what AI training will cost (financially and ecologically). The outputs also seem like a force multiplier that's more likely to be used for bad than good, at least without better guardrails. And it doesn't seem to make people any better, aside from a narrow view of productivity. Hopefully Ed is wrong. Or at least there are more articulate and methodical skeptics who can keep us grounded.
- meowface 8mo ago>And it doesn't seem to make people any better, aside from a narrow view of productivity. This could be said about almost any new technology. Spreadsheets, word processors, nearly any tech startup. People who use LLMs daily generally feel their lives are better because of them. Yes, including the non-"4o cultist psychosis" types. As for harms: thoughtful AI worriers and doomers have been trying to sound those alarms for decades, but AI skeptics generally shoot it all down because it would require accepting what "hype" and "boosters" say about likely future capabilities, or something like that.
- dcre 8mo agoI think those are all reasonable worries, and many critics do a better job than Zitron of articulating them.
- meowface 8mo agoOne of the most widely ridiculed and discredited AI skeptics, outmatched only by Gary Marcus. Note the date, then imagine this take repeated every single month up to now: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-a-i-bubble-is-bursting-with-ed-zitron/id1463460577?i=1000661003189 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-a-i-bubble-is-burs... Not to say all AI skepticism (especially concerning very short timelines) is necessarily unwarranted, but Zitron and Marcus are just professional contrarians selling a message to people who want their biases and priors affirmed.