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Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futi

• sesm 5mo ago
  "AI" is a marketing term, LLMs and Difusion Models are math.
• egui 5mo ago
  The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
  • velcrovan 5mo ago
    To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project? I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.
    • tavavex 5mo ago
      > If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project? No. Obviously, what you do on your PC is inconsequential to the rest of society. But despite this, AI and its consequences in big tech have become so thoroughly linked because the entities that develop and profit off of AI use are so big and influential over the rest of us. The hobbyist space isn't what people even think about.
      • velcrovan 5mo ago
        There are business uses of on-prem agentic AI happening right now all over the place, it's not just a hobbyist space.
        • tavavex 5mo ago
          Is it really that common? I know it exists, but everywhere I go I hear of everyone paying for enterprise subscriptions, the implications that LLM usage rates have for businesses, companies burning through allotted tokens, the use of cutting-edge models. From my impression, local models (especially so for image generators) were the domain of the hobbyists and only a small slice of corporate use.
          • velcrovan 5mo ago
            It is definitely a thing in regulated industries like healthcare and finance.
  • pear01 5mo ago
    This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard. This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal. I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?
  • davebren 5mo ago
    Seems more like a materialist religious project to me.
  • smegger001 5mo ago
    Exactly no one hates the ai algorithm finding cancer, or predicting protein folding or finding novel compounds for pharmaceuticals what they hate is the "we will slurp up all human knowledge violate everyone copyrights and give nothing back in return and get you fired and replaced by a shitty ai chatbot"
• bsza 5mo ago
  It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.
  • velcrovan 5mo ago
    It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models. I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)
  • jayGlow 5mo ago
    chips limiting what kind of software can be run sounds absolutely awful and would be a huge overstep in government power. once I buy a piece of hardware I should be able to run whatever I want on it.
    • bsza 5mo ago
      Sure, until it gets to the point where you're no longer able to just "buy a piece of hardware". Then it'll suddenly sound like a pretty sweet deal. Like when Nvidia nerfed ETH mining back when that was still a thing. That too was done to give more people access to hardware, not to take away their freedom.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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• Tubelord 5mo ago
  Everything is fundamentally energy. If you hate something you're just hating energy.
  • velcrovan 5mo ago
    This is funny and a pretty clever move, but not actually the argument I'm making. I'm specifically saying you can't make people un-learn math once it turns out to have interesting uses.
    • card_zero 5mo ago
      That invokes both learning and interest, and the latter can be rolled back. You can't (usually) remove some item from the store of human knowledge, but the humans can lose interest in the item. Interesting uses can cease to be interesting. Fads can pass, you don't know. Don't see the Mandelbrot set around much these days.
      • velcrovan 5mo ago
        OK, but we're talking about people who are "against AI". Are you saying that opposition to AI might help people lose interest in it? I'm not aware of an example of opposition to a useful application of math that caused people to lose interest. It didn't happen with public key encryption, for example. Can you explain further how you see "hating AI" (in the sense of TFA) will cause a loss of interest? > Don't see the Mandelbrot set around much these days. Was computing the mandlebrot set ever shown to be broadly and commercially useful in some way?
• ThinkingGuy 5mo ago
  The difference between generative AI and math is that math gives everybody the same answer every time.
• WorldMaker 5mo ago
  The problem is that isn't just math, the problem is more specifically one of the weakest maths for our entire species: Probability and Statistics. Humans as a general rule are terrible at Probability and Statistics. Being angry at LLMs isn't hating math, it is hating slot machines and the human inclination to lose everything to them because the Gambler's Fallacy affects us all, unfortunately deeply.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
  "Hating "AI" ins the abstract is like hating public-key encryption." It's more like hating the Almquist shell, or UNIX utilities in general In practice, for most of the population, "AI" is someone else's software. Maybe some dislike using it But as the commencement speaker at Middle Tennessee State said, "Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool." The UNIX shell and utilities are out there, running on billions of computers. There's no going back I chose to adapt. But many "software developers" will futilely keep demanding that the UNIX shell go away and be replaced by something else
• ofrzeta 5mo ago
  It's not "just math". It's also operating huge datacenters. You can do this or not.
• sanjananb 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• satisfice 5mo ago
  She wasn’t hating it in the abstract. Read the article. She’s not upset with mathematics.