4 ms·

This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them

by pj_mukh 5mo ago

This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them. Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.

metalliqaz 5mo ago
Rude how? The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.
- pj_mukh 5mo ago
  "AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs." This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away. My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.
jgalt212 5mo ago
On a certain level it is a scam. AI slop, vibe coding, tokenmaxxing, blaming employee layoffs on AI, pretty much any comment CEOs make about AI, etc.
- standardUser 5mo ago
  Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
  - koutakun 5mo ago
    > I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
    - anuramat 5mo ago
      why would anthropic do that?
      - ryantgtg 5mo ago
        The argument is that the sweet deal we're getting now, which involves Anthropic practically giving away a product while they lose lots of money, might not be sustainable for them.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    But none of what OP said was jargon. All except one of those terms are things that are either harmful to employer or kind of fraud.
  - jmull 5mo ago
    We're in a "both are true" situation here. AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities. People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have. There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.
- libraryofbabel 5mo ago
  Well yes, there is tons of AI bullshit about and all sorts of scammy behavior, but I don’t think that says anything at all either way about whether the core technology is a “scam”, theranos-style. In fact I’m not sure how it could be otherwise: of course there’s going to be all sorts of hype and scamming around a novel, rapidly-progressing and potentially transformative tech like this, even if it works. If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.
dude250711 5mo ago
Trying to justify current valuations by misrepresenting current model capabilities is a scam. A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.
- avarun 5mo ago
  Lol. What exactly have you based this "fair valuation" off of? Vibes?
- trotro 5mo ago
  These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
  - ru552 5mo ago
    Regardless of the marketing material, LLMs are still just using probabilities to guess what the next token is.
    - anuramat 5mo ago
      you think it should be deterministic?
      - bigfishrunning 5mo ago
        If LLMs were configured to be deterministic, instead of the current "small amount of randomness to provide the illusion of a thinking machine", they would be much more useful in exchange for being less exciting to laypeople. In other words, scam.
        anuramat 5mo ago
        you know you can set the temperature to zero and get exactly that, right?
goldenarm 5mo ago
Using unlicensed intellectual property to build a plagiarism machine that is wrong 10% of the time, could be interpreted as a scam by many folks.
- stalfie 5mo ago
  That sentence could easily be applied to the human baseline.
  - Keyframe 5mo ago
    Yes, if you're equating same rights to soulless corporations and humans as well as their motives.
    - stalfie 5mo ago
      I'd say both are equally soulless, dualism is a little bit of a philosophical dead end. Frankly, I don't particularly care much for the moral panic around capitalism. Capitalism has it's downsides for sure, but it's the system our society has chosen to motivate people, and it seems to work okay for many things. Does it matter if the AI model that solves your diagnosis, creates a life saving drug or solves an Erdös problem is made by a corporation or not? It bothers me none, progress is progress. As long as the authors of Textbooks everywhere wouldn't have otherwise invented LLMs a decade ago if they only had been given a little bit more money, then I'd say the money is going to the right place.
      - Keyframe 5mo ago
        I don't think anyone's disputing advantage and progress AI brings. What's at odds are corporate leeches bringing it on by leeching of everyone's work and giving back nothing for it except for a subscription service. That's where the soulless comes from, not teligious context. China and EU are somewhat doing the right thing though. Not at the scope yet.
        5mo ago
tjsquared 5mo ago
I've noticed the disconnect between tech moguls and enthusiasts and the rest of the media in AI coverage. AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule. I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to appreciate how impactful it already is if you're not using it to write software every day. This is a point made by Andrej Karpathy.
- pj_mukh 5mo ago
  The value in building creative tools (esp writing) for writers and educators will be a rounding error compared to all the back office automation that is eating the lion shares of tokens. I just don’t think the media or mainstream thought is even aware of this because you don’t “see” it like that AI slop advertisement.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
"This is a fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them..." Who is "them" Is it "AI" that the literati are trying to "expose" or is it certain individuals "Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant ot them." Made with a small fraction of the budget available to Altman But is this article about "AI" models. Or is it about Altman "Some folks are in for a very rude awakening." Who are the folks and what is the awakening Is it "AI" investors Once Altman starts taking the public's money, then it is possible he could end up like Holmes or SBF If that happens, journalists ("literati") will publish stories about it, these stories will be submitted to HN and HN commenters ("??????") will complain
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
  Was 2
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
> AI is a "scam" AI itself, the technology, isn't a scam but the promotion of it certainly reeks of a pyramid scheme / scam and the promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time, but not today (one could say Tesla's FSD which some users paid for years ago, was/is a scam) and there is one thing that is incontestable: AI, as wielded by large companies today, is a highly destructive force. you might be fine with that (one must tear down to rebuild approach), but many many other people are not.
- phoobahr 5mo ago
  LLMs as “AI” is a scam, and a dead end. They might be useful for some things in some situations and they are here to stay… for now. They won’t be the future though.
- pj_mukh 5mo ago
  "promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time" You think the Frontier lab revenue reports are faked? [1] [1]: https://cryptobriefing.com/anthropic-revenue-surge-10-billion/ https://cryptobriefing.com/anthropic-revenue-surge-10-billio...
m463 5mo ago
I remember the dot com boom. One of my friends somehow convinced me to visit his friend who had a small startup that needed people. ...and it was in the extra bedroom of someone's dingy apartment. A bunch of folks were working on not-very-remarkable nonsense. and the guy running the apartmen^h^h^h^h show said something to the effect of there's so much nonsense getting funded, why shouldn't I get in on it. It was kind of depressing, I didn't get involved, got out quickly. It's not that the dot com thing was a scam, it was that hype got money flooding into the market. For every amazon or google or yahoo there were 1000 dumpster fires burning piles of cash.
IAmGraydon 5mo ago
A “weird fantasy”, huh? I’m pretty sure back here in reality, the majority of companies who are trying to integrate AI have very little to show for it in increased productivity or reduced real costs. Meanwhile, you claim we’re all in for a rude awakening. Who is living the weird fantasy? If you have evidence otherwise, post it. Oh…you’re another “founder” at an “AI company”. One with a dead website on a Somalian TLD. Got it.
mik09 5mo ago
[dead]

by pj_mukh 5mo ago

metalliqaz 5mo ago

Rude how? The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.

pj_mukh 5mo ago
"AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs." This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away. My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.

jgalt212 5mo ago

On a certain level it is a scam. AI slop, vibe coding, tokenmaxxing, blaming employee layoffs on AI, pretty much any comment CEOs make about AI, etc.

standardUser 5mo ago
Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
- koutakun 5mo ago
  > I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
  - anuramat 5mo ago
    why would anthropic do that?
    - ryantgtg 5mo ago
      The argument is that the sweet deal we're getting now, which involves Anthropic practically giving away a product while they lose lots of money, might not be sustainable for them.
- watwut 5mo ago
  But none of what OP said was jargon. All except one of those terms are things that are either harmful to employer or kind of fraud.
- jmull 5mo ago
  We're in a "both are true" situation here. AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities. People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have. There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.
libraryofbabel 5mo ago
Well yes, there is tons of AI bullshit about and all sorts of scammy behavior, but I don’t think that says anything at all either way about whether the core technology is a “scam”, theranos-style. In fact I’m not sure how it could be otherwise: of course there’s going to be all sorts of hype and scamming around a novel, rapidly-progressing and potentially transformative tech like this, even if it works. If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.

dude250711 5mo ago

Trying to justify current valuations by misrepresenting current model capabilities is a scam. A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.

avarun 5mo ago
Lol. What exactly have you based this "fair valuation" off of? Vibes?
trotro 5mo ago
These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
- ru552 5mo ago
  Regardless of the marketing material, LLMs are still just using probabilities to guess what the next token is.
  - anuramat 5mo ago
    you think it should be deterministic?
    - bigfishrunning 5mo ago
      If LLMs were configured to be deterministic, instead of the current "small amount of randomness to provide the illusion of a thinking machine", they would be much more useful in exchange for being less exciting to laypeople. In other words, scam.
      - anuramat 5mo ago
        you know you can set the temperature to zero and get exactly that, right?

goldenarm 5mo ago

Using unlicensed intellectual property to build a plagiarism machine that is wrong 10% of the time, could be interpreted as a scam by many folks.

stalfie 5mo ago
That sentence could easily be applied to the human baseline.
- Keyframe 5mo ago
  Yes, if you're equating same rights to soulless corporations and humans as well as their motives.
  - stalfie 5mo ago
    I'd say both are equally soulless, dualism is a little bit of a philosophical dead end. Frankly, I don't particularly care much for the moral panic around capitalism. Capitalism has it's downsides for sure, but it's the system our society has chosen to motivate people, and it seems to work okay for many things. Does it matter if the AI model that solves your diagnosis, creates a life saving drug or solves an Erdös problem is made by a corporation or not? It bothers me none, progress is progress. As long as the authors of Textbooks everywhere wouldn't have otherwise invented LLMs a decade ago if they only had been given a little bit more money, then I'd say the money is going to the right place.
    - Keyframe 5mo ago
      I don't think anyone's disputing advantage and progress AI brings. What's at odds are corporate leeches bringing it on by leeching of everyone's work and giving back nothing for it except for a subscription service. That's where the soulless comes from, not teligious context. China and EU are somewhat doing the right thing though. Not at the scope yet.
      - 5mo ago

tjsquared 5mo ago

I've noticed the disconnect between tech moguls and enthusiasts and the rest of the media in AI coverage. AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule. I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to appreciate how impactful it already is if you're not using it to write software every day. This is a point made by Andrej Karpathy.

pj_mukh 5mo ago
The value in building creative tools (esp writing) for writers and educators will be a rounding error compared to all the back office automation that is eating the lion shares of tokens. I just don’t think the media or mainstream thought is even aware of this because you don’t “see” it like that AI slop advertisement.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago

"This is a fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them..." Who is "them" Is it "AI" that the literati are trying to "expose" or is it certain individuals "Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant ot them." Made with a small fraction of the budget available to Altman But is this article about "AI" models. Or is it about Altman "Some folks are in for a very rude awakening." Who are the folks and what is the awakening Is it "AI" investors Once Altman starts taking the public's money, then it is possible he could end up like Holmes or SBF If that happens, journalists ("literati") will publish stories about it, these stories will be submitted to HN and HN commenters ("??????") will complain

1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
Was 2

insane_dreamer 5mo ago

> AI is a "scam" AI itself, the technology, isn't a scam but the promotion of it certainly reeks of a pyramid scheme / scam and the promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time, but not today (one could say Tesla's FSD which some users paid for years ago, was/is a scam) and there is one thing that is incontestable: AI, as wielded by large companies today, is a highly destructive force. you might be fine with that (one must tear down to rebuild approach), but many many other people are not.

phoobahr 5mo ago
LLMs as “AI” is a scam, and a dead end. They might be useful for some things in some situations and they are here to stay… for now. They won’t be the future though.
pj_mukh 5mo ago
"promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time" You think the Frontier lab revenue reports are faked? [1] [1]: https://cryptobriefing.com/anthropic-revenue-surge-10-billion/ https://cryptobriefing.com/anthropic-revenue-surge-10-billio...

m463 5mo ago

I remember the dot com boom. One of my friends somehow convinced me to visit his friend who had a small startup that needed people. ...and it was in the extra bedroom of someone's dingy apartment. A bunch of folks were working on not-very-remarkable nonsense. and the guy running the apartmen^h^h^h^h show said something to the effect of there's so much nonsense getting funded, why shouldn't I get in on it. It was kind of depressing, I didn't get involved, got out quickly. It's not that the dot com thing was a scam, it was that hype got money flooding into the market. For every amazon or google or yahoo there were 1000 dumpster fires burning piles of cash.

IAmGraydon 5mo ago

A “weird fantasy”, huh? I’m pretty sure back here in reality, the majority of companies who are trying to integrate AI have very little to show for it in increased productivity or reduced real costs. Meanwhile, you claim we’re all in for a rude awakening. Who is living the weird fantasy? If you have evidence otherwise, post it. Oh…you’re another “founder” at an “AI company”. One with a dead website on a Somalian TLD. Got it.

mik09 5mo ago

[dead]