this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Stuff like LLMs or ConvNets (and the likes) can already be used to do some pretty amazing stuff that we could not do a decade ago, there is really no need to shit rainbows and puke glitter all over it.

I'm shitting rainbows and puking glitter on a daily basis BUT it's not against AI as a field, it's not against AI research, rather it's against :

  • catastrophism and fear, even eschatology, used as a marketing tactic
  • open systems and research that become close
  • trying to lock a market with legislation
  • people who use a model, especially a model they don't even have e.g using a proprietary API, and claim they are an AI startup
  • C-levels decision that anything now must include AI
  • claims that this or that skill is soon to be replaced by AI with actually no proof of it
  • meaningless test results with grand claim like "passing the bar exam" used as marketing tactics
  • claims that it scales, it "just needs more data", not for .1% improvement but for radical change, e.g emergent learning
  • for-profit (different from public research) scrapping datasets without paying back anything to actual creators
  • ignoring or lying about non renewable resource consumption for both training and inference
  • relying on "free" or loss leader strategies to dominate a market
  • promoting to be doing the work for the good of humanity then signing exclusive partnership with a corporation already fined for monopoly practices

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few but basically none of those criticism are technical. None of those criticism is about the current progress made. Rather, they are about business practices.