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China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen
(www.thebeaverton.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Technology
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Hey! Are you up to talking about your opinions on the value of current AI technology? I'm personally opposed due to how our society has chosen to organize itself, but I think the basic concept is interesting.
Agreed. I've been following the technology of neural networks and generative AI since before LLMs were the new hotness and it's fascinating and powerful stuff.
My qualms with what's happening now are more about how we organize our economy and society. Rushing them to market, aggressively trying to cull workers, etc. are critiques of capitalism not AI. In a different world we would all be excited about the prospect of having to work less and reap the benefits of AI, but we wouldn't be reopening coal plants and leaving people to starve on the street.
No opinions whatsoever. I believe I made that clear in my list of things to disregard when considering the objective reality of current AI tech.
Your estimation of what constitutes "objective reality" is in fact the opinion that you're being asked about.
Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don't like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn't make it less real.
Twitter wasn't profitable for its entire existence, it's often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.
Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.
Same for doordash and uber eats.
Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they're not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.
None of that is because they're "magic beans" from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn't, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.
And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).
Hey, I wanted to say I'm sorry for using ambiguous language there. My time studying history has profoundly affected me, so I tend to use "Opinion" to mean "What's your understanding and reasoned analysis of X thing?"
The alternate implications slipped my mind when I posted. My bad!
I wanted to say thanks for sharing your thoughts and I think we're actually on the same page with regards to current AI technology. I do recognize that a lot of people are interested in using it, and that they will continue to highly value the functionality it has. My objections to it are, of course, related to secondary concerns and problematic social issues- which I think you understand based on your post.
You saying your opinion is objective reality does not make it so. I agree that LLMs have their (few, niche) uses, but you're just being arrogant here.
few niche uses? it has heaps of uses that aren’t niche at all
https://aussie.zone/post/16417192/14017352
perplexity.ai is a better search engine than any current ones and that’s about as mainstream a use as you can get
I have made only factual statements. You can believe I'm arrogant for doing so, you can believe the preference of hundreds of millions of people is "niche" or "few" in number. Those are called opinions.
Which statements have I made that you believe to be my opinion?