This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Thank fucking god.
I got sick of the overhyped tech bros pumping AI into everything with no understanding of it....
But then I got way more sick of everyone else thinking they're clowning on AI when in reality they're just demonstrating an equal sized misunderstanding of the technology in a snarky pessimistic format.
I’m more annoyed that Nvidia is looked at like some sort of brilliant strategist. It’s a GPU company that was lucky enough to be around when two new massive industries found an alternative use for graphics hardware.
They happened to be making pick axes in California right before some prospectors found gold.
And they don’t even really make pick axes, TSMC does. They just design them.
They just design them.
It's not trivial though. They also managed to lock dev with CUDA.
That being said I don't think they were "just" lucky, I think they built their luck through practices the DoJ is currently investigating for potential abuse of monopoly.
They didn't just "happen to be around". They created the entire ecosystem around machine learning while AMD just twiddled their thumbs. There is a reason why no one is buying AMD cards to run AI workloads.
As I job-hunt, every job listed over the past year has been "AI-drive [something]" and I'm really hoping that trend subsides.
"This is an mid level position requiring at least 7 years experience developing LLMs." -Every software engineer job out there.
That was cloud 7 years ago and blockchain 4
Reminds me of when I read about a programmer getting turned down for a job because they didn't have 5 years of experience with a language that they themselves had created 1 to 2 years prior.
Shed a tear, if you wish, for Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jenson Huang, whose fortune (on paper) fell by almost $10 billion that day.
Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
I’m sure he won’t mind. Worrying about that doesn’t sound like working.
I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I work seven days a week. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about working, and when I'm working, I'm working. I sit through movies, but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about work.
- Huang on his 14 hour workdays
It is one way to live.
That sounds like mental illness.
ETA: Replace "work" in that quote with practically any other activity/subject, whether outlandish or banal.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about baking cakes.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about traffic patterns.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about cannibalism.
I sit through movies but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about shitposting.
Obsessed with something? At best, you're "quirky" (depending on what you're obsessed with). Unless it's money. Being obsessed with that is somehow virtuous.
Valid argument for sure
It would be sad if therapists kept telling him that but he could never remember
Some would not call that living
My only real hope out of this is that that copilot button on keyboards becomes the 486 turbo button of our time.
Meaning you unpress it, and computer gets 2x faster?
Actually you pressed it and everything got 2x slower. Turbo was a stupid label for it.
I've noticed people have been talking less and less about AI lately, particularly online and in the media, and absolutely nobody has been talking about it in real life.
The novelty has well and truly worn off, and most people are sick of hearing about it.
The hype is still percolating, at least among the people I work with and at the companies of people I know. Microsoft pushing Copilot everywhere makes it inescapable to some extent in many environments, there's people out there who have somehow only vaguely heard of ChatGPT and are now encountering LLMs for the first time at work and starting the hype cycle fresh.
Welp, it was 'fun' while it lasted. Time for everyone to adjust their expectations to much more humble levels than what was promised and move on to the next sceme. After Metaverse, NFTs and 'Don't become a programmer, AI will steal your job literally next week!11', I'm eager to see what they come up with next. And with eager I mean I'm tired. I'm really tired and hope the economy just takes a damn break from breaking things.
I just hope I can buy a graphics card without having to sell organs some time in the next two years.
Don't count on it. It turns out that the sort of stuff that graphics cards do is good for lots of things, it was crypto, then AI and I'm sure whatever the next fad is will require a GPU to run huge calculations.
I find it insane when "tech bros" and AI researchers at major tech companies try to justify the wasting of resources (like water and electricity) in order to achieve "AGI" or whatever the fuck that means in their wildest fantasies.
These companies have no accountability for the shit that they do and consistently ignore all the consequences their actions will cause for years down the road.
It's research. Most of it never pans out, so a lot of it is "wasteful". But if we didn't experiment, we wouldn't find the things that do work.
Most of the entire AI economy isn't even research. It's just grift. Slapping a label on ChatGPT and saying you're an AI company. It's hustlers trying to make a quick buck from easy venture capital money.
Too much optimism and hype may lead to the premature use of technologies that are not ready for prime time.
— Daron Acemoglu, MIT
Preach!
Personally I can't wait for a few good bankruptcies so I can pick up a couple of high end data centre GPUs for cents on the dollar
Search Nvidia p40 24gb on eBay, 200$ each and surprisingly good for selfhosted llm, if you plan to build array of gpus then search for p100 16gb, same price but unlike p40, p100 supports nvlink, and these 16gb is hbm2 memory with 4096bit bandwidth so it's still competitive in llm field while p40 24gb is gddr5 so it's good point is amount of memory for money it cost but it's rather slow compared to p100 and compared to p100 it doesn't support nvlink
A lot of the AI boom is like the DotCom boom of the Web era. The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.
AI feels a lot like that, it's here to stay, maybe not in th ways investors are touting, but for voice, image, video synthesis/processing it's an amazing tool. It also has lots of applications in biotech, targetting systems, logistics etc.
So I can see the bubble bursting and a lot of money being lost, but that is the point when actually useful applications of the technology will start becoming mainstream.
FMO is the best explanation of this psychosis and then of course denial by people who became heavily invested in it. 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 am also not against exploring and pushing the boundaries, but when you explore a boundary while pretending like you have already crossed it, that is how you get bubbles. And this again all boils down to appeasing some cancerous billionaire shareholders so they funnel down some money to your pockets.
Argh, after 25 years in tech I am surprised this keeps surprising you.
We’ve crested for sure. AI isn’t going to solve everything. AI stock will fall. Investor pressure to put AI into everything will subside.
The we will start looking at AI as a cost benefit analysis. We will start applying it where it makes sense. Things will get optimised. Real profit and long term change will happen over 5-10 years. And afterwards, the utter magical will seem mundane while everyone is chasing the next hype cycle.
A.I., Assumed Intelligence
More like PISS, a Plagiarized Information Synthesis System
Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the "AI services" and what they actually cost?
I'm a writer. I've looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with "Just Another Streaming Service" pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don't care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.
Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don't want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.
Wall Street has already milked “the pump” now they short it and put out articles like this
Well, they also kept telling investors all they need to simulate a human brain was to simulate the amount of neurons in a human brain...
The stupidly rich loved that, because they want computer backups for "immortality". And they'd dump billions of dollars into making that happen
About two months ago tho, we found out that the brain uses microtubules in the brain to put tryptophan into super position, and it can maintain that for like a crazy amount of time, like longer than we can do in a lab.
The only argument against a quantum component for human consciousness, was people thought there was no way to have even just get regular quantum entanglement in a human brain.
We'll be lucky to be able to simulate that stuff in 50 years, but it's probably going to be even longer.
Every billionaire who wanted to "live forever" this way, just got aged out. So they'll throw their money somewhere else now.
