This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I think the first llm that introduces a good personality will be the winner. I don't care if the AI seems deranged and seems to hate all humans to me that's more approachable than a boring AI that constantly insists it's right and ends the conversation.
I want an AI that argues with me and calls me a useless bag of meat when I disagree with it. Basically I want a personality.
I'm not AI but I'd like to say thay thing to you at no cost at all you useless bag of meat.
To be hkoId welcome that response in an AI I have chat gpt set to be as deranged as possible giving it examples if the Dungeon Crawler AI among others like the novels of expeditionary force like skippy.
I want an AI with attitude honestly.
LLMs are fundamentally limited, the only interesting application with them is research more or less. There are some practical applications, but those are already being used in industry today, so meh.
Whether or not it's a dead end, is questionable, because scientific research is often met with many a dead end, that's just how it is.
This is slightly misleading. Even if you can't achieve "agi" (a barely defined term anyways) it doesn't mean AI is a dead end.
I like my project manager, they find me work, ask how I'm doing and talk straight.
It's when the CEO/CTO/CFO speaks where my eyes glaze over, my mouth sags, and I bounce my neck at prompted intervals as my brain retreats into itself as it frantically tosses words and phrases into the meaning grinder and cranks the wheel, only for nothing to come out of it time and time again.
COs are corporate politicians, media trained to only say things which are completely unrevealing and lacking of any substance.
This is by design so that sensitive information is centrally controlled, leaks are difficult, and sudden changes in direction cause the minimum amount of whiplash to ICs as possible.
I have the same reaction as you, but the system is working as intended. Better to just shut it out as you described and use the time to think about that issue you're having on a personal project or what toy to buy for your cat's birthday.
Better to just shut it out as you described and use the time to think about that issue you’re having on a personal project or what toy to buy for your cat’s birthday.
Exactly. Do the daily corpo dance and cheer if they babbling about innovation, progress, growth and new products. Do not fight against it. Just take your money and put your valuable time and energy elsewhere.
I think my CEO is doing something wrong then because he seems to be trying to maximize IC whiplash sometimes.
Right, that sweet spot between too less stimuli so your brain just wants to sleep or run away and enough stimuli so you can't just zone out (or sleep).
The problem is that those companies are monopolies and can raise prices indefinitely to pursue this shitty dream because they got governments in their pockets. Because gov are cloud / microsoft software dependent - literally every country is on this planet - maybe except China / North Korea and Russia. They can like raise prices 10 times in next 10 years and don't give a fuck. Spend 1 trillion on AI and say we're near over and over again and literally nobody can stop them right now.
IBM used to controll the hardware as well, what's the moat?
How many governments were using computers back then when IBM was controlling hardware and how many relied on paper and calculators ? The problem is that gov are dependend on companies right now, not companies dependent on governments.
Imagine Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft decides to leave EU on Monday. They say we ban all European citizens from all of our services on Monday and we close all of our offices and delete data from all of our datacenters. Good Fucking Luck !
What will happen in Europe on Monday ? Compare it with what would happen if IBM said 50 years ago they are leaving Europe.
It's ironic how conservative the spending actually is.
Awesome ML papers and ideas come out every week. Low power training/inference optimizations, fundamental changes in the math like bitnet, new attention mechanisms, cool tools to make models more controllable and steerable and grounded. This is all getting funded, right?
No.
Universities and such are seeding and putting out all this research, but the big model trainers holding the purse strings/GPU clusters are not using them. They just keep releasing very similar, mostly bog standard transformers models over and over again, bar a tiny expense for a little experiment here and there. In other words, it’s full corporate: tiny, guaranteed incremental improvements without changing much, and no sharing with each other. It’s hilariously inefficient. And it relies on lies and jawboning from people like Sam Altman.
Deepseek is what happens when a company is smart but resource constrained. An order of magnitude more efficient, and even their architecture was very conservative.
wait so the people doing the work don't get paid and the people who get paid steal from others?
that is just so uncharacteristic of capitalism, what a surprise
I have been shouting this for years. Turing and Minsky were pretty up front about this when they dropped this line of research in like 1952, even lovelace predicted this would be bullshit back before the first computer had been built.
The fact nothing got optimized, and it still didn't collapse, after deepseek? kind of gave the whole game away. there's something else going on here. this isn't about the technology, because there is no meaningful technology here.
I have been called a killjoy luddite by reddit-brained morons almost every time.
What’re you talking about? What happened in 1952?
I have to disagree, I don’t think it’s meaningless. I think that’s unfair. But it certainly is overhyped. Maybe just a semantic difference?
Companies aren't investing to achieve AGI as far as I'm aware, that's not the end game so I this title is misinformation. Even if AGI was achieved it'd be a happy accident, not the goal.
The goal of all these investments is to convince businesses to replace their employees with AI to the maximum extent possible. They want that payroll money.
The other goal is to cut out all third party websites from advertising revenue. If people only get information through Meta or Google or whatever, they get to control what's presented. If people just take their AI results at face value and don't actually click through to other websites, they stay in the ecosystem these corporations control. They get to sell access to the public, even more so than they do now.
Good, let them go broke in the pursuit of a dead end.
It doesnt matter if they reach any end result, as long as stocks go up and profits go up.
Consumers arent really asking for AI but its being used to push new hardware and make previous hardware feel old. Eventually everyone has AI on their phone, most of it unused.
If enough researchers talk about the problems then that will eventually break through the bubble and investors will pull out.
We're at the stage of the new technology hype cycle where it crashes, essentially for this reason. I really hope it does soon because then they'll stop trying to force it down our throats in every service we use.
The actual survey result:
Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe
Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.
It's becoming clear from the data that more error correction needs exponentially more data. I suspect that pretty soon we will realize that what's been built is a glorified homework cheater and a better search engine.
what's been built is a glorified homework cheater and an ~~better~~ unreliable search engine.
The bigger loss is the ENORMOUS amounts of energy required to train these models. Training an AI can use up more than half the entire output of the average nuclear plant.
AI data centers also generate a ton of CO². For example, training an AI produces more CO² than a 55 year old human has produced since birth.
Complete waste.
Why won't they pour billions into me? I'd actually put it to good use.
Optimizing AI performance by “scaling” is lazy and wasteful.
Reminds me of back in the early 2000s when someone would say don’t worry about performance, GHz will always go up.
don’t worry about performance, GHz will always go up
TF2 devs lol
They're throwing billions upon billions into a technology with extremely limited use cases and a novelty, at best. My god, even drones fared better in the long run.
I mean it's pretty clear they're desperate to cut human workers out of the picture so they don't have to pay employees that need things like emotional support, food, and sleep.
They want a workslave that never demands better conditions, that's it. That's the play. Period.
If this is their way of making AI, with brute forcing the technology without innovation, AI will probably cost more for these companies to maintain infrastructure than just hiring people. These AI companies are already not making a lot of money for how much they cost to maintain. And unless they charge companies millions of dollars just to be able to use their services they will never make a profit. And since companies are trying to use AI to replace the millions they spend on employees it seems kinda pointless if they aren't willing to prioritize efficiency.
It's basically the same argument they have with people. They don't wanna treat people like actual humans because it costs too much, yet letting them love happy lives makes them more efficient workers. Whereas now they don't want to spend money to make AI more efficient, yet increasing efficiency would make them less expensive to run. It's the never ending cycle of cutting corners only to eventually make less money than you would have if you did things the right way.
Absolutely. It's maddening that I've had to go from "maybe we should make society better somewhat" in my twenties to "if we're gonna do capitalism, can we do it how it actually works instead of doing it stupid?" in my forties.
Technology in most cases progresses on a logarithmic scale when innovation isn't prioritized. We've basically reached the plateau of what LLMs can currently do without a breakthrough. They could absorb all the information on the internet and not even come close to what they say it is. These days we're in the "bells and whistles" phase where they add unnecessary bullshit to make it seem new like adding 5 cameras to a phone or adding touchscreens to cars. Things that make something seem fancy by slapping buzzwords and features nobody needs without needing to actually change anything but bump up the price.
I remember listening to a podcast that’s about explaining stuff according to what we know today (scientifically). The guy explaining is just so knowledgeable about this stuff and he does his research and talk to experts when the subject involves something he isn’t himself an expert.
There was this episode where he kinda got into the topic of how technology only evolves with science (because you need to understand the stuff you’re doing and you need a theory of how it works before you make new assumptions and test those assumptions). He gave an example of the Apple visionPro being a machine that despite being new (the hardware capabilities, at least), the algorithm for tracking eyes they use was developed decades ago and was already well understood and proven correct by other applications.
So his point in the episode is that real innovation just can’t be rushed by throwing money or more people at a problem. Because real innovation takes real scientists having novel insights and experiments to expand the knowledge we have. Sometimes those insights are completely random, often you need to have a whole career in that field and sometimes it takes a new genius to revolutionize it (think Newton and Einstein).
Even the current wave of LLMs are simply a product of the Google’s paper that showed we could parallelize language models, leading to the creation of “larger language models”. That was Google doing science. But you can’t control when some new breakthrough is discovered, and LLMs are subject to this constraint.
In fact, the only practice we know that actually accelerates science is the collaboration of scientists around the world, the publishing of reproducible papers so that others can expand upon and have insights you didn’t even think about, and so on.
Me and my 5.000 closest friends don't like that the website and their 1.300 partners all need my data.
The funny thing is with so much money you could probably do lots of great stuff with the existing AI as it is. Instead they put all the money into compute power so that they can overfit their LLMs to look like a human.
There are some nice things I have done with AI tools, but I do have to wonder if the amount of money poured into it justifies the result.
I liked generative AI more when it was just a funny novelty and not being advertised to everyone under the false pretenses of being smart and useful. Its architecture is incompatible with actual intelligence, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just fooling themselves. (It does make an alright autocomplete though).
It peaked when it was good enough to generate short somewhat coherent phrases. We'd make it generate ideas for silly things and laugh at how ridiculous the results were.
