People genuinely think LLMs will solve climate change
they will, just not the way they think
Kind of like how an autoclave solves transmissible diseases.
And enough cooling to drain a lake
AI is shit. Poor programming results in heavy errors and intrusive break ins during benign operations. Worst is that the corpos that adopt it shove it into your systems in a way that makes it unremovable
What the hell even is this fucking stupid take?
Just one more lane and we’ll fix traffic bro
Just one more cryptocurrency and we’ll break free from the banks
Just one more department for efficiency and we will finally be efficient.
Just one more election and we’ll never have to vote again.
Just 10 more years and we will finally have fusion power
Just one more job and we’ll be in Tahiti, Arthur!
This is getting down. Back in the day, fusion was always 20 years away.
(Anyway, you’ll need 10 years just to scale Tritium production if you make a commercially viable D+T fusion reactor today. And the last experimental one too 25 years to build.)
Braess’s paradox
It’s always amazing to see how folks latch on to the extreme vs the reality.
ML and AI tools are quite helpful. Yes they make mistakes but at the end of the day it reduces human effort. It’s really not hard to see the usefulness.
Reduces human effort in what? Certainly for producing garbage, but it increases my human effort in having to wade through that garbage.
Dumbass. You.
It reduces effort in summarizing reports or paper abstracts that you aren’t sure you need to read. It reduces efforts in outlining formulaic types of writing such as cover letters, work emails etc.
It reduces effort when brainstorming mundane solutions to things, often by knocking off the most obvious choices but that’s an important step in brainstorming if you’ve ever done it.
Hell, I’ve never had chat GPT give me the wrong instructions when I ask it for a basic cooking recipe, and it also cuts out all of the preamble.
If you haven’t found uses for them, you either aren’t trying too hard or you’re simply not in an industry/job that can use them for what they are useful for. Both of which are ok, but it’s silly to think your experience of not using them means that no one can use them for anything useful.
To add on to your comment. Even beyond job/industry, its like your cooking example. I spin up an llm locally at home for random tasks. An llm can be your personal fitness coach, help you with budgeting, improve your emails, summarize news articles, help with creative writing, christmas shopping list ideas, brainstorm plants for your new garden, etc etc. they can fit into so many simple roles that you sporadically need.
Its just so easy to fall into the trap of hating them because of the bullshit surrounding them.
The soul-crushing effort of socialising and producing art, an effort that is eating all that mental and physical energy which would be better utilised in the mines to make more profits for billionaires. /s
What about people who have artistic thoughts but have trouble getting them out of their head? I would argue that is most people because most of us arent artists. We also arent going to pay a commission for every idea we have. A simple image generator can be valid for that.
Also you are ignoring those who may even refine their prompt generated images (which are usually what people see as ai slop) into something better using all the new tools and techniques available now (inpainting, controlnets, regional guidance, etc). I dont think that is any less of an artistic process or artistic outlet than doing it with photoshop or with physical media.
I am VERY convinced you have heard all the counterarguments to these, several times, and you do not need me to reiterate them.
extreme is tech bros hyping ML and AI for not what it is to get shareholders to pay millions to projects that will likely not achieve its end goals. Anyone in the genuine ML and AI domain should be pissed because it is going to reduce interest and trust in these domains when the bubble bursts and then real researchers will be left to pick up the pieces whereas the tech bros will likely move onto the next thing.
Things that chatGPT, gen AI etc can do now? They are already crazy wild to me. But somehow to create more hype about it, they are advertised as being one step away from AGI or one step away from flawlessly pipelining creative processes. It is neither of these yet and from what it seems throwing more data to it will likely not be it either. But of course if you come up with a plan like “we need to double our compute bro and then we will have AGI bro” then you can get investors to pay double or quadruple of what they paid before. So in summary, they are basically con men.
The day to day reality for me at least is that the new hyped up llms are largely useless for work and in some cases actually detriments. Some people at work use them a lot, but the heavy users tend to be people who were bad at their jobs, or at least bad at the communication aspect of their jobs. They were bad at communicating before and now, with the help of chat gpt, they are still bad at communicating, except they have gotten weirdly obstinate about their crappy work output.
Other folks I know have tried to use them to learn new things but gave up on them when they kept getting corrected by subject matter experts.
I played around with them for code generation but did not find it any faster than just writing and debugging my own code.
Now, include the environmental costs of some of these tools, and whether they’re a) running at a loss or not in order to gain market share, and b) whether they’re the tools people are even using.
Do we still come out ahead? Are the minutes saved - if there are truly any - actually saved, or just shoveled onto someone else’s plate as environmental damage?
What’s the big picture here? Because society honestly should not give a flying fuck if your job becomes slightly easier at the cost of everybody else.
Yeah it’s absolutely not the inhuman giant inhuman entities that spew actual sewage and poison straight out into nature just for profits that’s the problem anymore it’s what the energy is used for
They are both the same entities.
No
Yes, they can be useful at times. This does not mean you can just ditch all the human effort and algorithmic solutions and fill every nook and cranny with AI. Which is exactly where we’re at currently. And it’s turning out dreadful.
And this is the worst it will ever be
It always reminds me how serious people were trying to build steam powered aircraft. I imagine they had a bunch of “if we can just get some lighter material” kind of discussions right until some bicycle guys used an internal combustion engine to make history.
Considering how energy efficient the human brain is I hope they keep going after video cards
OMG, video cards made of human brains! It’s genius!
just one more SSRI bro, i promise bro the next SSRI will work bro please i need one more SSRI bro Edit: okay, well maybe instead of insinuating that none of the SSRIs work, I should have claimed that all of them so many potentially crippling side effects, that prescribing these “medications” should be considered significantly more as an absolute last-resort solution - together with inpatient care - than be given out like candy as they are today. But I also understand that it is the cheapest option available, as the best option is therapy, which there are multiple of, all of them requiring quite a lot of time and work, all of which cost significantly more than what anyone is ready to pay. But that shit is long, so take it as you will
no… that’s not how that works.
But I also understand that it is the cheapest option available, as the best option is therapy,
outcomes of both treatments combined are superior to outcomes from either alone. SSRIs are just a tool to help you retrain your brain more easily during the course of behavioral modifications, which a therapist typically helps you identify and implement
they’re powerful which makes them difficult to use, i get it. finding the right medication can be exhausting, because you need to build up the drug in your body to have an effect and you need to titrate off to safely stop the drug. so it’s a long game of trial and error.
But I can assure you that psych meds are ridiculously important for managing certain conditions.
i really wish the fuckers who tote pharmaceutical population control conspiracies would just spend a weekend in the Before Times when people with mundane mental disorders by today’s standards were locked up and abused. yeah, totally randy, it’s lexapros fault your life is a mess, you’d be way better having a manic episode in 1700
They… Scientifically work though?
Not the same thing. Have a nice day.
