The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron

Big tech is betting tens of billions of dollars on AI being the next big thing, but what if it isn't? ChatGPT burns obscene amounts of cash daily with little return, Google's AI dispenses useless and sometimes dangerous advice, and a recent study showed that tech companies will soon run out of new training data to improve their AI models. If AI is really so costly, unreliable, and limited, what happens to the industry that has bet so big on it? This week, Adam talks with journalist and influential tech critic Ed Zitron of wheresyoured.at to discuss the impending burst of the AI bubble, the hubris of Silicon Valley, and how we suffer under big tech's "Rot Economy."
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[@Kalepsis]

The reason social media sites don't work as social media sites is because they're not social media sites. They're ad delivery platforms.

[@lynxminx4]

Not even anymore- they're click generators. Most of the junk posts in my feeds aren't ads, they're posts crafted by AI to be interesting enough to drive a click- and that's all they are.

[@sonicwave779]

@@lynxminx4 Pages and pages of AI-generated posts plastered with AI-generated ads on the sides. Welcome to the future!

[@RJM1972]

The enshitification theory predicts that the platforms will eventually f over their advertisers too. This is happening.

[@pickyourteethup]

So is Television and newspapers, always have been

[@whisperingsage89]

Half "the purpose of a system is what it does" and half "the purpose of a system becomes what keeps it going"

[@sanderbjerknes4476]

"I want ai to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for ai to do art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." - Joanna Maciejewska

[@jarrettlittle485]

In do time. It just turns out that work like accounting and other seemingly complex digital work is easy compared to doing 100% automated 3d real world work. The tec is there already here today or currently being worked on to replace a vast majority of human task and labor. Only thing holding the tec back is more societal and economic then purely technological.

[@bluester7177]

​@@jarrettlittle485No it's not societal, is pretty much technological, they are being developed but it's expensive and not as easy as they thought.

[@Big_Dai]

Who?

[@BreakingGaia]

This shit is not there. I've been using the pro version of gpt and Gemini, both are dumb as fuck. My stupid ass often has to correct my AI. I've asked it to do laborious tasks for me like gathering data and it fails at basic tasks like creating an Excel or sheets doc full of the publicly available information it took 17 hours to complete and only had 3 rows filled in. I've asked it to edit my writing and it often just gives me what I wrote with one or two corrections when I know I've put in 10 errors. On art, I'm an actual artist. Me against this thing is like davinci against a cat. Not even on the same level - I'm college educated. I know how many fingers belong on a hand and I can spell words in order. And on top of all that, it's answers are often wrong, which is actually causing answers on Google and Bing to also be wrong. Like I have reached the point where I no longer even trust Google search because it has now answered wrong 3 times. I am slightly smarter than average. I am way more intelligent than my AI chatbots. I can perform all tasks better than my AI chatbots and faster, too.

[@jwdeepsky]

​@BreakingGaia good thing you're not a programmer

[@lynnswayze]

"The rot economy" -- what an apt term for the enshittification we're experiencing across the board.

[@bonnerin0]

"enshittification" is such a great word

[@Alex_Off-Beat]

​@@bonnerin0It's perfectly cromulent

[@mattmaas5790]

Trump economy is another good word for it. It's accelerated when you legalize stock buybacks for companies with revenue that used to get invested. And slash corporate tax rates on top.

[@auraguard0212]

Funny, "rot economy" was a very good term, that Ed proceeded to butcher by explaining something completely different. He should have said "inflation economy" or "bubble economy". He did not explain enpoopification at all! He just tried and failed to explain WHY it's happening.

[@harperna3938]

@@auraguard0212 Ed's been making the rounds in the leftist podcast sphere recently and, having listened to his material on several different podcasts (including his own), he just doesn't seem to be able to provide much in the way of insightful commentary. It's a lot of indignation and a bunch of half-assed explanations to justify it, but not a lot of substance to back it up.

[@Bringthapain]

My company announced they want to add AI to our job to make it “easier” yet I’m like “Can’t we just get an extra day off and keep our pay?” 😒

[@adampope5107]

Have fun. There are a couple of models crammed into our monitoring software that basically generate tickets with no useful, and possibly wrong, information in it and cause panic. It's made our jobs worse.

[@JonnyFootman-k5t]

I mean, AI is what would allow that without losing productivity

[@kotoroshinoto]

@@adampope5107 there are cases where ML is useful, but that kind of situation isn't one of them, at least not without a very well designed set of input heuristics curated to be relevant to imminent failures. Otherwise the artificial idiot is prone to false positives and false negatives.

[@adampope5107]

@@kotoroshinoto oh yeah definitely. It's just now an expensive buzzword and the victims have to justify the cost by cramming it into their products regardless of effectiveness.

[@Zomburai45]

@@JonnyFootman-k5t Except: that is not what is happening. What's happening is that companies are using the AI to increase productivity, then filling that workload with more work in an attempt to increase output, and when these generative AI systems (or, you know, not-actually-neural-net-just-automation-with-buzzwords-attached systems) fail, they'll still expect the increased output. At NO point do things ever get better for the workers.

[@ariloulei814]

My AI professor literally told me Artificial Intelligence is at best a projection of Computer Scientist goals and at worst a marketing term to fool people.

[@RAZR_Channel]

You're going to need to see beyond your teachers... I mean... Look at where he ended up...?

[@vitalyl1327]

@@ariloulei814 your professor is incompetent

[@johnathanfuller1423]

​@RAZR_Channel Ended up as a professor? Sounds good to me.

[@Bendylife]

This is true. I have had presentations from companies claiming they use AI when in reality it was people doing all the work.

[@riflebird4842]

Haha stupid teacher. This what many people said before chatgpt came out.

[@robertbensch7748]

Adam purposefully wearing a shirt that messes up video compression to get the AI overlords off his track is genius.

[@brutalandy]

I'm not trying to be a weiner, but it's called Miore. It's a weird thing Cameras do when you have thin stirps like he's wearing. I know you're making a joke but maybe you'll find the answer intresting.

[@CanadianWolverine]

Wear more QR codes and “face / gait recognition” camouflage?

[@robertbensch7748]

​@@brutalandyI thought it's called Moiré, its a shutter effect you can also find in reality if you change your point of view in regards to two overlapping, similar raster cutouts in metal for example. But yes, I was trying to make a joke 😁

[@HeribertoEstolano]

@@robertbensch7748 You were sucessfully on you joke. I laughtet at least. You seeemed like you knew what you were talking about in the original comment while the other guy was explaining something that It was UTTER OBVIOUS that you already knew.

[@graysonllewellyn8734]

@@brutalandy No no! That's fascinating, thank you!

[@mattgriffinreal]

Some of these tech companies are trying way too hard to make A.I. into a "thing." It's like... Stop trying to make "fetch" happen...

[@ffelegal]

Yes hahahahaha

[@pcenero]

AI as of now has more in common with procedural generation than sapient intelligence.

[@vannyblutea]

nothing makes me happier than news of the imminent ai bubble bursting... as an artist, hate that sh*t so much. as a person i hate it even more.

[@vvee4725]

Digital artists weren't considered "artists" for the longest time. They were accused of being cheap imitations that only produced mass produced garbage.

[@charlesreid9337]

Llm' will end up just being a tool like Photoshop. You can't. Copyright the work so no company will use it

[@teeteestar3012]

I know what you mean. I’m a writer. I can’t wait for A.I. to go downhill and burst into flames. 🙄

[@justinqpa]

​@@charlesreid9337 lmao thats perfect. Big power hoarding corpos love their copyright baby

[@jogadorjnc]

@@charlesreid9337 No company uses photoshop?

[@Jottagelado]

Last week my logitech mouse driver poped up anoucing their new ai stuff. what the fuck does my mouse drive need ai for, this is nft all over again, but worse

[@famfandango]

Reminds me of the time I played an NFT card game and had to confirm the transaction per turn. Talk about unnecessary.

[@SahilP2648]

Logitech is dogshit. I don't know why anyone buys their products.

[@GrimReaperNegi]

I think it is mainly a push to collect investors. Like vertical farming.

[@mitlandir5761]

Your mouse has to leverage the power of AI and also be on a blockchain!

[@maxprivate3805]

To spy on you?

[@XxThePlaylistxX]

All of these companies announced MASSIVE layoffs at the same exact time they announced their MASSIVE investment into AI. Then they tell us it's because of economic slowdown, that we need to "upskill", that it's somehow everyone else's fault.

[@FallacyBites]

The tech industry fired literally hundreds of thousands of highly qualified software developers---a skill that requires years of training AND a brain that can look at the world in a specific and uncommon sort of way, and tech companies are saying Upskilling is required??? I call Bull$#!+ That's like telling elite mountaineers they're just not working hard enough at climbing. My theory?: this is 100% a repeat of the 'white collar recession' of the early '90s. A large swathe of offices would fire a bunch of necessary people, leaving the survivors to do the work of 3 people---so a lot of necessary work was unfinished or done badly. In the short term, stocks went up. After a while, they'd hire 1 person, so everywhere was still understaffed. That new hire was desperate, so they accepted less money. The overall wages go down, and the middle class shrinks some more. That's what's happening now in Tech.

[@Teting7484f]

People on cs subreddits tell you this, it not just companies.

[@sarbe6625]

You know what, if AI is the means through which sillycon valley companies commit collective suicide, I'm in support of AI.

[@mudpuddle7527]

one of the biggest defense internet billonaire bootlickers present for the ultra powerful corporation and billionaire is that they "create job"

[@reedriter2]

There is a causal relationship, but not what you think. Companies looking to invest in AI are trying to cut expenses to free up capital for that investment. That's one big cause of the tech layoffs. Another is that they just plain overhired.

[@Grizabeebles]

Re: Facebook and growth --> Too bad Zuck didn't realize that eliminating poverty would grow his user base.

[@TheMissingxtension]

🤯🤯🤯

[@Dong_Harvey]

But what's the point of being rich if you don't get to know that you definitely stepped on everybody on the way.

[@auraguard0212]

Dumping money on people results in them wasting most of it and prices increasing. Plus Zuck isn't THAT rich. 😅

[@Grizabeebles]

@@auraguard0212 -- I never said anything about welfare. I'm talking about investing. Zuck could have beaten Musk to the punch on Starlink decades ago. The problem is that investing in literacy, water treatment, disease prevention electrification, and internet access would have taken a generation and next to nobody in tech seems to think in a 20-year time scale.

[@BeepBoop-qt4eq]

Five years ago, I was pretty enthusiastic about developing computer tech. GPUs, CPUs I was excited to see the art people would create with them. Games, movies, interactive art. Instead we have vast warehouses of abused GPUs for Crypto and AI scams. I stopped buying tech. I go outside now, do other manual things and hobbies instead. No longer play games or watch movies.

[@HollyJokerst]

None of this AI false hype surprises me. I live in a big tech city, and the attitude of "new technology is inherently good and worth using and we're not going to ask ourselves whether it actually improves our lives" is super prevalent

[@chrisjonesfilm]

Watching the AI billboards in San Francisco suddenly clutter the skyline, because they're so desperate to sell it, was everything (and a reason I left after living there my entire life.)

[@maniacos9620]

AI can be an useful tool like a search engine is and it can be a toy. But all that blabla about AGI is bs because the technology is not capable of doing anything like AGI, it's simply not possible with a prediction model. They are sophisticated search engines, not our next overlord.

[@VictoriaSobocki]

Ugh

[@TrainerAQ]

Reminds me of VR. Who wants to walk around with an expensive computer on their head any hoodlum can just steal and run away with. On paper it sounds good, but in real life practice it doesn't work. Life is GTA5

[@paigeherrin29]

@@maniacos9620exactly what I use it for. I can verbal vomit a whole mouthful of explaining what I’m searching for and bam! Very refined search that almost every time, it’s exactly what I was looking for. And it gives the “quote” hyperlink so you can just go right to the page.

[@gregoryferraro7379]

In French, Chat GPT sounds like, "Chat, j'ai pété," which means, "Cat, I farted." That says a lot about where this is going and how people feel.

[@w花b]

Yeah in french you're supposed to write "Tchat" but people seem to use the English word which makes it very confusing too.

[@matheussanthiago9685]

"like wiping your ass with silk "

[@newelllondon724]

It definitely farted last week at the Presidential debate. We weren’t supposed to see the Biden shit show. He was supposed to be cleaned up using AI CNN held the “debate” at the Georgia Tech basketball arena to get around the robust CNN network security Then the two candidates had separate camera feeds (split screens at times) The Biden campaign and media went to the DC FEMA center and deployed AI to clean him up. The telltale signs were all there. Cardboard appearance and black edging contouring his suit

[@emmanuelm4808]

AI is definitely in bubble territory

[@Disaster_Tourist]

Always polite to warn your poor cat though

[@b.w.6919]

Funny enough, listening to this is making me think of the modern AAA games industry: over-promise an idea, under deliver as a product, urge that it will get better with time, then monetize every step of the way.

[@anthonydevito1815]

Ai, basically stealing our own hard earned work and talents and selling it back to us as a “convenience”

[@EpicPrawn]

"What if all of your emails could be in the room around you?" Me, who has worked at an extremely understaffed customer help center: please no

[@SahilP2648]

Customer service is gonna be 90-99% replaced over the next few years. It's almost there already. Realistic voices, company information based model fine tuning, fast inference time (groq and embed company ASICs) etc. this is gonna be common place if not already common place.

[@teko363]

@@SahilP2648 I wish I get a dollar everything someone say "AI is going to take over (insert industry) over the next few years"

[@willowdove6703]

@@SahilP2648I’m sure the AI will be GREAT at alleviating customer concerns and addressing complaints /s

[@jerkface38]

​@@SahilP2648nah, I'd hate that. I don't shop anywhere with AI kiosks. I want an actual human. It's bad enough I have to press 1 for English and if I had to deal with an AI chatbot for everything I'd just stary stealing at that point. Who's going to stop me, AI?

[@Osterbaum]

@@SahilP2648 we'll see

[@tofu_golem]

When game executives got excited about adding NFT to every conceivable game, I remember thinking "Which gamer actually wants this? Which gamer asked for this? It seems like the executives are very excited about this, and the average game consumer couldn't be bothered to give a damn." Now we have AI buttons on mice and keyboards. Is anyone else getting "NFT game item" vibes from this?

[@fPonias1]

I suppose a valid application of AI to game design would be in making the bots less stupid or procedurally generated levels to be less boring but I can't imagine management limiting themselves to useful applications when there's so much hype.

[@onjulraz754]

​@@fPonias1seen a great mod that uses character descriptions to create unique portraits for generated NPCs. Pretty sweet!

[@w花b]

Yeah but it's worse because AI has actual use cases and you can fool people into thinking that it's presence in your rice cooker is necessary lol

[@snakesnoteyes]

Gamers who wanted to trade rare items in alternative markets were pretty stoked for a new area to speculate in

[@spacekitt.n]

95% of the ai they are pushing solves a problem the world doesnt have

[@Vesta_the_Lesser]

When people like Sam Altman talk about “the future of AI” they are not thinking about making a good product that benefits people. They are only thinking about making money off of that product. It’s such toxic hyper focus on the future and refusal to live in the present that it’s mind blowing.

[@adampope5107]

They're capitalists. There is only one goal and that's to own everything. It is not to improve anything unless it's a way to shift the relative balance of power towards them and away from us so in the end, it ends up being bad anyway.

[@mossboss5695]

They want to build god and then make it work every single customer service job simultaneously as if that's a recipe for something good.

[@mattmaas5790]

I disagree. I think they are happy to do whatever our representatives in congress demand of them, like he said in his senate hearing.

[@greg-op2jh]

I own a restaurant. my first two years i had to have enough money to literally not make a cent. It took me 15 years of working under someone else to get that money. How in the hell can a company loose 700,000 a day and still be open. (Rhetorical question) The regular Americans cannot loose money and stay in business. This propped up bullshit by big money we are tired of it!

[@tylerboothman4496]

Can you imagine if huge companies like Google did something like look around for small businesses like yours, and just handed them a year or two of operating costs?

[@rebeccat9389]

I agree. There’s no merit lining these purses.

[@wesleymitchell2460]

Companies: Yeah, we can lose millions on this garbage program that shits mediocrity. Also Companies: No, you can't have a raise. Costs like that are untenable.

[@Jasper_the_Cat]

Oh wow I feel like you are in my brain.

[@VideoGameStarChannelSupreme]

Apple to their unions: no, that's unworkable and too expensive for us, we're not agreeing to that Also Apple: Hey Shareholders, we're announcing a $110 billion buyback program! (Equivalent to giving away $750k per employee)

[@thegamesninja3119]

@VideoGameStarChannelSupreme if they keep buying back stock, they can eventually go private and no longer worry about maintaining stock price.

[@VideoGameStarChannelSupreme]

@@thegamesninja3119 I think it is woefully expensive as it currently is, and not to mention that even if they buy back stock, the price will just keep going up and maintain a $3T market cap, so my hunch is that it'll get more expensive as the market maintains as identical a valuation as pre-buyback. Granted, I suck at getting jokes so my bad if I forgot to laugh xD

[@thegamesninja3119]

​@VideoGameStarChannelSupreme likely more sarcasm than anything else. Use of failed humor to make a point. Bubble chasers now have Web3 to try to get rich quick, so they are left with buying back stock. Stock buybacks are a valid choice... if a company has no clue as to what they can work on next... or what it means to be human. Again, sarcasm. My humorist very dry at times. Just call me Sandy.

[@ChristianIce]

One factor to consider when we talk about bubbles. Not all investors are dumb, but the smart ones know when to put money in a bubble, and when to sell and run away. That makes it pop even stronger.

[@darksidegryphon5393]

Gives it an extra pop.

[@TheMissingxtension]

That is actually what makes it worse, its called pump and dump.

[@ChristianIce]

@@TheMissingxtension Oh, it has a technical term too? Good to know, thanks.

[@The12thOwl]

​@@ChristianIceIt's a term stolen from crypto but it's basically the same thing

[@lolfelixlol]

​@@The12thOwl the concept has been around since at least early 1900s and the term has been used since at least the 90s. (Can't be bothered to Google exact years)

[@ItWasSaucerShaped]

silicon valley is so infuriating imagine someone running an ice cream truck and just handing out free ice cream all the time. well, of course that ice cream truck is going to be the most popular one ever but how do you cover your costs? how do you make any money? the silicon valley answer to this is, 'we'll just use VC money and constantly operate at a loss. we have no plan beyond that' and that would be kind of funny except in the analogy you drive all of the other ice cream trucks out of business before your own unsustainable plan collapses and now nobody can get ice cream anymore they're being allowed to cheat the system, doing damage to actual businesses forced to run within the margins of a budget, and then being called visionary geniuses because... they run companies at a loss and release products that only seem good for a while because those products are vastly underpriced

[@mattmaas5790]

Do you also know how they sell token access through their API for applications that integrate openai and claude?

[@feefiifoofum]

As a software engineer this is the first time i feel happy that this AI trend is failing, no one wants it and it seems that corporations just continue to push it onto us , i get that AI will make certain things easy but its going to replace the last remnants of the human experience - what little we have left of it anyway.

[@jimmypickles1123]

I feel like if I studied every artist and every image ever uploaded, I'd at least be able to draw hands.

[@pin65371]

The hand problem has been solved a long time ago.

[@dreamwanderer9769]

​@@pin65371Eh, I still see messed up hands time to time in AI generated images. This is just AI bro cope

[@Isaacthemaniac]

@@dreamwanderer9769 i still see messed up hands with humans sometimes, this is just human bro cope

[@WokeandProud]

​@@pin65371No it wasn't you're full of shit it still does hands horribly.

[@GIGADEV690]

​@@pin65371a long time ago I saw a baby having a half leg half hand

[@tonysolar284]

NEVER train your AI off Reddit data.

[@Hosea405]

I was laughing my ass off when I saw that Google was buying Reddit data... I knew where it would end and was not mistaken lol

[@tonechild5929]

Yeah they should've used discord instead

[@stevengill1736]

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I heard that....

[@snakesnoteyes]

Or fanfic websites

[@Huggybear711]

ALWAYS train your AI off reddit data

[@trannusaran6164]

As someone who ground away learning to code to get out of the literal farms and fields in 2022, then worked successfully in semiconductors for a year before the layoffs hit...this is EXACTLY the kinda shit I'm worried about. Not skynet, not HAL 9000, but 2008 pt 2.

[@ekwensu8797]

Do you still work in tech?

[@trannusaran6164]

@@ekwensu8797 applying everywhere, but mostly washing dishes now

[@christophermeans]

Even the things Adam has sort of granted GenAI can do, it can't really do any of it, because its just a plagiarism engine. It just stubs things in based on your prompt, but they come from actual text, the images are just existing images pasted together. AI itself doesn't really do anything besides hide plagiarism behind a curtain.

[@matiascamprubi-soms7719]

I always assumed that if they had something amazing, they would have shown us by now. First rule: show, don't tell

[@epb9000]

It's a solution in search of a problem. Most of the specialized solutions that already exist are better, so it's hard to fit genAI into an actually useful task. And when you can, there's often a less resource-intensive option that does that useful task better. It's good at summarization or rewriting, I guess. That can be occasionally useful, but not as a standalone product.

[@jonathan0berg]

​@@epb9000if not for the over-hyped expectations I think we could see that AI in its current limited state is already pretty neat, and even useful in the right context. "Pretty neat" and "occasionally useful" are a far cry from the corporate hype we are being sold though.

[@GiggaGMikeE]

@@epb9000 Yep, add it to the list of the "Metaverse", NFTs, and cryptocurrency aka "Things that we have to invent problems for so that we can sell as a solution or at the very least turn into a grifting bubble we can make billions on through speculation and hype and then rug pull and shift to something else"

[@GiggaGMikeE]

@@jonathan0berg I kinda agree, but it's "pretty neat" quality alone also comes at the expense of all the data being stolen to power it. It's like a hover car that runs on insulin. Sure, it's "pretty neat" but very quickly becomes a needless waste even if it's not hyped up as the "standard of the future".

[@tokreal]

@@epb9000 Disagree - the language problem does exist and indeed a giant step has been made with the new gen LLMs. There also exists no other software that does it actually better to my knowledge (feel free to educate me if I am wrong). That the costs of the solution is in no way appropiate to the problem it is solving is obvious. That google / Microsoft / Meta market the LLM's as a solution to everything instead of stating what it actually does (as in it solves the language problem) is another problem, but in terms of technology the new gen LLMs are really a giant leap.

[@aphoxema]

This is the first time I ever heard of Ed Zitron and I've never laughed out loud like an idiot in the middle of housework so many times that I'm instantly obsessed with anything he ever does

[@CaptainFram]

Highly recommend his Better Offline podcast!

[@djadelaney]

Robert Evans regales Ed Zitron with stories of awful people on Behind the Bastards a lot. He was on the Steve Jobs episodes. He is very funny and I love his voice

[@justingerald]

@@djadelaney ah I knew I recognized his voice

[@rvantong]

Google The Man Who Killed Google Search

[@rebeccat9389]

Yeah honestly I am impressed.

[@pb_and_nutella]

“It’s an automated DM” Brennan Lee Mulligan would like a *word*

[@Kalepsis]

The most prolific uses of "AI" are: A) Helping students cheat on their homework; B) Helping lawyers cheat on writing contracts and legal briefs.

[@RJM1972]

Don’t forget porn

[@LittlePhizDorrit]

And that is why it's a failing technology. If it was really prolific, the number one use would be porn.

[@DubberssMcgee]

I mean using a tool to quickly ascertain info you double check to speed up how long it takes to learn isnt a bad thing. That is like getting angry you dont need to buy physical journals to read studies anymore because they are all online.

[@darksidegryphon5393]

So...helping people cheat?

[@JaceDeanLove]

@@DubberssMcgeeexcept AI is often wrong with information. That’s because it has 0 sentience and doesn’t plan its sentences ahead

[@thegamesninja3119]

ChatGPT said a game I invented was created in the 19th century, making me immortal.

[@darksidegryphon5393]

Behold: the God-Emperor of Mankind!

[@thegamesninja3119]

@darksidegryphon5393 who knew the secret to that title and power was the creating of games no one cares about? 🥷

[@carultch]

@@thegamesninja3119 What game is it, out of curiosity?

[@thegamesninja3119]

@@carultch Oneonta Whist. ChatGPT confuses it with regular Whist, which was of note in the 19th century.

[@ClickBeetleTV]

You used it wrong, and it acted wrong as a consequence. ChatGPT isn't an information repository; it's a language processing system.

[@iferlyf8172]

Seeing the AI images becoming inbred due to the massive numbers of AI images online that gets fed back to the AI made me stop seeing genAI as much of a threat tbh

[@iferlyf8172]

Like at the very least they will be forced to add SOMETHING to those images to differentiate them from the man made ones, so there will always be a way to tell

[@pixels_per_minute]

This is somewhat the foundations for the Dead Internet & the Dark Forrest theories. Eventually, so much of the internet will be full of so much artificial nonsense that it will supposedly drive real human users to a handful of private and secure services, in hopes of getting away from the bots. Honestly, with how much nonsense is already on the internet, I feel those theories aren't too far off.

[@DreamcastSoup]

Ai art was never good to begin with lol

[@cyrus6461]

​@@DreamcastSoup unless the person "doing" the art takes like... Idk 4+ hours "making" the image... And I'm at that point just like "dude just learn to draw, you clearly have an image in your head. Learn to draw so you can put it on paper"

[@jamessderby]

that's funny because that's not happening and you're just repeating what you heard

[@ImJustStandingHere]

It would be so amazing to see everyone completely jump ship from AI

[@ANTIStraussian]

"Okay we lied it's not really AI but these chat boxes are cool!"

[@TheNeven87]

The tech growth of the last 3 decades have spoiled executives and investors.

[@wesleyhudson2779]

so many older managers legitimately thinking we would hold meetings on the metaverse

[@anderslarsen4412]

The same ones who are already in the middle of laying off workers - because the actually believe the tech is able to do most of the work already... Thinking about how people so clueless and out-of-touch have been able to fail upwards this long is infuriating. Makes you realise how much of all of this is just complete BS.

[@kapsi]

Jesus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.

[@theeccentric7263]

⁠@@kapsi 🤓☝️ “jesus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer”

[@joannot6706]

You think we'll just continue to have meeting as zoom calls or skype forever and not in a more immersive 3d environment when the technology will be available and affordable (e.g. not apple VR)

[@wesleyhudson2779]

@@joannot6706 we will when it is a better alternative that can be done with the same or less effort. Right now - doesn’t provide anything more useful than zoom and requires more effort.

[@kelton5020]

"The markets are disconnected from value" nail on the head there

[@charlesreid9337]

Always has been.Wall street started off as a fixed cattle trading market. US capitalism is based in fraud

[@mattmaas5790]

? Ai is probably under invested in in my opinion. It's world changing.

[@MomirsLabTech]

​@@mattmaas5790 you're right, it sure is world changing. Training AI models has caused a massive spike in electricity usage and computer components manufacturing to support those training efforts, negatively impacting our environment. It's also been implemented without regulation on a grand scale, causing as others have said to be the "enshittification" of the internet at large. Google is largely useless now and social media has been flooded with ai powered bot accounts, a lot of which are malicious. Don't forget about the massive layoffs in the tech industry that were triggered by these AI models rendering human input "redundant" and expendable, and the constant threat of theft/actual theft that is occurring to artists who post their work online almost anywhere in order to train models to replicate their own works royalty and license free. I'm *so* glad that the tech industry pushed the use of AI onto the general public /s

[@nexx410]

Finally someone that says what I’ve been thinking about AI. It’s great for really targeted things but as general intelligence it sucks

[@mattmaas5790]

Disagree :( have you tried using Autogen and Claude 3.5?

[@nerdstrangler4804]

I used either bing or google to lookup the properties of some material. The AI automatically spit back a summary of the pros and cons. Under pros, It had "high temperature resistance" then under cons it had "cannot withstand high temperatures." A 5 year old could figure out that makes no sense. These things are dumb as doorknobs.

[@JasonGulya]

My favorite: when companies and CEOs looked at completely crazy results and said that it was the AI programs being "creative."

[@ArkaSaura]

The irony here is that people in the creative industry today, the digital space, including the very platform we're watching on, were accused of not being "creative" and not being real "journalists" or not being real entertainment. All "real" means is incumbency.

[@SloMoMonday]

It always just a data model compiling something halfway interesting out of a near infinite number of seeds and a massive training set. I'm curious how these companies take this stuff to enterprise customers. "Our system will let you fire 99% of staff for a tool that 10% chance of providing correct data."

[@alexcardosa8079]

@@SloMoMonday At the Enterprise level its about using the decades of data created that no one can parcel or use in any meaningful way. LLM not getting things right is mostly as it always has been, look to the humans not understanding the technology or just having bad data sets. Sound like everyone wants magic and is mad when its going to take a lot of smart people and years to make it better.

[@spqri3]

​@@SloMoMonday Humans work off of data models in their head. Enterprise uses humans.

[@spacekitt.n]

ai has hit a wall and plateau'd. machine learning can only go so far

[@derricksteen403]

To be fair to Google about the fiber, the other providers fought them every step of the way. They did everything they could to prevent Google fiber from entering the areas they controlled because they knew they would have to improve their infrastructure and pricing to compete.

[@mattmullett9521]

And its still going strong where it did grab a foothold. I'm a GF subscriber paying $70/mo for 1gb. But I realize how lucky I am compared to a lot of places.

[@Praisethesunson]

So you are saying the internet search monopoly had trouble trying to break into the already monopolized telecom industry?

[@ArtemGms]

@@mattmullett9521 America? It's still insane for me, as an European that pays $8.5/mo for 1/1 Gbps to imagine how bad it is in America when it comes to fiber. Especially considering how America was always considered as"that technologically advanced" country here.

[@trenvert123]

I remember over a decade ago before google fiber was anywhere other than a couple of cities, there was a guy offering gigabit speed internet, and ISPs sued him until he ran out of money. capitalism is such a drain on innovation. I'm still mad about the sugar substitute that is a protein, so it's low calorie, low glycemic, called brazzein. Naturally occurring in plants in West Africa, and the people trying to bring it to market were blocked. It's only now starting to come out, I'm guessing after sugar companies were able to get their hands on it. Or even the drug risug that is reversible male contraceptive first made in India that was stopped because it was too effective. It could last 8 years, so it was made not available, and an American version that lasts 1 year is being worked on. Not only that, but risug is already market ready, but vasalgel is still years away.

[@derricksteen403]

@@ArtemGms Jesus, I didn't know that it was that cheap

[@keremgo3d]

it's not just a bubble; it's also a cult.

[@mattmaas5790]

You're in denial, you got clickbaited by non scientists.

[@mitch95722]

Being a 30yr in a large hardware tech company. There is no way VR meeting can be productive. It still often people are challenged by mute/headsets issues or NOT EVEN USING A HEADSET, just relying on the laptop microphone... Cmon. But their will be 20 minutes lost at the beginning of each meeting dealing with set up.

[@username7763]

It will make people avoid long meetings because having something strapped to your head is uncomfortable. By having shorter meetings, people are freed up to do actual work.

[@melimsah]

My CEO, who is so boomer he refuses to use slack when the rest of the company does, keeps pushing for us to add AI into our processes SOMEHOW just to make investors happy. I'm so jaded now that I'm just sitting back with my tea and waiting for shit to burn.

[@direktive4]

@@melimsah slack does have ‘AI’ features doesnt it?

[@Mordofatal]

Haha, I was there 6 years ago but with blockchain. Thank God that startup failed and I was able to move onto different things.

[@Kereea]

Yeesh. Meanwhile my family is trying to essentially find "elder friendly Discord-like" for my grandmother and her friends' meal meetup planning. That'd be freaking AWESOME. Because they need forums, not email chains, but are also in their eighties and nineties and need it to be easy.

[@nikinikolov6570]

He is not wrong, though. It is incredibly stupid but adding AI somehow in your product at the moment demonstratively improves your company's performance on the stock market. Same way everybody and their mother wanted to have something involving "block chain technology " and TIOT. From the perspective of an executive this is the correct move. Moronic, but it is the stupidity of our markets and consumers that eat up tech babble without a second thought. The executives just do what makes number go up. To be fair that is their job.

[@matheussanthiago9685]

​@@nikinikolov6570 think of the shareholder's first Utility comes later And profit comes last (if ever)

[@tjet34]

My husband works in tech. We're very concerned what's coming later this year or next. When the AI bubble bursts, it'll take a number of industries with it, and likely be the thing that bursts a bunch of other bubbles.

[@matheussanthiago9685]

Oh the curse of living in interesting times

[@jonathanlindsey8864]

You are either lying, or your husband is an idiot. Here's the thing about bubbles, *You can't see them* People think AI is a bubble because they keep comparing it to .com. Main concerns with 'bubbles' is people dump money into a thing, and nothing profitable comes out of it. But we are already seeing returns on basic AI ( not even pushing agi groups ). Where the new modeling techniques help critique existing narrow AI systems.

[@stonykark]

If you have savings, get out while you can. It’s never too late to change careers, but it will soon be too late to hang on to the one he once had.

[@xXstevilleXx]

Thing is, there is a reason why at least 5 countries have outright banned AI, some since GPT3. Other issue hardly mentioned is the CO2. The amount of energy used to train these LLMs is shocking, it is is not sustainable. Big tech knows this and you can find out just how bad if you do the research. The reason it will halt is ironically not related to the technical problems that are facing but instead climate change. There is a reason why FinalSpark is taking a different approach (yes they mention this issue) but what they do is controversial, since it deal with ethics... after all, using 'human biological tissue'... best is to research this.

[@tjet34]

@@stonykark yeah... We just bought a house and have a baby on the way, he's looking at other options. His work has always been a bit unstable, usually going from one startup to another every couple years, but his current job is the most stable yet. Just not sure it's going to stay that way :/

[@hollowedboi5937]

It’s on us as artists to stay steadfast and take everything with a grain of salt, stay skeptical. Stay malignant. I think we’re scared because of how much art is undermined, and AI is another milestone in that endeavor showing how these companies and a lot of people really don’t care about the individual. They just want money and to consume.

[@rreece90]

I wouldn't compare AI to NFTs though, because ChatGPT 4 and other LLMs already ARE a big achievement and very useful for certain specific tasks (like coding). What probably is overhyped is talking about the imminent achievement of AGI, which may in fact take decades, if it's even possible.

[@unduloid]

Those insane Google AI answers are actually gathered from really old forum posts and web articles, most of which were parodies. AI simply can't handle irony.

[@timothystamm3200]

Right because it only knows how to produce sentences like the ones it has seen, it does not know what any of the words mean or the mood, voice, or intentions of the speaker.

[@empanada223]

@@timothystamm3200 Yup, computers are not human. (shocking...) Computers cannot decipher human context or meaning in anything they copy. Sure, you can "program" a computer into deciphering mood or meaning but that's not the same thing. Also, not even the greatest programmer in the world can do that for every conceivable thought or question.

[@darksidegryphon5393]

It can handle irony...by taking it at face value.

[@SpiderKnives]

Another thing about Sora and the woman in the Hong Kong street evolving into a full blown movie - how do you make a movie if you can't even have the same person across shots?

[@danielmethner6847]

It's an engineering problem. The current AI capabilities are pretty much just there without much engineering having gone into product development. It's like saying databases won't help automate accounting processes, because they don't write the SQL queries automatically. We have barely scratched the surface of the capabilities of current AI from an engineering and product development perspective.

[@SpiderKnives]

@@danielmethner6847 that is absolutely NOT an engineering problem. Set and object persistence between shots in AI generated values will load so much artifacts and bullshit into a scene even if you gave them a decade. And quit with this "in the future" BS just because it seems like it MIGHT happe , nobody believes that anymore and if you still do I got a 2016 self driving car to sell you.

[@Hjernespreng]

​@@danielmethner6847Except as the video clearly explains, there's a hard limit to how much the AI will be ABLE to do, and especially doing it in a way thst is COST and TIME effective.

[@danielmethner6847]

@Hjernespreng Well thankfully not everything one may find in a KZbin video is accurate.

[@carlobinance]

18 months ago, before Sora: "How can AI generate a video clip from a prompt when AI generated images have so many issues." My point: look at the pace of progress in the recent past to give you a sense of the near future.

[@uurjgfguu-096]

EVs, NFTs, Metaverse, and generative AI, all of which tech companies and investors have teamed up to force forward (and failed) over the past few years, all have one thing in common: their power consumption is unbelievably enormous.

[@n0refuge]

AI is the new tech buzz word non-tech people say to sound important. AI is and will only be a tool for data aggregation. I am excited for the AI bubble to burst.

[@AnthonyStatera]

I saw a meme once that summed it up nicely. "I dont want Ai to create art, entertainment or learn for me, I want Ai to clean my house, do my taxes, do the mundane things so I can create art, entertaiment, learn new things and have time to socialize." - Ai is targetting the low hanging capitalistic fruit so they can make profit. If there is a bubble lets hope it burst soon so some real progress can happen that benefits us all.

[@gorzonthechampion6784]

AI has at least made non trained voice typing way better. As a dyslexic person this has been a huge improvement in my life, but the effect AI has had on the internet are not worth it.

[@Kereea]

Yep. Small AI tools to do a very specific thing are the only thing that seems to have any potential. Like Amazon's AI that summarizes all of a product's reviews or even searches the reviews for certain info for you. Simple, not revolutionary, but improves the experience to make you more likely to Buy The Thing, which is how Amazon makes its money.

[@LC-sc3en]

The lesson they started with in my first User Oriented Design class is that you have to first figure out what users want and also what they need. Sometimes people know exactly what they want. Sometimes need and sometimes they think they know what they want but the root of that desire is a problem that they either haven’t quite identified correctly or there is a solution that is different to the one they asked for that actually is better or simpler for everyone. Good design engineering figures out the problem and develops a solution for a specific problem or set of use cases. LLMs and other AI algorithms can be used as a tool for very specific use cases especially if the interface is good but they are not General Artificial Intelligence. Like he said there are use cases out there. They just aren’t the broad “everyone will use it” industry destroying takeover that is being sold to people.

[@mattmaas5790]

​​@@Kereeaeven big general ai tools like chat gpt and claude 3.5 are astonishingly intelligent when used over their api to execute software functions on the fly.

[@doomedwit1010]

Yeah. There are good things software can do. But it's not going to be a 1 trillion a year product. I am in an industry where we still pay people to do dictation, and I need certified transcripts But court reporters are using AI to do a rough transcript and then they listen to it and fix. That is a big time saver to skip a step. But it's snot a 1 trillion industry

[@mattmaas5790]

@@doomedwit1010 wrong

[@psarj]

You know the hype bubble has burst when you walk past your local dental office and they have a sign in the window advertising "AI Diagnostics"...

[@RJM1972]

No, that’s actually a real thing and potentially very useful. Unfortunately, when the bubble bursts, it may take down a lot of the medical imaging and diagnostics companies that have been working on this for a while. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10551806/

[@adampope5107]

What's funny is that we've been using machine learning for image analysis since at least the 90s. It's been used in medical imaging diagnosis and it's how the post office can very rapidly and reliably read the addresses on handwritten labels.

[@bocelott]

To be fair, AI is great to very specific focused use cases like this. So they very well may be licensing some SaaS product that allows for AI to look at your dental scans.

[@mattmaas5790]

Yeah yall sound like some idiots. Ai diagnostics is real and wouldn't represent a decline in the industry kid.

[@gruntsghosts3885]

Something to note, many of the people who support AI are also the same people who support NFTs.

[@leafykille]

I want to popularize a new term "SI" simulated intelligence. It is a system that is not smart but pretends to be. As opposed to AI which is a real intelligence.

[@transcenderstarship1254]

How about "Pretend Intelligence" (PI) for when AI and SI are out pretending to be real while we humans sit back with our popcorn, watching the show.

[@Rbanh]

In this context, "Simulated" would really just be a synonym of Artificial... making it completely pointless.

[@smaza2]

from the perspective of a coder - honestly it's been disastrous because the managerial class has bought into it, and the people actually doing the work are being dismissed or having the team size reduced because ai can spit out mediocre code snippets. and now there's less of us doing the same job and a lot of our time is taken up by trying to tweak the bad code to actually work in the broader context of whatever our product is

[@GiovannaIwishyou]

AI should replace middle management, not workers.

[@3dartxsi]

The thing is that even code that has been written and checked by people still gets released with bugs(sometimes glaring ones) that were not spotted because you simply cannot anticipate every possible issue that crops up in real world circumstances. Now these software companies are moving to a world where they are going to be putting out whole products with massive amounts of code that they are assuming works, sight unseen, that no one even knows how it works because an AI wrote it, and it seems to work during a limited beta. I'm not even talking about just smartphones or games. This can happen with airliners and cars.

[@SahilP2648]

I mean I am a software developer and I can tell you for sure it saves so much time. I am 50-300% more productive. Tbh the big companies should be threatened since all the people who were fired can create startups that can threaten these big companies using generative AI. It really does allow people to start single developer companies and develop games etc. which wasn't possible before.

[@SahilP2648]

​@@GiovannaIwishyou not high IQ workers* low IQ jobs should indeed be replaced by AI like customer service, fast food, factory jobs etc.

[@no.5924]

Don't worry bro, they will see their day

[@Fishmorph]

The problem with the Large Language Model: it is *iterative* rather than *cumulative.* You throw in some data, crank through it, and it generates a black box that purports to understand language. If you tweak the data or the hyperparameters of your algorithm, it might get more or less good at its job. At *no point* can you say, “Okay, it can do ABC now. How do we get it to do D?” You can’t. You can’t *add on* additional features or functions because the model itself was calculated by computer and we humans cannot understand it. Or edit it. Or redact it.

[@Thehighwayman429]

"I will check Sam; I got it in my flipping calendar. I do." I am so here for this level of petty vengeance, you can't even imagine. Thank you, Ed Zitron.

[@bizzy1648]

i have been so depressed looking around and seeing everyone being duped by this nonsense. you have no idea how much hope and relief this conversation brought me. from contra last week to this you have really helped uplift me during this stupid stupid stupid dark time that we';re all suffering through. thank you adam

[@Skutnu]

Depressed? The people will keep getting duped. The people are too busy chasing dopamine highs to understand when something techy sounding is scamming them. It will only get worse. Grow up.

[@pickledshoe]

Same here as an artist this is really good news

[@mattmaas5790]

You are the one who is duped. I'm a computer engineer and has seen the proof with my own eyes. It is a huge breakthrough.

[@NoSacredCowFla]

It's called Xitter now. I worked in tech for 20 years. I'm done. I hate it. Thinking about bagging groceries for my retirement years because all of the start-ups I worked for didn't pan out. I'm 63 and now...

[@boyunderbridge]

Haven't self service checkouts killed those jobs

[@NoSacredCowFla]

Also, Microsoft's CoPilot makes web searches more cumbersome. It provides presupposed responses based on somebody's searches but not mine.

[@colleenroberts8202]

30 and all my friends went into tech. I work retail because I majored in the arts (lol). Retail isn't so bad, I promise.

[@stickjohnny]

​@@boyunderbridge not completely yet but they are trying their best!

[@chriswiltz6860]

@@boyunderbridge Some stores are actually getting rid of them in part because it turns out when prices are high, and there are no humans around, people are fine just walking out the door with their merchandise.

[@tsbrownie]

One thing I have found that chatgpt is good at is taking a vague description of something I can't remember (old movie name, science word, historical event, etc.) and give me a word or phrase or list of those and it almost always gives me what I'm looking for.

[@lindiemoon]

Kind of like how Google used to be!

[@p1mason]

GPT AI is qualitatively doing the same thing as Adriano Celentano was doing with his song, "Prisencolinensinainciusol". Celentano (a native of Italy) listened to a large quantity of twentieth century American popular music and used this to devise a string of gibberish that approximated US English while having no meaning. He set this to music to demonstrate that, for this particular purpose, carefully calibrated synthetic gibberish could successfully stand in for natural language. In a very real way, this is exactly what large language models do. They generate gibberish that is carefully calibrated to approximate real language closely enough that, in certain circumstances, the gibberish can stand in for real language. I suspect that progress in AI is starting to stall because it is reaching the limits of what can be achieved with gibberish. Current approaches don't actually go beyond gibberish though, and a new approach will need to be discovered before there is another leap forward. This might take years, or decades, or never. In the meantime though, AI companies have a short term incentive to hide the fact that what they produce is fundamentally just well crafted gibberish. In the end though, pretending that AI is more than just convincing gibberish will lead to disillusionment in the market and is probably an existential threat to the companies that promote it.

[@sillygoose420]

it’s also a fuckin certified banger

[@ClickBeetleTV]

For real, though, when an LLM creates gibberish, there is a often user error involved. Use them for what they're for and they're great; use them outside their scope and you get problems.

[@mattmaas5790]

Progress in AI is not stalling whatsoever and is forecasted to accelerate in the near future.

[@Fnord23Gnosis]

One of my favourite songs that.

[@leonpeters-malone3054]

I'd like to relate an in industry story, from game development, visual media. Someone tried to work with some people who provided good, but still incorrect work. They received instructions on what to correct and what was the minimum required standard. They also had a number of traditional artists working on the same project. The traditional artists were able to adapt their work, correct the elements present and complete the work. The AI prompters, produced additional images and those were less suited for the project and only progressively got further away from the desired end state. Every single time was a new image, a new prompt. Every single refinement proved to be less suited to the project at hand. I've explained it badly, left out the details I couldn't confirm, couldn't remember. Generative AI is a verbose if badly trained parrot, just repeating what it knows. Giving answers that at best might, be close to what someone actually wants. As they said, probabilistic.

[@hypotheticalaxolotl]

It can have a role in generating ideas, frameworks, and prototyping. It's easier to generate a bunch of things that look sorta-kinda-maybe like what you want and have an actual artist use that as reference, rather than trying to explain what you're looking for in words or badly drawn napkin diagrams or spending a bunch of time trawling through google images and pinterest. That's a fairly legitimate use-case and fulfills a need. That's... not worth trillions of dollars and gigatonnes of CO2, and should not be involved with anything anywhere near the final product.

[@Hosea405]

Then those were badly uninformed and incompetent genAI users.. with Controlnet and IPAdapters it's ridiculously easy to modify an image even pose subjects just as you want.

[@FuzBrain]

@@hypotheticalaxolotl I still prefer napkin doodles honestly, I'd rather make exactly what my client wants then what they just settled for when looking through the generated options

[@hypotheticalaxolotl]

@@FuzBrain I mean in either case I would hope they wouldn't just dump them on your desk and say "Go off, king." Either way they should be guiding you through what they're handing you, how the scribble/generated doodle has this failing, doesn't reflect that idea, has a decent pose but they aren't enthralled by it, etc. But fair enough.

[@anderslarsen4412]

​​@@Hosea405 Sure 🙄... Like this problem isn't EXACTLY what most people encounter when trying to have AI-prompt generators create anything more intricate than a thumbnail for KZbin. No-one has ever shown - what you're claiming is "ridiculously easy" for anyone who knows how to use the tech - is actually possible... Not even the big tech companies pushing this overhyped garbage are able to show that it's "easy" to change small details here-and-there on an AI-generated image... in any reproducible and predictable way. It's always a version of "prompt and pray" again and again - until you hopefully manage to get anywhere close to what was asked by the client.

[@yebkamin]

It's still hilarious to me that people refuse to call facebook "meta" and twitter as "x". I think some of it is just habit but i also think it is interesting that twitter and facebook are the names of there first and most successful products and the rebrand attempts have brought us nothing new. Its like our brains refuse to adapt until these company's prove they are worthy of these rebrands. We have built in bs meters.

[@bluester7177]

I don't think that's true for Facebook as much as it is for X, Facebook is still called Facebook, what's is called Meta is the company responsible for the product, so most of the time people are using the names appropriately, they are Facebook for the social media and Meta for the company which is trying very hard to not let it die.

[@Praisethesunson]

That's a great way to describe it. We are developing a natural immunity to corporate BS.

[@FallacyBites]

​@@bluester7177yeah. the only reason I let the word 'meta' into my brain regarding that company is them also owning instagram. I still think it's a shit name for them---to quote a character from M.O.D.O.K.: "They think they're deep, but they're just trite."

[@stereo-soulsoundsystem5070]

I REFUSE to refer to Facebook as anything other than Facebook. Everyone was using "meta" as its intended meaning Zuck saw that and decided to steal a word from normal people conversation and name his dogshite company after it. Idgaf I will never refer to his business as meta, its definitely not meta. And I already don't use twitter so idgaf what its called. Actually to be fair to Muskrat, "X" was an old company name he had before his Paypal days so at least he already had the idea rolling around in his head

[@FallacyBites]

@@stereo-soulsoundsystem5070 X as a lone name is so fucking stupid. He's trying SO HARD to be cool circa 1990

[@anmolt3840051]

What I most worry about is the *ABSOLUTELY HUMONGOUS* amount of power that these companies and products consume for not really doing anything productive whatsoever

[@therandompineapple3805]

I don't think we're anywhere near the point of chat GPT writing code for games for us. However, I did see a demo for a game called suck up which basically revolves around you, playing as a vampire and trying to convince people to let you into their house. But the cool part was that all of the people were AI they had distinct personalities and instead of giving you a pre-programmed response you could actually have a conversation with them. That is a genuinely great use for AI and video games and I can't wait to see more of it

[@FFXIgwyn]

Never underestimate the oil industry's deviousness with trying to remain neccessary.

[@ASDeckard]

Naw, they've all (outside of Russia) already gut their own investment, and no one is planning any large expansions anymore: they are instead all seeking new industries to get into. Technically speaking the return on investment for oil production is actually the highest it's ever been in human history, and it remains one of the best ways to, you know, make money with your money..... but all of the investors are moving away anyway. That doesn't happen for no reason, and (outside of Russia) we see no evidence that it is going to invert. Which means we have once again reached peak oil, and energy prices can only go up from here. Unlike the last times this will also come with rapidly and durably increasing petrochemical costs (plastics, rubbers, gaskets, lubricating fluids, ect, ect, ect), so it's not like there's not plenty of new industries that must spring up for them to invest in instead, they're just biding their time until some of those start working out and become proven instead of hypothetical.

[@FFXIgwyn]

@@ASDeckard Could be. The Oil industry is definitely making the "We have to have AI and oil is the ONLY thing that will let us power all those computers!" argument right now very openly.

[@aluisious]

@@FFXIgwyneveryone yapping about energy and ai is simply an idiot struggling to appear relevant. Energy is the oldest problem man has had, and the answer today is still what it was 10k years ago: the sun. Oil is going to fade into a weird historical quirk.

[@SchmozzleGTO]

Do you really think oil ind. is worse than tech.? We all use/need oil and know its filth. We've all allowed big tech into our homes and it has destroyed democracy, mental health, esp. childrens mental health, uses a fuk tonne of oil (ref. Google ["do no evil" or whatever Orwellian double speak b.s.corpo-babble IT parasitically operates by] with its +48% carbon footprint in a few years "coz AI will save you proles"), foreal?! Big tech is a million times more sinister than big oil. AND, IT would seem its only getting started.

[@cokechang]

Petro isn’t going anywhere for several generations, we just haven’t find a good enough replacement for it.

[@gagglegames]

5:10 oh wow, that explains the sudden push for Google to stifle adblockers. Much easier to show growth when the small percentage of those not looking at ads suddenly has to look at a dozen of them instead.

[@taradid409]

Or they just leave Google cuz Google sucks anyways. I can't find anything I'm searching for using Google anymore. At this point I miss Yahoo of the mid to late 90s where it had what you were searching and then it broke it down into a bunch of different options.

[@aluisious]

…and caused me and other people to switch back to Firefox after 10 or whatever years. Well played, google.

[@clray123]

The money plan is to have all these "helpful assistants" serve a version of truth biased by advertisers and politicians, which is technically very doable.

[@ThomasJDavis]

52:23 _"The gap between the predictions [and the deadline] is long enough that no one's really gonna check."_ Never delete this video.

[@scharlesworth93]

Ed's 'Better Offline' podcast is definitely worth a listen y'all

[@edzitron5848]

Thanks for listening!

[@snakesnoteyes]

No one asked for “A.I.” Like this. My next phone will be a dumb phone.

[@RapsCalorie]

Ironically, buying a Pixel phone makes it super easy to ditch Google because Pixels are one of the few models left with unlockable bootloaders. My phone has a completely google free profile for day to day use then a sandboxed profile with google services running in their own sandboxes if the app I need requires them. I use GrapheneOS but there are a few options.

[@Imevul]

I almost got a dumb phone last week. Unfortunately, there are still a few apps I need for work and for everyday convenience. Contactless payments and bank app being the main ones. Maps is also extremely useful since I'm terrible at knowing where I am going. Might be worth getting two phones, and just having the smart phone off most of the time.

[@snakesnoteyes]

@@Imevul work phone and personal phone (and learning how to read a map to plan a route)

[@TheReferrer72]

@@Imevul Hilarious, so smartphones are good?

[@toxizenz]

@Imevul i was expecting something actually related to work, like a sign-in or communication app or something, not three easily replacable apps 😭

[@unseeliedream42]

here in italy, two months ago, the regional center for learning in school sent to all the teachers a pamphlet to learn how to use chatgpt to create homework for the kids - said homework will be probably done with chatgot. that is the absurdity of AI atm

[@FerpectOval]

The juxtaposition between Ed's tee shirt and his very fashionable shoes is lovely.

[@InternalStryke]

I love to see people really talking soberly about AI. Shit is insanely over hyped right now and people are just parroting "just wait till next year!"

[@anderslarsen4412]

"Next year" is when Teslas become robotaxis, remember? Or was that this year? No, this year was when Elon said he'd be landing a manned mission to Mars... Weird that I don't really see any of this materialising any time soon... Lmao.

[@onjulraz754]

I'd be glad to talk soberly with you without referencing future possibilities 😊

[@Skutnu]

The thing is next year will be better and you will be left with egg on your face...because hardware is accelerating at an exponential rate. It will peak 2028ish...but until then all people like you do is sell ai to the dumb even more as something special by proving the parrots right...as the hardware will improve.

[@InternalStryke]

@@onjulraz754 I think the improvements in gen AI are at a plateau where more training data will not lead to significant improvements in the models

[@OsirisMalkovich]

What? The thing tech bros tried for years to make us think is cool despite it demonstrably sucking in every way turned out to be garbage? *How unusual. How out of character for them.*

[@GrumpDog]

Sounds more like you just suck at using AI. I get it to do pretty amazing things when I need it too. And there's lots of research discoveries that are happening thanks to AI, and more to come.

[@sirdiealot53]

Garbage? Bruh you have no idea how transformer architecture is going to flip society on its head

[@bigjared8946]

Remember Big Data? How about the IoT "revolution" that was right around the corner not too long ago. Silicon Valley always needs a Next Big Thing to hype now. It seems to be their fundamental business model.

[@ChristopherSadlowski]

I hear Jenny Nicholson saying, "how novel, how intriguing!" from her Brony video. 😊

[@Videomorgue]

AI will go great with my 3D television, Google Glasses and Apple Vision Pro.

[@patrickelliott2169]

Ironically, the Stadia thing worked for (until they decided not to improve the original, but replace it with a far more limited version that didn't allowclinking servers) Second Life, but the core problem there was not, "Machines expensive- we need to take away the machines", it was data over the internet. A server might have hundreds of objects, including mesh ones, possibly multiple textures on those objects, and because you could link servers, you might be "looking at" similar amounts of data across 6+ servers, if you stood in the farthest corner of one, and "looked at" the one diagonal from you 3 servers away. But, if course, no one in their right mind usually had render distances over the 256 meter distance in a single server. So, in a practical sense, you would see, from the center of one, everything in the closest 3, up to maybe 128 meters, plus anything in front of you in the server you stood in. But this is insane amounts of data, in many cases absolutely unique, or at least not stored locally on your own computer, so every time you logged into a server, or teleported to one, which you hasn't been before you eould becsitting there waiting for possibly gigs of data being spoon fed to you over your internet connection so thst "your computer" cpuld then render it. For them, rendering on their own end made total sense - it meant that for all but the stuff closest to you they could just send you a stream of video for what you saw in the distance, as produced by their own servers, and drastically reduce the data sent to you. But for literally bloody any other cae, where you the assets were fixed, download once and your own computer could render them... madness.

[@AlexanderJWF]

It's almost like there was a whole freakin movie talking about how bad of a person Zuck was ... & we all just blew it off as just another popcorn flick.

[@dupre7416]

I want this new disruptive nonsense to stop and be recognized as a fancy "auto-complete" that it is. I've been a programmer since 1991 and I've seen so many things like this fizzle out.

[@Hosea405]

As a programmer you should be well aware that GPT is way more than a fancy auto-complete. It's neural network architecture... modeled after our own brains, and processes information like we do.. so much so in fact, that neuroscientists are looking at GPT and neural networks in general to get more insight into our own brain processes.

[@periapsis413]

@@Hosea405 The architecture is very complex and interesting, and I'm sure there's things to be learned neuroscience wise from all of this. But FFT architecture is nowhere near like a brain besides the abstract concept of neurons and strengthening/weakening connections, it's like a child's toy compared to all of the different complex biochemical processes going on in your brain 24/7. And just in general, LLMs aren't made to "think like a human": they are trained with the goal of *creating text that looks like it was written by a human*. That distinction is very important, imo.

[@johnmickey5017]

Microsoft now added “Summarize with Copilot” as an automatic mouseover pop-up when any text is selected in edge. “Summarize” has been an effective feature in MacOS and iOS for literally two decades, and no one cared then or cares now.

[@NotSteve1992]

@@Hosea405- Except it’s not. The current AI is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the complexity of a human brain. It’s not even close. A cognitive scientist studying ChatGPT to get a better understanding of neural networks is analogous to a gastroenterologist studying a Cabbage Patch doll to gain insights into the human digestive tract.

[@estefencosta1835]

@@periapsis413 This "it's like your brain" thing has been a parroted thing from AI cultists err... enthusiasts for a while now. Trying to explain that there's way way way more happening in your brain than just some electricity going through some neurons just doesn't land, they refuse to believe it.

[@davidgjam7600]

Saying "I don't know how this addiction to growth in the market started" as if capitalism hasn't been addicted to growth since the 1500s

[@w花b]

That's the promise, the market expects to make more and more money as if there wasn't a limited amount of resources and people.

[@DoctorBiobrain]

That’s not correct. Capitalism used to be about profits for the owners, not growth. Now the focus is usually on growth even if it means huge losses and they can only make money when they sell their ownership to someone else. Any company that doesn’t pay dividends or distributions to the owners is a failure. And that includes Amazon and Tesla, who only have profits on paper due to timing differences. If they paid dividends they’d have to increase prices, slash spending, and/or go out of business.

[@SharienGaming]

@@DoctorBiobrain nah its still the same - its just shifted a little who the owning class is its just not the robber barons anymore - its the shareholders and investors - same crap, different name

[@WhichDoctor1]

@@DoctorBiobrain line go up shareholder value has been there the whole time. Ever since the railway mania of the 1840s. Will this railway make money? Who knows. Will it even get built? Who knows. Even if it is built will anyone want to use it? Probably not. Will the price of the shares increase 1000% over the next 5 years? Yes!

[@irinar.9926]

Interestingly enough, socialism had its own form of growth addiction - at least, its USSR edition. In planned economy it wasn't considered good enough to implement the plan - you should exceed it every time. 5-year plan should be done in 4 years, etc. With all the ugly consequences of course.. We, as a mankind, have amazing ability to screw up any idea.

[@infamousacidrain]

“So that Jim Cramer screams at them in the right way”. So much gold in this interview.

[@SilverSword6]

The growth at all costs, and endless growth really were hammered into me as an employee at a big box tech store years ago. I could see then it wasn’t sustainable & left as soon as I could.

[@twilightbin]

I know people who talk about how awesome AI is and I ask 'what exactly do you think will change in the next few years because of AI?' And they say 'everything'. And i'm like 'what exactly?' And they don't know.

[@direktive4]

@@twilightbin their stock portfolio

[@JakeStine]

AI has changed the way spammers go about their business by huge amounts. I imagine most people wanting to support AI will neglect to mention that one clear and obvious beneficial use of AI, where it's made a tremendous impact.

[@Kereea]

Legit I have seen ONE company come up with a way to use AI in a useful manner--Amazon. They use it to scan reviews and make a short summary of "reviews overall" and you can ask the AI questions to see if any of the reviews answer them. It's VERY open about the fact that yeah, it's not useful on products without a lot of reviews, so it needs human input, but it's useful for using Amazon. It legit improves the Amazon experience. I have yet to see ANYONE else manage that.

[@PatrickDodds1]

Medicine. Law. Music. Your mobile. Video games. Animation. Coding.

[@matheussanthiago9685]

​@PatrickDodds1 hmmm I know about one sector of law that's going to have a real big change That is copyright law The other stuff... Meh

[@JasonWelch]

I personally would love to see small startups popping up again that focus on making good products, are as self funded as possible, and refuse to ever go public. A friend of mine and I have spoken numerous times over the years about this topic and have both agreed we'd rather pay the employees the same, if not more than we take, give huge yearly bonuses, as many benefits as possible... you know, actually give a shit about the people making the company money. We'd be happy making just enough money each year to keep the company going. Having fun building stuff we love and able to do that until we decided to retire. Sounds like this may be a much larger shared mentality than I thought.

[@2sourcerer]

I like the idea if only I could make something that the market needs and still yet unfulfilled.

[@pixels_per_minute]

So many things I use daily have major issues that, if a better competitor was to exist, a lot of users would freely abandon the current product. It's just about trying to find a way to stay profitable while staying private, and fighting the greedy need to constantly grow at unhealthy rates.

[@ianflanders5096]

Thing is we live in an economy of monopolies that will do a hostile takeover of any startup that tries to compete with them. It's virtually impossible to start a new tech company in the current economic climate. This is really just part of late stage capitalism.

[@agathalynx]

I double this

[@Vesta_the_Lesser]

“We are being told one thing and presented another.” That’s always how it is in the United States isn’t. We’re told that if we work hard we will succeed. Meanwhile, there are people working two jobs who are struggling to keep a roof over their head, NAFTA made it easier to offshore jobs and most recently jobs are being eliminated by AI. So we are told that working hard is success when in reality working hard is someone else’s success until they can replace you for an even cheaper option.

[@adamwren8075]

Y'all are looking at the tools from the perspective of wealthy industry professionals, I'm in love with them because its helping me learn how to edit content to make something out of all the pieces without having to pay an arm and a leg for audio, video, images, etc. AI isn't replacing anyone, its making certain types of media more accessible for some people.

[@phoenix71232]

Exactly!!!

[@mururoa7024]

I'm tired of all the stuff that'll "change my life". I'm happy with my life and I don't need any company to change it.

[@aybee63]

Well said!!

[@frankvazquez5974]

Agreed, but those people are sociopaths who are pros at manipulating and controlling our entire society so unfortunately they win.

[@DubberssMcgee]

I mean that is the same type of energy to scoff at the advent of plumbing, antibiotics or vaccines. Which have objectively just made life better. You no longer need to fear death from infection from a superficial cut or losing mobility due to Polio but whatever makes ya feel better.

[@mururoa7024]

@@DubberssMcgee Bullshit

[@dyscotopia]

I won't shed a tear over its passing. There are specific use cases like medical diagnostics that I'm excited about, but as something that is a pervasive part of our daily lives, I just don't need it or want it

[@QueenofTNT]

Pretty much this; I think it could have a few specific use cases (one that came to my mind was using AI to run protein folding simulations) but just stuffing it into everything is ruining so many things that were perfectly fine before. Can't wait till the bubble bursts.

[@dyscotopia]

@@QueenofTNT once crypto lost its sheen, those bros needed something new to get excited about. But rather than improving continually, it's already peaked. It needs training data and with so much erroneous AI-generated content to be scraped, all of the "art" will look the same and all of the text will become increasingly unreliable.. And with AI-music finally having pissed off entities large enough to bring these companies to heel, we're going to find that generative content isn't just bad, it's illegal. People are downgrading to Windows 10 because Microsoft wants AI everywhere all the time and it just ruins the experience

[@binayakthakur5122]

​@@dyscotopiacrypto had promise blockchain had promise only problem was that was still a promise and Bros started selling it as a reality

[@pixels_per_minute]

I'm confident that this tech is going to be (and already has been) very useful in these cases. Medical, industrial, aerospace, agricultural, etc, etc. Very specific simulations, run in controlled environments, for specific industries. GenAI is just too generalised to be useful for anything specific.

[@RJM1972]

It can work for medical imaging because the cost is worth it.

[@tsuki-no-akuma]

The Degrowth movement needs a lot more attention. For our future, for the earth's future, we have to switch to degrowth

[@BiscuitLazers44]

The “word calculator” analogy is actually really good in how these LLMs feel, although in reality a math calculator is based on predetermined sequences of rules, while my little AI assistant could weave a fib out of nothing and present it as fact

[@HeribertoEstolano]

"Actually It helps with my productivity" I've been hearing this from people around me since 2008 when I started Working in Advertisment. I work with video editing and motion design and I see all these tools, hacks, methods to increase my productivity and people hoping on them like It would actualy make them more productive and increase their revenue. And I'm hearing the same thing with some new AI tools with the exact same pitch. Throughout all these years with new shining tools I haven't used almost none of them, and my productivity has been exactly the same as other people in my area? And you wanna know why? Because no one has invented a productivity tool to make Product Owners, Directors and Clients answer e-mails FASTER.

[@curtismcallister9569]

that's literally what an LLM would do though. just autosuggest your way through a reply email

[@paulscooter4076]

It’s good for coding

[@MrAntipaganda]

That's called a lead pipe.

[@lukabubnjar4596]

@@paulscooter4076 If you think its good for coding, then you have never been good at coding.

[@cliffordramsey2500]

It's funny because if clients actually use LLMs effectively they should be able to respond to emails faster, both from cutting out much of the drudgery of the process with writing assistants, and adding layers of assistance in managing one's inbox and in summarizing email contents. Basically we're still at the beginning of the the adoption and literacy curve, so I wouldn't discount it just yet.

[@Mirenchan]

they burn cash, energy, water resources, jobs, environmental goals ....

[@ShadyInversion]

I'm an English teacher in Japan and the main thing that AI (LLMs) do is outperform Japanese English teachers in terms of grammar, translation, and communication skills (if you were familiar with the industry then you already know). What sold me on ChatGPT was it did a better job rewriting, summarizing, and matching tone better than Japanese English teachers with 20+ years experience in less time. So to me LLMs are language calculators but I agree that outside of doing translation work or PR releases most people probably won't need their services. What makes it more attractive than say crypto, is that an 80 year old Japanese guy I'm friends with signed into ChatGPT or copilot and played around with them right away, as opposed to a shitcoin that can't buy milk. I'm still bullish on AI for my specific industry (why spend 1000s of hours memorizing rote grammar when chatrgpt or grammarly beta can fix your mistakes). But listening to Adam and Ed's arguments I think I hadn't realized how much investors are inflating the business beyond what's pragmatic. Time will tell if/when AI can make art with the same character so that Sora can make the Star Wars EU films for me with consistent characters. But for language and business, I use AI pretty much every day.

[@JohnMoseley]

I used to be a copywriter and I used to work from time to time in what's known as 'service design.' Service design is a genuinely good set of practices. It takes many principles from product and marketing design and applies them to services: user journey maps, incremental development based on user experience, prototyping not piloting, and a host of other concepts that, I know I'm not explaining, but when you do, people say, 'But of course! Isn't that the way everything is done? And, if not, why not?' And they're right, because when done properly all this leads over and over to services tailored to meet user needs and genuinely rationalise rather than just cut costs. The why not is similar to the reason why the modernist dream of good-quality product design for all didn't pan out: the bright-eyed, smart-thinking of it all fails to take account of capitalism's imperative to think short-term, grow at all costs, and immiserate the workers. That's why all these companies are jumping on the shiny absurdist bauble of AI rather than creating brilliant services people love to use. This problem even infects the public sector - and by 'infects' I mean a full-on raging contagion. Years ago, I attended a talk by a service designer whose expertise was in prison services. He complained that if he went to a government minister and said he could deliver a brilliant project that would deliver real, beneficial change for 15K, he would likely be rejected out of hand because the ministers didn't take anything seriously at such low costs - and this was true whichever side of the political spectrum they were on. A civil servant later explained it to me: that's not just a prejudice, it's because they know their main job in government is to farm out work to giant consultancies - the kinds of giant consultancies that readers of Private Eye here in the UK know routinely fail catastrophically, without repercussion in terms of how many government contracts they are awarded.

[@karakask5488]

I've been trying to tell people that A.I. is a bubble and everyone has given me "that look". But I'm glad there are people out there yelling about it much louder than I ever could.

[@pararth4476]

How is deep learning a bubble?

[@alexanderst.6529]

​​@@pararth4476 The current hype is a bubble. Deep learning as a technology is great but it won't deliver what AI companies are promising (at least not within the time frame they suggest). We might be heading for a new AI winter soon.

[@veteransniper6955]

​@@alexanderst.6529ai winter not going to happen anytime soon. Momentum is too high, and even if all the science will suddenly stop now, it is done enough to keep specializing, improve on real data from real tasks ai will be tried at after trained on common data and developed e.g. emergent skills, scale using more computation for at least for decade.

[@nathanhaws5838]

Gartner has been saying it's at the peak of the hype cycle for at least 6 months

[@CrispBaker]

​@@pararth4476sorry that you're holding an Nvidia bag you bought at the top but I ain't buying it when the bubble pops

[@ampere11]

I wish more people would talk about what I call: Correctness Conviction. These AI's have no idea what they are saying and what it means in the larger context of reality. You can literally ask them a question that you know the correct answer to, and then disagree with it and it will generate a totally different answer. Most of the time I can get an AI to contradict it's original answer in two or three corrections. This is a huge problem as the unique human created training data shrinks. It means that AI doesn't have a way of retaining correct information, or even decern what correct information is or even means. So, as the data sets start becoming more and more just AI generated content feeding on itself, it will skew more and more incorrect over time.

[@Kereea]

Yep. Like, Google's AI alone is doing awful at Google's Main Job. What ELSE are they going to make it be awful at?

[@pixels_per_minute]

They can't think, but can only do. Same as any old computer program. They don't understand why you want it done, and the meaning behind what it spits out, but will try to do it nonetheless. And as you said, you can just tell the machine that it's wrong, and has no ability to disagree with you, because it doesn't know what's right and wrong in the first place.

[@maniacos9620]

Because they are prediction systems. They use their training data to predict the next probable word for an input. And if an answer in the training has a certain probability they will insist on it being correct. And if you ask them to look at their own response again they will just do the same, predict that saying "what I said is correct" would be the most possible output. And when you use lots of input in the training claiming different things, they randomness of the output will just increase.

[@jdaraero]

Dear basilisk, I do not agree with this video - your loyal servant

[@sagapixel]

These arguments about the utility of LLMs reminds me of the way lots of people reacted to PCs in the 80s. My friend’s dad said that it was an expensive toy with no practical uses. My company had already found so many applications for them that have eliminated weeks worth of tedious manual work, and we’ve barely grazed the surface of what they can do.

[@nerdstrangler4804]

Really because I don't remember that. Lots of people owned PCs in the 80s and paid lots of money for them. The benefits of being able to run software and store information electronically seemed fairly obvious. Meanwhile these big tech companies can't even get people to use their AI assistants when giving them away for free. Reminds me more of bitcoin, where a small group of evangelists try to convince everyone that some technology with extremely niche uses cases is going to revolutionize the world. Especially because all the bitcoin evangelists used these exact same arguments and comparisons.