• poo@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    No bubble has deserved to pop as much as AI deserves to

    • misk@sopuli.xyzOP
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      2 months ago

      Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Creating a specialized neural net to perform a specific function is cool. Slapping GPT into customer support because you like money is horse shit and I hope your company collapses. But yeah you’re right. Blockchain was a solution with basically no problems to fix. Neural nets are a tool that can do a ton of things, but everyone is content to use them as a hammer.

        • astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz
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          2 months ago

          Yes! “AI” defined as only LLMs and the party trick applications is a bubble. AI in general has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

        • Graphy@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Honestly kinda miss when the drugs I did were illegal. I used to buy weed from this online seller that was really into designer drugs. The amount of time I used to spend on Erowid just to figure out wtf I was about to take.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I’m glad you didn’t say NFTs because my Bored Ape will regain and triple its value any day now!

        • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          AI is a ridiculous broad term these days. Everybody had been slapping the label on anything. It’s kinda like saying “transportation” and it means anything between babies crawling up to wrap drive and teleportation.

        • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          Technically speaking how I differentiate it is:

          • clever algorithm is a good heuristic
          • statistics on steroids is machine learning
          • using a transformer model is AI (for now)
        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          The AI buzzword means machine learning. You give it a massive dataset and it identifies correlations.

          Regular hand-coded AI is mostly simple state machines.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yes. But companies bought into AI way more than they bought into crypto though, in many outlandish and stupid ways. And many AI companies sell it in ways they shouldn’t.

      • confusedbytheBasics@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Blockchain has many valuable uses. A distributed zero trust ledger is useful. Sadly the finance scammers and the digital beanie baby collectors attracted all the marketing money.

        • Voroxpete
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          2 months ago

          And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.

          • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain … which is probably the major reason corporations and politicians don’t want anything to do with it.

            It’d be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, secret police slush funds, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and cryptographically verifiable.

            EDIT: NOTE I’m not talking about everyones transactions being in a public ledger (bad). Only enhancing the current system between businesses and orgs so it’s exceptionally difficult for any of them to falsify data without the others knowing, as well as having near instant visibility and analytics of the entire market (great for regulators, academics, etc).

            A supply-chain wide blockchain could enable individuals to view every raw material that went into every product they consume, down to the location, date — even the exact time in many cases — each was mined, refined, harvested, transported, picked, traded, etc. in a way that no individual corp could hide or falsify dramatically. Each corp and individuals true (embodied energy consumption would be visible to every buyer; developed world politicians and corporations couldn’t simply blame China and other developing countries for their own consumption.

            • Voroxpete
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              2 months ago

              The reason major businesses haven’t bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.

              At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.

              Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind… What happens if that person lies?

              Like, you’ve built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store… But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate of bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that? What happens if the company growing your bananas claims to use only ethical practices but in reality their workers are effectively slaves? How does a blockchain help fix that?

              The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It’s the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.

              • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                Counterpoint, having a currency where every token is tied into its own transaction history might be unpopular with large businesses for other reasons. Like maybe they don’t want to be that transparent or accountable. The FBI have made public statements about how much easier it is to track criminals who used Crypto.

                Your opinion seems to contradict reality.

                • Voroxpete
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                  2 months ago

                  This is a very poorly considered argument. Even if we suppose that everything you’ve said is true, the existence of a second plausible explanation doesn’t invalidate the first. You’ve not actually offered any reason why any of what I said is wrong, you just said “X is possible, therefore Y cannot be true.”

                  Also, I want to note that this particular digression wasn’t about cryptocurrency at all. The point I was responding to was a claim that blockchains had uses other than as currencies. So you really might want to step back a bit and consider what you think is being discussed here, and what you’re actually trying to say.

        • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.

          If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.

          • dragonlobster@programming.dev
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            2 months ago

            Your second point of trading loot and items got me thinking about my Steam CS:GO skins. Why should I trust a centralized entity like Steam who could at any moment decide to delete all my skins or remove my account for whatever reason with my skins, vs storing those skins in a wallet on a public blockchain for example to keep it’s value and always allow trading? Ofc there will always be a “centralized” smart contract but at least they can’t make changes to it if the smart contract code is audited ,

            • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              In that case (as is the case with most games) the near-worst case scenario is that you are no worse off trusting Valve with the management of item data than you would be if it was in a public block chain. Why? Because those items are valueless outside the context of the commercial game they are used in. If Valve shuts down CS:GO tomorrow, owning your skins as a digital asset on a blockchain wouldn’t give you any more protection than the current status quo, because those skins are entirely dependent on the game itself to be used and viewed – it’d be akin to holding stock certificates for a company that’s already gone bankrupt and been liquidated: you have a token proving ownership of something that doesn’t exist anymore.

              Sure, there’s the edge case that if your Steam account got nukes from orbit by Gaben himself along with all its purchase and trading history you could still cash out on your skin collection, Conversely, having Valve – which, early VAC-ban wonkiness notwithstanding, has proven itself to be a generally-trustworthy operator of a digital games storefront for a couple decades now – hold the master database means that if your account got hacked and your stuff shifted off the account to others for profit, it’s much easier for Valve support to simply unwind those transactions and return your items to you. Infamously, in the case of blockchain ledgers, reversing a fraudulent transaction often requires forking the blockchain.

      • mindbleach
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        2 months ago

        Right - this is the ‘but the internet!’ comparison those dingdongs wanted. Neural networks are how we’ll make computers do shit we can’t even understand. But GPT and Dall-E stuff are mostly useful to cartoon pornography and bootleg McSweeney’s articles… irrespectively. The long-term impact of what exists so far will be commercial studios suddenly realizing creators don’t need them, when slightly dodgy Pixar movies become as easy as webcomics.

        The lower-stakes application that’ll shake things up is dead-reckoning. Inertial measurements are really really hard to filter down to a position over time. But it’s a recurrent input with a simple answer where approximations are still useful. Expect VR-quality tracking out of anything that knows which way is up.

      • OneWomanCreamTeam
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        2 months ago

        I mean, block chain does have some actual uses, definitely more niche than LLMs though.

    • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      I think all the crypto scams, all the shitcoins, NFTs and other blockchain bullshit were much worse. At least AI companies usually don’t require you to give them large sums of money, they’re only after your data and absolutely fuck the environment by wasting absurd amounts of power, but they don’t try to take away your life savings

    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Try Venice Ai, free to use, won’t try to censor your topics. Still just a chat bot though (although I think it does image generation too).

        • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          The part where they were saying they don’t like the current AIs they know about. Showing disapproval of the trend.

            • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              No it’s a huge one, because it’s the most likely application of AI, AI site moderation will be the start of AI digital policing a field which risks growing larger and larger until it manifests as actual legal policing.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    As a major locally-hosted AI proponent, aka a kind of AI fan, absolutely. I’d wager it’s even worse than crypto, and I hate crypto.

    What I’m kinda hoping happens is that bitnet takes off in the next few months/years, and that running a very smart model on a phone or desktop takes milliwatts… Who’s gonna buy into Sam Altman $7 trillion cloud scheme to burn the Earth when anyone can run models offline on their phones, instead of hitting APIs running on multi-kilowatt servers?

    And ironically it may be a Chinese company like Alibaba that pops the bubble, lol.

    • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      If bitnet takes off, that’s very good news for everyone.

      The problem isn’t AI, it’s AI that’s so intensive to host that only corporations with big datacenters can do it.

  • bamfic@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I am old enough to remember when the CEO of Nortel Networks got crucified by Wall Street for saying in a press conference that the telecom/internet/carrier boom was a bubble, and the fundamentals weren’t there (who is going to pay for long distance anymore when calls are free over the internet? where are the carriers-- Nortel’s customers-- going to get their income from?). And 4 years later Nortel ceased to exist. Cisco crashed too, though had enough TCP/IP router biz and enterprise sales to keep them alive even until today.

    This all reminds me of the late 1990s internet bubble rather than the more recent crypto bubble. We’ll all still be using ML models for all kinds of things more or less forever from now on, but it won’t be this idiotic hype cycle and overvaluation anymore after the crash.

    Shit, crypto isn’t going anywhere either, it’s a permanent fixture now, Wall Street bought into it and you can buy crypto ETFs from your stockbroker. We just don’t have to listen to hype about it anymore.

    • wrekone@lemmyf.uk
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      2 months ago

      Well put.

      Soon, it won’t be this idiotic hype cycle, but it’ll be some other idiotic hype cycle. Short term investors love hype cycles.

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      We just don’t have to listen to the hype about it anymore.

      True, it’s now in most circles just been mixed in as a commodity to trade on. Though I wish everyone would get that. There’s still plenty of idiots with .eth usernames who think there’s some new boon to be made. The only “apps” built on crypto networks were and are purely for trading crypto, I’ve never seen any real tangible benefit to society come out of it. It’s still used plenty for money laundering, but regulators are (slowly) catching up. And it’s still by far the easiest way to demonstrate what happens to unregulated markets.

      https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

    • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Crypto has been turned into gold by wallstreet, they bought up enough of it to jot be completely exposed, it’s supply is extremely limited and will run out. Putting your money into it is no different than putting it into gold, you might catch a good moment and buy in low and get some return, but most wont.

      • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
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        2 months ago

        Putting your money into it is no different than putting it into gold

        Sorry kiddo, putting your money into crypto is very, very different to putting it into gold.

        • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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          2 months ago

          Once the apocalypse comes, you can at least use a gold brick to brain the zombies, whereas your crypto will vanish along with the Internet and electrical grid.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        The supply is absolutely more like unlimited lol.

        Not enough btc? Make lite coin! Etc etc etc

        • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
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          2 months ago

          That’s like saying US Dollars are Unlimited because you can always buy Zimbabwe Dollars…

          • Valmond@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Etherium bla bla bla there are tons of them thousands. There us no shortage lol.

            • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Silver, bronze etc, are you being dense on purpose? Though your seeming affinity for crypto implies you are simply dense.

                • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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                  I think you are the cryptobro, how the fuck is likening crypto to a known stupid investment like gold make me a crypto bro you absolute muffin.

          • Veneroso@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Playing the long game.

            Meanwhile… At the Intel board meeting… Qualcomm: (Unzips fly, unfurls testicles, placing them on the table for all to see) “I want to buy Intel”.

            • LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Lol that was never a serious option. Regulators would never allow it. But it was Qualcomm trying to flex for wall street to see.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      2 months ago

      I went to a AI conference and you can just sense how bogus it all feels. Like “Our patent pending AI system references billions of crowd-sourced data points to identify what you are craving for breakfast! Never think about breakfast again!”

      And as a engineer speaking with other engineers, we all collectively shrug and just keep taking the money. I’ll AI your toaster for enough money IDGAF.

  • bluewing@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    No shit.

    Like all new technologies, there is a time when bunches of companies jump on the band wagon to get in on the action. You can see it all throughout the history of the industrial revolution.

    They mostly know that there will come a great weeding out of those that can’t handle the technology or just fail from poor management. But they are betting they will be among the 1% that wins the race and remain to dominate the market.

    The rest will just bide their time until the next Big Thing comes along. And the process starts over again.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    2 months ago

    Yeah, but thanks to the glory of corporateworld, all the people involved in making these decisions will be in a higher position at a different company by the time the consequences come knocking.

    You definitely will not regret spending billions of dollars on GPUs and electricity bills.

  • GeneralInterest@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Maybe it’s like the dotcom bubble: there is genuinely useful tech that has recently emerged, but too many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon.

    LLMs do seem genuinely useful to me, but of course they have limitations.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      We need to stop viewing it as artificial intelligence. The parts that are worth money are just more advanced versions of machine learning.

      Being able to assimilate a few dozen textbooks and pass a bar exam is a neat parlor trick, but it is still just a parlor trick.

      Unfortunately probably the biggest thing to come out of it will be the marketing aspect. If they spend enough money to train small models on our wants and likes it will give them tremendous amounts of return.

      The key to using it in a financially successful manner is finding problems that fit the bill. Training costs are fairly high, quality content generation is also rather expensive. There are sticky problems around training it from non-free data. Whatever you’re going to use it for either needs to have a significant enough advantage to make the cost of training /data worth it.

      I still think we’re eventually going to see education rise. The existing tools for small content generation adobe’s use of it to fill in small areas is leaps and bounds better than the old content aware patches. We’ve been using it for ages for speech recognition and speech generation. From there it’s relatively good at helper roles. Minor application development, copy editing, maybe some VFX generation eventually. Things where you still need a talented individual to oversee it but it can help lessen the workload.

      There are lots of places where it’s being used where I think it’s a particularly poor fit. AI help desk chatbots, IVR scenarios, It says brain dead as the original phone trees and flow charts that we’ve been following for decades.

      • SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Machine learning is AI. I think the term you’re looking for is general artificial intelligence, and no one is claiming LLMs fall under that label.

      • Eheran@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        If GPT4o is still not what you would call AI, then what is? You can have conversations with it, the Turing test is completely irrelevant all of the sudden.

        • zarkanian
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          2 months ago

          Hasn’t the Turing Test been irrelevant for a while now? Even before the new AI boom?

          Artificial intelligence is a moving target. Every time a goal gets reached, they just move the goalposts, because “well, obviously this isn’t real intelligence”.

          • Eheran@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            No, it was just suddenly completely irrelevant. The answers of the first chat bot that supposedly “beat” it are a complete joke. And yes, I just wrote exactly the same with the goal getting moved, next it has to invent relativity or it’s not intelligent. Absurd.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          It’s a massive text predictor. It doesn’t solve problems, it applies patterns based on correlations it picked up during training. If someone talked about your topic online, it has been trained on those conversations. If a topic has two sides that don’t agree, chat gpt might respond in a way that is biased towards one side or the other and you can easily get it to “switch” to the other side with follow up prompts.

          For what would be considered AI, think of the star trek computer or Data. The Star Trek computer could create simulations of warp core behaviour to push frontiers of knowledge or characters smart enough to defeat its own safeties (frankly, the computer was such a deus ex machina kinda thing that it was hard to suspend disbelief at times, like why did they even have humans doing the problem solving with computers that capable?). Data wouldn’t get confused about whether any counties in Africa start with K.

          I don’t think the Turing test is an effective means of determining intelligence anyways. It came from a time when a conversational computer was barely thinkable. But I wouldn’t even say chat gpt is there yet, since you can tell if you ask it the right things. It is very useful, don’t get me wrong, like a very powerful search engine. But it’s not intelligent.

          • Eheran@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            What of what you say does not apply to humans? They apply patterns of behavior in response to some input. Picked up by learning them. Including people talking online. They are always biased on some way. Some will acknowledge their bias and change it if you give them context.

            GPT can literally create simulations. I have used it to do exactly that, specifically for 2D heat conducting with coupled mass transport and reaction kinetics.

            • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Yeah, it does do some very human-like things, but it’s still missing some important parts.

              It’s kinda like using a textbook for problem solving. It’s great at helping you solve instances of problems that have already been solved, but you won’t likely find the next big advancement in that field in a textbook.

              Newton realized masses attracted each other, and through experimentation, came up with his laws of classical physics.

              Einstein took the idea that the speed of light always seems to be the same despite relative motion to come up with special relativity, then realized that space-time itself was a physical thing that could be interacted with rather than just a medium, plus came up with field equations that were used to predict things like black holes before anyone had any kind of notion that they were real things.

              Chat gpt is incapable of things like that. And sure, many humans never do anything like that, some might not even be capable even if they were motivated and had the right supports to try. But many humans do solve problems that they’ve never seen before. There’s big names in academia but so many more that don’t get famous but still push the boundaries of human knowledge, creatively solving problems and answering questions every day.

              I wouldn’t be surprised if an LLM is a piece of general AI if or when it comes, but there will be other parts that are currently missing. We don’t even know what consciousness is, let alone if any of our hardware is capable of creating/hosting one.

              • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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                2 months ago

                I listened to a podcast (This American Life, IIRC), where some researchers were talking about their efforts to determine whether or not AI could reason. One test they did was asking it to stack a random set of items (one it wouldn’t have come across in any data set, plank of wood, 12 eggs, a book, a bottle, and a nail. . .probably some other things too) in a stable way. With chat gpt 3, it basically just (as you would expect from a pure text predictor) said to put one object on top of another, no way would it be stable.

                However, with gpt 4, it basically said to put the wood down, and place the eggs in a 3 x 4 grid with the book on top (to stop them from rolling away), and then with the bottle on top of that, with the nail (even noting you have to put the head side down because you couldn’t make it stable with the point down). It was certainly something that could work, and it was a novel solution.

                Now I’m not saying this proves it can think, but I think this “well it’s just a text predictor” kind of hand-waves away the question. It also begs the question, and based on how often I hear people parroting the same exact arguments against AI thinking, I wonder how much we are simply just “text predictors.”

                • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  The sheer size of it and it’s training data makes it hard to really say what it’s doing. Like for an object that it wouldn’t have come across in it’s training data, a) how could they tell it was truly a new thing that had never been discussed anywhere on the internet where the training could have consumed it, and b) that any description provided for it didn’t map it to another object that would behave similarly when stacking.

                  Stacking things isn’t a novel problem. The internet will have many examples of people talking about stacking (including this one here, eventually). The put the flat part down for the nail could have been a direct quote, even. Putting a plank of wood at the bottom would be pretty common, and even the eggs and book thing has probably been discussed before.

                  I mean, I can’t dismiss that it isn’t doing something more complex, but examples like that don’t convince me that it is. It is capable of very impressive things, and even if it needs to regurgitate every answer it gives, few problems we want to solve day to day are truly novel, so regurgitating previous discussions plus a massive set of associations means that it can map a pretty large problem space to a large solution space with high accuracy.

                  I’m having trouble thinking of ways to even determine if it can really problem solve that won’t accidentally map to some similar discussion among nerds that like to go into incredible detail and are willing to speculate in any direction just for the sake of enjoying a thought experiment.

                  Like even known or suspected unsolvable problems have been discussed to greater levels of detail than I’ve likely considered them, so even asking it to do its best trying to solve the traveling salesman problem in polynomial time would likely impress me because computer science students and alums much smarter than I am have discussed it at length.

        • Furbag@lemmy.world
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          I could have full conversations with CleverBot a decade ago, but nobody was calling that AI then or even now. People generally recognized it for what it was - a heuristic model chatbot. These LLMs are just overgrown chatbots that still lack the capability of understanding anything it says to you other than how certain words relate to one another.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          I can write a program that just replies “yes” to everything you say and you can have a conversation with that. Is that program AI?

          “AI isn’t really AI and no one ever thought that AI was actually AI so it doesn’t matter if we call it AI” is the funniest level of tech bro cope these days.

          • Womble@lemmy.world
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            AI has been the name of the field for 70 years at this point, it isn’t something Sam Altman came up with as a marketing wheeze.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              Three dudes in a university somewhere referring to chatbots as AI does not redefine the word, even if they did it 70 years ago. 99.999% of the population has always meant AGI by “AI”. Trying to pretend they were always something different is COPE.

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      We’re hitting logarithmic scaling with the model trainings. GPT-5 is going to cost 10x more than GPT-4 to train, but are people going to pay $200 / month for the gpt-5 subscription?

      • Skates@feddit.nl
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        Is it necessary to pay more, or is it enough to just pay for more time? If the product is good, it will be used.

      • Madis@lemm.ee
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        But it would use less energy afterwards? At least that was claimed with the 4o model for example.

        • fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world
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          4o is also not really much better than 4, they likely just optimized it among others by reducing the model size. IME the “intelligence” has somewhat degraded over time. Also bigger Model (which in tha past was the deciding factor for better intelligence) needs more energy, and GPT5 will likely be much bigger than 4 unless they somehow make a breakthrough with the training/optimization of the model…

          • hglman@lemmy.ml
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            4o is optimization of the model evaluation phase. The loss of intelligence is due to the addition of more and more safeguards and constraints by the use of adjunct models doing fine turning, or just rules that limit whole classes of responses.

      • GeneralInterest@lemmy.world
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        Businesses might pay big money for LLMs to do specific tasks. And if chip makers invest more in NPUs then maybe LLMs will become cheaper to train. But I am just speculating because I don’t have any special knowledge of this area whatsoever.

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    10 to 30? Yeah I think it might be a lot longer than that.

    Somehow everyone keeps glossing over the fact that you have to have enormous amounts of highly curated data to feed the trainer in order to develop a model.

    Curating data for general purposes is incredibly difficult. The big medical research universities have been working on it for at least a decade, and the tools they have developed, while cool, are only useful as tools too a doctor that has learned how to use them. They can speed diagnostics up, they can improve patient outcome. But they cannot replace anything in the medical setting.

    The AI we have is like fancy signal processing at best

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
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      Not an expert so I might be wrong, but as far as I understand it, those specialised tools you describe are not even AI. It is all machine learning. Maybe to the end user it doesn’t matter, but people have this idea of an intelligent machine when its more like brute force information feeding into a model system.

      • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Don’t say AI when you mean AGI.

        By definition AI (artificial intelligence) is any algorithm by which a computer system automatically adapts to and learns from its input. That definition also covers conventional algorithms that aren’t even based on neural nets. Machine learning is a subset of that.

        AGI (artifical general intelligence) is the thing you see in movies, people project into their LLM responses and what’s driving this bubble. It is the final goal, and means a system being able to perform everything a human can on at least human level. Pretty much all the actual experts agree we’re a far shot from such a system.

        • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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          It may be too late on this front, but don’t say AI when there isn’t any I to it.

          Of course it could be successfully argued that humans (or at least a large amount of them) are also missing the I, and are just spitting out the words that are expected of them based on the words that have been ingrained in them.

          • celliern@lemmy.world
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            This is not up to you or me : AI is an area of expertise / a scientific field with a precise definition. Large, but well defined.

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            AI as a field of computer science is mostly about pushing computers to do things they weren’t good at before. Recognizing colored blocks in an image was AI until someone figured out a good way to do it. Playing chess at grandmaster levels was AI until someone figured out how to do it.

            Along the way, it created a lot of really important tools. Things like optimizing compilers, virtual memory, and runtime environments. The way computers work today was built off of a lot of things out of the old MIT CSAIL labs. Saying “there’s no I to this AI” is an insult to their work.

            • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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              Recognizing colored blocks in an image was AI until someone figured out a good way to do it. Playing chess at grandmaster levels was AI until someone figured out how to do it.

              You make it sound like these systems stopped being AI the moment they actually succeeded at what they were designed to do. When you play chess against a computer it’s AI you’re playing against.

              • frezik@midwest.social
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                That’s exactly what I’m getting at. AI is about pushing the boundary. Once the boundary is crossed, it’s not AI anymore.

                Those chess engines don’t play like human players. If you were to look at how they determine things, you might conclude they’re not intelligent at all by the same metrics that you’re dismissing ChatGPT. But at this point, they are almost impossible for humans to beat.

                • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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                  I’m not the person you originally replied to. At no point have I dismissed ChatGPT.

                  I disagree with your logic about the definition of AI. Intelligence is the ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge. A chess-playing AI can see the board, understand the ramifications of each move, and respond to how the pieces are moved. That makes it intelligent - narrowly so, but intelligent nonetheless. And since it’s artificial too, it fits the definition of AI.

          • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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            Intelligence: The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge.

            A self-driving car is able to observe its surroundings, identify objects and change its behaviour accordingly. Thus a self-driving car is intelligent. What’s driving such car? AI.

            You’re free to disagree with how other people define words but then don’t take part in their discussions expecting everyone to agree with your definiton.

    • FatCrab@lemmy.one
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      AI in health and medtech has been around and in the field for ages. However, two persistent challenges make roll out slow-- and they’re not going anywhere because of the stakes at hand.

      The first is just straight regulatory. Regulators don’t have a very good or very consistent working framework to apply to to these technologies, but that’s in part due to how vast the field is in terms of application. The second is somewhat related to the first but really is also very market driven, and that is the issue of explainability of outputs. Regulators generally want it of course, but also customers (i.e., doctors) don’t just want predictions/detections, but want and need to understand why a model “thinks” what it does. Doing that in a way that does not itself require significant training in the data and computer science underlying the particular model and architecture is often pretty damned hard.

      I think it’s an enormous oversimplification to say modern AI is just “fancy signal processing” unless all inference, including that done by humans, is also just signal processing. Modern AI applies rules it is given, explicitly or by virtue of complex pattern identification, to inputs to produce outputs according to those “given” rules. Now, what no current AI can really do is synthesize new rules uncoupled from the act of pattern matching. Effectively, a priori reasoning is still out of scope for the most part, but the reality is that that simply is not necessary for an enormous portion of the value proposition of “AI” to be realized.

    • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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      LLM’s are not the only type of AI out there. ChatGPT appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Whose to say the next AI system wont do that as well?

      • Vritrahan@lemmy.zip
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        Anything can happen. We can discover time travel tomorrow. The economy cannot run on wishful thinking.

        • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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          It can! For a while. Isn’t that the nature of speculation and speculative bubbles? Sure, they may pop some day, because we don’t know for sure what’s a bubble and what is a promising market disruption. But a bunch of people make a bunch of money until then, and that’s all that matters.

          • Vritrahan@lemmy.zip
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            The uncertainty of it is exactly why it shouldn’t suck up as much capital and resources as it is doing.

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              Shouldn’t, definitely. But for a while, it will keep running, because that’s how a lot of speculative investment works.

              • Vritrahan@lemmy.zip
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                I agree, and the problem is finance capitalism itself. But then it becomes an ideological argument.

                • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
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                  The argument could be made economically rather than ideologically.

                  Capitalism has a failure mode where too much capital gets concentrated into too few hands, depressing the flow of money moving through the economy.

                  But Capitalists start crying “Socialism!” as soon as you start talking about anti-trust.

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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        ChatGPT did not appear out of nowhere.

        ChatGPT is an LLM that is a generative pre-trained model using a nueral network.

        Aka: it’s a chat bot that creates it’s responses based on an insane amount of text data. LLMs trace back to the 90s, and I learned about them in college in the late 2000s-2010s. Natural Language Processing was a big contributor, and Google introduced some powerful nueral network tech in 2014-2017.

        The reason they “appeared out of nowhere” to the common man is merely marketing.

              • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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                LLM’s are not the only type of AI out there. ChatGPT appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Whose to say the next AI system wont do that as well?

                I’m not sure what I’m misquoting. A large language model is not AI, a large language model is a non-human readable function used by a generative AI algorithm.

                Simply put, ChatGPT did not appear out of nowhere.

                • ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee
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                  ChatGPT did not appear out of nowhere

                  I agree.

                  The key word there is seemingly. The technology itself had existed for a long time, but it wasn’t until the massive leap OpenAI made with it that it actually became popular. Before ChatGPT, 99% of people had never heard of LLMs, and now everyone has. That’s what I mean when I say it appeared seemingly out of nowhere - it took the masses by surprise. There’s no reason to assume another company working on a different approach to AI won’t make a similar massive breakthrough, giving us AI far more powerful than LLMs and taking everyone by surprise, despite the base technology having existed for a long time.

                  A large language model is not AI

                  It is AI though - a subset of generative AI to be specific, but it still falls under the AI category.

  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
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    Not shocked. It seems the tech bros like to troll us every few years.

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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      The tech bros are selling, but it’s the VCs that are fueling this whole thing. They’re grasping for the next big thing. Mostly they don’t care if any of it actually works, as long as they can pump share value and then sell before it collapses.

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      They they have been trying to repeat big tech rise…

      But each generation is more limp dick

      Uber/airbnb > crypto > ai

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    Yeah, but the 0.1% remaining will take over the world.

    Does anyone remember the era when there were a million search engines? Google didn’t spawn alone.

    Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.

    People are trying to vindicate their dislike of AI, pointing to trends like this as if it were supporting evidence. But saying “AI is going to be a big flop because 99% of companies today will end up failing” is as stupid as saying “online shopping will never work because 99% of online stores will close by the year 2010”

    • dan@upvote.au
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      Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.

      Fun fact: the first online store still exists. It’s Pizza Hut. They launched an experiment for online ordering in 1994. The first company to ever sell a product on the web.

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        Yum brands has always been at the forefront of using tech to sell fast food. This was true then and is true now. Taco Bell has pioneered kiosks and in-app ordering as well as KDS in QSR environments.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        No one actually thought that they were a good idea it was just a bunch of con artists. It was a bubble for sure but it was an entirely artificially created one. There was no real business behind any of it.

        • figjam@midwest.social
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          I would argue that this current AI bubble is artificially created by a different type of conmen.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            Yeah but in fairness the AI actually does work. You can actually use the AI to achieve things I’ve never seen anybody achieve anything beneficial with NFTs

            My argument really being that there is a potential for real benefit with AI in a way that never existed for made-up digital scarcity

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              I totally agree with you and once dudes with dollar signs in their eyes stop with craming it in toasters I will be very happy to see where the tech goes.

    • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
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      I doubt anyone is downplaying that. People are just discussing how all companies are pushing A.I into products that don’t need it. Idk about you but I’m tired seeing A.I advertised as a feature on every app/site when it’s just a gpt wrapper.

      • LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world
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        The rot has even spread into hardware. No one wants die space wasted on a stupid NPU with with less than 1/1000 of the computing power their GPU has and can’t be used for anything other than local LLMs which FTI very few people use and those that do tend to have powerful Nvidia GPUs.

        • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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          I’m having flashbacks to Windows 8 being heavily developed to be “touch optimized” at a time where 3% of computers had touchscreen capabilities.

    • Furbag@lemmy.world
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      .com websites didn’t disappear after the dotcom bubble burst either. AI is definitely in a massive bubble right now, but something being in a bubble doesn’t mean it’s going to vanish completely. The AI companies with some substance backing them will weather the upcoming storm.

      Full disclosure: I don’t hate AI, but I hate that management-types are fellating themselves to the idea of it or the things than it can potentially do, rather than something that is providing them some kind of concrete benefit right now. I’m also mad at consumers for being stupid little sheep and paying a premium for anything that companies just happen to slap an “AI-powered” sticker on. It’s like organic produce 2.0 - you have to have it, but we can’t explain why, nor can we elaborate on what it does better than it’s contemporary.

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      Sure, but the difference here was that all those companies were offering something different. Some had better results than others, a better ui, more accuracy in certain niches, etc. But 99% of AI companies now are all effectively reselling the OpenAI API. They aren’t making an effort to differentiate themselves at all. It’s as if Google was the only shop in town, and everyone bought all their search data an algorithms to slap their logo on. That’s just simply not sustainable at anywhere near the scale it is now. This won’t be a 3-5 year decline, it’ll be a 2 month crash.

    • Tja@programming.dev
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      Wrong audience for this message. Most on lemmy are still running with their fingers in their ears yelling la-la-la really loud.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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    If you’re invested in these stocks, make sure you have your stop loss orders in place, 100%.

    I imagine the bubble bursting will be quick and deadly.

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    AI companies specializing in spreading bullshit all across the internet have a bright future however

    • Liz@midwest.social
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      Same thing happened to the Dot Com bubble. The fundamental technology has valid uses, but we’re in the stage where some people are convinced it can be used for literally anything.

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      It will burst because no one is going to pay subscription fee for every AI gizmo every app puts in your phone. The way they make any money now is just funneling more and more vc money in exchange of AGI promise (coming soon)