this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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This is a wildly incorrect assessment of the situation. If you think AI is going anywhere you're delusional. The current iteration of ai tools blow any of the tools from just a year ago out of the the water, let alone tools from a decade ago.
Yeah, calling the new developments a "fad" is wildly inaccurate.
The only reason it became hyped is due to their surprising capabilities, taking even technically oriented people by surprise at what they can do.
AI has come and gone 4 times in the past. Every single time they have been investment bubbles that followed the same cycle and this one is no different. The investment money dries up and then everyone stops talking about it until the next time.
It's like people have absolutely no memory. This exact same shit happened in the 1980s and at the turn of the millenium.
The second that investors get burned with it the money dries up. The "if you think it's going anywhere" shit is the same nonsense that gets said in every investment bubble, the most recent amusing one was esports people enthusiastically believing that esports wasn't going to shrink the moment investors got bored.
All this shit relies on investment and as soon as they move on it drops off a cliff. The only ai content worth paying attention to is the government funded work because it will survive when the bubble pops.
This is a bubble that will pop, no doubt about that, but it also is a huge step forward in practical, usable, AI systems. Both are true. LLMs have very hard limits right now, and unless someone radically changes them, they will keep those limits, but even within the limits they are useful. They aren't going to displace most of the work force, they aren't going to break the stock market, they aren't going to destroy humanity, but they are a very useful tool.
Practical and usable? lol
The only thing they're succeeding at doing is getting bazinga brained CEOs to sack half their staff in favour of exceptionally poor quality machine learning systems being pushed on people under the investment buzzphrase "AI".
90% of these companies will disappear completely when the bubble bursts. All the "real practical usable" systems will disappear because there's no market for them outside of convincing bazinga brained idiots with too much money to part with their cash.
The entire thing is not driven by any sustainable business models. None of these companies make profit. All of them will cease to exist when the bubble bursts and they can no longer sustain themselves on investment bazinga brains. The only sustainable business model I have seen that uses AI (machine learning) is the replacement of online moderation with it, which the social media companies reddit, facebook and tiktok among others are all actually paying a fortune for while laying off all human moderation. Ironically it has a roughly 50% error rate which is garbage and just allows fascist shit to run rampant online but hey ho I've almost given up entirely on the idea that fascism won't take over the west.
I use an LLM frequently in my work. It is for things that I used to Google, like PowerShell functions and where settings are in common products. That's a practical, real world use. I already said I agree that it is a bubble that will pop, but we don't need it to be profitable for other people. In my case I'm using a Llama variant locally, so every AI company out there could implode tomorrow and I'd still have the tool.