Something that strikes me as really weird about the AI age that we're in is we all know we've entered it, but no one was aware when we entered it.
It was like a time jump.
Two years ago we were mocking AI videos for their crappiness, speculating that AI may or may not be all they're saying it's cracked up to be.
And now, we're in solid "AI is terrifying and I can't imagine the dystopia someone born today is going to grow up in regarding the all encompassing nature of AI"
And it's like having a black out when drunk. One minute you're in a bar. The next minute you're behind bars for public intoxication and you didn't remember anything in between.
That's how it feels with the AI thing.
Of course we always had trepidations from early on, but unlike certain ages, the age of woke, the age of covidians, the age of seeing the extent of the brainwashing, there were solid markers of "we were there, and now we're here and here's what led to that."
But with AI, I don't know if it's similar to you, but it was like a realtime mandella effect where suddenly we're in the AI age and it felt just like yesterday we were mocking the "Will Smith eats spaghetti" and there doesn't seem to be a clear moment where everyone took AI for the serious existential threat that it is....it just happened, like a black out from drinking. It's a very strange feeling.
Just wait 'til OpenAI collapses under its mountain of debt hidden by financial shell games and takes down half of the semiconductor industry with it.
Dude, ram is gonna be so fucking cheap.
I wish... even storage price increased alot in the past few months.
Storage prices are supposed to go down over time, not up...
I doubt that will happen any time soon and do you think the powers that be will allow it to collapse once every industry is dependent on AI?
We'll still have AI, it just won't be from OpenAI.
Every bubble bursts eventually. These companies burn through billions with NO plan to earn a return on the investments.
It's the Tulip Frenzy, only with no flower bulbs involved.
OpenAI is gonna be the new 2008 bank bailouts. doesn't matter that they're massively in debt, they're there for building infrastructure
That's because it's entirely synthetic.
AI is not a technology ready for mainstream use; it's buggy, high cost, and totally unreliable. It reminds me of VR in that respect.
But certain people want it to be adopted and are pumping billions of dollars into something thatvis incapable of paying out. Human tech support is being pushed out, not because AI can do the job, but because someone wants people to be unemployed and dependent on the government.
This is a pretty good assessment. AI is actually in a really good place for hobbiests right now. There's a lot you can run on your own box for personal use, it doesn't matter too much if something you're operating for your own use only goes off the rails, and there's no question if something is permissible or not. If you ask it to do something, and it's capable of that, and it does what you asked it to, there's no problem.
Not so for big business. Turns out trying to verify that a clever machine designed to be very compliant never complies with malicious requests adds a lot of overhead.
And so we have AI that's good for generating porn, making up stories, pretending to be a hot girl or guy so you can flirt with it, and writing messy computer code at the level of a high school graduate. But not as useful as it was expected to be anywhere else.
Honestly, a good solid chunk of the amount of money that started getting circulated into this was Trump's doing.
I mean I get what the reasoning may have been, a potential race against China and an opportunity to make it as much of an American dominated product and industry as possible. But much like with the clotshot and covid, I think he threw way too much fucking taxpayer money at it. Pre-rewarding companies for anti-consumer practices and somewhat shoddy work.
I only started hearing AI in the news during 2022, when Biden changed the definition of a recession. That's when the AI hype/FOMO picked up, the B2B spending cranked up, GDP go up, and technical recession averted.
Now, Trump obviously wants to keep this game of musical chairs going, since a recession will crater his legacy and cancel any leverage the US has with its fiat fun bucks. Line must ONLY go up.
For me it was not that slow. Companies have been working it for a long time, I remember almost a decade ago IBM using Watson to do medical diagnosis in India because India sucks and the shit IBM AI was much better at diagnosis than Indian doctors but somehow we also need to import jeet doctors because reasons.
AI changed things fast once it hit the public market but it's not something that we did not expect. Even before OpenAI there were attempts of replacing support with AI.
As for consequences this is my opinion.
Skill crisis will be another problem as everyone is dependent on AI already, especially the Indians that are replacing us. If any crisis happens that AI can't solve we're going to be f**d.
And education. One of my wife's cousin is a teacher and kids are mass using AI, even cheating on tests by taking a quick photo and having ai solve it. Like education was not bad enough already.
Ai is an amazing technology but man will it f**k us big time.
I think that there's lots of things that probably/definitely won't be solved with AI, enough said. There's going to be tons of kids who won't be able to function without tech or innovate once the people who made the systems in the first plce are dead.
People act like AI/robotics will render the human race obsolete when these gassed-up algos can't even return a shopping cart. Not buying it.
It's because it's not a natural adoption. This is being thrust onto us by the elite so it's a bit janky. True "ages" caused by technological invention/innovation happen naturally. This isn't it. There will be a fallout from all of this somewhere down the line.
No we're out of "AI is terrifying" and into "tech CEOs are begging people to use AI so their stock bubbles and fake orders don't pop"
I think it comes from awareness levels, I've been following this train wreck in slow motion. It did 'pop up' but I was also anticipating it, from the breadcrumbs I could see the loaf..
AI is a bubble just like the .com bubble.
It's just a tool, same as a tractor - certainly not an "existential threat."
It's only an existential threat to the people who have jobs that will be dramatically downsized with AI implementation, but they just need to pivot instead of pushing back against the inevitable. Imagine how many jobs the calculator and computer got rid of. Society survived. Or, like you mentioned, the tractor.
No, I was paying attention to the AI space pretty closely since 2015 - 2016 ish. The progress is really straightforward and mostly predictable if you're familiar. Chat GPT caught a lot of people off guard, but GPT-2 had been creating surreal somewhat comprehensible stories for a while. The big breakthroughs of getting the AI to go the other way and generate generalized output had predictable consequences, and rapid development happened in the space that opened up without software to fill it. Things iterated rapidly, frameworks were created and discarded rapidly as we made quick efficiency improvements and picked off low hanging fruit.
'AI Winter' ends, AI Spring begins and rapid progress is made in the structural level. Now we begin to enter an AI Summer where we have to figure out how to convert all these gains into something productive.
You make some really good points.
IMHO, AI gains largely follow gains in computing capacity. The more computer power we get, the more powerful AI can be. If--or when--we hit the point that AI is able to start truly writing creative and novel algorithms to extend AI programming, that's when things get really interesting or scary.
Most of the AI techniques that are in common usage today have been basically been the result of decades of linear progress in AI sciences.
Perceptrons go back to the 1950s!!! The foundational ideas of neural network computing go back a decade or two before.
Capacity and Framework. They alternate. This time was a framework bottleneck that was broken by the development of transformers.
Now we find capacity lagging which is why Computer hardware has spiked.
"Novel" is a word with shifting meaning. AI is always the domain of the novel. In 1997 Deep Blue defeating Kasparov was cutting edge AI. Now it's just a computer chess algorithm.
The bar for "truely creative" is already rising, and is reaching the point where we will start to have to dismiss a large number of humans as incapable of creativity.
Not that what you're saying is incorrect, this is just a domain where definitions shift as State of the Art does, and you need to pay attention to how if you want an accurate perspective.
I know that, and you know that. But good luck getting the normies to admit that. It punches a lot of holes it what the common culture believes, or is at least taught, so admitting it is inconvenient enough to be painful on a psychic level for them.
I recently read about a billion-dollar Ai playing chess against a TRS-80 (or something from that era) chess program. Ai lost every match, it never learned anything.
3d printers (and the like, cnc) are the real threat, and that's what they're going after while we are all distracted.
At this point I don't think it is "about AI"... more that the tech has been hyped up so much that for corporations and governments, it has become the next convenient excuse to enshittify the world even more.
Just idea of AI's potential is good enough reason to ruin lives and disrupt what has worked for so long.
It started with chatbot, a rudimentary language learning model that idiots used for memes, now the same idiots are vehemently against what it has expectedly evolved to.
If it weren't for AI and retards this site would have even less content
I knew something big happened as soon Dall-E come out. I'm not saying I didn't laugh at the funny pictures and ridiculous fails too, but I knew it would be a big deal. Maybe it's because I understand the limits of conventional software a little better than the average person. They taught a computer to do something that seemed impossible. Whether it was useful or not, I could tell it wasn't just a gimmick, it was a breakthrough.
So I guess that's where I'd put the start of the AI age. To be clear I'm not claiming I knew where we'd be in 5 years (or else I'd have brought a whole lot of Nvidia stock...) but I couldn't say anything that happened since then came as a surprise exactly either.