this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I have a theory about this.
The people who had both genius and work ethic made magic. That was the GPT, Dall-E, AlphaGo generation of AI. You can't make magic because you want to have a good career and you did some seminars. You have to do it because you have it burning inside you, and you're in a community of people who all have that type of vision, and all pulling in the same direction you can make things that are impossible before you did them.
(Not that I'm saying AI itself is necessarily a good thing, certainly not in its present trajectory. I'm just saying that getting the tech from recognizing digits to ChatGPT was pretty fucking impressive.)
Now probably about 90% of the people in the field are there because it's a good career. And, the people giving them their marching orders day-to-day are greedy idiots. You just can't make magic that way. All you can do is follow the road that's been laid down. The industry is just throwing orders of magnitude more electricity, money, and engineer time at these still-impossible remaining problems and hoping that'll get them suddenly solved.
Remember when ChatGPT was programmed by competent and humble people (who are now, a lot of them, fired because they fought with Sam Altman), and so it kept emphasizing to people that it was not an AI (meaning an AGI), just a language model? They felt like that was important for people to understand (not that it did any good). Anyway, those days are gone, and with them, the forward progress that people like that can make.
Why? Because we're trying to make magic with career people. It doesn't work that way, never has. It's like trying to start a fire with a bunch of rocks. Rocks are fine. Fire is fine, if a little bit dangerous. But they are not interchangeable.
GPT, DALL-E and AlphaGo are not the type of magic born from passion. They are the type of magic born by years of researchers doing the mostly boring work of science. Those are career people. They are just career researchers.
The current public AI scene is what happens when commercial interests take over. They can push the current state of the art to its limit, but aren't going to make any fundamental breakthroughs.
People mostly only accept the extremely shitty working conditions of the research industry if they have at least one of a lot of passion, extreme egomania, or independent wealth. Preferably more than one. Most of the people doing a research career do at least start out with a lot of passion.
Yeah. If you talked to any of these people toiling away in obscurity, they would never in a million years describe their work as boring. To an outsider, maybe.
its was 85% boring work and 15% interesting work. You cant just ignore the foundational work and that stuff doesnt just handle itself.
I can confirm.
Source: I lack passion (for research topics), and I lack independent wealth, and I direct my egomania in healthier directions than research.
I'll get into research when it pays better (likely never).
Exactly, they are a breakthrough built on top of decades of steadily paced progress. Those decades are conveniently ignored by the commercial interests, who like to act as if those once in a decade breakthroughs are actually the normal pace of research at their company, and the next one is right around the corner.
Nor do they remember the previous AI boom of the 90's and 2000's, where the likes of Lernout & Hauspie were also promising the world. In that case they went bankrupt and executives were convicted of fraud, because they resorted to "creative" accounting to paper over solvency issues.