But for that brief moment, we all got to laugh at it because it said to put glue on pizza.
All worth it!
The problem isn't the rise of "AI" but more so how we're using it.
If a company wants to create a machine learning model that analyzes metrics on an automated production line and spits out parameters to improve the efficiency of their equipment, that's a great use of the technology. We don't need a LLM to produce a useless summary of what it thinks is a question when all I want is a page of search results.
AI is a tool. what matters is what humans do with the tool, not the tool itself
I can't wait for the AI bubble to burst
So 2+2 = boobs?
2+2 = ancap hidden folder
Oh if my math class was like that...
Just turn the calculator upside down…
Is not the entire picture, we are destroying our planet to generate bad art, fake tities and search a little bit faster but with the same chance of being entirely wrong as just googleing it.
Is it actually a little bit faster though?
Well, it's definitely more wrong , so there's that.
This is a strawman argument. AI is a tool. Like any tool, it's used for negative things and positive things. Focusing on just the negative is disingenuous at best. And focusing on AI's climate impact while completely ignoring the big picture is asinine (the oil industry knew they were the primary cause of climate change more than 60 years ago).
AI has many positive use-cases yet they are completely ignored by people who lack logic and rationality.
AI is helping physicists speed up experiments into supernovae to better understand the universe.
AI is helping doctors to expedite cancer screening rates.
AI is powering robots that can do the dishes.
AI is also helping to catch illegal fishing, tackle human trafficking, and track diseases.
Yes, ai is a tool. And the person in the screenshot is criticizing a generative gpt-like and midjorney-like ai, which has a massive impact on the climate and almost no useful results.
In your examples, as I can see, they always train their own model (supernovae research, illegal fishing) or heavily customize it and use it in close conjunction with people (cancer screenings).
And so I think we talking about two different things, so I want to clarify:
ai as in neural-network algorithm that can digest massive amounts of data and give meaningful results - absolutely is useful and, I think, the more the time will pass (and more grifters move on to other fields) the more actual useful niches and cases would be solved with neural-nets.
But, ai as in we-gonna-shove-this-bot-down-your-throut gpt-like bots trained on all the data from all the internet (mostly reddit) that struggle with basic questions, hallucinate glue on pizza, generate 6-fingered hands and are close to useless in any use-case are absolutely abismal and not worth it to ruin our climate for.
Obviously by AI they mean stuff like ChatGPT. An energy intensive toy where the goal is to get it into the hands of as many paying customers as possible. And you're doing free PR for them by associating it with useful small scale research projects. I don't think most researchers will want to associate their projects with AI now that the term has been poisoned, though they might have to because many bigwigs have been sucked into the hype. The term AI has basically existed nebulously since the beginning of computing, so whether we call one thing or another AI is basically personal taste. Companies like OpenAI have successfully attached their product to the term and have created the strongest association, so ultimately if you say AI in a contemporary context a lot of people are hearing GPT-like.
Yeah, but it doesn't really help that this is a community "Fuck AI" made as "A place for all those who loathe machine-learning...". It's like saying "I loathe Dijsktra's algorithm". The term machine learning has been used since at least the 50's and it involves a lot of elegant mathematics which all essentially just try to perform optimizations of various functions in various ways. And yet, at least in places I'm exposed to, people constantly present any instance of machine learning as useless, morally wrong, theft, ineffective compared to "traditional methods" and so on, to the point where I feel uneasy telling people that I'm doing research in that area, since there's so much hate towards the entire field, not just LLMs. It might be because of them, sure, but in my experience, the popular hating of AI is not limited to ChatGPT, corporations and the like.
It is a sad thing to see. The education system especially here in the US has really failed many people. I was always super curious and excited about machine intelligence from a young age. I was born in the mid 90's. I've been dreaming about automation myself out of work so I could create and do what I love and spend more time with the people I love, and just explore and learn and grow. As a kid I noticed two things that made adults miserable:
I went to school for CS and eventually had to drop because of personal life and mental health struggles, but I'm still interested in joining the field and open source. People sometimes make me feel really sad, and misunderstood, plus discourages me from even bothering because they're so negative. I know how we got here, but it's sad it's this predictable a reaction.
By 2014-2015 I was watching a lot of machine learning videos on YouTube, playing with style GANs etc. The fact a computer could even "apply a style" and keep the image coherent was just endlessly fascinating and it made for a lot of cool photos etc. Watching AlphaGo beat a world champion in Go using Q-learning techniques and self-play was incredible. I just love it. I love future tech and I think we can have social and economic equity and much less wealth and income inequality with all this.
A lot of people don't realize labor adds a lot to the cost of what they buy and there are only so many workers. Having even today's LLMs fully implemented and realized as agents (this is very quickly coming about) things will slowly get cheaper and better, then likely more rapidly. Software development will be cheaper. Engineers, game designers and artists will bring to life incredible things that we haven't thought up yet, and will likely use these tools/entities to enhance their workflows. Yes there will be less artist grunt work, and there will be affects on jobs. It's just not going to stop anyone from doing what they love however they like to do it. It's so odd to me.
Cheers and keep your head up. If we get this right I think people will change their tune, but probably not until they see economic and quality of life improvements. Though, I'd say machine learning and machine intelligence has added a great deal of value and opportunity in my life. I wish everyone a good future regardless of how your feel about this. I just hope people who aren't in the field or weren't enthusiastic before will at least remember there are a lot of real, kind, and extremely intelligent people working really hard on this stuff, and truly believe they can make a substantial positive impact. We should be more trusting and open. It's really hard to do it, we can get burned, but most people want decent things for most others despite disagreement and don't strife. We've made it this far. Let's go to the stars 🤠
but those are the cool interesting research related AIs, not the venture capital hype LLMs that will gift us AGI any day now with just a bit more training data/compute.
I thought the statement was more about how much energy it costs to run AI while the planet burns.
If all fossil fuel power plants were converted to nuclear then tech power consumption wouldn't even matter. Again, it was the oil industry that railroaded nuclear power as being unsafe.
If we had infinite money plus infinite people with the required skills to design and build nuclear power plants plus a magical method to build nuclear reactors in 2 months (or even instantly !) plus managed to convince the public opinion that nuclear energy is actually fine, then the climate crisis would be only partially solved ! Hurray ! (This doesn't in and of itself solve food production & consumption, transportation and other sources of land use change emissions, we'd need a whole lot more work or on many other subjects)
In more serious terms (Net Zero research), nuclear isn't perfect nor is it the be all and end all solution, but it IS globally a part of the solution to generate cleaner electricity and cutting emissions. However, since we don't have all the magical things I was listing earlier, its development encounters many roadblocks and it turns out that wind and solar are extremely well scalable, integrates pretty well into grids as long as we're willing to develop the (mostly known) solutions to counter their variability (several exemples of high integration rates in different settings). The issue is that all of this (both nuclear and renewables) demands a lot of investment in terms of money, of people with the required skill sets and educating the public opinion that this is needed and desirable. And that's a MASSIVE challenge.
Which is why, to get to the point, the enormous electricity use of AI is actually a problem because its additional power consumption is keeping fossil power plants running or making them run more when emissions should be declining due to advancements in low carbon electricity production (mostly renewables). In general, it makes reaching Net Zero goals harder.
But these are other applications of AI. I think he meant LLMS. That would be like saying "fitting functions has many other applications and can be used for good".
And focusing on AI's climate impact while completely ignoring the big picture is asinine
immediately goes to whataboutism and chooses big oil as an example. Pure gold.
If you're complaining about climate impact, looking at the big picture isn't whataboutism. It's the biggest part of the dataset which is important for anyone who actually cares about the issue.
You're complaining about a single cow fart, then when someone points out there are thousands of cars with greater emissions - you cry whataboutism. It's clear you just want to have a knee-jerk reaction without rationally looking at the problem.
"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.
