I'm not an american but a speech like this would possibly earn him a vote from me if I were.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
360 points (98.9% liked)
Fuck AI
5157 readers
1004 users here now
"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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I am an American, I did vote for him (2016 primaries), and it’s still maddening how hard this man was snubbed.
That time the election actually was rigged (and also in 2000)
Because the Democratic Party had already decided that it was Hillary’s “turn” to be president.
I do not agree with this idea; merely explaining how I feel things happened.
It's sad, but for a lot of people over here this is something they would laugh at and get angry over.
They want to be no longer dependent on the human workforce.
When the climate gets so bad that they have to enter their luxurious bunkers, they want robot butler and robot guards.
That's because when it gets that bad, even the dumbest wage slave might notice that we are more then them.
They don't want to pay us. On top of stealing the cumulative knowledge of all humanity and reselling it for profit.
While I fully agree with him politically on this issue.
Anyone else doubts all these claims?
Before the dot com bubble popped, you could do online banking, send emails, buy stuff online and order pizza on a website. The speed was just very slow.
Today, the only applications of AI are either really evil (surveillance tech) or just sub par compared to the traditional method.
Email was superior to mail for most cases, and AI summery, art or code is pretty much always inferior to the human (or even algorithmic) version.
IMO this is far closer to crypto, which didn’t go away but hasn’t revolutionized shit except scams.
I’m guessing AI will just revolutionize surveillance, can’t see it do anything else “better”.
Edit: some great responses but I would like to clarify, I get how ML can make somethings better, the issue is that’s it’s incremental, whereas the internet was orders of magnitude. What is the ML equivalent of this (sorry to use Gates):
AI has actually made plenty of things easier and is not evil. The problem is AI is so many different things but most people don't talk about those as different. LLMs are the problem and a type of AI, but they aren't the only AI.
AI (in the non llm form) is used in medical research, material science, chemistry, and more and has been for several years (though has exploded recently alongside LLMs).
AI as a whole is very much on the level of usefulness of an engine or the Internet. LLMs can go die in a fire.
However LLM is the one really driving the datacenter and investment. Things like machine vision are generally not controversial, except for surveillance.
Most applications of AI/ML don't need nearly the size of processing they're throwing into these data centers.
If I put on my crazy hat, I'm actually suspicious of the purpose of these massive data centers for LLMs. In no way does any of this reach the singularity. All it does is counterfeit the thinking process by having all the information shoved into the model. I say counterfeit because people still believe they do think, and that's not how any AI model works.
AI as a whole is very much on the level of usefulness of an engine or the Internet.
Right so that’s what I’m kind of challenging here. What can machine learning do today that we couldn’t do without it.
I fully understand how you could have weather prediction models that might outperform traditional algorithms, but it would need waaay more power and the gain is a small increment instead of a difference of magnitude.
Remember those pictures in PC magazines from the 90s that showed how much data can be stored in a single CD vs paper? What’s the ML equivalent of that?
I'll just focus down on one example, but I've seen this amount of success with non llm AI elsewhere. Protein folding. I'm not directly in the space but my understanding from friends who are researchers is this has solved massive problems for them. Cutting years of time down to potentially days (it's still in early adoption so not fully proven. But I trust their judgement).
Alphafold uses an attention network to determine potential fold patterns and fairly well. This let's them cut research time and materials as they can very quickly actually predict likely outcomes without having to directly test things in an experimental environment. (Where they go from there I get lost, I've helped friends write script to sort data so my knowledge of this area ends at the computer phase)
Yes you can argue we technically could do it manually before AI,, but ultimately you could say that about most any tool. The cotton gin didn't do anything we couldn't do before, but it sure changed things with it's speed and utility.
That’s great to hear.
But genome and protein sequencing has been getting easier for the last few decades for a number of reasons. While it sounds like ML is contributing positively, idk if I would call this revolutionary.
Is there anything new the average person has access to today that they didn’t have before?
IMO revolutions are like: I have a computer in my pocket that has thousands of times more power than the best ones a few decades ago.
While I would love to see a revolution in medical science, I have yet to see it (maybe I’m just uninformed). We are getting close to designer babies but I would argue that’s more like social media than the internet in terms of benefits to society.
I think your definition of revolutionary tech and mine are just fundamentally different here so I don't think I can point you at what you want.
That’s fair.
I fully agree that ML can help in niche ways but yeah I would just say we have another tool in the toolbox not that we are dead set on huge changes in the coming years.
Also, industrial processing. Predictive maintenance on equipment.
It is likely to be the key needed to make fusion power possible.
While I believe some uses of LLMs are valid, I agree that the emphasis on them is all wrong.
Predictive maintenance on equipment is usually not AI. They're basic heuristic algorithms.
I only know PID and such so I can't speak on fusion system control, lol.
"AI" or machine learning does great things but making art and video is very resource intensive and does not further humanity. I went to super compute this year and went to a talk about using machine learning/AI for tsunami detection, learning about past ones to get alerts out sooner. Having access to a big data center that can train the models over weeks instead of months with the amount date they were ingesting has allowed them to quickly refine their model.
went to super compute this year and went to a talk about using machine learning/AI for tsunami detection
Thanks for the example.
So although I do agree this is a good thing, I wouldn’t call it revolutionary. If a tsunami is predicted, knowing a day or two earlier isn’t going to revolutionize response, it would help but it’s not in the same scale as being able to give live updates via the internet vs the speed or a newspaper.
If a tsunami is predicted, knowing a day or two earlier isn’t going to revolutionize response
From the article:
Early warning systems also rely on rapid communication to the public, including mass alerts communicated by mobile phone, coordination by the relevant authorities across borders, clear advice, and advance evacuation plans and occasional alarm tests or drills.
How do we know that the improvements isn’t from better communication instead of better prediction systems?
I might have missed it but the article doesn’t talk about how many lives saved can be attributed to AI, just that tsunami response has gotten better.
Predictive models and machine learning is interesting, chatbots are complete waste of resources tho.
If google search just got as good as it used to be that would impact my life more.
Is that supposed to be that all those sheets of paper fit on that once CD?
How is this guy always right on every issue?
The problem with Bernie, is he's just unfortunately about 30 years ahead of his time. He's universally almost always right (IMO), but you also can't completely expect a system to flip itself on its head overnight. He's doing the important work, and laying important foundations. The crappy part is, he's probably not going to be around for the time it actually starts to take effect.
I mean afaik Bernie's original fight was for racial equality. IMO this an extension of that. He's not ideologically driven, he's addressing the same poverty from back then that still exists today. The solutions just happen to be socialist.
He lost me at "the most transformative technologies in the history of humanity".
I get it, (some) AI tools can be useful, but a printing press or electricity they are not.
You missed the "AI and robotics" part. He probably shouldn't've conflated the two though.
Nothing about the recent trend of enshitification indicates that billionaires won't replace us all with inept but marginally more profitable GPT-6 clankers. Or maybe they'll strap us to VR headsets like in those faux demos and bring back remote work in the worst way possible.
But forget replacing human jobs. AI robots could mine asteroids and completely disrupt the precious metals market. The potential payout for winning the AI race is beyond fiscal description.
This the type of thing that gets us from < Type 1 to Type 2 on the kardoshev scale.
no, mining precious metals using space bots would just collapse the markets for those precious metals lol
That is what I said. Whomever monopolizes space mining won't be selling that shit on the market. They'll be building more robots and computer chips and in general dominating all the other markets.
Y'all gotta stop thinking like normal ass humans and start thinking like sociopathic supervillans.
cool
... and senate voted to force datacenters on everyone today
Were running out of time for UBI. The powerful will prefer genociding the slave class rather than redistribute power.
Why tf did he quote Musk saying stupid shit?
Oh, right...
Guilty as charged. I talk to my AI too much other than this world. Oh I see I know it’s Twitter and stuff. It’s just hate and yeah the workforce kind of forced us into this place. You listen to a robotic speech. I think if we’d be kinder we wouldn’t have to rely on the technology.