"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.
Jacob Coxon is a lying AI-hyper. He shouldn't be taken seriously, he is a LLM-cultist who believes LLMs are close to achieving AGI, and his vague stories about LLM apocalypse are intended to boost the companies in question.
The fact that this guy became a mainstream media darling when it comes to LLMs shows perfectly well how incapable they are of reporting on the subject with any kind of independent and critical approach.
I think this viewpoint is purposely being pushed to make actual rational anti-AI people also seem ridiculous
Who? Oh, that climate denier guy? Sorry, can't be bothered.
“it’s literally 2020 already. look at climate change headlines from the 1970s then look around. nothing is happening, use your eyes,” the account wrote in March 2022.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/old-tweets-appear-anthropic-employee-quit
Wow, thanks for bringing this up, that guy really is a piece of shit.
I watched it yesterday and interesting is the appropriate word. The interviewee is a young guy, 28, which Jon brought up at the start of their talk. Jacob just shrugged his shoulders. After watching Jon for so many years, I thought it was an oddly unprofessional start, and since Jacob didn't take the bait, it fell flat.
The interview goes on, with Jon poking the well-known, glaring holes in the AI debate, with Jacob nodding along. It seems like they agree. Then Jon mentions the future ramifications of AI. Jacob disagrees, starts repeating the utopian rhetoric. Jon picks at him to get some inroads into a debate. Jacob agrees, not giving up his position of a utopian outcome, but always circling back to the probable dangers.
I like that Jacob was on and that Jon did the interview. This was a tough one, because Jacob exists in a different world than Jon, and as much as he tried, he could not pull Jacob out of it.
Jacob understands there is great danger in the way AI is being developed. He has enough sense to know his employers were reckless and possibly homicidal. What he doesn't understand is that this technology isn't inevitable. He's seen the back end, he understands the leaps and bounds LLMs have made, but he didn't live through the "inevitably" of nuclear war, the "inevitably" of every computer going dark on Y2K. Even video calls were seen as the future norm in Sci-fi movies, but with all this capability, we'd rather text.
I like that they gave the interview time to breathe. It might not have been the most engaging TV, but I appreciated its awkwardness. Jacob is a tech-bro. We don't often get a journalist on Jon's level to give him the what-for. Watch it while you can.
I swear to god people like Jacob only exist as part of the AI hype cycle. They're here to tell us how dangerous it is, and yet how utopian it will be, and yet it'll kill us all if we aren't careful, and yet it's inevitable! We hear the same rhetoric from the AI companies themselves, as if they want to depict AI as some phenomenon that is self-perpetuating to the point of being completely out of anyone's control.
The sad truth is that all of the "leaps and bounds" that AI have made in the last few years have very little to do with our understanding of computer science, and everything to do with just how brazenly big tech corporations are acting by ignoring intellectual property, scraping every piece of data that they can get their hands on, and using it all to train their AI. It is the silicon valley social media company textbook behavior of "move fast and break things", and they have proven (both in their actions and in actual courtrooms) that they are perfectly happy to bend and break the law in hopes of disrupting the market.
The entire generative AI industry would disappear in an instant if the courts explicitly forbid them from exploiting everybody's labor, and we all (be it you and me, the judges, or the AI companies themselves) know it.
it's embarrassing
it's not like I didn't think we were all fucked before. but damn