this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
754 points (97.5% liked)

Technology

58814 readers
4667 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 hour ago
[–] Veneroso@lemmy.world 7 points 2 hours ago

Please please please please please please please please

[–] MooseTheDog@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago

People look at the advertising for this shit (and future tech-bro shit) and wonder, "who is this for"? Remember E.L.O.N. Exaggerated Lies Overlooked Narratives

Think of every manager and boss you've ever had. They don't think, they just do. Salesmen convince them using issues that don't exist, to sell solutions that don't really work, to people that don't understand how to use them. Repeat over 70 years and you have the modern American education system.

Now things are different. Money is scarce, things are getting tight. Tech-Bros have changed from a mildly infuriating strategy, to a downright abusive one. These simple minded managers think everything is under attack, and the only solution is what they already have, but heavily monetized and completely unusable.

[–] sirico@feddit.uk 44 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Always invest in the spades never the gold mine

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 11 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I went to a AI conference and you can just sense how bogus it all feels. Like "Our patent pending AI system references billions of crowd-sourced data points to identify what you are craving for breakfast! Never think about breakfast again!"

And as a engineer speaking with other engineers, we all collectively shrug and just keep taking the money. I'll AI your toaster for enough money IDGAF.

[–] weew@lemmy.ca 16 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

That's why Nvidia is making bank right now

[–] whoisearth@lemmy.ca 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

And AMD won the console wars

[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

AMD won because it has x86 CPUs and GPUs.

[–] Veneroso@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Playing the long game.

Meanwhile... At the Intel board meeting..... Qualcomm: (Unzips fly, unfurls testicles, placing them on the table for all to see) "I want to buy Intel".

[–] Hackworth@lemmy.world -2 points 1 hour ago

To be clear, it'll be 10-30 years before AI displaces all human jobs.

[–] weew@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

Yeah, but the 0.1% remaining will take over the world.

Does anyone remember the era when there were a million search engines? Google didn't spawn alone.

Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.

People are trying to vindicate their dislike of AI, pointing to trends like this as if it were supporting evidence. But saying "AI is going to be a big flop because 99% of companies today will end up failing" is as stupid as saying "online shopping will never work because 99% of online stores will close by the year 2010"

[–] dan@upvote.au 8 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

Same with Amazon. You think nobody else tried to make an online store in the 90s? Lol.

Fun fact: the first online store still exists. It's Pizza Hut. They launched an experiment for online ordering in 1994. The first company to ever sell a product on the web.

[–] wavebeam@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Yum brands has always been at the forefront of using tech to sell fast food. This was true then and is true now. Taco Bell has pioneered kiosks and in-app ordering as well as KDS in QSR environments.

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

That is a fun fact!

[–] Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I doubt anyone is downplaying that. People are just discussing how all companies are pushing A.I into products that don't need it. Idk about you but I'm tired seeing A.I advertised as a feature on every app/site when it's just a gpt wrapper.

[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

The rot has even spread into hardware. No one wants die space wasted on a stupid NPU with with less than 1/1000 of the computing power their GPU has and can't be used for anything other than local LLMs which FTI very few people use and those that do tend to have powerful Nvidia GPUs.

[–] Tja@programming.dev -4 points 2 hours ago

Wrong audience for this message. Most on lemmy are still running with their fingers in their ears yelling la-la-la really loud.

[–] fluxion@lemmy.world 15 points 7 hours ago

AI companies specializing in spreading bullshit all across the internet have a bright future however

[–] bluewing@lemm.ee 45 points 10 hours ago

No shit.

Like all new technologies, there is a time when bunches of companies jump on the band wagon to get in on the action. You can see it all throughout the history of the industrial revolution.

They mostly know that there will come a great weeding out of those that can't handle the technology or just fail from poor management. But they are betting they will be among the 1% that wins the race and remain to dominate the market.

The rest will just bide their time until the next Big Thing comes along. And the process starts over again.

[–] TehWorld@lemmy.world 10 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

So, I have clients that are actively using AI on a daily basis and LOVE it. It is however a very narrow subset. Also, I’m pretty sure that a LARGE amount of Dollars are currently being spent on AI generated political articles.

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 10 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The web didn't die after the dot com bubble burst. The AI bubble will burst, but a smaller niche of companies will continue to exist.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

The dot com crash was because tech companies were massively overvalued and didn't have a proper business plan or profit. I definitely see some similarities with the AI bubble, especially with the large unprofitable companies like OpenAI. OpenAI isn't estimated to become profitable until 2029, and there's a lot of unknowns between now and then (e.g. maybe they'll be forced to license content they use for training).

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 42 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, but thanks to the glory of corporateworld, all the people involved in making these decisions will be in a higher position at a different company by the time the consequences come knocking.

You definitely will not regret spending billions of dollars on GPUs and electricity bills.

[–] xenoclast@lemmy.world 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 hours ago

This hurts so much. Being in the tech industry, I see it everywhere.

[–] GeneralInterest@lemmy.world 41 points 12 hours ago (7 children)

Maybe it's like the dotcom bubble: there is genuinely useful tech that has recently emerged, but too many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon.

LLMs do seem genuinely useful to me, but of course they have limitations.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 12 points 9 hours ago (15 children)

We need to stop viewing it as artificial intelligence. The parts that are worth money are just more advanced versions of machine learning.

Being able to assimilate a few dozen textbooks and pass a bar exam is a neat parlor trick, but it is still just a parlor trick.

Unfortunately probably the biggest thing to come out of it will be the marketing aspect. If they spend enough money to train small models on our wants and likes it will give them tremendous amounts of return.

The key to using it in a financially successful manner is finding problems that fit the bill. Training costs are fairly high, quality content generation is also rather expensive. There are sticky problems around training it from non-free data. Whatever you're going to use it for either needs to have a significant enough advantage to make the cost of training /data worth it.

I still think we're eventually going to see education rise. The existing tools for small content generation adobe's use of it to fill in small areas is leaps and bounds better than the old content aware patches. We've been using it for ages for speech recognition and speech generation. From there it's relatively good at helper roles. Minor application development, copy editing, maybe some VFX generation eventually. Things where you still need a talented individual to oversee it but it can help lessen the workload.

There are lots of places where it's being used where I think it's a particularly poor fit. AI help desk chatbots, IVR scenarios, It says brain dead as the original phone trees and flow charts that we've been following for decades.

[–] SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Machine learning is AI. I think the term you're looking for is general artificial intelligence, and no one is claiming LLMs fall under that label.

load more comments (14 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›