Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As a fervent AI enthusiast, I disagree.
…I’d say it’s 97% hype and marketing.
It’s crazy how much fud is flying around, and legitimately buries good open research. It’s also crazy what these giant corporations are saying what they’re going to. TSMC’s allegedly calling Sam Altman a podcast bro is spot on, and I’d add “manipulative vampire” to that.
Talk to any long-time resident of localllama and similar “local” AI communities who actually dig into this stuff, and you’ll find lots of healthy skepticism, not the crypto-like AI bros like you find on linkedin, twitter and such and blot everything out.
TSMC are probably making more money than anyone in this goldrush by selling the shovels and picks, so if that’s their opinion, I feel people should listen…
There’s little in the AI business plan other than hurling money at it and hoping job losses ensue.
TSMC doesn’t really have official opinions, they take silicon orders for money and shrug happily. Being neutral is good for business.
Altman’s scheme is just a whole other level of crazy though.
Seriously, I’d love to be enthusiastic about it because it’s genuinely cool what you can do with math.
But the lies that are shoved in our faces are just so fucking much and so fucking egregious that it’s pretty much impossible.
And on top of that LLMs are hugely overshadowing actual interesting approaches for funding.
I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:
A set of securities fraud charges.
8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.
He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?
So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.
“When you’re rich, they let you do it.”
I really want to like AI, I’d love to have an intelligent AI assistant or something, but I just struggle to find any uses for it outside of some really niche cases or for basic brainstorming tasks. Otherwise, it just feels like alot of work for very little benefit or results that I can’t even trust or use.
I dunno about that.
I keep Qwen 32B loaded on my desktop pretty much whenever its on, as an (unreliable) assistant to analyze or parse big texts, to do quick chores, to bounce ideas off of or even as a offline replacement for google translate (though I specifically use aya 32B for that)
Attractive. You got some pretty solid specs?
Rue the day I cheaped out on RAM. soldered RAMmmm
Soldered is better! It’s usually faster.
But TBH the only thing that really matters his “how much VRAM do you have,” and Qwen 32B slots in at 24GB, or maybe 16GB if the GPU is totally empty and you tune your quantization carefully.
I receive alerts when people are outside my house, using security cameras, Blue Iris, CodeProject AI, Node-RED and Home Assistant, using a Google Coral for local AI. That’s a good use case for AI.
I’ve been curious about google coral, but their memory is so tiny I’m not sure what kinds of models you can run on them
A lot of people use them for the use case I described (object detection for security cameras), using either Blue Iris or Frigate. They work pretty well for that use case.
Wake word detection is a good use case too (eg if you’re making your own smart assistant).
The Coral site lists a few use cases.
The saddest part is, this is going to cause yet another AI winter. The first few ones were caused by genuine over-enthusiasm but this one is purely fuelled by greed.
The AI ecosystem is flooded, we need a good bubble pop to slow down the massive waste of resources that our current info-remix-based-on-what-you-will-likely-react-positively-to shit-tier AI represents.
Agreed that’s why it’s so dangerous. These tech bros are going to do damage with their shitty products. It seems like it’s Altman’s goal, honestly.
He wants money/power, and he is getting it. The rest of the AI field will forever be haunted by his greed.
Ya, it’s like machine learning but better. That’s about it IMO.
I mean… it is machine learning.
It’s also neural networks, and probably some other CS structures.
AI is a category, and even specific implementations tend to use multiple techniques.
Well there is a very specific architecture “rut” the LLMs people use have fallen into, and even small attempts to break out (like with Jamba) don’t seem to get much interest, unfortunately.
That’s like saying breathing is like turning oxygen into carbon dioxide but better…
It is. It’s that plus an important process for living organisms rather than just burning something.
After getting my head around the basics of the way LLMs work I thought “people rely on this for information?”, the model seems ok for tasks like summarisation though
I don’t love it for summarization. If I read a summary, my takeaway may be inaccurate.
Brainstorming is incredible. And revision suggestions. And drafting tedious responses, reformatting, parsing.
In all cases, nothing gets attributed to me unless I read every word and am in a position to verify the output. And I internalize nothing directly, besides philosophy or something. Sure can be an amazing starting point especially compared to a blank page.
It’s good for coding if you train it on your own code base. Not for very complex code, but it’s great for common patterns and straightforward questions specific to your code base (eg “how do I load a user’s most recent order given their email address?”)
It’s wild when you only know how to use SELECT in SQL, but after a dollar worth of prompting and 10 minutes of your time, you can have a significantly complex query you end up using multiple times a week.
the model seems ok for tasks like summarisation though
That and retrieval and the business use cases so far, but even then only if the results can be wrong somewhat frequently.
It’s selling the future, but nobody knows if we can actually get there
It’s selling an anticompetitive dystopia. It’s selling a Facebook monopoly vs selling the Fediverse.
We dont need 7 trillion dollars of datacenters burning the Earth, we need collaborative, open source innovation.
The first part is true … no one cares about the second part of your statement.
TSMC’s allegedly calling Sam Altman a ‘podcast bro’ is spot on, and I’d add “manipulative vampire” to that.
What’s the source for that? It sounds hilarious
web.archive.org/…/openai-plan-electricity.html
When Mr. Altman visited TSMC’s headquarters in Taiwan shortly after he started his fund-raising effort, he told its executives that it would take $7 trillion and many years to build 36 semiconductor plants and additional data centers to fulfill his vision, two people briefed on the conversation said. It was his first visit to one of the multibillion-dollar plants.
TSMC’s executives found the idea so absurd that they took to calling Mr. Altman a “podcasting bro,” one of these people said. Adding just a few more chip-making plants, much less 36, was incredibly risky because of the money involved.
Yep the current iteration is. But should we cross the threshold to full AGI… that’s either gonna be awesome or world ending. Not sure which.
Current LLMs cannot be AGI, no matter how big they are. The architecture just isn’t right.
You’re absolutely right. LLMs are good at faking language and sometimes not even great at that. Not sure why I got downvoted but oh well. But AGI will be game changing if it happens.
Based on what I’ve witnessed so far, people will play with their AGI units for a bit and then put them down to continue scrolling memes.
Which means it is neither awesome, nor world-ending, but just boring/business as usual.
There are people way smarter than me that claim it will be a threshold and would likely grow exponentially after it’s crossed. I guess we won’t know for sure until it happens. I do agree most people get bored easily but if this thing is possible to think for itself without interaction it won’t matter if the humans get bored.
I know nothing about anything, but I unfoundedly believe we’re still very far away from the computing power required for that. I think we still underestimate the power of biological brains.
Very likely. But 4 years ago I would have said we weren’t close to what these LLMs can do now so who knows.
What makes you think there’s a threshold?
falkerie71@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
For real. Being a software engineer with basic knowledge in ML, I’m just sick of companies from every industry being so desperate to cling onto the hype train they’re willing to label anything with AI, even if it has little or nothing to do with it, just to boost their stock value. I would be so uncomfortable being an employee having to do this.
Mikelius@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For sure, it seems like 90% of ai startups are nothing more than front end wrappers for a gpt instance.
dan@upvote.au 2 weeks ago
They’re all built on top of OpenAI which is very unprofitable at the moment. Feels like the whole industry is built on a shaky foundation.
I guess the successful AI startups will eventually transition to self-hosted models like Llama, if they survive that long.
Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 2 weeks ago
Most projects I’ve been in contact with are very aware of that fact. That’s why telemetry is so big right now. Everybody is building datasets in the hopes of fine tuning smaller, cheaper models once they have enough good quality data.
Badland9085@lemm.ee [bot] 2 weeks ago
As someone who was working really hard trying to get my company to be able use some classical ML (with very limited amounts of data), with some knowledge on how AI works, and just generally want to do some cool math stuff at work, being asked incessantly to shove AI into any problem that our execs think are “good sells” and be pressured to think about how we can “use AI” was a terrible feel. They now think my work is insufficient and has been tightening the noose on my team.
falkerie71@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
This. Exactly.