Comment on What Will Remain for People to Do? The future of labor in a world with increasingly productive AI.
Telorand@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Not going to read most of this paper, because it reads like a freshman thesis, and it fundamentally oversells or misunderstands the existing limits on AI.
In closing, I consider the limits to these limits as AI gradually, but relentlessly, becomes ever-more capable.
The AI technofacists building these systems have explicitly said they’ve hit a wall. They’re having to invest in their own power plants just to run these models. They have scores of racks of GPUs, so they’re dependent upon the silicon market. AI isn’t becoming “ever more capable,” it’s merely pushing the limits of what they have left.
And all the while, these projects are still propped up almost entirely by venture capital. They’re an answer to a problem nobody is having.
Put another way, if the leaders of the AI companies are right in their predictions, and we do build AGI in the short- to medium-term, will these limits be able to withstand such remarkable progress?
Again, the leaders are doing their damnedest to convince investors that this stuff will pay off one day. The reality is that they have yet to do anything close to that, and investors are going to get tired of pumping money into something that doesn’t return on that investment.
AI is not some panacea that will magically make ultracapitalists more wealthy, and the sooner they realize that, the sooner we can all move on—like we did with the Metaverse and blockchain.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
While I agree that this paper sounds like a freshman thesis, I think you’re betraying your own pack of knowledge here.
Because no, they havent said they’ve hit a wall, and while there are reasons to be skeptical of the brute force scaling approach that a lot of companies are taking, those companies are doing that because they have massive amounts of capital and scaling is an easy way to spend capital to improve the results of your model while your researchers figure out how to make better models, leaving you in a better market position when the next breakthrough or advancement happens.
The reasoning models of today like o1 and Claude 3.7 are substantially more capable than the faster models that predate them, and while you can make an argument that the resource / speed trade off isn’t worth it, they’re also the very first generation of models that are trying to integrate LLMs into a more logical reasoning framework.
This is on top of the broader usage of AI that is rapidly becoming more capable. The fuzzy pattern matching techniques that LLMs use have literally already revolutionized fields like Protein Structural Analysis, all the result of a single targeted DeepMind project.
The techniques behind AI allow computers to solve whole new classes of problems that werent possible before, dismissing that is just putting your head in the sand.
VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
whatever way youbslice it, “AI” at this point in time is a gross waste of precious resources and betrays the uttter contempt of the Other and the Worker that the Owning class harbors.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Bruh, I get how you feel, but your complaints are with capitalism, not algorithms that are wildly better than previous ones at fuzzy pattern matching.
Here is an example of how AI has already literally revolutionized science through one targeted project:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_fHJIYENdI
My best friend literally did his PhD in protein crystallography and is at MIT doing a protein structural analysis Post Doc, and the work of the new AI based protein structural predictions has literally completely changed the direction of their lab’s research, basically overnight.
Yeah there’s a lot of dumb tech bros over hyping AI, and a lot of giant corporations that care about using it for literally nothing but getting personally richer, but you’re going to be misinformed the other direction if just read nothing but AI doomed blogs from people who don’t actually bother trying to use or understand the technology.
VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Capitalism is merely a child of heirarchal domination. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ZK2-viyAo
Real shit im glad you’re able to find a few diamonds in the rough – BUT from the fashy techbros you mentioned to Corpo wide mainstream forcefeeding it, absolutely a net negative.
Truly, I love new tech. Always have. I wanna love AI…but as things stand I come to the inevitable conclusion that it is tossing gas on the climate crisis, on social and economic inequity and much more. I’m far from a doomer. Pull your head out your ass.
“bruh”