Comment on AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 22 hours agoThat won’t happen until the brick wall is not only hit, but completely demolished. While Democrats are significantly more rational than Republicans, they are still almost as much in the oligarchs’ collective pockets. Only the Progressives give me any hope, but there aren’t nearly enough of them in Congress to make shit happen yet.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
It is already happening.
The distractions is that you only see the AI companies which have been blitz scaling, dumping unlimited amounts of money into orders and plans without any revenue plans for the other side. This move only pays off if they can essentially buy the entire market and lock out any competition (and then the rent-seeking enshittification will being). The long-term prospects of these companies is shaky at best, but that doesn’t matter to the people currently dumping funding into them… they’re going to sell everything at the IPO and leave some other suckers with the bag.
Because of this, there are many many times the amount of advertising and promotional hype than is justified by the actual progress in the field.
Everyone is familiar with this. If someone says AI, do you think of ChatGPT or an LLM? That’s because you’ve been affected by this hype wave that is being intentionally propagated in order to drive valuations for AI companies who are looking to hit an IPO so all of the early investors can get out quick before the bubble bursts (It’s like a crypto rugpull, except it is using the stock market instead of a meme coin).
‘Actual’ AI. By which I mean machine learning, including neural networks, has made huge progress in a lot of fields following the discovery of the Transformer model (the T in GPT). The, very real and impressive, improvements that have been gained are not flashy, they do not make for immediate next-quarter profits and are mostly public discoveries coming out of academia so they benefit everyone which makes them worthless to the people trying to horde emerging technology in order to push this bubble/rugpull.
Your life will be WAY more affected by the slow and incremental work being done in the field of robotics than having a slightly more personable chatbot. Your life or the lives of people you love will be saved by the advances in protein folding which allow rapid development of new treatments which can be customized to the individual. Cancer therapies that are optimized for the exact mutations in the patient’s cancer cells or customized medicine aimed at reducing side effects or harmful interactions.
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 17 hours ago
I was already aware of much of what you said, although I probably hadn’t faxed down the road quite as far.
However, what I was referring to was the legislation the commenter I replied to was calling for. What I meant was that proper legislation wouldn’t happen until the “rugpull” you described actually happens, and the economy finally goes into the recession it would otherwise already be deep into at this point. Being delayed so long may make it especially ugly, I fear - or if may just bridge us into the next thing that keeps the economy propped up, such as the robotics you mentioned.
May you live in interesting times, indeed.