“What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?”

Wages. They’re trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.

  • @kitnaht
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    104 days ago

    And not only that – all of the people you see claiming “AI is worthless”; are just huffing that copium REALLY hard. All of the AI models out there aren’t just LLMs and Diffusors; there’s a lot of robotics work going on behind the scenes, and a lot of the things that the middle-class do in their day-to-day are being attacked here.

    The transition to a post-scarcity world is going to require some major rethinking if we’re going to keep our population up at 8 billion. Because at this rate, we’re looking at a major turnaround.

    • @[email protected]
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      214 days ago

      I think “AI” has just become shorthand for LLMs and diffusers though in general conversation.

      • @kitnaht
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        4 days ago

        If being used in that context, the person using it is an idiot.

        huggingface.co/models – shows many of the things AI is being used for. And even in the context of only LLMs and Diffusors, you cannot claim that LLMs are worthless with a straight face.

        • @UnderpantsWeevil
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          4 days ago

          you cannot claim that LLMs are worthless

          It’s not a question of “worthless” so much as “net benefit”. How much money and manpower are we investing in the tools?

          Because, right now, the Sam Altman approach to LLMs is to simply throw more compute at the problem forever. The degree to which he seems interested in reinventing the model or the foundational technology pales beside his demands for GWhs of new power to brute force a better solution.

          If you’re spending $1T to do $100B worth of human labor, that’s not any kind of efficency.

          • @Grimy
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            64 days ago

            I understand the sentiment but there are very few technologies that didn’t need a disproportionate amount of research and development before seeing proper “net benefits”.

            • @Tehdastehdas
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              14 days ago

              Brute forcing is the least efficient R&D. Best efficiency was achieved at Bell labs, ARPA, early NASA, Xerox PARC.

            • @UnderpantsWeevil
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              14 days ago

              The trash bin of history is full of ideas that absorbed enormous amounts of resources and labor, only to flounder on implementation. The idea that Sam Altman’s pet project just needs another trillion to take off is heavily predicated on him building the next Model T and not the next Hindenburg.

              • @[email protected]
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                34 days ago

                The Hindenburg exploded due to political reasons. It was capable of flying with helium, but the US was the biggest He producer in the world during the time.

                • @UnderpantsWeevil
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                  -34 days ago

                  Americans rapidly constructing for-profit nuclear power plants to power AI server farms without any kind of plan on where to source fuel or dispose of waste won’t know anything about this.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil
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      44 days ago

      there’s a lot of robotics work going on behind the scenes, and a lot of the things that the middle-class do in their day-to-day are being attacked here.

      If you get behind the scenes of a big retail company like Amazon or Nike, you get a certain increased amount of automation in the manufacturing and physical sorting. But this isn’t happening absent human labor. It’s happening in concert with human labor.

      The end result is humans expected to work at the speed of machines, rather than humans off-loading the physically intense tasks to machines.