AnarchoNinaAnalyzes (@[email protected])
social.treehouse.systems
Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don't care if AI doesn't work. They really don't. They're pot-committed; these dudes aren't tech pioneers, they're money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it's literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it's not real and they don't care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made. The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don't know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it's total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised. Particularly in the media, it's all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.

the writer Nina Illingworth, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and @[email protected]):

Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don’t care if AI doesn’t work.

They really don’t. They’re pot-committed; these dudes aren’t tech pioneers, they’re money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it’s literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it’s not real and they don’t care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.

The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don’t know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it’s total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.

Particularly in the media, it’s all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.

the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism

  • kromemEnglish
    1·
    3 years ago

    without any clear benchmark of progress.

    The problem is that previous benchmarks have been so completely blown out of the water they keep needing to establish new benchmarks.

    If GPT-3 scores around 30% in a standardized test and GPT-4 scores 95% in that same test, how useful will that test be to evaluating GPT-5?

    What ever happened to the benchmark that was being used in popular coverage of AI for decades of the Turing test? That disappeared pretty quick from the conversation over the past two years.

    You may not like the technology for whatever reason (and I’d encourage introspection on just how much of those attitudes are the result of decades of self-propagandizing via Sci Fi that’s since been revealed to have poorly anticipated reality). But don’t make the mistake of conflating those feelings with analyzing where the trend is going over the next few years.

    If you think this is the peak of AI, you’re in for quite the surprise.