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Sounds like the internet in the 90s.
Or computers decades before that.
Many of these advances are incredibly recent.
And also many of the things we use in our day to day are ai powered without people even realising.
AI powered? Like what?
https://fusionchat.ai/news/10-everyday-ai-applications-you-didnt-realize-you-use
Some good examples here.
Most social media uses it. Video and music streaming services. SatNav. Speech recognition. OCR. Grammar checks. Translations. Banks. Hospitals. Large chunks of internet infrastructure.
The list goes on.
Got it. Thanks.
Automated mail sorting has been using AI to read post codes from envelopes for deacades, only back then - pre hype - it was just called Neural Networks.
That tech is almost 3 decades old.
The key fact here is that it’s not “AI” as conventionally thought of in all the scifi media we’ve consumed over our lifetimes, but AI in the form of a product that tech companies of the day are marketing. It’s really just a complicated algorithm based off an expansive dataset, rather than something that “thinks”. It can’t come up with new solutions, only re-use previous ones; it wouldn’t be able to take one solution for one thing and apply that to a different problem. It still needs people to steer it in the right direction, and to verify its results are even accurate. However AI is now probably better than people at identifying previous problems and remembering the solution.
So, while you could say that lots of things are “powered by AI”, you can just as easily say that we don’t have any real form of AI just yet.
Oh but those pattern recognition examples are about machine learning, right? Which I guess it’s a form of AI.
Perhaps, but at best it’s still a very basic form of AI, and maybe shouldn’t even be called AI. Before things like ChatGPT, the term “AI” meant a full blown intelligence that could pass a Turing test, and a Turing test is meant to prove actual artificial thought akin to the level of human thought - something beyond following mere pre-programmed instructions. Machine learning doesn’t really learn anything, it’s just an algorithm that repeatedly measures and then iterates to achieve an ideal set of values for desired variables. It’s very clever, but it doesn’t really think.
I have to disagree with you in the machine learning definition. Sure, the machine doesn’t think in those circumstances, but it’s definitely learning, if we go by what you describe what they do.
Learning is a broad concept, sure. But say, if a kid is learning to draw apples, then is successful to draw apples without help in the future, we could way that the kid achieved “that ideal set of values.”
Machine learning is a simpler type of AI than an LLM, like ChatGPT or AI image generators. LLM’s incorporate machine learning.
In terms of learning to draw something, after a child learns to draw an apple they will reliably draw an apple every time. If AI “learns” to draw an apple it tends to come up with something subtley unrealistic, eg the apple might have multiple stalks. It fits the parameters it’s learned about apples, parameters which were prescribed by its programming, but it hasn’t truly understood what an apple is. Furthermore, if you applied the parameters it learned about apples to something else, it might completely fail to understand it all together.
A human being can think and interconnect its throughts much more intricately, we go beyond our basic programming and often apply knowledge learned in one thing to something completely different. Our understanding of things is much more expansive than AI. AI currently has the basic building blocks of understanding, in that it can record and recall knowledge, but it lacks the full amount of interconnections between different pieces and types of knowledge that human beings develop.
Oh surprise surprise, looks like generative AI isn’t going to fulfill Silicon Valley and Hollywood studios’ dream of replacing artist, writers, and programmers with computer to maximize value for the poor, poor shareholders. Oh no!
As I said here before, generative AIs are not universal solution to everything that has ever existed like they are hyped up to be, but neither are they useless. At the end of the day, they are ultimately tools. Complex, powerful, useful tools, but tools nonetheless. A good artist can create better work faster with the help of a diffusion model, the same way LLM code generation can help a good programmer finish their project faster and better. (I think). All of these AI models are trained on data from data from everyone on Internet, which is why I think its reasonable that everyone should have access to these generative AI models for the benefit of humanity and not profit, and not just those who took other people’s work for free to trained the models. In other words, these generative AI models should belong to everyone.
And here lies my distaste for Sam Altman: OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit for the benefit of humanity, but at the first chance of money he immediately started venture capitalisting and put anything from GPT-2 onwards under locks and keys for money, and now it looks like that they are being crushed under the weight of their own operating costs while groups like Facebook and Stability catches up with actual open models, I will not be sad if "Open"AI fails.
(For as much crap as I give Zuck for the other awful things they do, I do admire their commitment to open source.)
I have to admit, playing with these generative models is pretty fun.
Hm. I think you should zoom out a bit and try to recognize that AI isn’t stagnant.
Voice recognition and translation programs to years before they were appropriate for real-world applications. AI is also going to require years before it’s ready. But that time is coming. We haven’t reached a ‘ceiling’ for AI’s capabilities.
Breakthrough technological development usually can be described as a sigmoid function (s-shaped curve), while there is an exponential progress in the beginning, it usually hit a climax then slow down and plateau until the next breakthrough.
There are certain problem that are not possible to resolve with the current level of technology for which development progress has slowed to a crawl, such as level 5 autonomous driving (by the way, better public transport is a way less complex solution.), and I think we are hitting the limit of what far transformer based generative AI can do since training has become more and more expensive for smaller and smaller gains, whereas hallucination seems to be an inherent problem that is ultimately unfixable with the current level of technology.
One thing that I think makes AI a possibility to deviate from that S model is that it can be honed against itself to magnify improvements. The better it gets the better the next gen can get.
that is a studied, documented, surefire way to very quickly destroy your model. It just does not work that way. If you train an llm on the output of another llm (or itself) it will implode.
Also at best it’s an refinement, not a new sigmoid. So are new hardware/software designs for even faster dot products or advancements in network topology within the current framework. T3 networks would be a new sigmoid but so far all we know is why our stuff fundamentally doesn’t scale to the realm of AGI, and the wider industry (and even much of AI research going on in practice) absolutely doesn’t care as there’s still refinements to be had on the current sigmoid.
Oh surprise surprise, looks like generative AI isn’t going to fulfill Silicon Valley and Hollywood studios’ dream of replacing artist, writers, and programmers with computer to maximize value for the poor, poor shareholders. Oh no!
It really is incredible how much this rhymes with the crypto hype. To be fair, the technology does actually have uses but, as someone in the latter category, after I saw it in action, I quickly felt less worried about my job prospects.
Fortunately, enough people in charge of staffing seem to have listened to people with technical knowledge to not make my earlier prediction (mass layoffs directly due to LLMs, followed by mass, panicked re-hirings when said LLMs ruined the business) come true. But, the worry itself, along with the RTO pushes (not to mention exploitation of contractors and H1B holders) really underscore his desperately the industry needs to get organized. Hopefully, what’s going on in the games industry with IATSE gets more traction and more of my colleagues on the same page but, that’s one area where I’m not as optimistic as I’d like to be - I’ll just have to cheer on SAG, WGA, and UAW for the time being.
(For as much crap as I give Zuck for the other awful things they do, I do admire their commitment to open source.)
Absolutely agreed. There’s a surprising amount of good in the open source world that has come from otherwise ethically devoid companies. Even Intuit donated the Argo project, which has evolved from a cool workflow tool to a toolkit with far more. There is always the danger of EEE, however, so, we’ve got to stay vigilant.
There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.
But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.
In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.
AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It’s not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.
I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn’t overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.
Generative AI can make each individual artist/writer/programmer much more efficient at their job, but the shareholders and executives get their way and only big companies have access to this technologu, this increased productivity will instead be used reduce headcount and make the remaining people do more work on a tighter deadline, instead of helping everyone work less, do better work, and be happier.
This is the reason I think democratizing generative AI via local models is important, because as your example shows, it levels the playing field between small and big players, and helps people work less while making more cool stuff.
A big problem in Aus is the industry culture. They don’t care about using technology to improve results. They only care about cutting costs, even if the final product doesn’t meet the previous standard.
And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically. Because studios play silly buggers to weasel out of paying VFX companies what they are due.
From what I hear, even DNEG is in trouble, and were even before the strike.
It’s a race to the bottom it seems.
My honest hope for the film industry is likely the same as yours. That we have smaller productions with access to better post due to improvements in AI-driven compositing software and so on.
But it’s likely that a role that was earning $$$ before is devalued significantly. And while I’m an unabashed anti-capitalist, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what this sudden downward pressure on income can do. Cost of living increasing while wages shrink is an awful combination
I’m 35, left a six figure job, folding my company and starting an electrician’s apprenticeship. To give you an idea around what my views about AI are. And of course this is as an Australian. We have a garbage white collar work culture anyway.
I think there will be a net improvement. But I worry that others will fail to adapt quickly. Too many are writing off AI as this thing that already came and went, but the tools have just landed, and we don’t yet have workflows that correctly implement and leverage these yet.
This is exactly why the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes have been vitally important, I think. Without pressure on industry, as we’ve seen across the board in the US for the last near half-century, fewer and fewer things that should improve lives are allowed to do so.
And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically.
The joke that the cost increased drastically too. Modern VFX movies are far more expensive than older movies, while also looking worse. As what the studio bosses really want isn’t cheap movies, but movies they can control and micro-manage. VFX makes it much easier to rerender a scene with some changes than a practical shot where you have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. The end result of that is of course a lack of planing ahead, endless reshoots, overworked VFX studios and bad results, but the bosses got what they wanted, so that’s ok.
It’s crazy that with current economic systems, tools that make people work more efficiently have such a negative impact on society.
A powerful tool maybe, but useless
If your drill needs a nuclear plant and monthly subcription to drill a hole, it’s a shitty tool
Going to have to disagree with you there. I’ve gotten plenty of use out of chat GPT in multiple scenarios. I find it difficult to imagine what exactly you think is useless about it because it seems so indispensable to me at this point.
Indispensable, nothing less. lmao
Have fun when they decide to multiply the price x10 and you are too dependant to have an alternative, or when it becomes stupid or malevolent 👍
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand how that makes it useless. I get the feeling that you just want to feel smug, so if it makes you feel better go ahead, I guess.
Because it’s too fragile and not ready to be use at scale without causing massive damage
Not useless for now (even if i’d like to know more about the domains where it’s really “indispensable”), but as useless as a drill with a dead battery the day they decide to cut it.
I don’t find it future-proof, as impressive as some results are
Nowdays LLM can be ran on consumer hardware, so the “dead battery” analogy fall short here too.
With the same efficiency ? I’m interested in an example
Why everyone using these crappy SaaS then ?
You sound like the people who thought credit cards would never replace cash.
Silicon like usual thinking these things are as big as the invention as the internet, and trying to get their money in there the first place. AI was and still is a massive game changer, but nothing can live up to the hype of which they throw a stupid amount of money at these things. They didn’t learn their lesson after crypto or the “metaverse” either lol. I see AI being a tool, an incredibly useful one. That also means it has a lot of jobs it simply can’t do. It can’t replace artists, but artists can use it as a tool to help them work off of things.
So far I’ve only seen AI being used to fire employees that a company totally absolutely still needs but just doesn’t want to pay wages to. Companies are dumb as fuck, that’s my conclusion, but what else can you expect by organizations run by ladder-climbing CEO figures?
There’s utility in keeping workers desperate, it depresses wages.
Think about the coordinated tech layoffs that happened and now the tech industry has a labor surplus.
Saves them money.
The company that laid me off is paying me 4 months of wages without any work, this is the severance package I get in exchange for them not being forced to try to find me another suitable position in the company or “prove” that there no tasks at the company that I could do with my existing skill set (that’s how the law works where I live).
Was it really worth it?
My point was it’s not dumb, it’s malicious and self serving.
It’s not worth it.
Are you in the states? I’m surprised you have those protections.
No, Sweden
Things will live up to the hype and easily surpass it. That’s not the issue. The issue is that people take the world of today and imagine how much better/faster/richer they could become if they had AI. The crux is by the time they have AI, everybody else has it too. Thus it loses its competitive advantage. It just raises the baseline.
If I had to create the thousands of images I have generated with AI three years ago it would have costs thousands if not millions of dollar, a gigantic almost insurmountable task. But that doesn’t mean they have any value today. Everybody can produce similar images with a few clicks.
The whole point of AI is after all that it makes work that used to be difficult and expensive, cheap and easy, and nobody is going to pay huge amounts of money for a task that has become trivial.
What I’m curious is what’s going to happen to all these companies that went all-in on building data centers when they weren’t doing it previously. Places like Meta and Amazon are huge enough that it’s always been a sound investment but with this hype there are other companies trying to set up server farms with no real prize in sight.
I mean A100s don’t exactly break that quickly and they’re specialised enough hardware so that they will continue to be able to rent them out. They’re also overpriced AF though which might cut into the bottom line but they’re probably not going to end up with a giant loss, I don’t really doubt they will break even. Opportunity costs are stellar, but OTOH there’s so much billionaire capital floating around screaming for opportunities to park itself in that macro-economically it’s negligible. Also I’m not exactly in the habit of crying about billionaires having a low ROI.
Ever since the Internet Bubble crashed around 2000 that the business community in the Valley has been repeatedly trying to pump up a new bubble, starting with what they called Web 2.0 which started being hyped maybe even before the dust settled on tha crash after the first Tech bubble.
And if you think about it, it makes sense: the biggest fortunes ever made in Tech are still from companies which had their initial growth back then, such as Google, Amazon and even Paypal (Microsoft and Apple being maybe the most notable exceptions, both predating it).
What I don’t like about the article is that the phrasing ‘paying off’ can apply to making investors money OR having worthwhile use cases. AI has created plenty of use cases from language learning to code correction to companionship to brainstorming, etc.
It seems ironic that a consumer-facing website is framing things from a skeptical “But is it making rich people richer?” perspective
In my case, I still want to know if it’s not making rich people richer, because a) fuck rich people, and b) I don’t want to buy into things that will disappear in a year when the hype dies down. As a “consumer” my purchasing decisions impact my life, and the actions of the wealthy affect that more than you’d like.
AI is a tool to assist creators, not a full on replacement. Won’t be long until they start shoving ads into Bard and ChatGPT.
AI is a tool to
assistplagiarize the work of creatorsFixed it
LOL OK it’s a super-powerful technology that will one day generate tons of labor very quickly, but none of that changes that in order to train it to be able to do that, you have to feed it the work of actual creators- and for any of that to be cost-feasible, the creators can’t be paid for their inputs.
The whole thing is predicated on unpaid labor, stolen property.
At what line does it become stolen property? There are plenty of tools which artists use today that use AI. Those AI tools they are using are more than likely trained on some creation without payment. It seems the data it’s using isn’t deemed important enough for that to be an issue. Google has likely scraped billions of images from the Internet for training on Google Lens and there was not as much of an uproar.
Honestly, I’m just curious if there is an ethical line and where people think it should be.
Wait, R&D doesn’t research and develop dollar bills into existence?
Thats how this works. Blow though VC money to try and “strike gold” fail. Change model to become profitable." Move to the next scam.
You’d think at this point that investors would wait for a thing to fill out the question mark second step in their business plan before investing in it, but you’d be way, way wrong.
Every new tech company comes to the investor panel with:
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build expressive to run new tool and give it away to end users for free
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???
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profit!
And after more than two decades somehow people keep falling for it (even when the last few “big ones” didn’t pan out at all).
Because people assume all these investors know what they are doing. They don’t. Now, some investors are good, but they usually don’t go for shit like this. At lot of investors are VCs, rich upper class twits, who can afford to lose money. Pure and simple. It’s like a bunch of lotto winners telling people they know how to pick numbers, betting outside bets once in a while, get lucky, and have selective bias.
Plus, they have enough money to hedge their bets. For example, say you invest $1mil in companies A, B, C, D, E, and F. All lose everything except A and B, which earn you $3mil each. You put in $6mil, got back $6mil. You broke even, tell people you knew what you were doing because you picked A and B, and conveniently never mention the rest. Then rich twits people invest in what YOU invest in. So you invest in H, others invest in H because you did, drives up the value. Now magnify this by a lot of investors, hundreds of letters, and it’s all like some weird game of luck and timing.
But a snapshot in time leads to your 2) ??? Point. Many know this is a confidence game, based on luck, charm, and timing. Some just stumble through it, and others are fleeced, but who cares? Daddy’s got money.
Money works different for rich people. It’s truly puzzling.
They sure as hell are doing a good job of making me reliant on AI though. Soon I’ll probably be payinf 200$ a month because i cant remember how to do things without AI. I think thats the plan anyway.
Soon I’ll probably be payinf 200$ a month because i cant remember how to do things without AI.
Sounds like a problem TBH, I’d get that checked out by a professional.
Okay, ill ask ChatGPT
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Have they not tried simply asking the AI how to make it profitable?
Do people really not understand that we are in the early stages of ai development? The first time most people were made aware of LLMs was, like, 6 months ago. What ChatGPT can do is impressive for a self contained application, but is far from mature enough to do the things people are complaining it can’t do.
The point the industry is trying to warn about is that this technology is past its infancy and moving into, from a human comparison standpoint, childhood or adolescence. But, it iterates significantly faster than humans, so the time it can do the type of things people are bitching about is years, not decades, away.
If you think businesses have sunk this much money and effort into AI and didn’t do a cost-benefit analysis that stretched out decades, you are being naive or disingenuous.
If you think businesses have sunk this much money and effort into AI and didn’t do a cost-benefit analysis that stretched out decades, you are being naive or disingenuous.
Are you kidding? We literally just watched the same bubble and burst in companies that rushed to get their piece of the Metaverse and NFT cash grab. I worked at a SaaS company that decided to add AI features because it was in the news and Azure offered it as a service. There was zero financial analysis done, just like for every other feature they added
I’m sure Microsoft has a plan since they invested heavily. But even Google is playing catch-up like they did with GCP.
AI is actually useful.
The metaverse and NFTs aren’t.
Your analogy is not a 1:1 representation of the situation and only serves to distract from the topic at hand.
But there is a similarity, the hype pulls in all sorts of companies to blindly add buzzwords without even knowing how it might possibly apply to their product, even if it were the perfect realization of the ideal.
Yes AI techniques obviously have utility. 90% of the spend is by companies that don’t even know what that utility might be. With that much noise, it’s hard to keep track of the value.
But there is a similarity, the hype pulls in all sorts of companies to blindly add buzzwords without even knowing how it might possibly apply to their product
Yes, I see what you are saying. I guess we can add ‘blockchain’ to that list, then.
Do people really not understand that we are in the early stages of ai development?
Yes. Top post in this thread is someone cheering that AI won’t replace people in hollywood.
Just give it time. Remember how poor voice recognition and translation software was at first?
Top post in this thread is someone cheering that AI won’t replace people in hollywood.
I really like how I’m just “someone” here now.
To be fair, who pays attention to user names?
I do. 🥺
pretty much all improvements aren’t “better tech”, but just “bigger tech”. Reducing their footprint is an unsolved problem (just like it has always been with neural networks, for decades)
Optimization is a problem that cannot be “solved” by definition, but a lot of work is being done on it with some degree of success
Well, they don’t want to do the one thing needed to make it successful: transparency. Maybe it can’t be.
So far what I’ve seen from AI is that it lies and lies and lies. It lies about history. It lies about science. It lies about politics. It lies about case law. It lies about programming libraries. Maybe this will all be fixed some day, or maybe it will just get worse. Until then the only thing I would trust it is about something in which their is no wrong answer.
I never ask it things I don’t know. I don’t think that’s really what’s it’s useful for. It’s really good at combining words though. So it can write a better sentence than I could. Better in a sense that it’s easier for others to understand what my thoughts are if I feed them in as input. Since they were my thoughts originally I can spot the bullshit pretty fast.
It should also worry investors open-source AI is only months behind the big tech leaders. I looked into AI voice cloning lately. There’s a few really pricey options. Like $25 a month for a couple of hours voice cloning.
However, there’s already an open-source version of what they’re selling.
People are literally paying monthly subscriptions for access to a bunch of these things.
Did you read the article? The problem hasn’t been getting some people to pay for some things, it’s that the things that are available so far are losing loads of money. Or at least, that’s the premise.
Goood. Gooooooooooood.
Yeah, so far. It’s super early in the modern incarnation of AI that actually has the chance to pay off, LLMs.
This isn’t like Bitcoin where there’s huge hype for a pretty small market opportunity. We all realize the promise, we are just still figuring out how to get rid of hallucinations and making it consistent and tuned to a certain business usage.
Well, and also navigating the minefields that the LLMs absolutely have copyrighted material in them that wasn’t paid for or licensed. E.G. Dall-E can produce a full image of Fresh Cut Grass, a character owned by Critical Role.
And that the stuff they produce isn’t copyright-able.
And that the stuff they produce isn’t copyright-able.
Even if that were true, is there no value in public domain art resources?
Not to the companies looking to use AI.
Exhibit A, Disney, a giant megacorp whose most famous works are literally founded on public domain material.
Bear in mind that public domain is not like a copyleft license, it’s not “viral.” If I make a movie and the Mona Lisa shows up in it, that movie is still copyright to me even though there’s a public domain element in it. It’s even easier with unique AI-generated stuff because you can’t even tell what’s public domain and what isn’t.
Something has to be ownable to be public domain. AI produced items are un-ownable, since the AI is the owner, but it can’t own them since it’s a legally a “tool”.
You are deeply confused about what “public domain” means. Something that is un-ownable (in an intellectual property sense) is public domain.
You may be referring to the Thaler v. Perlmutter case when you say “AI is the owner?” That’s a widely misunderstood case that’s gone through quite the game of telephone in the media. The judge in it ruled that an AI cannot own copyright, but that doesn’t mean that AI-produced art is uncopyrightable. Just that AIs aren’t people, from a legal perspective, and you need to be a legal person to own copyright. If Thaler had claimed copyright for himself, as a person, things might have gone differently. But he didn’t.
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