Kameron Hurley: This is what blows me away every time. There's no one who NEEDS predictive text machines. It's not curing cancer or feeding people or producing clean energy. It's just sucking up resources, convincing CEOs to fire humans who do better jobs than it can do, and allowing founders to siphon VC money

This is what blows me away every time. There's no one who NEEDS predictive text machines. It's not curing cancer or feeding people or producing clean energy. It's just sucking up resources, convincing CEOs to fire humans who do better jobs than it can do, and allowing founders to siphon VC money

"will require a breakthrough energy source" my dude, it requires nothing because it doesn't need to exist. you WANT a breakthrough energy source to keep playing, and you can get in line behind the people who actually need it #comemierda

Cancer researcher here. Can confirm. LLM engineers are being paid multiples of my salary to make things which are useless at best, but more often destructive. Although I'm not primarily in it for the money, I can't help but find that vexing.

Here's to the cancer researchers .. from the bottom of my heart

If I can't get rid of the "Help Me Write" prompt in Android Gmail, I am quite likely to do everything I can (which is quite a lot) to get Google software out of my life.

fyi all -- it went away when i divorced myself from google labs ... the beta option for new stuff.

Reminds me of a story I read many years ago about a guy who was trying to make an engine that ran on water. He was diluting actual fuel, and he had convinced himself that he was just about to get over that last hump where he didn't need any fuel at all in the water.

This is like when alchemists were always claiming to be on the verge of a breakthrough process for turning base metals into gold, but they need to acquire a bit of starter gold to “seed” the process, and somehow they keep having to add more and more gold

Exactly, we have real problems! Low wage writers and artists existing and charging a pittance to the capitalists exploiting them have never been a problem, much less one that requires an energy breakthrough to solve.

And it's like surely there are actually useful applications of the general technology, but what I see showcased is more like, "Here's some bullshit you're going to hate." Or "check it out, we're building the tools for an even more dystopian near-future"

Once upon a time, I was at an excellent conference and IBM's head of content gave us several Watson case studies that had me sold. Read and summarize mounds of text in a time crunch? Mine medical histories? Instantly translate instructions for global emergencies?!💯 We have not used this tool well.

"Here's some bullshit you're going to hate" reminded me of this skeet.

The Wagon Queen Family Cyber Truckster: You think you hate it now, wait till you see it self-driving.

CEOs are like 'I don't do anything myself, surely that's the dream?'

Gets awful tense in the room when the tech-tech breaks and no one wants to re-accept the vulnerability of being human.

Here’s the deal: if AI is smart enough to develop a truly breakthrough energy source, it gets to exist.

"Ah, but it needs more energy to get that far."

the few serious use cases (protein folding etc.) are pretty small in volume, absolutely dwarfed by the amounts of frivolous horseshit.

and also take *years* of skilled human labor to produce useful output

Absolutely. A LLM might be able to predict how a peptide sequence would fold, but it takes an expert biochemist/pharmaceutical chemist to make anything useful out of that information.

We’re getting interesting data out of those efforts, but also starting to learn their limitations. www.science.org/content/blog...

Screening Against AlphaFold Models: Maybe Better Than It Lookswww.science.org

*except as assistive technology

Exactly—one example is that it seems to be a very helpful tool for people who don’t speak English as their native language.

But there's a really effective business model using generative text to produce fake web content to attract search engines and advertising and Make Money Fast even if it turns the entire web into toxic mush! It's also good at diverting money from useful kinds of AI, pattern recognizers et.

I just got surveyed by Angus Reid about AI and my business and I kept having to choose "other" and then explain "AI does not exist, and these predictive text machines are totally useless to my business" lol; all the questions were things like "which AI are you most excited about for your business?"

That kind of question, that presumes a response, is kind of infuriating.

I have to assume it was for a client that sells AI stuff, the Angus Reid polls are like half real polls and half just businesses asking you to tell them how they can sell you stuff better lol (I don't begrudge Angus Reid for keeping the lights on of course)

Yeah. I just think they need an option for "Oh fuck off".

It’s a mass delusion/justification of business (in the keeping up with the Joneses sense), similar to open offices, RTO mandates, and Myers-Briggs tests. “It will save money!” Is the cry even though the unspoken reason is ramping up hierarchical control in corporations.

This was Andreessen's whole manifesto though, that AI would eventually cure cancer and clean the environment for us, you just have to Trust the Plan or something.

We’ll need the predictive text machines once we replace the CEO class with AI & run the companies ourselves.

well, let me be that guy for a minute: cancer genomes are a kind of language, and we could and should be training models to discover biochemical mechanisms to combat them. I'd be surprised if pharma isn't using LLMs already, but I expect they're training their own special purpose models

derp I see the replies have already gotten into this, apologies for piling on

Hey, it's also stealing proprietary metadata and writing inexcusably vulnerable and poor code.

"VC money" is the key here: they're jonesing for a new fairy tale and this is it, for now.

There are so many luxuries we get in our lives & they've been around so long & so many ppl are privileged & entitled they don't realize they're luxuries. Reminds me when ppl were bitching durring quarantine about the unavailability of getting their hair cut.

The weird part is... it is. We do have DL being trained to predict cancer, to make predictions that augment logistics thereby feeding people, to make predictions about the grid that helps reduce energy waste. Only the applications being written about are the worst ones.

We have hundreds of applications that offer AI as an assistive technology making the worker more valuable, but what capital is dumping its money into is the one that makes the worker obsolete, even if that's impossible or decreases quality.

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