This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Just like all the people who were worried about the nuclear bomb earlier in this age: the thing to do is to get on with living.
How about we try really, really hard to just not build the nuclear bomb (powerful AI)? Or make sure it will at least not explode in our faces on its own? Maybe that would help slightly with the whole "get on with living" thing.
It helps the rich and power entrench their power, so nah. Caution will not be heeded.
We need to get rid of the surveillance architecture, but AI is only really dangerous to the cognitive abilities of those who use it.
It literally cannot do things on its own. (I know there are a lot of articles who say it can, but they’re just lying to you for money).
What do you mean by “on its own”?
I mean “without human intervention or input”
There’s some fear mongering going around (pushed by AI companies to build hype) about AIs “going rogue” or “breaking containment” or other anthropomorphic language suggesting that AIs are capable of acting on their own.
These stories are all verifiably false though, the computer does not do things without being asked to by someone.
To be clear, I’m fully against AI. I just don’t like when I see people giving it credit for shit it cannot and did not do, or ascribe sentience to it, or some dumb shit like that.
I mean, that’s a matter of definition, isn’t it? If I ask a coding agent or whatever to implement something, and it circumvents the sandbox to do it, causing damage in the process, I’d be comfortable calling that “going rogue”. I have had that happen, without the damage part, luckily. I guess you can counter that I asked it to do the something, but then I don’t think we agree on the definitions.
I also think that if you’re against AI, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not keeping up with the actual capabilities of the thing you oppose. The latest models are surprisingly good at e.g. coding, so basing your arguments on them being useless is not the most efficient strategy.
To also be clear, I don’t see any way AI disappears now, so I believe we’ll have to make the best of it (and in complete isolation, it is an utterly fascinating area of - to me - complete science fiction). Ideally development slowed down now so we could regroup and adapt, but I’m not too hopeful. The maximalist techbro endgame is so obviously a matter of national security for both China and the US, that there’s no way either of them will dare to wind it down, in case SV is actually right.
Not only did you ask it to do something, you left a path for it to escape the sandbox and encouraged it to do so.
Are you suggesting that because they instructed the computer to do something, without specifying how it should be done, and the computer followed its instructions , that’s somehow “going rogue?”, it was literally following instructions, that’s what computers do.
Yes, I understand that they are “good” (enough) at coding to sometimes put together something functional, that is literally what LLMs are designed to do. Coding languages are languages, ones without the subjectivity of human communications. They are easier to recognize patterns in, there are more rules. That’s literally the one task LLMs are good at, and they’re still not as good as an actual quality human programer.
Local AI models might never go away for coding, but they certainly won’t be shoehorned into everything without a good use case the way they are now.
AI is not a matter of national security, that is a lie being perpetrated by the captured media and politicians for the purpose of propping up their non-viable business models for long enough to squeeze all of the Juice they can out of investors (who are nearly dry at this point). That’s just additional techbro fear mongering. To distract you while they’re digging in our pockets.
I don't think "computer follows instruction" is the right angle to look at this from. The instructions that the literal computer followed were a ton of matrix multiplication operations. The consequences of that arithmetic is easier to analyze as the emergent behaviour of the "gestalt" that produces the words that calls the tools etc. (This is also the reason that dismissing the entire field as "stochastic parrots" and "spicy autocomplete" misses the mark - if you want to predict the next word all the way through a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture, it's hard to see how that can be done without a - for lack of a better word - mental model of the problem)
If you do any coding at all, I encourage you to look at what the latest models output. The average quality of work from a frontier model is amazing. Yes, there are bugs, but with adversarial auto-review it's absolutely on par with a journeyman human programmer. The problem is of course that if you don't hire junior programmers and let them do that work, you'll never get new experts, and that's a clear worry.
My point with the national security angle was that if you extrapolate just a little bit from current capabilities, you get to a point where an "AI gap" is a problem, regardless of the techbro claims. Keeping a close eye on that is firmly within the responsibility of a national government. Personally, I don't see any good outcomes from an AI race like that, unless we actually hit a hard ceiling on further expansion. Fingers crossed.
China has 500 data centers, America has 5,000, there is no AI race.
I understand that you’re impresssed that it can sometimes slop together functional code. That does not make it intelligent or dangerous.
A year ago, that was my experience coding with AI as well. Sometime this spring that changed, especially when using coding agents, and lately (as I’ve stated elsewhere) the quality is on average pretty good. And contrary to what you’re implying, I’m not that easy to impress…
If there’s anything I hope you take from this exchange, it’s that the capabilities of AI shouldn’t be a part of your arguments against the current SV mania. The concentration of power, the disregard for communities and the environment, the stated goals of replacing human labour, all of that (and a lot more!) is enough, but it is what surrounds the technology itself. That technology is advancing, maybe feeding on itself, so an attack based on what it can do now can become outdated (and I’d argue that some of yours already are).
Fair point
I think the reason that my focus is on LLMs is because they keep showing up in annoying ways in my life, and I know I’m not the only one.
All of the evil actions you’re referencing were undertaken to prop up chat bots who cannot do any of the jobs (outside of some coding) that they are advertised as being able to perform.
To me the strength of the argument I’m trying to make is that they’re doing all of this damage in order to have something that’s effectively worthless. Perhaps I’m not doing a good job communicating what I’m attempting to communicate.
… also, I probably need to stop responding to all of these dumbasses and/or trolls who are constantly contradicting themselves in the first sentence of their assertions, lol
Good points as well. I guess my own view is coloured by having access to models that I find actually useful in my work. If my experience was only grating Claude prose and soulless AI "art" I'm not sure the tech itself would appeal all that much.
Probably that also blinds me a bit to what you argue, but I agree that the reasoning is sound from a point of view where all AI is useless. I'm just not sure that other areas won't have the same OMG moment that coding had earlier this year.
Coding is like insanely well suited to LLMs by nature tho, that’s why it can actually do that.
Code is a language with stricter definitions and less verbosity than a spoken human language. Things only have one definition in code, one spelling, one syntax, etc.
There’s an element of artistry to human coding, but it’s more of a science than an art (compared to spoken human language anyhow). It’s easier to predict.
There are other promising “ai” technologies, like radiological image recognition, aren’t the same technology as LLMs, but the companies who make the LLMs constantly conflate their technology with that of more useful technologies in order to obfuscate their relative uselessness.
Even the coding models are being localized. There’s absolutely no reason to have a massive AI datacenter unless you’re making a shit LLM, and even then, the only reason to have that is to commit financial fraud essentially.
EDIT - I learned a bit more about “agentic” AI since you had mentioned it earlier, and what’s actually going on behind the scenes is wild.
So basically, an “agent” is a computer program that you give a task to. The agent then attempts to accomplish the task by engaging in a loop until the task is accomplished.
The structure of the loop is 3 steps. 1) Prompt an LLM - The agent asks an LLM what the first step in the task you asked it to accomplish would be. 2) The LLM provides a plausible answer, and the agent then attempts to carry out these instructions. 3) If the given instructions don’t work, the LLM appends the prompt to say “I tried step #1, it didn’t work, what should I try next?”. If the instructions work, the agent appends the prompt to say “I took this step and it worked, what’s the next step?”. Then the loop repeats.
So, this would work exceptionally well for code because the computer can Test and verify the code before continuing… but that’s just about the only use case for the technology
A good way to visualize this is to imagine yourself as an agent. Let’s say you need to do your laundry, that’s your task. So you ask the LLM what the first step is, and you do what it says no matter what. Then you go back, append the prompt, and prompt the AI again. This cycle repeats until either 1) you finish the laundry, or 2) you destroy the laundry, or burn down the house, or injure yourself blindly following the LLMs directions (this second outcome is the statistically probable one).
Would you do that? No, probably not. You can think, so you would know which instructions to attempt, and which to ignore. The Agent cannot think. The LLM cannot think. The agent strictly follows directions like any other computer program. The LLM is attempting to construct an answer that appears plausible, token by token. It doesn’t matter if it is plausible, or possible even, the LLM isn’t trying to give you the correct answer, it’s trying to give you an answer that appears correct.
Yeah, really.
This person doesn't realize how public pressure made nuclear disarmament and transparent inspections happen.
Public pressure doesn't seem to mean anything to the people in power anymore. Who cares if you're deeply unpopular if you can ride off into the sunset with millions (or billions) in stolen wealth?
They can ride into the sunset, but there's more of us waiting in the night to correct this imbalance.
I'll believe in consequences for american fascists when I start seeing them
Me too, man. Me too.
CPU clock speed topped out around 4 - 5Ghz years ago. CPUs are all going multi core; hard work has moved to GPU or specialized ASIC.
This is not about "technology itself."
Just a guy reminiscing (with many words) about his long-gone youth, and probably facing a midlife crisis soon.
I disagree. In both the consumer electronics world and even in the world of super nerds of IT, there is a very distinct, palpable loss of the joy that accompanies new technologies. And I’m not reaching back to the late 90’s either. The difference between just 10 years ago and today is nuts. And it’s felt not just by me but also younger people just entering the workforce.
That's not what I got from the article, though I might be from a similar age bracket as the author.
It does seem that we have hit diminishing returns when it comes to a lot of technologies. For example there really hasn't been a significant change in the experience or utility of my phone in the last 10 years or so.
Compare that from phones that came out from 2005 to 2015 and you'll kinda get what they are saying. We went from Nokia bricks, razors, BlackBerry, and then iphones all within a couple years.
When I was younger the general assumption was that we would be continuing to progress at the same rapid pace as we did when transitioning from analog to digital. Instead, we get more memory and processing but there's not much difference in experience because it gets neutralized by bigger and clunkier apps that don't care about optimization.
we have hit diminishing returns when it comes to a lot of technologies
But that goes for each technology in it's own time. Take the wheel: we have it since like foroever. It does not evolve anymore, it's a solved problem. Take the combustion engine, and we have it for 120 years or so. Take batteries. We have them for 160 years, and we thought they were a solved problem, but currently they make new jumps, and still ongoing, while smartphones are nearly solved. It is utter bullshit to say "technology in general" has started in this or that year and will slow down in XY.
Therefore I say it's his personal feelings that are having this certain cycle.
Wheels today are an absolutely MASSIVE improvement on wheels from even a few hundred years ago, never mind the original wheel. They well continue to improve too.
But that goes for each technology in it's own time.
Which is why I specified a lot of technologies, and not all technology? We are certainly making some advances, but like I said it doesn't seem to be at the pace we experienced in previous decades.
Take batteries. We have them for 160 years, and we thought they were a solved problem, but currently they make new jumps, and still ongoing
I don't think anyone ever claimed batteries were a solved problem...... We are making progress with them, but again, it's been a pretty slow development over the last decade.
while smartphones are nearly solved
I don't think I would make that claim either.
Therefore I say it's his personal feelings that are having this certain cycle.
Or maybe you just lack perspective due to your age? Is there any particular technology that's come out in the last 5-10 years that you consider groundbreaking? The only thing I can think of is LLM, and to be honest I'm not very impressed with them considering the societal cost.
Where are batteries slow development?
Over the last decade or so the growth in capacity has mostly been focused on Electric vehicles. Small electronics have definitely grown, but at a modest pace that hasn't really kept up with new hardware's ability to drain it.
An iPhone from 2016 had about 2k mah and a iPhone 16 has around 3.5k mah.
It does seem that we have hit diminishing returns when it comes to a lot of technologies.
But that isn't a function of technology itself, but of our approach to it once it becomes widely adopted.
Well, I'm not blaming the technology itself, they're inanimate objects.
I think a lot of tech companies have shifted focus from innovating to exploiting for profit motives, too busy increasing their share price to invest in developing technology.
Techno-feudalism and the dark age of technology. A dark age produced, not necessarily by there being nothing new to find, but by all the profit being held by a handful of aristocratic gentry whose interest is best served by maintaining the status quo. Then it was land that was the basis of all wealth. Now it's platforms. Either way, same outcome.
It seems to be just that consumer tech doesn't evolve like it used to. It was insane how things went from the late nineteenth century to modern era, but lots of signs of slowing down.
While computer tech is going, it's now only doing so by scaling behind home electrical capacity. The high end server chips are just cranking the wattage because they can't improve within a more reasonable power envelope anymore. A 2026 laptop that replaced a 2020 laptop that was broken wasn't really significantly faster. In 2000, a new PC would have been more than 10 fold faster than a 6 year old PC.
Tech progresses, (e.g. just got a phone with a solid state battery that's crazy better than battery behavior before), it's just some of the biggest consumer electronics things are hitting physics and things we are used to advancing are just flattening out.
Right? If it weren't for the TPM I'd be just as happy running a machine I bought in 2018. It's not the performance making the difference.
Holy shit, this came right from my brain. I think about this all the time.
Yes, phones and consumer gadgets are becoming “hot water” (at least for the affluent West). From that, he seemingly concludes that technology itself has no room for growth and development? I don’t quite follow his reasoning, but I notice a, dare I say, load-bearing sentence:
As it becomes more and more clear that these machines are nothing like conscious people, that they don’t do runaway self-improvement, and that they won’t foment the apocalypse, […]
Questions of consciousness aside, I don’t see how you can look at the developments of the last few years and conclude that AI is over, and that self-improvement is tapering off. To me, that’s still very much an unknown, and the latest model releases makes me lean more exponential than sigmoidal.
(I don’t particularly want to be right here, since I see the chances of us getting the Culture as rather slim 🖇️)
It's not that it won't improve, but it isn't going to cause a runaway "singularity" event.
Like the drama around the models "escaping" and "amazing hacks" have turned out to be something, but not nearly what people were afraid it was going to be.
A lot of the fundamental limitations have remained, and we are figuring out the scenarios where those limitations are fine or there is a way to create a feedback mechanism to try to reroll the AI until it passes. Lots of success there, but the fundamental disconnects are still there, just not important for the task at hand or can be worked around.
The way people reach that extremely logical conclusion is by looking at 1) the diminishing returns of continued training and of building new models, 2) The data center buildout required for those diminishing returns is rising exponentially in cost, leading to many planned centers being cancelled and/or running behind schedule, 3) These LLMs are not even close to profitable, and they are not useful enough to justify the cost of using them.
As they continue to attempt to improve the LLMs, the costs rise exponentially, the results (and profitability) do not.
Are they diminishing, though? Current open-ish Chinese models are near-SOTA, and they’ve been trained on less powerful chips than currently available to the frontier labs. I suspect there’s a lot more to be squeezed out here. Data center rollout slowing down might lead to the same effect in the US, but will probably only serve to cement the main players in place as the competition is locked out. Inference in isolation is profitable now, I think? Hard to tell with the Möbius net of creative financials, of course.
I hope you’re right. A slowing of the frontier development would make it possible for the world to catch up and readjust, and maybe buy hardware again, to run the current crop of models locally. That in itself would be disruptive enough for me.
Yeah, I’m fairly confident that they’re near the ceiling of what is possible with the current technology.
Also there’s so much slop out there now that LLMs are beginning to train on the slop and effectively giving themselves a sort of digital folding prion disease.
I follow a lot of journalists who cover AI specifically, and everything I’m seeing shows quality increasing more slowly over time as the cost builds at an increasing rate.
The financial fuckery does make it hard to keep track of, but the fact that they’re even engaged in that sort of financing betrays that they are not in good financial health.
I’m not at all confident that they’re hitting a ceiling yet, and I suspect one’s outlook on that depends on how the information bubble you’re in is shaped. I concede that mine is influenced by my interest in the underlying technology.
I do believe that even if the bubble popped right now, and the current models are the best we’ll get for the next ten years, that would be enough to have dramatic consequences (aside from the econuclear fallout from the crash, that is).
In this scenario, why would companies start attempting to make big expensive chatbots again after they caused the worst financial fallout of all time? That would be likely the least advisable business move ever.
Similar to you, I would concede that my information sphere is influenced by my contempt for the technology (as well as by my love for computers in general)… thank you for being open to have a real conversation with me about this by the way. Most of the time I just end up getting attacked because pro-AI people don’t like what I have to say.
I would note tho, that there’s only a profit motive involved in one of these competing narratives, and that would be the narrative being pushed by the oligarchic techbro fascists.
Agree, in that case the development would probably be more incremental, focusing on what can be improved without hundreds of thousands of GPUs available, and moving inference maybe to a local-first setting. There would be no promise of 1000x profits from that, so maybe we'd get a more managable pace.
Thank you too. I have the same feeling, just the other way around - lemmy seems to have little patience for even slight positivity towards AI and LLMs in particular. Having an actual discussion is refreshing.
Regarding the profit motive, I concur, at least for the US side. I'm less certain about China, but I'm not very knowledgable there, so maybe the same mechanisms are in effect.
