I'm among those who held that majority opinion for a long time. However mine is continuing to slide further and further into "I'm so sick of all the bullshit, I wish I lived in a different reality...
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
I'm among those who held that majority opinion for a long time. However mine is continuing to slide further and further into "I'm so sick of all the bullshit, I wish I lived in a different reality where LLMs never existed" territory.
I'm right there with you. It's exhausting to constantly be in this brain space and have tools that are useless to you forced upon you, with no recourse and no way to say no. And then you are also...
I'm right there with you. It's exhausting to constantly be in this brain space and have tools that are useless to you forced upon you, with no recourse and no way to say no. And then you are also proselytized to over and over.
It’s a breath of fresh air to see an article like this. It seems like everything I read is billionaire hype or (understandable, justified, but often technically misguided) backlash against the...
[W]hat they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI, which can be pretty succinctly summed up:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.
If we were to simply listen to the smart voices of those who aren't lost in the hype cycle, we might see that it is not inevitable that AI systems use content without the consent of creators, and it is not impossible to build AI systems that respect commitments to environmental sustainability. We can build AI that isn't centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies. Or any other definition of "good AI" that people might aspire to. But instead, we end up with the worst, most anti-social approaches because the platforms that have introduced "AI" to the public imagination are run by authoritarian extremists with deeply destructive agendas.
It’s a breath of fresh air to see an article like this. It seems like everything I read is billionaire hype or (understandable, justified, but often technically misguided) backlash against the billionaire hype - and as someone who works in scientific ML, a field that’s firmly swept into the “AI” catch all but has nothing to do with LLMs, it’s nice to hear a voice of moderation.
And the author’s absolutely right, if we treat it more like the “normal technology” that it is, we might just break this idea that it’s synonymous with Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg’s bullshit, defuse some of the backlash, and have an opportunity to make use of it in a positive way.
It seems to me that part of the issue here is the inability to have a complex narrative in public discourse. Things are either all bad or all good. Having a "useful with flaws" kind of narrative...
It seems to me that part of the issue here is the inability to have a complex narrative in public discourse. Things are either all bad or all good. Having a "useful with flaws" kind of narrative usually just trends towards "bad."
I see some parallels in a discussion about Pro Football Focus (PFF) rating I saw on reddit today. PFF ratings are based on human scoring of videos of the game. The post had some data showing that PFF ratings are more predictive of future results than other stats/results based metrics. There are a lot of people in the comments bashing the PFF ratings saying that they're not representative of reality, pointing to disconnects between PFF ratings and the statistics. There are people defending the ratings saying that although they may have flaws, they measure things in a way that raw stats based on results can't. Some of the responses are some kind of results-oriented thinking or saying that there's no point if there are flaws. It seems like it's hard to get across that this stat might be interesting and useful in certain circumstances, but not the end-all-be-all. People seem to be looking for one stat that is the correct or best one, when the system is complex and such a stat doesn't exist. In a similar way, some of these AI models are far from perfect and far from universally applicable, but they are improvements in certain circumstances or in certain marginal ways.
That's an unsubstantiated statement. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Sundar Pichai are all liberal. Sam and Dario have publicly stated that there is/will be an AI inequality problem that needs to be...
But instead, we end up with the worst, most anti-social approaches because the platforms that have introduced "AI" to the public imagination are run by authoritarian extremists with deeply destructive agendas.
That's an unsubstantiated statement. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Sundar Pichai are all liberal. Sam and Dario have publicly stated that there is/will be an AI inequality problem that needs to be solved through UBI and/or some socioeconomic reform; Sam himself spent $100m+ in cash on a UBI experiment. Only Elon Musk is an authoritarian extremist, but his Grok AI isn't a big player.
I'm optimistic about AI. It's creating a lot of economic value. It's not a normal technology because it's targeting a human domain—information synthesis—that has been untouched by other technologies, which have targeted information retrieval or, in the past, manual labor automation/augmentation. In parallel, there are rapid advancements in robotics. I find the future quite bright — if we choose it to be.
It's really on voters to choose leaders to harness this promethean fire for society's benefit. Unfortunately, the right lacks brains, while the left lacks imagination.
We can build AI that isn't centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies.
People are building that. Lots of folks and companies are working on alternative models and hardware for local or on-device compute.
I'm among those who held that majority opinion for a long time. However mine is continuing to slide further and further into "I'm so sick of all the bullshit, I wish I lived in a different reality where LLMs never existed" territory.
I'm right there with you. It's exhausting to constantly be in this brain space and have tools that are useless to you forced upon you, with no recourse and no way to say no. And then you are also proselytized to over and over.
It’s a breath of fresh air to see an article like this. It seems like everything I read is billionaire hype or (understandable, justified, but often technically misguided) backlash against the billionaire hype - and as someone who works in scientific ML, a field that’s firmly swept into the “AI” catch all but has nothing to do with LLMs, it’s nice to hear a voice of moderation.
And the author’s absolutely right, if we treat it more like the “normal technology” that it is, we might just break this idea that it’s synonymous with Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg’s bullshit, defuse some of the backlash, and have an opportunity to make use of it in a positive way.
It seems to me that part of the issue here is the inability to have a complex narrative in public discourse. Things are either all bad or all good. Having a "useful with flaws" kind of narrative usually just trends towards "bad."
I see some parallels in a discussion about Pro Football Focus (PFF) rating I saw on reddit today. PFF ratings are based on human scoring of videos of the game. The post had some data showing that PFF ratings are more predictive of future results than other stats/results based metrics. There are a lot of people in the comments bashing the PFF ratings saying that they're not representative of reality, pointing to disconnects between PFF ratings and the statistics. There are people defending the ratings saying that although they may have flaws, they measure things in a way that raw stats based on results can't. Some of the responses are some kind of results-oriented thinking or saying that there's no point if there are flaws. It seems like it's hard to get across that this stat might be interesting and useful in certain circumstances, but not the end-all-be-all. People seem to be looking for one stat that is the correct or best one, when the system is complex and such a stat doesn't exist. In a similar way, some of these AI models are far from perfect and far from universally applicable, but they are improvements in certain circumstances or in certain marginal ways.
That's an unsubstantiated statement. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Sundar Pichai are all liberal. Sam and Dario have publicly stated that there is/will be an AI inequality problem that needs to be solved through UBI and/or some socioeconomic reform; Sam himself spent $100m+ in cash on a UBI experiment. Only Elon Musk is an authoritarian extremist, but his Grok AI isn't a big player.
I'm optimistic about AI. It's creating a lot of economic value. It's not a normal technology because it's targeting a human domain—information synthesis—that has been untouched by other technologies, which have targeted information retrieval or, in the past, manual labor automation/augmentation. In parallel, there are rapid advancements in robotics. I find the future quite bright — if we choose it to be.
It's really on voters to choose leaders to harness this promethean fire for society's benefit. Unfortunately, the right lacks brains, while the left lacks imagination.
People are building that. Lots of folks and companies are working on alternative models and hardware for local or on-device compute.