The phony comforts of AI skepticism

In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right. It’s not impossible that the tech industry’s planned quarter-trillion dollars of spending on infrastructure to support AI next year will never pay off. But it is a signal that they have already seen something real.

The market is incredibly irrational and massive bubbles happen all the time.

The number of users when all the search engines are forcibly injecting it in every search (and hemorrhaging money to do it)? Just as dumb.

Any thoughts on the paragraph following your excerpt:
The most persuasive way you can demonstrate the reality of AI, though, is to describe how it is already being used today. Not in speculative sci-fi scenarios, but in everyday offices and laboratories and schoolrooms. And not in the ways that you already know — cheating on homework, drawing bad art, polluting the web — but in ones that feel surprising and new.
With that in mind, here are some things that AI has done in 2024.
Cut customer losses from scams in half through proactive detection, according to the Bank of Australia.
Preserved some of the 200 endangered Indigenous languages spoken in North America.
Accelerated drug discovery, offering the possibility of breakthrough protections against antibiotic resistance.
Detected the presence of tuberculosis by listening to a patient’s voice.
Reproduced an ALS patient’s lost voice.
Enabled persecuted Venezuelan journalists to resume delivering the news via digital avatars.
Pieced together fragments of the epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest texts.
Caused hundreds of thousands of people to develop intimate relationships with chatbots.
Created engaging and surprisingly natural-sounding podcasts out of PDFs.
Created poetry that participants in a study say they preferred to human-written poetry in a blind test. (This may be because people prefer bad art to good art, but still.)
- Caused hundreds of thousands of people to develop intimate relationships with chatbots
  did you actually just bring that up as a positive?
- Mostly hyping up very simple things?
  LLMs don't add anything vs actively scanning for a handful of basic rules and link scanning. Anything referencing a bank that isn't on a whitelist of legitimate bank domains in a given country would likely be more effective.
  The language stuff is the only parts they're actually good at.
  Chatbots are genuine dogshit, PDF to podcast is genuine dogshit, poetry is genuine dogshit.

I don't believe that this is the path to actual AI, but not for any of the reasons stated in the article.

The level of energy consumption alone is eye watering and unsustainable. A human can eat a banana and function for a while, in contrast, the current AI offering requirements are now getting dedicated power plants.

lol the entire hope is basically "infinite scaling" despite being way past diminishing returns multiple orders of magnitude ago.

It's real and it's dangerous, but it's also fake and it sucks.

I honestly doubt I would ever pay for this shit. I'll use it fine but ive noticed actual serious problematic "hallucinations" that shocked the hell out of me to the point i think it has a hopeless signal/noise problem to the point it could never be serially accurate and trusted
- I've had two useful applications of "AI".
  One is using it to explain programming frameworks, libraries, and language features. In these cases it's sometimes wrong or outdated, but it's easy to test and check to make sure if it's right. Extremely valuable in this case! It basically just sums up what everybody already said, so it's easier and more on-point than doing a google search.
  The other is writing prompts and getting it to make insane videos. In this case all I want is the hallucinations! It makes some stupid insane stuff. But the novelty wears off quick and I just don't care any more.
- I've been using AI to troubleshoot/learn after switching from Windows -> Linux 1.5 years ago. It has given me very poor advice occasionally, but it has taught me a lot more valuable info. This is not dissimilar to my experience following tutorials on the internet...
  I honestly doubt I would ever pay for this shit.
  I understand your perspective. Personally, I think that there's a chicken/egg situation where free AI versions are a subpar representation that makes skeptics view AI as a whole as over-hyped. OTOH, the people who use the better models experience the benefits first hand, but are seen as AI zealots that are having the wool pulled over there eyes.

At the moment, no one knows for sure whether the large language models that are now under development will achieve superintelligence and transform the world.

I think that's pretty much settled by now. Yes, it will transform the world. And no, the current LLMs won't ever achieve superintelligence. They have some severe limitations by design. And even worse, we're already putting in more and more data and compute into training, for less and less gain. It seems we could approach a limit soon. I'd say it's ruled out that the current approach will extend to human-level or even superintelligence territory.

Is super-intellignence smarter than all humans? I think where we stand now, LLMs are already smarter than the average human while lagging behind experts w/ specialized knowledge, no?
Source: https://trackingai.org/IQ
- Isn't super intelligent more the ability to think so far beyond human limitations that it might as well be magic. The classic example being inventing faster than light drive.
  Simply being very intelligent makes it more of an expert system than a super intelligence.
- I think superintelligence means smarter than the (single) most intelligent human.
  I've read these claims, but I'm not convinced. I tested all the ChatGPTs etc, let them write emails for me, summarize, program some software... It's way faster at generating text/images than me, but I'm sure I'm 40 IQ points more intelligent. Plus it's kind of narrow what it can do at all. ChatGPT can't even make me a sandwich or bring coffe. Et cetera. So any comparison with a human has to be on a very small set of tasks anyways, for AI to compete at all.

the most dangerous assumption either camp is making is that AI is and end-solution. Whre 8n fact it's just a tool. Like invented steam machines they can do a lot more than humans can but they are only ever useful as tools that humans use. Same here AI can have value as a tool to digest large chunks of data and produce some form of analysis providing humans with "another datapoint" but it's ultimately up to humans to make the decision based on available data.

It's the latest product that everyone will refuse to pay real money once they figure out how useless and stupid it really is. Same bullshit bubble, new cycle.