>>SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so.
I have been saying this for a while. I visited SF a couple months ago and god do people feel empty from the inside. Everything is revolving around AI this and AI that. Half of these people were not paying attention when we were training gradient boost models and now all of these people are 'AI Agents experts'.
I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.
What's the evidence that the doom narrative is connected to valuations? It seems more like a marketing/recruiting strategy. As the post points out, institutional investors generally think the idea of mass unemployment is BS, and they are investing accordingly.
Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment.
The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.
It's significantly worse! All NFTs did was separate fools from their money, and crypto in general increased GPU costs. All the Metaverse did was cause Facebook to throw away a bunch of money (lol).
Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate.
Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model.
I know this is the cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.
I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.
Journalism and public media in general needs to be a licensed profession with tangible standards, and malpractice suits should be pursued aggressively.
Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.
Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea.
If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats.
But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.
Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.
It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.
It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."
> It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."
Yeah poor you this must be much more tiring than being told constantly that the apocalypse is coming and your jobs are gone and everything is going to be shitty because a bunch of ultra rich midwits want even more money and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Sorry dude, hearing that people don't like that messaging and are replying with copypasta talking points must really be rough for you. Praying for you in these trying times.
What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.
> Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.
I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.
LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.
What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.
I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”
There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored.
However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.
Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.
I have been saying this for a while. I visited SF a couple months ago and god do people feel empty from the inside. Everything is revolving around AI this and AI that. Half of these people were not paying attention when we were training gradient boost models and now all of these people are 'AI Agents experts'.
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