“The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent,” he added. “Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we’ll be fine as an industry.”
Needless to say, we haven’t seen anything like that yet. OpenAI’s top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail’s pace and requires constant supervision.
Is he saying it’s just LLMs that are generating no value?
I wish reporters could be more specific with their terminology. They just add to the confusion.
Edit: he’s talking about generative AI, of which LLMs are a subset.
But the hype isn’t about any other form of AI. It’s just OpenAI and a few other companies trying to copy them.
YES
YES
FUCKING YES! THIS IS A WIN!
Hopefully they curtail their investments and stop wasting so much fucking power.
I think the best way I’ve heard it put is “if we absolutely have to burn down a forest, I want warp drive out of it. Not a crappy python app”
That’s because they want to use AI in a server scenario where clients login. That translated to American English and spoken with honesty means that they are spying on you. Anything you do on your computer is subject to automatic spying. Like you could be totally under the radar, but as soon as you say the magic words together bam!..I’d love a sling thong for my wife…bam! Here’s 20 ads, just click to purchase since they already stole your wife’s boob size and body measurements and preferred lingerie styles. And if you’re on McMaster… Hmm I need a 1/2 pipe and a cap…Better get two caps in case you cross thread on…ding dong! FBI! We know you’re in there! Come out with your hands up!
The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux is some college software (Won’t need it when I’m done) and 1 game (which no longer gets updates and thus is on the path to a slow sad demise)
So I’m on the verge of going Penguin.
What software / game is that? it could still run in Wine or Bottle.
Plants vs. Zombies garden Warfare 2. It used to run on Linux but then they added Easy anti-cheat which broke compatibility.
They don’t update the game anymore and they’ve essentially abandoned the franchise after the flop that was battle for neighborville so I’m not too sad leaving it behind. Was a very fun game though.
You’re really forcing it at that point. Wine can’t run most of what I need to use for work. I’m excited for the day I can ditch Windows, but it’s not any time soon unfortunately. I’ll have to live with WSL.
But… i am still curious… what are you trying to run 😆
MobaXTerm namely. It will start up, but it misses a lot of features when used in Wine. To the point it’s not usable for work purposes.
Not the same person with the program. Just another person making an excuse.
Yeah use Windows in a VM and your game probably just works too, I was surprised that all games I have on Steam now just work on Linux.
Years ago when I switched from OSX to Linux I just stopped gaming because of that but I started testing my old games and suddenly no problems with them anymore.
You can just install Linux besides windows. It’s easy, I did it last month.
Just run Windows in a VM on Linux. You can use VirtualBox.
That’s standard for emerging technologies. They tend to be loss leaders for quite a long period in the early years.
It’s really weird that so many people gravitate to anything even remotely critical of AI, regardless of context or even accuracy. I don’t really understand the aggressive need for so many people to see it fail.
I just can’t see AI tools like ChatGPT ever being profitable. It’s a neat little thing that has flaws but generally works well, but I’m just putzing around in the free version. There’s no dollar amount that could be ascribed to the service that it provides that I would be willing to pay, and I think OpenAI has their sights set way too high with the talk of $200/month subscriptions for their top of the line product.
This summarizes it well: https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
Wouldn’t call that a “summary”, but interesting read all the same. Thanks for the link.
For me personally, it’s because it’s been so aggressively shoved in my face in every context. I never asked for it, and I can’t escape it. It actively gets in my way at work (github copilot) and has already re-enabled itself at least once. I’d be much happier to just let it exist if it would do the same for me.
Because there’s already been multiple AI bubbles (eg, ELIZA - I had a lot of conversations with FREUD running on an Apple IIe). It’s also been falsely presented as basically “AGI.”
AI models trained to help doctors recognize cancer cells - great, awesome.
AI models used as the default research tool for every subject - very very very bad. It’s also so forced - and because it’s forced, I routinely see that it has generated absolute, misleading, horseshit in response to my research queries. But your average Joe will take that on faith, your high schooler will grow up thinking that Columbus discovered Colombia or something.
It is fun to generate some stupid images a few times, but you can’t trust that “AI” crap with anything serious.
I was just talking about this with someone the other day. While it’s truly remarkable what AI can do, its margin for error is just too big for most if not all of the use cases companies want to use it for.
For example, I use the Hoarder app which is a site bookmarking program, and when I save any given site, it feeds the text into a local Ollama model which summarizes it, conjures up some tags, and applies the tags to it. This is useful for me, and if it generates a few extra tags that aren’t useful, it doesn’t really disrupt my workflow at all. So this is a net benefit for me, but this use case will not be earning these corps any amount of profit.
On the other end, you have Googles Gemini that now gives you an AI generated answer to your queries. The point of this is to aggregate data from several sources within the search results and return it to you, saving you the time of having to look through several search results yourself. And like 90% of the time it actually does a great job. The problem with this is the goal, which is to save you from having to check individual sources, and its reliability rate. If I google 100 things and Gemini correctly answers 99 of those things accurate abut completely hallucinates the 100th, then that means that all 100 times I have to check its sources and verify that what it said was correct. Which means I’m now back to just… you know… looking through the search results one by one like I would have anyway without the AI.
So while AI is far from useless, it can’t now and never will be able to be relied on for anything important, and that’s where the money to be made is.
Even your manual search results may have you find incorrect sources, selection bias for what you want to see, heck even AI generated slop, so the AI generated results will just be another layer on top. Link aggregating search engines are slowly becoming useless at this rate.
While that’s true, the thing that stuck out to me is not even that the AI was mislead by itself finding AI slop, or even somebody falsely asserting something. I googled something with a particular yea or no answer. “Does X technology use Y protocol”. The AI came back with “Yes it does, and here’s how it uses it”, and upon visiting the reference page for that answer, it was documentation for that technology where it explained very clearly that x technology does NOT use Y protocol, and then went into detail on why it doesn’t. So even when everything lines up and the answer is clear and unambiguous, the AI can give you an entirely fabricated answer.
What’s really awful is that it seems like they’ve trained these LLMs to be “helpful”, which means to say “yes” as much as possible. But, that’s the case even when the true answer is “no”.
I was searching for something recently. Most people with similar searches were trying to do X, I was trying to do Y which was different in subtle but important differences. There are tons of resources out there showing how to do X, but none showing how to do Y. The “AI” answer gave me directions for doing Y by showing me the procedure for doing X, with certain parts changed so that they match Y instead. It doesn’t work like that.
Like, imagine a recipe that not just uses sugar but that relies on key properties of sugar to work, something like caramel. Search for “how do I make caramel with stevia instead of sugar” and the AI gives you the recipe for making caramel with sugar, just with “stevia” replacing every mention of “sugar” in the original recipe. Absolutely useless, right? The correct answer would be “You can’t do that, the properties are just too different.” But, an LLM knows nothing, so it is happy just to substitute words in a recipe and be “helpful”.
Ironically, Google might be accelerating its own downfall as it tries to copy the “market”, considering LLMs are just a hole in its pocket.
LLMs in non-specialized application areas basically reproduce search. In specialized fields, most do the work that automation, data analytics, pattern recognition, purpose built algorithms and brute force did before. And yet the companies charge nx the amount for what is essentially these very conventional approaches, plus statistics. Not surprising at all. Just in awe of how come the parallels to snake oil weren’t immediately obvious.
I think AI is generating negative value … the huge power usage is akin to speculative blockchain currencies. Barring some biochemistry and other very, very specialized uses it hasn’t given anything other than, as you’ve said, plain-language search (with bonus hallucination bullshit, yay!) … snake oil, indeed.
Its a little more complicated than that I think. LLMs and AI is not remotely the same with very different use cases.
I believe in AI for sure in some fields, but I understand the skeptics around LLMs.
But the difference AI is already doing in the medical industry and hospitals is no joke. X-ray scannings and early detection of severe illness is the one being used specifically today, and will save thounsands of lives and millions of dollars / euros.
My point is, its not that black and white.
On this topic, the vast majority of people seem to think that AI means the free tier of ChatGPT.
AI isn’t a magical computer demon that can grant all of your wishes, but that doesn’t mean that it is worthless.
For example, Alphafold essentially solved protein folding and diffusion models built on that discovery let us generate novel proteins with specific properties with the same ease as we can make a picture of an astronaut on a horse.
Image classification is massively useful in manufacturing. Instead of custom designed programs purpose built for each client ($$$), you can find tune existing models with generic tools using labor that doesn’t need to be a software engineer.
Robotics is another field. The amount of work required for humans to design and code their control systems was enormous. Now you can use standard models, give them arbitrary limbs and configurations and train them in simulated environments. This massively cuts down on the amount of engineering work ($$$) required.
That is not at all what he said. He said that creating some arbitrary benchmark on the level or quality of the AI, (e.g.: as it’s as smarter than a 5th grader or as intelligent as an adult) is meaningless. That the real measure is if there is value created and out out into the real world. He also mentions that global growth is up by 10%. He doesn’t provide data that correlates the grow with the use of AI and I doubt that such data exists yet. Let’s not just twist what he said to be “Microsoft CEO says AI provides no value” when that is not what he said.
I think that’s pretty clear to people who get past the clickbait. Oddly enough though, if you read through what he actually said, the takeaway is basically a tacit admission, interpreted as him trying to establish a level-set on expectations from AI without directly admitting the strategy of massively investing in LLM’s is going bust and delivering no measurable value, so he can deflect with “BUT HEY CHECK OUT QUANTUM”.
AI is the immigrants of the left.
Of course he didn’t say this. The media want you to think he did.
“They’re taking your jobs”
Well duh
AI is burning a shit ton of energy and researchers’ time though!
eh, the entireity of training GPT4 and the whole world using it for a year turns out to be about 1% of the gasoline burnt just by the USA every single day. Its barely a rounding error when it comes to energy usage.
That’s not the worst. It is burning billions for the companies with no signs of them ever becoming close to profitable.
You say this like it’s a bad thing?
Indeed, we just have to wait until venture capital realized no one’s getting their money back from this. It’ll all crumble down like the world is ending.
Makes sense that the company that just announced their qbit advancement would be disparaging the only “advanced” thing other companies have shown in the last 5 years.
R&D is always a money sink
It isn’t R&D anymore if you’re actively marketing it.
Uh… Used to be, and should be. But the entire industry has embraced treating production as test now. We sell alpha release games as mainstream releases. Microsoft fired QC long ago. They push out world breaking updates every other month.
And people have forked over their money with smiles.
Microsoft fired QC long ago.
I can’t wait until my cousin learns about this, he’ll be so surprised.
I’d tell him but he’s at work. At Microsoft, in quality control.
Make sure to also tell him he’s doing a shit job!
He’s probably been fired long ago, but due to non-existant QC, he was never notified.
Milton?
Sarah?
Especially when the product is garbage lmao
He probably saw that softbank and masayoshi son were heavily investing in it and figured it was dead.
For a lot of years, computers added no measurable productivity improvements. They sure revolutionized the way things work in all segments of society for something that doesn’t increase productivity.
AI is an inflating bubble: excessive spending, unclear use case. But it won’t take long for the pop, clearing out the failures and making successful use cases clearer, the winning approaches to emerge. This is basically the definition of capitalism
What time span are you referring to when you say “for a lot of years”?
Vague memories of many articles over much of my adult life decrying the costs of whatever the current trend with computers is being higher than the benefits.
And I believe it, it’s technically true. There seems to be a pattern of bubbles where everyone jumps on the new hot thing, spend way too much money on it. It’s counterproductive, right up until the bubble pops, leaving the transformative successes.
Or I believe it was a long term thing with electronic forms and printers. As long as you were just adding steps to existing business processes, you don’t see productivity gains. It took many years for businesses to reinvent the way they worked to really see the productivity gains
If you want a reference there is a Rational Reminder Podcast (nerdy and factual personal finance podcast from a Canadian team) about this concept. It was the illustrated with trains or phone infrastructure 100 years ago : new technology looks nice -> people invest stupid amounts in a variety of projects-> some crash bring back stock valuations to reasonable level and at that point the technology is adopted and its infrastructure got subsidized by those who lost money on the stock market hot thing. Then a new hot thing emerge. The Internet got its cycle in 2000, maybe AI is the next one. Usually every few decade the top 10 in the s/p 500 changes.
Joseph Weizenbaum: “No shit? For realsies?”
And crashing the markets in the process… At the same time they came out with a bunch of mambo jumbo and scifi babble about having a million qbit quantum chip… 😂
Tech is basically trying to push up the stocks one hype idea after another. Social media bubble about to burst? AI! AI about to burst? Quantum! I’m sure that when people will start realizing quantum computing is another smokescreen, a new moronic idea will start to gain steam from all those LinkedIn “luminaries”
Quantum computation is a lot like fusion.
We know how it works and we know that it would be highly beneficial to society but, getting it to work with reliability and at scale is hard and expensive.
Sure, things get over hyped because capitalism but that doesn’t make the technology worthless… It just shows how our economic system rewards lies and misleading people for money.
It also can solve only a limited set of problems. People is under the impression that they can suddenly game at 10k full path ray tracing if they have a quantum cpu, while in reality for 99.9% of the problem is only as fast as normal cpus
That doesn’t make it worthless.
People are often wrong about technology, that’s independent of the technology’s usefulness. Quantum computation is incredibly useful for the applications that require it, things that are completely impossible to calculate with classical computers can be done using quantum algorithms.
This is true even if there are people on social media who think that it’s a new graphics card.
Absolutely, but its application is not as widespread as someone not into science might think. The only thing it might actually impact the average Joe is cryptography I think
