AI Is a Total Grift
Much of what’s known as ‘AI’ has nothing to do with progress — it’s about lobbyists pushing shoddy digital replacements for human labour that increase billionaire’s profits and make workers’ lives worse.
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AI has some legit uses but the hype around it is mostly VC's throwing money at buzzwords while the actual tech is nowhere near the "AGI revolution" they keep promising us lol.
A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.
A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it's what's selling for some reason?
The latter isn't even selling, just used because it is free to use or they jammed it into an existing ecosystem like Copilot.
The former isn't "kind of interesting" and there are lots and lots of daily use cases solved by AI that are much much more than "kind of interesting".
What a simple way to try to downplay it by calling it only kind of interesting.
The former is important, but attracts little attention from the tech & mainstream press, is not heavily marketed by major corporations to other corporations and the general public, and makes VCs fall asleep. Whereas the latter gets ALL the coverage, marketing, and gives VCs big fat boners. My comment expresses my bewilderment at this state of affairs (hence the "for some reason?"). You want to white-knight machine learning, expert systems and pattern recognition? Call VentureBeat, Andressen-Horowitz, PitchBook, and TechCrunch. And while you're at it, tell them to stop vaporizing genAI slop.
Sure, I'm just hoping smart people can see through the bullshit and call it out instead of treating all "AI" the same.
The crap they're promoting it for also showcases the direction they're developing it for which is an utterly depressing, unsustainable and impractical one. It's frustrating to see how much money is invested (and ultimately burned) to actively destroy the economy and create problems rather than fixing some.
But can we at least be thankful that it shifted focus from augmented reality? Prior to AI, the buzz was around things like the metaverse and digital avatars in your teams meetings.
Even crap AI is more useful than avatars in teams.
IDK, at least that was useful for gaming etc. AI is mostly about eliminating jobs
What's currently being marketed as AI reinforces that there's always someone who can do your job worse for cheaper
I'm just waiting for the "cheaper" part to change. Surely these VC's will want to see some ROI on the stupid amount of money these hosted models cost. There's no way the subscription fees being charged cover the actual cost of running the models, so something will have to give eventually
Digital Avatars in teams arent actively destructive to the internet, the environment, and people's grasp on reality.
I think you're universalising a personal grievance, without fully accounting for the impacts of Metaverse bullshit, which was never practical or feasible to begin with, and the AI Apocalypse sweeping the internet
Well, I was trying to bring a little humor to the conversation by just saying at least as a silver lining is that this other stupid crap is gone now.
If the AI "revolution" never came, I bet a thread just like this one would exist for metaverse or whatever saying how it's destroying the internet. And think about it, entering an entire world just to hold this conversation where all users are known and conversations recorded...kind of like AI scraping.
You can see his it could get just as bad or worse. Hint: its not the technology that's the problem, its the companies behind them - those wouldn't be any different.
I'm not trying to downplay AI, I'm just being realistic of the world we live in and trying to not be so doom and gloom every second of the day.
How does this differ from most other things VCs throw money at?
cough cough crypto cough
This. Everybody wanted it to be AGI right out of the gate. It's just a tool, like Photoshop. It will get better over time but it's not the end all be all.
