onfocus

The DeepMind CEO is dead-set that advanced AI models will bring about a renaissance in human existence. The “golden era” is only five short years away. “AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources,” Hassabis said.

Someone needs to check in on the standard tech CEO ketamine dosage. I feel like it's dialed too high at the moment.

While publishers contend with how AI is changing search, they are also seeking ways to protect their copyright material. The large language models that underpin the new generation of chatbots are trained on data hoovered up from the open web, including news articles.

This was always the central transaction of Google. It can display portions of your site (or maybe even a fully cached version) and in return site owners get traffic. The deal is off. Now it's all crawling/scraping but keeping most of the traffic for themselves.

The media has provided OpenAI with an aura of vast authority, with its executives publicly proclaiming that its tech is poised to profoundly change the world, restructuring the economy and perhaps one day achieving a superhuman "artificial general intelligence" — outsize claims that sound, on a certain level, not unlike many of the delusions we heard about while reporting this story.

Hadn't made this connection before. Yeah, if you claim your new technology is going to reorder society—and media outlets credulously parrot it—you're going to trick people into thinking they're tapped into genius. Some healthy skepticism about new technology is important.

That being said, there's no excuse for how everybody covered this Jony Ive fiasco. Even if you think this device ships, it took very little time and energy to establish how little Jony Ive has done since leaving Apple, and only a little more time to work out exactly how ridiculous everything about it.

Righteous rant from Edward Zitron about fawning, credulous OpenAi coverage.

Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

I think this article article helps bring many background assumptions of the AI mindset into the foreground. I've found thinking about AI as an ideology rather than a technology helps me process our current moment. Highly recommended.

"But I just use AI for boilerplate!" you whimper, clutching your Co-Pilot subscription. Listen to yourself. If you’re writing the same boilerplate every day like some industrial-age cog monkey, automate it yourself. Write a library. Invent a macro. Reclaim some dignity.

LOL, enjoyed this rant. Sometimes I feel like the only person who isn't an AI enthusiast.

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

ok, this isn't just weird memes and goofy youtube videos anymore. This is cult brainwashing shit.

As grim as some of these responses feel, I hope there’s at least some small solace to be taken from the fact that so many artists remain firm in their resistance to AI technology that devalues their work, and are championing human creators in the face of it.

This is a tough read but a good antidote to the ai cheerleading you see everywhere.

Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed "for most things" in the world, says Bill Gates.

LOL, man these billionaires are telling on themselves by promoting the idea they don't need labor anymore. AI's primary function is to devalue labor and it's not much more than that. These sorts of predictions are part of that devaluation process. Your work is valuable! Join a union.

“I’m in close contact with the CDC. They have about what, 13,000 employees, 13,000 employees at the CDC. In the last couple years, those probationary people, which is about 10% of their employee base, about 1,300 people, which you’re referring to. A lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI,” McCormick said. The mention of AI led to “no’s” and murmurs from the crowd, leading the Republican representative to say, “I happen to be a doctor. I know a few things.”

AI’s primary use right now is devaluing workers. Sounds like even Republican constituents have had enough of the AI snake oil.

But these older profiles are instructive, because they show that Meta’s AI primarily creates the exact type of AI spam that has taken over all of Meta’s platforms recently and which have become a running joke. They also show that Meta is not particularly good at this, and that users do not want this.

Makes sense that instead of protecting their users from garbage AI interactions, Facebook's reaction is to copy and monetize.

To create A.I. businesses, experts predicted, $1 trillion would be spent on data centers, utilities and applications. Mr. Covello thought those costs made it impossible for the industry to inexpensively solve real-world problems, which is what internet companies did decades ago.

As a member of Goldman’s working group on A.I., he reviewed a service that used generative A.I. to automatically update analysts’ spreadsheets with companies’ financial results. He said it saved his analysts about 20 minutes of time per company but cost six times as much money.

I think this is exactly it. AI is too expensive in terms of energy use and is highly subsidized by venture capital at the moment. The minute that money dries up there won't be enough of a payoff to justify the expense.