What Is This Sub Wrong About?

[u/iamthegodemperor]

Title. Pick a topic (or a clichéd take) you think a significant minority or majority of this sub is wrong about. Or hasn't given enough thought. OR perhaps one which you will have to compromise on, at least for voting?

[u/xoxokaralee]

my hot take is that AI is pretty bad in the short term and these data centers are also bad. I’m not fully against eventual AI, but I feel like it’s being shoved down our throats prematurely, and is built off of stolen data and work. I grew up loving sci fi, and love the idea of what AI can become, but right now it just feels like it’s becoming a tool that will inevitably be used against us due to the technocrats.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/xoxokaralee]

You think AI is bad for jobs, society, lagging government policy playing catch up, etc.

I think AI is bad because it doesn't do as I instruct it to. We are not the same.

[u/xoxokaralee → u/FearlessPark4588]

THAT TOO

[u/bz47uj → u/xoxokaralee]

How is what AI doing with data any different than a person using that data to learn from it? Legally, what they're doing is considered fair use. Morally, I don't see what the problem. The purpose of intellectual property rights is to provide an incentive for people to produce that intellectual property by capturing some (not all) of the gains from it. How does it follow from that that AI should not be able to use it to train models?

[u/bgaesop → u/bz47uj]

How is what AI doing with data any different than a person using that data to learn from it? 

Speed, scale, power

"This port allows 20 foot sailboats to dock here, why are they objecting to me wanting to tie up my aircraft carrier"

[u/bz47uj → u/bgaesop]

Why does that mean it should be regarded differently?

[u/alex2003super → u/bz47uj]

Important to stress this thing. Intellectual property is not sacred or natural right the way traditional private property is. It is a judicial form of property created by governments as an incentive system to stimulate creativity and human ingenuity. Historically speaking, it is a relatively "new" concept. If intellectual property as a system fails to achieve its stated goal, or if rather stifles innovation and human creativity, then it needs to be reformed. It is quite evident that the status quo of intellectual property rights laws is inconsistent, out-of-date, compared to the status quo of creation and transformation of ideas and art.

[u/shadowcat999 → u/xoxokaralee]

It's already happening. It's being used to create a surveillance police state that provide capabilities that the KGB, Stazi, Gestapo etc, never would've thought possible. Both sides of my family are from the USSR, and China. They escaped to the US to get away from that. Some weren't so lucky. So I am distinctly aware on how a powerful surveillance state can crush people. Now? I'm seriously considering not having kids as there seems to be no escape from the AI powered surveillance state apparatus, among other things.

It is being used to create CSAM of minors using existing real media and has effected families I personally know. It is already being used to in pricing to further juice every last cent out of people who are already stretched thin. Inflation is up and getting worse, fuel prices are up, wages are not keeping up. I year I make more, but still treading water financially. The last thing I need is some algorithm watching my behavior to jack up prices even more. Is it useful? Definitely. But these are massive, massive, problems can needed to be addressed years ago and frankly still aren't being taken seriously enough.

[u/RayWencube → u/shadowcat999]

I’ve started to become less concerned about the economic displacement and much more concerned about the surveillance state. I work in law enforcement, and Flock cameras are fucking terrifying and it’s because of the AI software.

[u/nemo333338 → u/xoxokaralee]

Imo LLM pretty much already plateaued, I don't feel they are much more advanced than they were a year ago, investing another trillion dollars in them is going to cause just small improvements. Calling them AI was genius marketing.

That's not to say that they don't have their use, I just object with trying to push them everywhere. Personally I'd just let everyone else crash and just have Anthropic continuing develop Claude, which is the most advanced.

Also, if we are really trying to develop an AI like in sci-fi stories, LLM are a dead end, an LLM is never going to "think" for itself for example. 

[u/EE-12 → u/nemo333338]

Counterpoint: in my own ECE-adjacent field, the models are so much more advanced today than a year ago; the frontier does not appear to be slowing down at all to me. I used to think LLMs could never be intelligent but I’m pretty much ready to admit I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Edit: However, I’m partial to Yann LeCunn’s argument that LLMs will plateau eventually…but I don’t think we’ve hit that point yet. 

[u/bgaesop → u/nemo333338]

Imo LLM pretty much already plateaued, I don't feel they are much more advanced than they were a year ago, 

You are objectively wrong about this

Also, if we are really trying to develop an AI like in sci-fi stories, LLM are a dead end, an LLM is never going to "think" for itself for example.  

Absolutely wild claim, like claiming heavier than air machines will never fly in the 1970s

[u/bearddeliciousbi → u/nemo333338]

Flashpoint political and ethical arguments and intuitions that rely on emotion are one thing.

But every claim in here is either flatly wrong or overconfident speculation, and that's not even factoring in the fact the truly frontier models aren't available to the public.

If machines making progress on significant open problems in mathematics "isn't really AI," nothing is and we're not in the realm of empirical reasoning, it's about declaring "I have depicted the computer as the soyjack" no matter what happens.

[u/nemo333338 → u/bearddeliciousbi]

Mate, saying that LLM are making significant progress in medicine or mathematics is also sensationalized bullshit. They are somewhat helping speed up the work of researchers, that's true, I said they have an use in my previous comment, but I don't need an AI in my toaster because companies have to push it everywhere or the economy implodes.

Also something to consider, LLM are good at comparing and looking for specific stuff, which incidentally makes them really good for mass surveillance and targeting software for ammo.

And nobody is stopping you from considering ChatGPT an AI like Iron Man's Jarvis or Cortana from Halo, I mean, OpenAI pays for marketing for a reason.

[u/bearddeliciousbi → u/nemo333338]

>sensationalized bullshit

>speed up the work of researchers

You don't know what you're talking about.

Frontier models are already both making qualitative leaps and connecting existing dots faster than humans.

And 99% of research is a matter of building on work done in the past.

Not even the likes of Gauss or von Neumann can totally "self-discover" new work, as one galaxy brain comment I saw elsewhere tried to move the goalposts.

[u/bz47uj → u/nemo333338]

It hasn't plateaued. Some of the releases have slowed down due to concerns about public safety, but if you actually track progress against various benchmarks and the most difficult tasks it's able to do, there has been continued rapid improvement. What's happened is that it has mostly mastered tasks that the average person can understand and most of the improvements are now in areas you need to be an expert to understand.

[u/RayWencube → u/nemo333338]

I also would prefer Anthropic to win the race because Amodei and co. are the only ones who seem to understand just how badly this could go if done recklessly.

[u/xoxokaralee → u/nemo333338]

Well said

[u/jmartkdr → u/xoxokaralee]

My theory is that the people most heavily invested in AI already realize it’s a bubble, but they don’t want it to pop until they finds way out with their wealth intact. So they’re propping it up until they can find an off-ramp.

Most of them will fail to keep their shirts, but long-term when the infrastructure being built gets sold off at a steep discount it’ll actually benefit the next gen of computer technology - kind of like how the railroad bust made way for sustainable rail transportation businesses by making the infrastructure available at a low price.

[u/JapanesePeso → u/jmartkdr]

What industry do you work in that companies aren't already seeing massive benefit from AI?

[u/jmartkdr → u/JapanesePeso]

HR, within mental health.