Technology

Good. Maybe the hype will finally die down soon and "AI" won't be shoved into every nook, cranny, and Notepad app anymore.

AI has been paying of for decades, it is used in all industries for appropriate tasks.

Now it is even better we are doing stuff no one thought it could be possible and advancing our work.

Perfect use case is for things that are simple to do but take too much time to be economical for humans (ex. counting products, plants, trees, cars, disease detection...) and using additional data to make better decisions.

Generative AI (for writing text, coding,... ) is of course no where close to being useful, but it can interesting to try. It is just a toy, expensive one, but still a toy.

AI is absolutely taking off. LLMs are taking over various components of frontline support (service desks, tier 1 support). They're integrated into various systems using langchains to pull your data, knowledge articles, etc, and then respond to you based on that data.

AI is primarily a replacement for workers, like how McDonalds self service ordering kiosks are a replacement for cashiers. Cheaper and more scalable, cutting out more and more entry level (and outsourced) work. But unlike the kiosks, you won't even see that the "Amazon tech support" you were kicked over to is an LLM instead of a person. You won't hear that the frontline support tech you called for a product is actually an AI and text to speech model.

There were jokes about the whole Wendy's drive thru workers being replaced by AI, but I've seen this stuff used live. I've seen how flawlessly they've tuned the AI to respond to someone who makes a mistake while speaking and corrects themself ("I'm going to the Sacramento office -- sorry, no, the Folsom office") or bundles various requests together ("oh while you're getting me a visitor badge can you also book a visitor cube for me?"). I've even seen crazy stuff like "I'm supposed to meet with Mary while I'm there, can you give me her phone number?" and the LLM routes through the phone directory, pulls up the most likely Marys given the caller's department and the location the user is visiting via prior context, and asks for more information - "I see two Marys here, Mary X who works in Department A and Mary Y who works in Department B, are you talking about either of them?"

It's already here and it's as invisible as possible, and that's the end goal.

This is how investments in new technologies work. That's such a non-story.

Okay... let's call wine "wine" and bread "bread": the acronym "AI" is mostly an advertisement stunt.

This is not artificial intelligence; and even if it was, "AI" is used for a bag of a thousand cats - game mob pathfinding, chess engines, swarm heuristic methods, so goes on.

What the article is talking about is far more specific, it's what the industry calls "machine learning"¹.

So the text is saying that machine learning is costly. No surprise - it's a relatively new tech, and even the state of art is still damn coarse². Over time those technologies will get further refined, under different models; cost of operation is bound to reduce over time. Microsoft and the likes aren't playing the short game, they're looking for long-term return of investment.

1. I'd go a step further and claim here that "model-based generation" is more accurate. But that's me.
2. LLMs are a good example of that; GPT-4 has ~2*10¹² parameters. If you equate each to a neuron (kind of a sloppy comparison, but whatever), it's more than an order of magnitude larger than the ~1*10¹¹ neurons in a human brain. It's basically brute force.

The GitHub copilot example seems to indicate it’s a pricing problem. In fact this situation might indicate that users are finding it so useful that they are using it more than MS expected when they set up their monthly subscriptions. Over time, models are going to be optimized and costs will reduce.

Expecting AI to take over all human intensive tasks is not realistic but eventually it’s going to become part of a lot of repetitive tasks. Though I hope that we see more open source base models instead of the current situation with 3-4 major companies providing the base models behind most of the AI applications.

As someone who has always been skeptical of "AI," I definitely hope corporations dial back their enthusiasm on it; but I think its value has never been commercial, but industrial.

"AI" was not designed so consumers could see what it would look like to have Abraham Lincoln fighting a T-Rex without having to pay artists for their time. "AI" was designed so that could happen on a much larger enterprise scale (though it would probably be stock images of technology or happy people using technology instead).

With this in mind, I think "AI" being a money pit won't dissuade corporations since they want the technology to be effective for themselves, they just want consumers to offset costs.

Billionaires spend billions making some jobs just a bit more efficient, against the wishes of the people who do those jobs, and then cry when it doesn't actually pay that much.

'big data' 'crypto' etc.

AI is just the next 'big thing' that amounts to nothing. 90% of what anyone says in the press/media is total nonsense. And most AI researchers are downplaying the hype because they know it's all bullshit and AI will ultimately not be a major change anymore than navigation systems in cars was. It is merely convenience and those that 'rely' on it will end up in trouble.

It's a complementary technology, not a revolution.

I feel like companies were all hoping to get in early, to get a solid chunk of the cake. Well, and then a lot more companies got in than anyone could have guessed, so the slices of the cake are a lot smaller.

We'll have to see what happens, though. It's possible that the startups have to give up and only a few big fish remain. But if those have to increase prices to become profitable, this market will still be a lot smaller than people were hoping for.

Good, we as a society aren't ready for these kind of tools. AI would further increase the divide between people. One of the reasons is that it costs too much to run it.

Everyone who can't afford the hardware would be dependent on AI owned by corporations. And most people can't even afford those fees. Since we build our society around (materialistic) "productivity", I am sure AI would escalate how we treat people and whole countries who fall off the capitalism train. I hope the hype dies.

Rather than debate every new technology for energy worthiness on a case-by-case basis up front, it would be more productive to direct our efforts towards better policy that internalizes the cost of pollution.

"These new-fangled 'lasers' don't even do anything useful for the energy they consume!"

I'm not too well-versed on the subject but, isn't user interactions with LLM's also train them further? They make it sound like the product has already been matured and they're letting people use it for free.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Oh, no! Billionaires with short term, selfish thinking might lose money! What a tragedy.

Good

With MS hinting at SAAS for Win12 with Copilot, this will be a good test.

Nobody can profit off "monthly usage credits" or without a subscription.

At least not until the tech becomes more affordable.

Could OpenAI refactor their code and algorithms to be more efficient? The more Instructions Per Cycle (IPC) that can be performed in the same amount of time can reduce costs to some extent when employed at scale.

That and computers are always getting more energy efficient, so if they can have these keep up or outpace user growth then it might become a little more sustainable.