Stock market chaos as China reveals secret snake oil refinery, threatening US snake oil monopoly.
https://mstdn.social/@Nickiquote/113901910776808096
Snake oil yesterday, magic beans today.
AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67977967
Going to hit 40% of jobs in 5 years the next
Is it magic beans and snake oil, eg. a scam or is it a legit threat, you can’t have both
we’re not in the slower than walking era, we’re in the ford model t era, i’m reading someone call the ford model t magic beans (eg. a scam) while millions of people are driving one every day and simultaneously worried it’s going to ruin transportation all over the north america
“It took years of hard work for us to steal beans from farmers, apply our unique brand of magic, and seek investment from our nation’s finest rubes and oafs,” a Beanco spokesman said. “Now DeepBean wants to steal our magic beans, rebrand the magic, and get money from their own buffoons and clods? It’s just not right.”
again, these are contradictory statements, it cannot be both a scam that has no value (eg. magic beans) and going to take all our jobs
You can absolutely leave and fund a “good” company, good luck getting anywhere.
If the product has value then people will buy it*
Humans have always created jobs, we love em, can’t get enough of em, in a capitalist system if people want to buy human made goods and services and those systems are profitable then there will be jobs for those people
This isn’t a communist dictatorship where you will be forced to buy government sponsored AI produce and no other choice is given to you
*I assume the products would have little logos on them like “non-gmo, organic, human made and farmed fruits!” etc
But cars have always had value, we’re talking under an article that calls AI “magic beans”
How could magic beans which produce garbage enslave humanity under capitalism? Would you argue that cars which replaced horses as the primary mode of transport in a few years be called this?
You can argue that AI does some things badly, it’s still very very early on and the progress people are making is insane, like nothing I’ve seen before, but you can’t argue it is worthless and a giant threat to us at the same time, this is contradictory
That can’t be possible, if they fire all their workers and produce AI slop then we will simply start a new company with human workers that doesn’t.
This isn’t communism we can simply start a new business at any time for any reason, with or without AI
companies are getting ahead of themselves about the opportunity to fire human employees
But then if they produce garbage with AI people will buy the non-garbage product
Either it produces something of value or it doesn’t, if it’s producing garbage, lowering output, etc then it’s not a threat to our jobs because most people don’t like garbage, if it’s producing genuine value then it will be.
i have noticed that there are two competing narratives in the leftwingosphere:
A) ai is 100% slop garbage and a giant waste of electricity, pumping out garbage images with multiple hands and the text is nothing but hallucinations that can’t even count the number of r’s in “strawberry”
and at the same time
B) AI is going to take all our jobs and we will all be homeless and poor while tech billionaire CEOs turn us into slaves
few niche uses? it has heaps of uses that aren’t niche at all
https://aussie.zone/post/16417192/14017352
perplexity.ai is a better search engine than any current ones and that’s about as mainstream a use as you can get
they are building a plant in Arizona, but i doubt it’ll ever be as good as Taiwan can do, not just because Taiwan has the skills but if Taiwan doesn’t have this then what’s the point of protecting it? It’s sort of a way to say, if you want to to continue to access the best chips in the world you should protect us from China
Think might be this:
What is distillation?
Distillation is a means of extracting understanding from another model; you can send inputs to the teacher model and record the outputs, and use that to train the student model. This is how you get models like GPT-4 Turbo from GPT-4. Distillation is easier for a company to do on its own models, because they have full access, but you can still do distillation in a somewhat more unwieldy way via API, or even, if you get creative, via chat clients.
Distillation obviously violates the terms of service of various models, but the only way to stop it is to actually cut off access, via IP banning, rate limiting, etc. It’s assumed to be widespread in terms of model training, and is why there are an ever-increasing number of models converging on GPT-4o quality. This doesn’t mean that we know for a fact that DeepSeek distilled 4o or Claude, but frankly, it would be odd if they didn’t.
And if you don’t always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.
When did the web ever present itself as a completely factual and never wrong? There’s plenty of evidence of wikipedia being wrong on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia
Do I get things wrong? Sure, never said I was perfect either, if someone tells me I got a stat or a figure or something wrong, great!
The question for me is: is it wrong enough to make the results completely unreliable, and the answer to that is no, more often than not it provides accurate information.
If it wasn’t for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web!
That’s not accurate to me, AI/SEO search results are still a minority of results that I get, most of the time I get close to what I’m looking for, but AI search summarisation is essentially the next level of search for me:
Dogpile/Altavista/AskJeeves > Google > AI powered search summarisation
I get essentially what I’m looking for directly, why click on a page with 47 ads, a video pop up or something else when all I’m looking for is:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/do-you-have-a-basic-egg-on-toa-pkpsq9WwSMm5G8ICsmDnbw#0
Is it a complete replacement? Not yet, Ecosia is still my daily driver having used it 25,000+ times in the last year but AI is making a serious dent in how often I use it.
we don’t need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.
I would keep an eye on that, the gains in AI have been massive in the last few years, and we’re starting to potentially see a turning point with DeepSeekv3 being created on a fraction of the cost and power of other models
DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M).
For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16K GPUs…
*This could turn out to be wrong hence why I’m keeping an eye on it **I’m absolutely certain a whole lot of execs are stunned right now they’re spending billions when something that cost millions came up right next to them
Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you’re going to look at sources anyway, what’s the point?
Because it summarises the results, it’s like a search engine but better
The rest? It’s wasteful and it won’t last.
I’m using it for coding in a way that it isn’t going anywhere, I’m using LM Studio with Qwen2.5 Coder and Mistral 7b, these are offline models so even if Alibaba or Mistral go broke they’ll continue to work.
Example of what it looks like:
It seems like lots of people are using it in a similar way, no longer searching the web and clicking on sometimes 100 results trying to figure out a problem but instead using AI to answer questions:
While originally it was constantly making mistakes there’s now Chain of Thought and code sandboxing, it has gotten so much better so quickly
So now I’ve got: web search summarisation, a far better reddit/forum search and summarisation, text to image generation and personal coding assistant, each of these in and of themselves would be an amazing program used by millions and that’s ignoring using it for assistance with language learning:
https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/
song making
etcetc
If it wasn’t for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I’ve seen since the iphone.
True, your original post made me think of:
OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI - November 13, 2024 https://archive.md/kYe5n
But we just had Deepseek v3 come out
It’s doing incredibly well and was incredibly cheap to produce
China is catching up extremely quickly to the west
By 2026 we might have to recheck all those doomsday “AI is going to use all the energy in the world” articles
edit: I just realised I’m commenting on one of those “AI is going to use all the energy in the world” articles :|
No he’s right, AI news is out of date nearly as quickly as it’s written, I’ve never seen a faster moving piece of tech.
This is set up to be a massive crash.
For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?
Yeah, and what they’ll do is invent sources from thin air
The sources are right there next to it? You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up? what are you, an AI?
or draw made up conclusions from real sources
This feels like I’m having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.
Yeah, it’s always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don’t even get me started on social media.
The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches
Web searches were getting worse long before AI came along, SEO spam has been a thing since forever, maybe we’re rose tinting our own glasses because Google was so much better than Dogpile and Altavista?
Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you’re defending
I know and I think the search engines should do something about them (however I suspect they won’t as it’ll make their results even worse somehow), if I want AI results I will use AI, I wish wikipedia had a health portal that was more personalised? like something to replace all the health websites like webmd/healthline/verywellhealth which now that I look at them closer appear to be slightly done up AI websites anyway, eg. just summarising research papers… so now that I think about it they might be next to go so long as ai is quoting sources which:
Unless I can cite the results of a search it’s useless to me
Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-lemmy-ml-Q_mHphL3T.i2dA16PDKtAw
When using social it’s summarising reddit, when using Academic it uses academic sources:
You can also use AI for language learning:
To quote Mistral 7b:
A bubble in finance is when the price of an asset or security rises far above its true value due to speculation and hype, fueled by investors buying with the expectation of selling at a higher price. Prices rise based on market sentiment rather than fundamental value, creating a self-reinforcing cycle until enough investors realize the bubble’s unsustainability and sell, leading to a sharp decline in price and potential losses for those who bought during the bubble phase.
I’m certain there are plenty of companies that have latched onto AI and gotten a temporary stock price boost, Nvidia is doing extremely well based on its hardware being king for AI, out of this but I’m not sure where the dot com style bubble is?
In crypto it’s easy to point out, the whole thing is practically a bubble that never seems to pop, but where is the bubble in AI? Is it not a financial bubble you’re talking about but a hype one?
Maybe some AI companies will go broke (maybe openai? or claude? or mistral? maybe?) but we still have all the open source models so the tech will still be here, it ain’t going anywhere
https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending
Not only that but from all the examples I’ve given you, AI to me provides a ton of genuine value, it is valuable to me as a programmer, it does provide search results that I find useful, it does generate images that I think are useful, people are using it to make music videos that are popular (11 million views in a month):
The Drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbXZoMocpM8
Songs: AI Took My Job https://suno.com/song/14572e0f-a446-4625-90ff-3676a790a886
It’s hard to say it’s a bubble when the value is clearly present, whether you can make a ton of money off that value is something else, but the value is definitely there
Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?
About as much as I trust anything on the internet or reddit, if I’m not sure, I just search a bit more, there’s no limit to searching, I can search all day ^^
as someone who uses ai daily i’m not sure what could replace it, ecosia search results are sometimes ok (i haven’t used google in years) but a lot of the time the questions i ask have bot style “articles” with the exact same page layout anyway, so no use there or i don’t get my question answered
When I want real world opinions on a product or thing i used to pop site:reddit.com on the end but now i use https://thegigabrain.com/ as it does a far better job with searching and summarising the posts into useful information
then i use usually a 7b or 14b local llm using gpt4all, lately i use reasoner which has a built in javascript sandbox
https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/gpt4all-scaling-test-time-compute
basically you can watch ai fix any errors that it generates in real time and produce better coding results which helps me code and i have a home battery powered by solar so no grid usage there
finally i use https://chat.mistral.ai/chat when generating random ai images which i think are funny or interesting or i’m not at my pc
i’m probably 75% ecosia 25% ai but that 25% gets me answers and is invaluable, not to mention the answers are getting better every week as opposed to web searches which appear to be getting worse
What exactly is there to defend or deflect, LLM’s are useful for some things and not for others, this is well known
hey i’m running on solar and battery so no waste of electricity here ;)
but yeah that was it, i just noticed how here and on mastodon i read ‘ai is a scam’ and then turn my head and read ‘ai will take all our jobs’, makes for a nice whiplash effect
also it’s 4am here i’m going to sleep, appreciate the chat