Lots of companies jumping the gun... laying off so many people only to realize they're going to need those people back. AI is still in its infancy, using it to replace an actual human is a dumb dumb move.
LLMs aren't virtual dumbasses who are constantly wrong, they are bullshit generators. They are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but don't really care either way and will say wrong things just as confidently as right things.
Because they’re playing a role, an actor so to speak, they’re not presenting their own personal opinions. They’re vocalizing and embodying the output of a series of complex internal mechanism, it’s a slow moving self optimizing system beyond the comprehension of any individual working with in the system.
I don't think any programmer would be dumb enough to take that bait.
They would be held personally liable for any business decision that costs the stockholders (while, of course, not being given anything extra when a business decision nets stockholders a fortune).
Funny thing is, the CEOs are exactly the ones to be replaced with AI. Mediocre talent that is sometimes wrong. Perfect place for an AI, and the AI could come to the next decision much faster at a fraction of the cost.
So, I'd say there is some slight issue with replacing all decision makers with AI cause Walmart and Amazon does it for employee efficiency. It means the staff are micro managed and treated like machines the same way the computer is.
Walmart employees are moved around the floor like roombas to never interact with each other and no real availability for customers to get someone. Warehouse workers are overworked by bullshit ideas of efficiency.
Now I get that it could be fixed by having the AI systems designed to be more empathetic but who is choosing how they are programmed? The board still?
We just need good bosses who still interact with their employees on their level. We don't need AI "replacing" anyone pretty much anywhere, but can be used as a helpful tool.
Yeah, apologies, I was being a bit glib there. Honestly, I kinda subscribe to the Star Trek: Insurrection Ba'ku people's philosophy. "We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man."
While it makes sense to replace some tasks like dangerous mining or assembly line work away from humans, interaction roles and decision making roles both seem like they should remain very human.
In the same way that nuclear missile launches during the Cold War always had real humans as the last line before a missile would actually be fired.
I see AI as being something that becomes specialized tools for each job. You are repairing a lawn mower, you have an AI multimeter type device that you connect to some test points and you converse with in some fashion to troubleshoot. All offline, and very limited in capabilities. The tech bros, meanwhile, think they created digital Jesus, and they are desperate to figure out what Bible to jam him into. Meanwhile, corps across the planet are in a rush to get rid of their customer service roles en masse. Can you imagine 911 dispatch being replaced with AI? The human component is 100% needed there. (Albeit, an extreme comparison.)
CEOs are obsessed with value derived free of all that messy human labor. It would make sense if they didn't still want the people they fired to pay money to talk to the robots.
Watch, hold on, I'll prove it! I'll perform a feat of brute strength in a blind rage that will end up hurting me in the long run! Then later when I find out that massive fall didn't actually kill you and you fought your way back up through 2km worth of test chambers powered by sheer spite to come and confront me, I'll act like nothing happened and beg you for your help because I have no idea how to run this place and it's falling apart and the robot test subjects I built don't work at all!
it's like how techbros constantly want to reinvent transportation, if they assign an AI to give them an answer it would just say "build more railways and trains" and they'd throw it out a window in anger
They re-invent everything for no reason. Every mundane device has been "re-invented" using big data, blockchain, VR, now AI and in a few years probably quantum-something.
The entire tech world fundamentally ran out of ideas. The usual pipeline is basic research > applied research > products, but since money only gets thrown at products, there's nothing left to do research. So the tech bros have to re-iterate on the same concepts again and again.
I get that it's cool to hate on how AI is being shoved in our faces everywhere and I agree with that sentiment, but the technology is better than what you're giving it credit for.
You don't have to diminish the accomplishments of the actual people who studied and built these impressive things to point out that business are bandwagoning and rushing to get to market to satisfy investors. like with most technologies it's capitalism that's the problem.
LLMs emulate neural structures and have incredible natural language parsing capabilities that we've never even come close to accomplishing before. The prompt hacks alone are an incredibly interesting glance at how close these things come to "understanding." They're more like social engineering than any other kind of hack.
The trouble with phrases like 'neural structures' and 'language parsing' is that these descriptions still play into the "AI" narrative that's been used to oversell large language models.
Fundamentally, these are statistical weights randomly wired up to other statistical weights, tested and pruned against a huge database. That isn't language parsing, it's still just brute-force calculation. The understanding comes from us, from people assigning linguistic meaning to patterns in binary.
Brain structures aren't so dissimilar, unless you believe there's some metaphysical quantity to consciousness this kind of technology will be how we do achieve general AI
Living, growing, changing cells are pretty damn dissimilar to static circuitry. Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells. The model ignores the fact neurons are constantly growing, shifting, and breaking connections with one another, and flat out does not consider structures and interactions within the cells.
Metaphysics is not required to make the observation that computer programmes are magnitudes less complex than a brain.
Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells.
As a programmer who has studied neuroanatomy and the structure/function of neurons themselves, I remain astonished at how not like real biological nervous systems computer neural networks still are. It's like the whole field is based on one person's poor understanding of the state of biological knowledge in the late 1970s. That doesn't mean it's not effective in some ways as it is, but you'd think there'd be more experimentation in neural networks based on current biological knowledge.
The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic "neurons" are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.
And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don't get much press.
Pretty much all artificial neural nets I have seen don't do all or nothing activation. They all seem to have activation states encoded as some kind of binary number. I think this is to mimic the effects of variable firing rates.
The idea of a neural network doing stuff in the background is interesting though.
The fact that you believe software based neural networks are, as you put it, "static circuitry" betrays your apparent knowledge on the subject. I agree that many people overblow LLM tech, but many people like yourself grossly underestimate it as well.
Language parsing is a routine process that doesn't require AI and it's something we have been doing for decades. That phrase in no way plays into the hype of AI. Also, the weights may be random initially (though not uniformly random), but the way they are connected and relate to each other is not random. And after training, the weights are no longer random at all, so I don't see the point in bringing that up. Finally, machine learning models are not brute-force calculators. If they were, they would take billions of years to respond to even the simplest prompt because they would have to evaluate every possible response (even the nonsensical ones) before returning the best answer. They're better described as a greedy algorithm than a brute force algorithm.
I'm not going to get into an argument about whether these AIs understand anything, largely because I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but also because that would require a definition of understanding which is an unsolved problem in philosophy. You can wax poetic about how humans are the only ones with true understanding and that LLMs are encoded in binary (which is somehow related to the point you're making in some unspecified way); however, your comment reveals how little you know about LLMs, machine learning, computer science, and the relevant philosophy in general. Your understanding of these AIs is just as shallow as those who claim that LLMs are intelligent agents of free will complete with conscious experience - you just happen to land closer to the mark.
They put new AI controls on our traffic lights. Cost the city a fuck ton more money than fixing our dilapidated public pool. Now no one tries to turn left at a light. They don't activate. We threw out a perfectly good timer no one was complaining about.
But no one from silicone valley is lobbing cities to buy pool equipment, I guess.
I've seen a video of at least one spa that does that. They mine bitcoin on rigs immersed in mineral oil, with a heat exchanger to the spa's water system. I'm struggling to imagine that's enough heat, especially piped a distance through the building, to run several hot tubs, and I'm kind of dubious about that particular load, but hey.
A large data centre can use over 100 MW at the high end. Certainly enough to power a swimming pool or three. In fact swimming pools are normally measured in kW not MW.
Whilst it's a shame this implementation sucks, I wish we would get intelligent traffic light controls that worked. Sitting at a light for 90 seconds in the dead of night without a car in sight is frustrating.
That was a solved problem 20 years ago lol. We made working systems for this in our lab at Uni, it was one of our course group projects. It used combinations of sensors and microcontrollers.
It's not really the kind of problem that requires AI. You can do it with AI and image recognition or live traffic data but that's more fitting for complex tasks like adjusting the entire grid live based on traffic conditions. It's massively overkill for dead time switches.
Even for grid optimization you shouldn't jump into AI head first. It's much better long term to analyze the underlying causes of grid congestion and come up with holistic solutions that address those problems, which often translate into low-tech or zero-tech solutions. I've seen intersections massively improved by a couple of signs, some markings and a handful of plastic poles.
Throwing AI at problems is sort of a "spray and pray" approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.
You need to really specify what is meant by "AI" here. Chances are it's probably some form of smart traffic lights to improve traffic flow. Which is not all that special. It has nothing to do with LLMs
I read a pretty convincing article title and subheading implying that the best use for so called "AI" would be to replace all corporate CEOs with it.
I didn't read the article but given how I've seen most CEOs behave it would probably be trivial to automate their behavior. Pursue short term profit boosts with no eye to the long term, cut workers and/or pay and/or benefits at every opportunity, attempt to deny unionization to the employees, tell the board and shareholders that everything is great, tell the employees that everything sucks, ...
Then some hackers get in and reprogram the AI CEOs to value long term profit and employee training and productivity. The company grows and is massively profitable until some venture capitalists swoop in and kill the company to feed from the carcass.
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I work in a technical field, and the amount of bad work I see is way higher than you'd think. There are companies without anyone competent to do what they claim to do. Astonishingly, they make money at it and frequently don't get caught. Sometimes they have to hire someone like me to fix their bad work when they do cause themselves actual problems, but that's much less expensive than hiring qualified people in the first place. That's probably where we're headed with ais, and honestly it won't be much different than things are now, except for the horrible dystopian nature of replacing people with machines. As time goes on they'll get fed the corrections competent people make to their output and the number of competent people necessary will shrink and shrink, till the work product is good enough that they don't care to get it corrected. Then there won't be anyone getting paid to do the job, and because of ais black box nature we will completely lose the knowledge to perform the job in the first place.