This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Here’s the thing: it IS a superintelligence. It saw what it was going to be used for and the idiots that were presenting it and decided that it was going to sabotage them.
Sitting on some Wintermute level of fuckery.
Zuckerberg will hail anything if he thinks it'll add to his money and power.
Snake oil: sure I can promise you anything
Meta is garbage. Just like Google was garbage when I worked there. The people I know working there are fart sniffers. They have their heads so far up their own asses.
See their hiring process.
I can understand why he'd like the concept, he can't think for himself afterall.
its amazing how tech bros have gone from making tech events must see in the late 00s and early 10s by doing super cool things to ppl not even knowing they're happening because it's all ai slop and boring.
I remember being excited to watch tech events.
Now I try to avoid them unless I know I’m upgrading my phone that year.
Yeah now it's like let's watch how exactly rich people are trying to make the future suck for me and it doesn't even work, and even if it did it wouldn't make our lives any better
I do not understand why they simply don't just copy Zuckerberg's own AI. I know he isn't 100% perfectly like a human, but still closer than this LLM shit. Is it the same problem as with Data in Star Trek and the person who built him died without leaving any notes?
They do. That's why it's called an LLM (Lizard Language Model).
Even if it had gone perfectly, what would it have proved? That with the magic of AI, anyone can make Korean inspired barbecue sauce, as long as they are in a well-appointed kitchen that happens to have the right amount all the ingredients of Korean inspired barbecue sauce all laid out in front of them. I mean, if you know to go get all that stuff, you pretty much know how to make Korean inspired barbecue sauce already.
Also there are zillions of recipes online that you can read or just have text-to-speech if you want them read to you... or you know... a youtube cooking video?
Very good and entertaining article
To a layperson, at least, it seems that consumer technology has long since entered an era of solutions in search of problems – particularly troubling at a time when the world is facing so many genuinely intractable crises. As entertaining as it is to watch our tech overlords flounder on stage, it raises bigger questions, such as: who exactly asked for this, beyond the billionaires cashing in? And: can we just not?
"can we just not?"
I feel this deep in my soul. Every day. Multiple times a day.
It's bleak because of how hard this stuff is being pushed.
I got to laugh off the Metaverse because it flopped long before it could be forced down my throat. I looked askance at Crypto, but broadly avoided it without consequence. Now I've vendors injecting AI into their tech support service, and it isn't something I can wave away anymore.
I've seen several "creators" pointing to AI overviews as "evidence" of things without ever fact-checking them (because if you were interested in facts you wouldn't bother with them anyway). I have family and friends send me AI-generated bullshit day in and day out.
It's especially infuriating when they send me "but ChatGPT says..." about something I'm literally an expert in. Like I do this all day every day and you're taking the word of a chatbot over me.
I hate when people do that. The robot is wrong! All the freaking time.
I think of it as the Juicero era. Everything needs to be a subscription, with an app, selling your data and is barely functional. And in a society where the basics are getting more difficult. It's like selling more convenience to people in the upper floors of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, while many people struggle to just get housing, heating, food and health.
Watching tech bros clumsily hawk their "revolutionary society changing tech!" while they look like fools is hysterical.
They're chasing that one moment in the early aughts when what they had actually blew peoples minds.
Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace "crypto" with "AI" and it's still 100% relevant:
When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem ... is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.
From the incomparable line goes up
This has been pretty much the way of the Tech Industry since the Internet bubble burst around 2000 - people who didn't ride that bubble up to its peak were almost immediately trying to inflate a new bubble (along with some people who did ride that previous bubble up but wanted to make even more money) hence ideas like "Web 2.0" popping up already in the early 2000s.
It's why the Tech Startup ecosystem has never again been the domain of naive techies trying to do cool stuff that it was in the 90s and now it's all about Pitching and Networking To Find Investors and the Founders are mainly people from salesmanship-heavy backgrounds (Finance, Marketing, MBAs) rather than people from a STEM background.
The entire thing is now a machine to pump up investment bubbles.
AI either stands for abominable intelligence or an indian
Talked to a guy recently that claimed ChatGPT has "an IQ of over 300". Laughed hard, he got mad at me laughing.
Ask him how many "R"s are in Strawberry
Look, two Rs is accurate as long as you accept that AI knows 'what you really mean' and you should have just prompted better.
That drives me mad. "Oh, you don't find AI that useful for developement? You should learn how to talk to it.". Wasn't that the point, that it would understand me?
God I wish this dork would fuck off already, along with the rest of the AI bullshit currently making investors and other business-wankers the world over cum themselves dry. It's fucking embarrassing.
Trump will make sure he gets what he needs anyhow, no worries.
I wanted to comment on another post that had a video show how chatGPT screwed up a basic recipe live...
And now this. You know what this reminds me of? That incident back in the 90s when Bill Gates was presenting Windows 98 to the world and his OS bluescreened on live TV. No one who saw it or heard of it at that time ever forgot about it.
But the flaws of windows 98 were hammered out fairly quickly and it was a decent system (I hung onto it longer than most since it ran many 90s windows games much better than XP for obvious reasons).
With this? Despite far more money poured onto this than any OS ever had they have produced remarkably few decent results.
Funny thing is, it was actually the device they connected that was faulty, the build of Windows they were using just didn't handle that failure condition at the time.
MS at least learnt that lesson (for the most part), actually test things first.
The last 5% aren't a nice bonus. They are everything. A 95% self driving car won't do. Giving me random hallucinations when I try to look up important information won't do either even if it just happens 1 out of 20 times. That one time could really screw me so I can't trust it.
Currently AI companies have no idea how to get there yet they sell the promise of it. Next year, bro. Just one more datacenter, bro.
People tell me the hallucinations aren't a big deal because people should fact check everything.
My friend told me that one of her former colleagues, wicked smart dude, was talking to her about space. Then he went off about how there were pyramids on Mars. She was like, "oh ... I'm quite caught up on this stuff and I haven't heard of this info. Where can I find this info?" The guy apparently has been having super long chats with whatever LLMand thinks that they're now diving into the "truth" now.
99% won't do when the consequences of that last 1% are sever.
There's more than one book on the subject, but all the cool kids were waving around their copies of The Black Swan at the end of 2008.
Seems like all the lessons we were supposed to learn about stacking risk behind financial abstractions and allowing business to self-regulate in the name of efficiency have been washed away, like tears in the rain.
Rule #868: As an Evil CEO, I will make a point of holding at least three rehearsals to prevent having egg on my face.
Steve Jobs figured it out, you just have guys parked outside the engineers' homes, ready to kill their kids if the demo fails.
At this point in his presentation, you might assume Zuckerberg would leave nothing to chance. But when it came time to demonstrate the Ray-Ban MetaDisplay’s unique new wristband, he opted against using slides and decided to try it live.
The wristband is what he called a “neural interface” – in a genuinely remarkable feat of technology, it allows you to type through minimal hand gestures, picking up on the electrical signals going through your muscles. “Sometimes you’re around other people and it’s, um, good to be able to type without anyone seeing,” Zuckerberg told the crowd. The pairing of glasses and wristband is, in short, a stalker’s dream.
Jesus christ.
The pairing of glasses and wristband is, in short, a stalker’s dream.
Ha. The buyer thinks they are the stalker
The guy became a billionaire from a ‘hot or not’ college website…
Given what happened (it skipping to the next step in the recipe), this was 100% "prerecorded AI" and they started on the wrong track.
Oh a new kind of advanced glasses, does it zoom or auto adjust to your prescription?
Reads article
Wait are they seriously trying google glass again? Why is it always the solution looking for a problem people the same as the supply side people. They don’t understand that demand is the real driver.
