• brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    331
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    As a fervent AI enthusiast, I disagree.

    …I’d say it’s 97% hype and marketing.

    It’s crazy how much fud is flying around, and legitimately buries good open research. It’s also crazy what these giant corporations are explicitly saying what they’re going to do, and that anyone buys it. TSMC’s allegedly calling Sam Altman a ‘podcast bro’ is spot on, and I’d add “manipulative vampire” to that.

    Talk to any long-time resident of localllama and similar “local” AI communities who actually dig into this stuff, and you’ll find immense skepticism, not the crypto-like AI bros like you find on linkedin, twitter and such and blot everything out.

    • falkerie71@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      101
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      For real. Being a software engineer with basic knowledge in ML, I’m just sick of companies from every industry being so desperate to cling onto the hype train they’re willing to label anything with AI, even if it has little or nothing to do with it, just to boost their stock value. I would be so uncomfortable being an employee having to do this.

      • Mikelius@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        ·
        1 month ago

        For sure, it seems like 90% of ai startups are nothing more than front end wrappers for a gpt instance.

        • dan@upvote.au
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          21
          ·
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          They’re all built on top of OpenAI which is very unprofitable at the moment. Feels like the whole industry is built on a shaky foundation.

          Putting the entire fate of your company in a different company (OpenAI) is not a great business move. I guess the successful AI startups will eventually transition to self-hosted models like Llama, if they survive that long.

          • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            1 month ago

            Most projects I’ve been in contact with are very aware of that fact. That’s why telemetry is so big right now. Everybody is building datasets in the hopes of fine tuning smaller, cheaper models once they have enough good quality data.

            • xavier666@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              6
              ·
              1 month ago

              My company is realizing that hosting a model which will be private, cost-effective, and performing better than traditional algorithms is like finding a unicorn. Few months back, the top execs were jumping around GenAI like a bunch of kids. Fortunately, the Sr. research head beat some sense into them.

              • falkerie71@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 month ago

                You’re lucky there’s a higher up that could talk down the even higher ups. Though, sometimes it’s not even about the r&d teams.

                I saw company wide HR educational emails or courses telling you how to improve you work quality/efficiency, and one of them tells us to “research AI” and learn how to utilize it, talking about how great it is and improved the work efficiency by 30%. Sure, it has its uses, but I won’t go touting how great it is. And with how ChatGPT works, you have to be the biggest idiot in the world to upload all your sensitive stuff to ChatGPT just for it to make a spreadsheet faster. But without these disclaimers in the email, I doubt regular clerical staff knows about this, and it’s extremely dangerous.

              • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 month ago

                What kind of use-cases was it, where you didn’t find suitable local models to work with ? I’ve found that general “chatbot” things are hit and miss but more domain-constrained tasks (such as extracting structured entities from unstructured text) are pretty reliable even on smaller models. I’m not counting my chickens yet as my dataset is still somewhat small but preliminary testing has been very promising in that regard.

                • xavier666@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 month ago

                  What kind of use-cases was it, where you didn’t find suitable local models to work with ?

                  Any time you ask very domain specific questions; eg “i have collected some soil samples from the mesolithic age near the Amazon basin which have high sulfur and phosphorus content compared to my other samples. What factors could contribute to this distribution?”, both of-the-shelf local models & OpenAI fail.

                  The main reason is because these models are not trained on highly-specialized domains of text. Sometimes the models start hallucinating and which reduces our trust upon them.

      • Badland9085@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 month ago

        As someone who was working really hard trying to get my company to be able use some classical ML (with very limited amounts of data), with some knowledge on how AI works, and just generally want to do some cool math stuff at work, being asked incessantly to shove AI into any problem that our execs think are “good sells” and be pressured to think about how we can “use AI” was a terrible feel. They now think my work is insufficient and has been tightening the noose on my team.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      1 month ago

      TSMC are probably making more money than anyone in this goldrush by selling the shovels and picks, so if that’s their opinion, I feel people should listen…

      There’s little in the AI business plan other than hurling money at it and hoping job losses ensue.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 month ago

        TSMC doesn’t really have official opinions, they take silicon orders for money and shrug happily. Being neutral is good for business.

        Altman’s scheme is just a whole other level of crazy though.

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      Seriously, I’d love to be enthusiastic about it because it’s genuinely cool what you can do with math.

      But the lies that are shoved in our faces are just so fucking much and so fucking egregious that it’s pretty much impossible.

      And on top of that LLMs are hugely overshadowing actual interesting approaches for funding.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

      1. A set of securities fraud charges.

      2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

      He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

      So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.

    • paddirn@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      I really want to like AI, I’d love to have an intelligent AI assistant or something, but I just struggle to find any uses for it outside of some really niche cases or for basic brainstorming tasks. Otherwise, it just feels like alot of work for very little benefit or results that I can’t even trust or use.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        It’s useful.

        I keep Qwen 32B loaded on my desktop pretty much whenever its on, as an (unreliable) assistant to analyze or parse big texts, to do quick chores or write scripts, to bounce ideas off of or even as a offline replacement for google translate (though I specifically use aya 32B for that).

        It does “feel” different when the LLM is local, as you can manipulate the prompt syntax so easily, hammer it with multiple requests that come back really fast when it seems to get something wrong, not worry about refusals or data leakage and such.