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"The moment you ask where the power comes from and when it arrives, the entire narrative falls apart in your hands."

I'm past tired of hearing about AI, but this person's engineering experience provides a different take than I've seen, and one that seems important and worth sharing to me.

h/t @composergreg, who shared this with me this morning.

youtube.com/watch?v=sQGZXrzykp…

#ai

in reply to Alison Wilder

The takeaway: the big AI companies are making ludicrous claims that are totally falsifiable about what their products will do to the job market. The incentive structure is such that creating fear around their products will make them loads of money.

I've heard that general take before, and it has felt intuitively true, but it's awesome to see someone provide evidence that the claims about job replacement are impossible without a quantum leap in energy generation etc.

#ai

#ai
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Alison Wilder

I suppose the "answer" is that if we can build Robot God, we can pray to it for a quantum leap in energy generation.
in reply to ranjit

@ranjit
That is one of the ideas, is that the power problem is already solved with some random research. It was grabbed, scanned, and ingested.

And you're only 1 prompt away from that answer.

We've seen this with some Erdos problems already. The answer to solve was already made, and an LLM jigsawed the completed parts together.

in reply to Yet another Josh

@crankylinuxuser can you expand on what you mean by "one of the ideas"? Do you mean that this is a defense against this guy's argument, or that people who are AI believers say this kind of thing to dismiss engineering arguments, or ?

@ranjit

in reply to Alison Wilder

in reply to Yet another Josh

@crankylinuxuser gotcha. I'd say that's pretty similar in general to the take that the guy in the video expresses re utility.

I certainly would not assume that the problem has already been solved in pieces and that an LLM will put it together. Sure, LLMs have done that a couple of times, and impressively. But there are a lot more problems that they have not solved, so I don't see the logic in assuming they would solve the specific problem that makes this business not really that viable.

in reply to Alison Wilder

YEEEP and you didnt say the name of the phenomenon. Prolly cause its still too new.

Its the hope and promise of Jackpotting or Slot Machine and getting that exact right prompt and getting the answer out. And of course, @pluralistic has an article this exact name!

doctorow.medium.com/https-plur…

Its similar to the Vegas eyes-glazed-over smoker/drinker pulling a 1 armed bandit. But it is paying for more tokens on the hope that the NEXT question is the right one. Or on local LLMs, its the waiting for the response to complete.

And that next tranche of tokens COULD BE IT!

in reply to Alison Wilder

@pluralistic

Whats funny is this isnt the first time Ive seen this phenomenon. I first saw it in 2007 when I turned pagan.

Its all about #tarot .

Some folks I met would do a reading on the dumbest of shit. "Should I do $mundane_action?" . They'd paralyze themselves with inaction until some external force gave them approval, and that was tarot.

Whether you believe or not is irrelevant. Not trying to proselytize. But this has plagued folks learning divination all the time, and newer ones are especially more weak to it.

Ive called it Divinatory Paralysis. I see the parallels with asking the talking slot machine in the same way.

marieclaire.com/health-fitness…