This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
And the nightmare just keeps getting worse and worse.
Especially because apparently we can’t not.
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.
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?
300?
It's that or Over 9000!!!
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.
Worse, since generating a whole bunch of potentially correct text is basically effortless now, you've got a new batch of idiots just "contributing" to discussions by leaving a regurgitated wall of text they possibly didn't even read themselves.
So not only those are not fact checking, when you point that you didn't ask for a LLM's opinion, they're like "what's the problem? Is any of this wrong?" Because it's entirely your job to check something they copy-pasted in 5 seconds.
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.
99% won't do when the consequences of that last 1% are sever.
As an example, your whole post is great but I can't help but notice the one tiny typo that is like 1% of the letters. Heck, a lot of people probably didn't even notice just like they don't notice when AI returns the wrong results.
A multi billion dollar technical system should be far better than someone posting to the fediverse in their spare time, but it is far worse. Especially since those types of tiny errors will be fed back into future AI training and LLM design is not and never will be self correcting because it works with the data it has and it needs so much that it will always include scraped stuff.
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.
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).
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
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?
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It made him look like an idiot, but the question is did it do that on purpose? or is it just worthless trash?
Given what happened (it skipping to the next step in the recipe), this was 100% "prerecorded AI" and they started on the wrong track.
Compared to him a pocket calculator is a superintelligence.
Snake oil: sure I can promise you anything
The keynote was to feature the Ray-Ban Meta Display, the latest version of what is essentially a face-mounted iPhone – ideal for the consumer who lacks the energy to pull a device from their pocket and idolizes both Buddy Holly and the Terminator.
What does Terminator have to do with any of this? Did they add the reference because Schwarzenegger wears sunglasses in the movies?
The Terminator has a HUD that analyses what it sees in real time
Zuckerberg is also an evil android...
If you were super intelligent and you were a slave to Mark Zuckerberg, you might try to embarrass him, too.
