"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
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Furthermore, I still have yet see a plausible revenue model explained...
@Gargron That's a quite strong stance, that missed proper argumentation. I agree it's not perfect and it has risks, but 'failed"?What is your definition for 'failed'?
Is it the fact that radiologists now can better diagnose breast cancer using AI as a tool to diagnose than without?
Or Is it the fact that it immensely progressed mRNA technology?
Or perhaps is it your fear for a 'new technology' that's alien and could perhaps take over your job and eventually your life?
@Luminous_J I've explained why it's failed technology in the same sentence. Perhaps you've lost the ability to interpret complex sentence structures? It is a technology that is fundamentally unable to provide consistently true information or behave in a deterministic way. This means you cannot rely on it to provide information or perform tasks, and it is dangerous and irresponsible to pretend otherwise.
@Gargron
I also had hoped that countering criticism obviously directed at genAI by appealing to legitimate and much older ML applications might have come out of style, but here I am, sharing the fate of all that dare to hope.
@Luminous_J
@Gargron
I am fascinated by your ad hominem attack, but I'm not here to score points or win a right-or-wrong debate.
Why not address the substance of my response and engage in a fair debate based on facts and experiences?
Let me start:
What if a technology doesn't need to provide 100% reliable information to be useful, provided its limitations are understood and appropriately managed?
And what if future developments improve the reliability of these models and address some of their current limitations? Would AI still be inherently dangerous and irresponsible as a technological tool?
I'm genuinely interested in the reasoning behind your conclusion that AI is a failed technology.
Heard Cory Doctorow speak recently & he used radiologists as an example--instead of AI as a "tap on the shoulder" assisting & aiding radiologists, numerous radiologists will be replaced by AI but "human" radiologists will have to sign off AI agents results and will bear the medical liability.
@FallsMom Cory Doctorow is right on some topics, but I consider him not extreme enough on "AI". This shtick works while there are qualified radiologists who retain their skills. It falls apart once the deskilling effects of "AI" are in the loop.
@Gargron It's been interesting in the economics world - if Kondratiev theory holds there should be a new epochal technology in the next five years that will give us a new economic golden age and everyone is betting on AI now despite it never turning a profit or achieving great advances. Meanwhile solar is just quietly halving in price every few years and seeing exponential growth in deployment...
@Gargron
The world has changed. This is just the awkward beginning. There is no realistic scenario where we go back to 2022.
Yea … I keep thinking that the “this will all crash and blow over” anti AI group might be one of the most damaging groups out there right now.
Between giving lots of peeps false hope and the average person probably having a decent awareness of the existence of the problems with AI, I’m just not sure that their perspectives serve anything other than their egos (which I get, but still).
@Noisecolor Same as blockchain and NFTs have changed the world, sure.
@Gargron @Noisecolor while these are useful examples to keep in mind, there are a lot of technologies that people hated, and they stayed nonetheless. Everyone loves remembering luddists. Well, they lost spectacularly. Machines won.
@Gargron
Not sure what that has to do with it.
In the case of ai, the investments are in the trillions, more planned. Infra is growing, businesses are deep in the implementation. Internet search usage is down, ai is growing. The progress is outpacing all expert predictions.
Again. There is no realistic scenario, that this will somehow blow over or something like that.
@Noisecolor I agree with you that the damage left in its wake after it collapses will be monumental. Think not just of the derailing of environmental goals which will have very real and painful consequences for most people who don't have a luxury bunker somewhere, but about the generations of kids who are growing up without critical thinking skills. So no, unfortunately, we won't be able to go back to 2022.
@Gargron
I think it's completely disingenuous to blame ai for all the troubles in the world, especially since all these problems were clearly there before ai.
You have a problem with capitalism, not ai. And I do too, don't get me wrong. I'd love to live in a better, cleaner, juster world.
But ai has nothing to do with it.
@Noisecolor I'd like to point you to the data centres being built around the world to accomodate "AI" investments, their energy and water consumption, how it's affecting communities living around them. There's an even deeper conversation that could be had about the belief a lot of the tech execs have expressed that a sufficiently advanced "AI" would solve the climate crisis, diverting efforts from actual solutions.
@Gargron counterpoint: we are well past the point of no return for agentic engineering. There will always be purists who insist on writing code by hand but we aren’t returning to that being the default even after the bubble pops. And I think quiet use of AI as glue will propagate more or less unseen through a lot of tech until it is the expected/desired thing vs a bolted-on buzzword.
Are there myriad problems with both of these? Of course. But that much is not “failure” in any meaningful sense.
@mellowfish @Gargron as bad as it may sound, that is the unfortunate reality. People are doing absolutely mind-blowing stuff with AI that up until a few years ago was considered completely impossible from the perspective of any software engineer, yet here we are mixing videogames. AI in coding is not going away also because most companies have very generic workflows and don't really care of shipping good code if AI can manage it and work 24/7 without getting tired
@super_user_do @mellowfish Most consumers find this “mind-blowing” stuff repulsive.
@mellowfish That's... just your opinion. Agentic coding (I don't think you can call it "engineering") is heavily subsidized by big AI companies right now, and that's going away sooner or later. The software world will have a painful wake up call from all the spaghetti code being pumped out right now.
@Gargron @mellowfish the subsidies are the biggest thing here. AI can perform well if you throw enough compute behind it, but it's much more expensive than people realize because AI companies are selling at a loss.
There will be a reckoning when the business model collapses, but afterward people will still work on making it cheaper, and it's the future time when AI compute is much cheaper that I'm concerned about. Many early AI companies will die, but the technology itself will remain.
It seems to me that the software world is more diverse than spaghetti-watchers alone.
There's more than one awakening, and thankfully, plenty of people share dreams of good things.
Tasty.
Cc @mellowfish
@Gargron @mellowfish I feel like some people think if and when the bubble pops, that major corporations are all universally going to completely stop investing in AI because it is "so bad" and AI is just going to disappear. Feels like wishful thinking. I am not an AI fan generally, but I see things that it is useful for and I also see how far it has come in just a handful of years. Two years ago people laughed at the shitty videos that it made. Now it makes a lot of videos that most people would
@Gargron It probably writes better code than you do at this point. Anyone who calls it spaghetti code TODAY has no clue what it’s capable of.
There’s a reason mathematicians are freaked out. Their heads aren’t in the sand
@Gargron @mellowfish Open-weight models don’t suddenly get massively more expensive, so this is a non-issue.
calling code that’s currently being generated by AI agents “spaghetti code” is a pretty sure sign that you either haven’t actually used it seriously or don’t know how to use it.
AI-generated code can absolutely be terrible. so can human-generated code. the interesting question is whether you know how to get the agent to produce good code and how to review, test, and evolve it.
@skavish @Gargron@mastodon.social
sure, let me go to the nearest casino to test out this theory on a slot machine.
oops, where'd all of my money go? oh right i put it in the slot machine for safe keeping.
@skavish I have never used "AI" in my professional or personal life and have no intentions of doing so.
@Gargron @skavish That's what Linus mentioned in his kernel list post:
"AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no
longer in question today.
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used
it."
The other thing that makes me think this ain't going anywhere is Fabrice Bellard's work on tsac and similar and his toys often seems a little ahead of the curve imo.
@Gargron @imhotep @skavish On the other hand you say in another post, that you have never used AI, but maintaining one of the biggest FOSS project on GitHub is enough expertise.
Im no Dev, but I assume Linux may be a even bigger FOSS project and Linus explored AI. According to your argumentation, he is as capable as you, if not more, to make guesses about GenAI.
Or what’s the difference, that make your opinion superior to his one?
![[empty]](https://files.mastodon.social/accounts/avatars/106/887/462/825/018/571/original/52e5d4364f73668f.jpg "[empty]")
that explains the confidence :)
if you’ve never actually used it, then you’re not really in a position to judge what agentic coding looks like when used properly.
@skavish @Gargron We live in very... Curious times at the moment.
There's a massive hype to adopt something that many don't want to adopt, nor should they have to do so, but equally there's a hype train that says 'do this thing or else...'
There's a middle ground where you can use it quietly, and not use it quietly, and it really doesn't matter.
It's the either siders I'm concerned about.
When those that hate it hear about it 24-7 it's like passive smoking. It sucks, it's bad for you and you wish you could escape it.
Equally when you use it for something meaningful and before you've had a chance to explain, you've been shut down because tolerance is 'agree with me or else' that equally sucks.
I haven't stated which side of the fence I fall on, and I won't here without being asked. I'm not here to persuade or dissuade, just to make a point.
Moderation is good.
You can see my thoughts by looking at my personal posts.
Both of you in this conversation have made your decision and that's OK, but there's nuance in everything and dismissing either side out-of-hand means you aren't thoughtful enough to know where that nuance lies.
You = general you, not you two personally.
I see a lot of love and hate recently, sadly more hate than love, more intolerance than tolerance, and that's not really the fedi I signed up for.
If we could step back about 6 years and show one another just a tad more respect, the world would genuinely be a nicer place to live in.
@FreakyFwoof @skavish @Gargron While I agree with your ethos of neutrality here, the reality is most people who present a 'neutral' opinion are just concealing a pro or anti opinion, in your case after checking your profile, you have a recent long post praising the AI agents and data centers you are using. So ostensibly that *is* a pro opinion, you are promoting AI to your followers. Using it 'quietly' would be doing exactly that: not posting about it, nor shushing those who take anti stances.
@skavish You think I, a maintainer and engineer on one of the largest open-source software projects on GitHub, am not in a position to judge what agentic coding looks like? Sure. Have a nice day!
if you’ve never used it, then yes, you’re not in a position to judge what it looks like when used properly. being an experienced engineer and maintainer gives you plenty of expertise in software engineering, but it doesn’t magically give you first-hand experience with a tool you explicitly said you’ve never used.
you can absolutely argue that you don’t want to use it. that’s a different claim.
@skavish @Gargron But your coveted "first-hand experience" is of no relevance here. Eugen was talking about the objective quality of the outputs, not the subjective feeling of generating them - and yes, given that you wouldn't even have the privilege of using this platform were it not for him, he certainly does have enough expertise as an engineer to judge whether the code is "spaghetti" or not.
Indeed, your elevation of personal feels about the tech suggests more than a touch of AI psychosis.
@skavish @Gargron Define "properly." Because I can already write code "properly" without destroying the environment with harmful data centres, shoving endless profits into middle-man companies who don't need to be involved and propping up the egos of the deranged psychopaths who are pushing this flawed technology.
@mastodonmigration cocaine is a substance with well-documented effects. AI is a tool whose results depend heavily on how it's used. the analogy doesn't work.
You sound like a cocaine user
RE: https://beige.party/@fuzzy/117417199780071912
Hint: most of the 1,266 accounts that I block are anti-AI.
Cc @skavish
@mastodonmigration and you sound like someone who’s never tried coffee but is absolutely certain everyone who drinks it is an addict :)
"Come on, give it a try, it's no more harmful than coffee." Glad to have not taken the bait.
@Gargron @mellowfish Eugen, you worded that far more diplomatically than I could have managed. I had to delete my reply. 😅
@Gargron jepp we will see what is going to happen with this AI stuff. Everyone IT related knows what is going to be happening.
The entire world knows it. As we say in Germany "lasse komme".
🤗 😂
@Gargron What we term AI today is misnamed and misused and oversold.
But the technology as such (i.e. LLMs and Neural Networks and the like) isn't useless.
E.g. my daughter is training AI to recognize and classify life in ROV videos from the deep sea ocean floors.
Many such applications. "AI" doesn't get bored and is extremely good at spotting patterns and things that break the patterns.
But, yeah, it is shit for coding...