Comment by stavros

21 days ago

To me, "AI is the letdown" is the letdown. The sheer lack of imagination and wonder you must have to see what are almost virtual people, something that was _unthinkable_ five years ago, and to say it's a letdown, I will never understand.

We have programs, actual programs that you can run on your laptop, that will understand images and describe them to you, understand your voice, talk to you, explain things to you. We have experts that will answer your every question, that will research things for you, and all we keep saying is how disappointing it is that they aren't better than humans.

To me, this is very much the old joke of "wow, your dog can sing?!" "Eh, it's not that impressive, he's pitchy". To go from "AI that can converse fluently is impossible, basically science fiction" to "AI is a letdown" just shows me the infinite capability humans have to find anything disappointing, no matter how jaw-droppingly amazing it is.

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stavros

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namaria  21 days ago

Frankly the "this didn't exist before" and extend-the-line "it will keep getting better" is not only bad reasoning, it's getting tired.

Yeah transformers doing NLP well is pretty impressive. No, it is not worth burning hundreds of billions of dollars on GPU data centers. And please, stop the hype. Non-technical decision makers are really spoiling everything with magical thinking about "artificial intelligence". We still have to learn domains and engineer products. There is no silver bullet.

  • stavros  21 days ago

    I don't know whom you're replying to, but it doesn't seem to be to my comment. It feels like you skimmed my comment and then replied to a straw man.

    • namaria  21 days ago

      > To me, "AI is the letdown" is the letdown. The sheer lack of imagination and wonder you must have to see what are almost virtual people, something that was _unthinkable_ five years ago, and to say it's a letdown, I will never understand.

      > jaw-droppingly amazing

      Did I imagine you said these things?

  • voidspark  21 days ago

    It is worth burning hundreds of billions, because users are demanding it and getting value from it.

    Grok has already overloaded their 200k GPU cluster and is struggling to keep up with the demand.