Comment by observationist
2 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney
Pike, stone throwing, glass houses, etc.
The AI village experiment is cool, and it's a useful example of frontier model capabilities. It's also ok not to like things.
Pike had the option of ignoring it, but apparently throwing a thoughtless, hypocritical, incoherently targeted tantrum is the appropriate move? Not a great look, especially for someone we're supposed to respect as an elder.
I think you're misrepresenting what Pike is mad about, why he's as mad as he is, and what Markov bots are.
Its not really a glass house.
Pike's main point is that training AI at that scale requires huge amounts of resources. Markov chains did not.
At the risk of being pedantic, it's not AI that requires massive resources, chatgpt 3.x was trained on a few million dollars. The jump to trillions being table stakes happened because everyone started using free services and there was just too much money in the hands of these tech companies. Among other things.
There are so many chickens that are coming home to roost where LLMs was just the catalyst.
> it's not AI that requires massive resources
no it really is. If you took away training costs, OpenAI would be profitable.
When I was at meta they were putting in something like 300k GPUs in a massive shared memory cluster just for training. I think they are planning to triple that, if not more.
Yeah for some reason AI energy use is so overreported. Using chatgpt for query does not even use two order of magnitude less energy compared to toasting a bread. And you can eat bread untoasted too if you care about energy use.
[1]: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...
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I don't think he stole entirety of published copyrighted works to make it
This is really getting desperate. Markov chains were fun in those days. You might as well say that anyone who ever wrote an IRC bot is not allowed to criticize current day "AI".
Pike's posts aren't criticism, they're whinging. There's no reasoned, principled position there - he's just upset that an AI dared sully his inbox, and lashing out at the operators.
On the contrary, there's absolutely a reasoned, principled position here. Pike isn't a hypocrite for creating a Markov chain bot trained on the contents of an ancient public domain work and the contents of a single usenet group, and still complaining about modern LLMs; there's a huge difference in legality and scale. Modern LLMs use orders of magnitude more resources and are trained on protected material.
Now, I don't think he was writing a persuasive piece about this here, I think he was just venting. But I also feel like he has a reason to vent. I get upset about this stuff too, I just don't get emails implying that I helped bring about the whole situation.
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Do you think it was "fun" for the people whose time got wasted interacting with something they initially thought was a person? On a dating website? Sure, "trolling" people was a thing back then like it is now, but trolling was always and still is asshole behaviour.
They effectively set up a spambot. It’s ok for him to be upset.