Comment by LogicFailsMe
2 days ago
I think society is divided on AI because we've let the billionaire tech bro class rawdog power resources and AI deployments and I welcome the pushback on those 2 axes. The water nonsense OTOH saps my will to live.
But also, the algorithms push enragement equals engagement and that favors pushing content to the product (us) that enrages the product to drive up their engagement numbers so they click on more ads.
Meanwhile, the medical applications of AI alone are astounding. But that doesn't get people mad so it doesn't get promoted as near as much as the latest clueless word salad from a rich dude. Election season is going be to very interesting this year IMO.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-medical-ai-i...
When people complain about"AI" they almost always mean general purpose LLMs and media generators. Nobody is complaining about OCR, MNIST trials, or machine translation.
Not in my experience. The rabbit hole is 9/11 truther deep here. And anything that isn't a mindset about either letting the billionaires billionaire the crap out of us or the American Butlerian Jihad gets shot down by both sides.
What's my position? GenAI will be subsumed into media toolchains. And reasoning is clearly no longer a hallmark of sentience or consciousness. That's going to take some time to sink in. Token costs are only going to drop further from here: https://www.navyaai.com/reports/ai-cost-report-token-prices-.... And there's opportunity to build businesses to bring down the rest of the costs in the article I cited.
Also, I'm with Martina Scorsese and Dua Lipa on GenAI. And having worked in and around Hollywood in the past, it blows my mind that such a corrupt oligarchy would be considered worth protection. Above the lines thrive while below the lines would be borderline homeless without the guilds. And the ones outside the guilds are.
Finally, build datacenters in the Dakotas, the Texas panhandle, and any other place far away from people where power can be generated onsite by whatever means suit the location best that's not coal.
The power and water requirements of AI DCs narrative is entirely nonsense. It doesn't hold up to even a cursory analysis on the back of an envelope.
And medical advances of AI are from other ML algorithms, not LLMs. They use similar technology and can run in the same DCs, but they aren't the same and people don't really have the same opinions on them both.
IMO the power issue is legit: https://ieefa.org/resources/projected-data-center-growth-spu...
But sensing the free market pitchforks and torches, the pushback commenced shortly thereafter...
But you're right that this can be addressed in multiple ways such as pushing the locations to places where construction is cheap or building where it is made cheap to operate with on-site power generation.
What's your take on medical VLMs? That's pretty much an LLM with multiple classes of tokens. While nothing's FDA approved yet, Cognita CXR is listed as a breakthrough device and multiple companies providing conventional AI have both published research and signaled intent to submit for FDA approval.
https://mosaicclinical.ai/news/2026/03/mosaic-clinical-techn...