Comment by gherkinnn

18 hours ago

All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future.

Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.

27 comments

gherkinnn

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dgellow  17 hours ago

I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen

  • azan_  16 hours ago

    Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").

    • evdubs  16 hours ago

      > while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases.

      The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.

      Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.

      1 reply →

    • Krei-se  16 hours ago

      where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO.

      After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.

      4 replies →

  • cyberpunk  12 hours ago

    I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem that would have taken me probably three weeks to understand, let alone fix.

    Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.

glhaynes  18 hours ago

Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."

  • matherial  18 hours ago

    Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.

    What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?

    • ryeights  17 hours ago

      https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://ai-2040.com

      Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?

      Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.

      2 replies →

    • dgellow  16 hours ago

      > Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?

      I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong

atleastoptimal  14 hours ago

You really think that legitimate concern about AI is equivalent to mass hysteria? Do you think AI will just stop getting better?