• very_well_lost@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    That would be all well and good, if corpos weren’t pushing AI as a technology that everyone should be using all the time to reshape their daily lives.

    The people most attracted to AI as a technology (and the ones that AI companies are marketing to the hardest) are the ones who want to use it for things where they don’t already have domain-specific expertise. Non-artists generating art, or non-coders making apps on “vibes”, etc. Have you ever heard of Travis Kalanick? He’s one of the co-founders of Uber and he recently made the news after he went on some podcast to breathlessly rave about how he’s been using LLMs to do “vibe physics”. Kalanick, as you can guess, is not a physicist. In fact he’s not a scientist of any kind.

    The vast, vast majority of people using AI aren’t using it to augment their existing skills, and they aren’t using their own expertise to evaluate the output critically. This was never the point nor the promise of AI, and it’s certainly not the direction that the people pushing this technology are attempting to push it.

    • Mika@sopuli.xyz
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      18 hours ago

      AI marketing is total BS, but it doesn’t mean AI is not useful in it’s current state. People try to argue as if that was the case, but it simply isn’t. Agentic AI + LLM does speed up usual tasks by a whole fucking lot.

      Next day, these people would be wondering why they don’t have access to essential tools they need to be effective (means of production), completely forgotten they were against these tools completely out of principle. This is as shortsighted as it can get.

      • very_well_lost@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        AI marketing is total BS, but it doesn’t mean AI is not useful in it’s current state.

        But the AI only exists because of the marketing BS! The fact that AI is useful to qualified people in specialized fields doesn’t matter when the technology is being mass marketed to a completely different group of people for completely different use cases.

        LLMs are called “large” for a reason — their existence demands large datasets, large data centers, large resource consumption, and large capital expenditure to secure all of those things. The only entries with the resources to make that happen are large corporations (and rich nation-states, but they seem to be content to keep any of their own LLM efforts under wraps for now). You can only say “don’t blame the technology, blame the technologist” when it’s possible to separate the two, but in this case it’s not. LLMs don’t exist without the corpos, and the corpos are determined to push LLMs into places and use cases where they have no business being.

        • Mika@sopuli.xyz
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          16 hours ago

          Openweight/Opensource LLMs do exist though. And isn’t not only tiny models.