Worth reading Ed Zitron's stuff on OpenAI
www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/
There are some major stumbling blocks for it, not least the hallucinations that seem unsolvable, and presumably will get worse considering that it's polluted the internet and is now feeding on its own shit.
Still going to cause a lot of shit and job loss. Just worth being wary that the LLM stories are being fed by hype-bros wanting more investment money to a media that aren't questioning their claims enough.
I feel sorry for people wanting to use AI for things other than content creation, as it does seem to have potential in things like medicine, but the industry is going to be associated with generative slop and cons because of these "entrepreneurs".
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monkeon schmonkeon, Thu 30 Jan 2025, 12:35,
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A good article about the finances and early losses, but Trump announced they're raising 100 billion in investment
despite the shaky finances and hype merchants and bullshitters that new tech always attracts, and whatever deficiencies it has in specific areas, the money won't stop and the advancements won't stop, because the carrot is so massive and valuable, and that carrot is not to be some helper service like clippy, that's just the transition, it's to replace waged employment with ai, and businesses will absolutely pay for that.
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Thu 30 Jan 2025, 23:01,
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I'm sure they'd also have liked
a $25,000 self-driving car by 2023, or to hold all their meetings with a legged avatar in the Metaverse.
Why do you think the advancement won't stop? Where are they going to get the new data from? How will they fix the hallucinations?
Anyone going all-in on it for anything business critical is risking a Post Office-esque scandal. On a smaller scale, you're already seeing it with cases like this.
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monkeon schmonkeon, Fri 31 Jan 2025, 10:05,
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It's a prediction engine that is good to use in some contexts
Pretty good at summarising notes (release notes etc) or scaffolding some template code for example, but people and tech-bros are treating it like it's some omnipresent god. My favourite was when it told someone to kill themselves.
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Fadgebadger Sweaty sumo wanks for everyone!, Fri 31 Jan 2025, 10:41,
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it doesn't have to be a god to do most of human work
we're kind of prediction engines ourselves, and have flaws and error rates.
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Fri 31 Jan 2025, 11:31,
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even if you're right I see it as more like the dot com boom, when there was stupid money being thrown at this shiny new thing
But 25 years later amazon is the biggest retailer in the world, and it's all online. It never went away becuase the underlying utility of it was solid, it just needed refinement. And now it's fucked countless retail business over the years. AI will do this for jobs. It might not be linear, there might be frontrunners that fall at the hurdles. But it will happen and it will fuck everyone but the few.
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Fri 31 Jan 2025, 11:39,
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Amazon always worked, though.
It used to be the go-to example of good usability before they fucked it with dark patterns and shoddy marketplace items. It always made business sense. They were just biding their time for bandwidth costs to come down and internet users to go up for it to become profitable. Same with Google and Facebook. Then they can enshittify.
Not all technical hurdles are solvable and unless they are, OpenAI provides at-best buggy business software and an alternative to Google that needs you to fact check if you don't want to get stung. Lots of people think technical stuff is easy if you can easily describe the frontend, but it's the detail that's usually the hardest part. ChatGPT still feels like a prototype.
Sam Altman keeps claiming to be approaching AGI without any evidence that it's even possible. No one seems to ever challenge him or ask for a live demonstration. He comes across as a shyster promising to turn lead to gold if you give him enough money for chips.
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monkeon schmonkeon, Fri 31 Jan 2025, 12:49,
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