Technology in most cases progresses on a logarithmic scale when innovation isn't prioritized. We've basically reached the plateau of what LLMs can currently do without a breakthrough. They could absorb all the information on the internet and not even come close to what they say it is. These days we're in the "bells and whistles" phase where they add unnecessary bullshit to make it seem new like adding 5 cameras to a phone or adding touchscreens to cars. Things that make something seem fancy by slapping buzzwords and features nobody needs without needing to actually change anything but bump up the price.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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I remember listening to a podcast that is about scientific explanations. The guy hosting it is very knowledgeable about this subject, does his research and talks to experts when the subject involves something he isn’t himself an expert.
There was this episode where he kinda got into the topic of how technology only evolves with science (because you need to understand the stuff you’re doing and you need a theory of how it works before you make new assumptions and test those assumptions). He gave an example of the Apple visionPro being a machine that despite being new (the hardware capabilities, at least), the algorithm for tracking eyes they use was developed decades ago and was already well understood and proven correct by other applications.
So his point in the episode is that real innovation just can’t be rushed by throwing money or more people at a problem. Because real innovation takes real scientists having novel insights and experiments to expand the knowledge we have. Sometimes those insights are completely random, often you need to have a whole career in that field and sometimes it takes a new genius to revolutionize it (think Newton and Einstein).
Even the current wave of LLMs are simply a product of the Google’s paper that showed we could parallelize language models, leading to the creation of “larger language models”. That was Google doing science. But you can’t control when some new breakthrough is discovered, and LLMs are subject to this constraint.
In fact, the only practice we know that actually accelerates science is the collaboration of scientists around the world, the publishing of reproducible papers so that others can expand upon and have insights you didn’t even think about, and so on.
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Me and my 5.000 closest friends don't like that the website and their 1.300 partners all need my data.
Why so many sig figs for 5 and 1.3 though?
Some parts of the world (mostly Europe, I think) use dots instead of commas for displaying thousands. For example, 5.000 is 5,000 and 1.300 is 1,300
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Why won't they pour billions into me? I'd actually put it to good use.
The funny thing is with so much money you could probably do lots of great stuff with the existing AI as it is. Instead they put all the money into compute power so that they can overfit their LLMs to look like a human.
I liked generative AI more when it was just a funny novelty and not being advertised to everyone under the false pretenses of being smart and useful. Its architecture is incompatible with actual intelligence, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just fooling themselves. (It does make an alright autocomplete though).
The peak of AI for me was generating images Muppet versions of the Breaking Bad cast; it's been downhill since.
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There are some nice things I have done with AI tools, but I do have to wonder if the amount of money poured into it justifies the result.
Current big tech is going to keeping pushing limits and have SM influencers/youtubers market and their consumers picking up the R&D bill. Emotionally I want to say stop innovating but really cut your speed by 75%. We are going to witness an era of optimization and efficiency. Most users just need a Pi 5 16gb, Intel NUC or an Apple air base models. Those are easy 7-10 year computers. No need to rush and get latest and greatest. I’m talking about everything computing in general. One point gaming,more people are waking up realizing they don’t need every new GPU, studios are burnt out, IPs are dying due to no lingering core base to keep franchise up float and consumers can't keep opening their wallets. Hence studios like square enix going to start support all platforms and not do late stage capitalism with going with their own launcher with a store. It’s over.
It's because customers don't want it or care for it, it's only the corporations themselves are obsessed with it
Pump and dump. That’s how the rich get richer.
Imo our current version of ai are too generalized, we add so much information into the ai to make them good at everything it all mixes together into a single grey halucinating slop that the ai ends up being good at nothing.
We need to find ways to specialize ai and give said ai a more consistent and concrete personality to move forward.
Imo to make an ai that is truly good at everything we need to have multiple ai all designed to do something different all working together (like the human brain works) instead of making every single ai a personality-less sludge of jack of all trades master of none
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