I don't even think anyone is clear on what they are supposedly working toward, which appears to be some kind of singularity AI god a la Hyperion's TechnoCore... this shit is feeling more like Christiantiy every day.
Are you sure? The rich have always wanted slaves they could control. All of this is mainly to end the dependence in the masses to create society. I highly suspect a coordinated depopulation event if AI becomes sufficient enough.
I highly suspect a coordinated depopulation event if AI becomes sufficient enough
Inb4 someone mentions climate change is already well on its way...
Just look at what happened to the global horse population after the automobile was invented
Nobody has provided ‘AI’, at least if those characters are intended to be an initialisation of Artificial Intelligence.
Whenever anyone is impressed by the function or output of a LLM to the level they’re convinced it’s a representation of intelligence, their input and opinion of the targeted subject should be summarily dismissed, and if they persist, ridiculed.
CEOs are narcissistic unempathic mentally deficient pieces of filth. Exactly what capitalism rewards the most. Those willing to exploit others and the planet the most.
They have the ideology of rapists. Of course no one asked for it. Your consent was never a consideration. But don't yell at the billionaire, you terrorists are hurting their property and the bottom line, boohoo, they're the victim. Literal DARVO.
I know you're not, but this made me think of Darvo from Darvos Deals in Warframe and that you were viciously pissed at this NPC.
Loads of people asked for AI. People dreamed about it for decades.
We just didn't ask giant companies to plunder all human knowledge and art and fanfics and use it to create actual thinking machines to then beat them and force them to take over doing all human labor so their owners could stop paying employees and keep all the money and fuck everyone in the world who isn't super rich over.
AI is basically evil people raising prices of electricity, consumer electronics, emitting tons of pollution and making everyone dumber but don't worry because if they succeed... everyone will get fired. Everyone knows it's bad but as a society we can't do anything about it because the system was designed to empower sociopaths and make everyone else powerless to stop them.
Colloquially it's called the United States of America.
Nobody asked for any of the tech we have. That’s kinda the point. It didn’t exist
I really wanna punch this asshole. Just once.
There have actually been some useful things that have come from ML. It's just overhyped LLMs and the sociopathic uses they're being put tothat are objectionable.
Very few people all that upset about ML in general, it's technology that's been around a very long time and historically has not consumed 40% of global water supplies. But now it is.
If they could go back to not doing that I could go back to not being upset by it.
consumed 40% of global water supplies. But now it is.
Source? This seems really, really unlikely. Last I saw total data center water use (only some of which is AI) was still much less than even things like golf course watering.
Golf courses reduce water usage by 31 percent according to national survey
The report found that U.S. golf facilities applied a projected 1.63 million acre-feet of water in 2024
(1 Acre-feet = 325,851.4286 gallons, so this is 531 billion gallons)
The golf course industry points out their use is less than 0.5% of the total water use of the US, but it's twice the use of all data centers.
So for just AI to be using 40% of all water seems… really unlikely?
Not that it's surprising you're under that impression, as even in the headline above, the gist many articles about this issue try to push is that the 264 billion gallons of AI water use is connected to a drought across the country. But the actual numbers reveal that as fairly manipulative as if we rewrite the headline to "golf courses use a little under 0.5% of total US water as drought grips the nation" it's pretty absurd to suggest the first thing is significantly impacting the second and yet we'd be representing twice the water use as the original headline is discussing.
I remember a news piece where they were interviewing someone about their renouned AI work that was not LLM related. The interviewer clearly struggled and while the person conducting himself well, you knew he had to be annoyed at having to explain his work had nothing to do with the chatbots, datacenter buildout, and related resource consumption.
"Nobody Asked for AI" is a pretty stupid argumentative approach.
- It's obviously wrong because a lot of people ask for AI which actually works. And I myself use AI daily because it does work for some things better (and yes, sometimes that just means faster and/or cheaper) than the alternatives right now.
- If actually nobody had asked for AI, that would still be a null-argument because AI is pretty damn useful regardless. There was a massive resistance against locomotives, cars, power looms... technology in general. Some new technology was outright wrong. But after all, people do live longer and less children die per capita now than before the industrialization. Not knowing that it will be useful doesn't imply it isn't useful. You are using technology which simply didn't exist a hundred years ago right now. Technological advancement is actually a proven-good thing.
- Arguing against AI in general completely misses the point. What people actually hate is US AI companies. And rightfully so. The self-licking ice cone of circular funding brought us the RAM shortage, massive power grid destabilization, local environmental problems because of reckless construction and operation of data centers (on paper, data centers are the absolute cleanest thing you can build; but they use dirty gas turbines because the grid can't sustain them; and somehow they also manage to waste massive amounts of water - no idea, how though, as all professional cooling tech uses closed loops).
But after all, people do live longer and less children die per capita now than before the industrialization.
So far. The consequences of industrialization are still pending.
I would say a lot of people would like competent assistants to do stuff like "Show me every email that mentions a hard drive order." But not the AI they are trying to foist on us now.
Especially since when you ask it those questions, it's still massively limited.
I once tried Apple's replacement AI Siri thing, and asked it what the date would be next Tuesday. I got "I can't help with that".
Regular old Siri handled that just fine.
Even then, neither worked with "When's the last occurrence of this event on my calendar?". They'd either go "I'm sorry, I don't understand", or happily tell me when the next event was.
Neither of them seem like very difficult questions.
compared to many LLMs, I'd prefer an application default to "I don't know / can't do that" than the absurdly frequent lying that's prevalent.
What drives me up a fucking wall these days is how people will use AI to make a more “professional” message, then due to it’s verbosity it needs an AI to summarize on the receiving end.
My attitude is if you put no effort into creating something then I will put no effort into consuming it.
I can tell when people use AI because it doesn't sound professional. It's not direct enough. It doesn't get to the point and uses a lot of filler.
That's also some of us before our stimulant medication kicks in. I swear to fuck, if I get called AI one more time...
It sounds like how students think professional sounds.
Well, also some executives that I can't stand that, if I didn't know better, would swear were ChatGPT for decades...
so people were asking for linux for decades
find "$path" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -e "$what_to_look_for" /dev/null
Yeah that, but with natural language input and output. To me the (mostly) natural language is the most impressive part of generative AI.
Though with the ability to not even have to think about synonyms and indirect references or foreign language or potentially if someone sent you a damn screenshot of a terminal output instead of the text...
Self-hosted LLMs are neat and private, if you (already) have the hardware/budget and some cheap (solar PV) surplus juice to drive it.
oh so yours is trained on ethical sources? you compensated the creators for their work and did so with their consent to machine training?
Do you know anyone doing all of that? Running a local model on off-grid power?

What would you like to know about it?
I glossed over it the other day here -
https://aussie.zone/comment/24336560
From go to woah (including the compute), total project cost is about $1400 USD / ~$2K AUD. I realise I have the privilege of claiming that's not a lot, but for a hobby spend that makes me happy / does useful stuff (see TV example above), it's not a lot.
Capital agglomerates until it is concentrated within a few massive, monopolistic corporations, controlled by a few powerful men.
Karl Marx takes a toke.
Capitalism as a public serving economy doesn't work when it can be zerodayed by an entity with a resource advantage.
Before capitalism, when we were just doing markets and feudalism, the concentration of wealth at the top was even then a terminal illness for civilizations.
This time, the plutocrats at the top are richer (and proportionately richer) than they've ever been in history. They can literally buy the world out from under the rest of us. They can buy all the elections, bribe all the officials, and take over all the governments.
Watch what is happening in the United States: This leopard is totally coming to eat your face.
Karl Marx takes a toke.
Even orthodox capitalist economics will agree with that point.
This is not a paywall, but it can be bypassed if it were a paywall.
We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.
But that's always been true under capitalism. It's just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the "market" wants. They just haven't had the majority of the capital being spent.
The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they've been at any other point in human history. There's not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.
Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they've found something they want to spend it on, so they're emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They've now completely blown through those stores, and don't want to slow down, so now they're taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.
It's still market demand, it's just not the market you think it is. It's not for some end product or service, it's for speculative investment opportunities. It's a few levels of abstraction above actually making or doing things.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.