I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes.
I think it will, it’s the one bit of AI optimism I actually have. I have a theory the big AI firms love for example Yudkowsky’s doomsday cult so much because it’s easier for them to imagine the end of humanity than it is to imagine them not getting an extractive oligopoly over an emerging technology.
The tech itself is actually decent as tech, it’s not what the boosters claim it is but even if development stopped advancing today there’s loads of niches it’d be changing for a long time; computer vision in medical settings for example. Useful things like TTS will be much better going forward than they ever were, and for better and worse things like computer vision in general (ie in public) will never be the same. LLMs are basically magic NLP boxes too, they’re useful for classification as much as generating slop.
My own opinion is that Ai is the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx and nobody has caught on to it yet.
The idea of top down control of this technology- eg a single or a few companies holding the rinse and selling it to everyone else - has been quickly proven to be a fantasy.
I think it’s what both the fuck ai crowd and the Ai bros are missing with the whole situation. No one makes money with Ai (except the people that make the hardware it runs on). Not the people who used to do the things it does, not the people who want to control and sell it.
It seems highly unlikely to me because AI requires massive amounts of capitalism to work, from the mass production of chips to the mass aggregation of knowledge in digital form.
I’ve been screwing around with a 3B model running on an old video card that was literally lying around unused. Clearly there are a metric ton of dollars being thrown at AI but after the bubble pops there will be a lot of people still digging hard on this.
I think it will, it’s the one bit of AI optimism I actually have. I have a theory the big AI firms love for example Yudkowsky’s doomsday cult so much because it’s easier for them to imagine the end of humanity than it is to imagine them not getting an extractive oligopoly over an emerging technology.
The tech itself is actually decent as tech, it’s not what the boosters claim it is but even if development stopped advancing today there’s loads of niches it’d be changing for a long time; computer vision in medical settings for example. Useful things like TTS will be much better going forward than they ever were, and for better and worse things like computer vision in general (ie in public) will never be the same. LLMs are basically magic NLP boxes too, they’re useful for classification as much as generating slop.
My own opinion is that Ai is the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx and nobody has caught on to it yet.
The idea of top down control of this technology- eg a single or a few companies holding the rinse and selling it to everyone else - has been quickly proven to be a fantasy.
I think it’s what both the fuck ai crowd and the Ai bros are missing with the whole situation. No one makes money with Ai (except the people that make the hardware it runs on). Not the people who used to do the things it does, not the people who want to control and sell it.
It seems highly unlikely to me because AI requires massive amounts of capitalism to work, from the mass production of chips to the mass aggregation of knowledge in digital form.
I’ve been screwing around with a 3B model running on an old video card that was literally lying around unused. Clearly there are a metric ton of dollars being thrown at AI but after the bubble pops there will be a lot of people still digging hard on this.