News article about this: https://www.businessinsider.com/students-boo-eric-schmidt-google-ceo-ai-university-arizona-2026-5
“The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.”
The problem with Schmidt’s perspective, and to some degree that of the linked article itself, is that they take an “AI” future for granted. Like it’s a given that we need to adapt to whatever the tech giants put before us.
But the thing is, the only place where (the success of) “AI” is necessary — that’s in those companies’ projected earnings. They sunk billions into a technology that could be a big deal in certain number crunching research fields, but to recoup the investment they marketed the product as an everything assistant for everybody.
The corporations pushing “AI” into personal computers, into workspaces, into public governance; they’re huge, but they’re hardly infallible. They may wish, as in “bet their savings”, that this utopian tech dream will work out better than the metaverse …but that’s all it is.
They’re just trying to talk their ROI into existence. We need to counter that talk, and that future. It’s ours to decide over.
it’s fucking ghoulish that these salesmen treat a college commencement as just another platform to push their product and grow hype
I was hoping someone would throw tomatoes or something at him.
Maybe a brick or two.
He already looks like he took a tomato or two to the face
That will happen sooner or later
Here’s hoping for sooner
I don’t think Schmidt is doing that. He’s just drunk the Kool-Aid.
He’s a multi-billionaire either way. For him it’s not about making more money. It’s about his self-image as an important guy in tech who was still on the cutting edge at 71. I don’t think he thinks he’s important or relevant enough to shape the future anymore. I think he just wants to be seen as someone who can be invited to conferences and public speaking events because he’s still relevant.
IMO that’s a really, really big part of the AI ecosystem. A lot of executives are implementing AI at their companies because they’re afraid they’re going to be seen as old fuddy duddies who didn’t know that the world had changed.
For most of these commencement speakers, it’s more of an “emperor has no clothes” situation than it is a conspiracy to pump up the stock price.
As we all know, once you’re rich, you stop wanting more money. 😉
When you’re that rich, there are things that matter more than more money. Money is good, but more important is power, respect, etc.
They want more of everything. They want more power, more respect, and more money. They want it all. They want everything.
They’re hungry ghosts, they just want more and more forever and ever to fill the empty screaming void at the core of their being.
i don’t think you get that rich without your entire brain being rewired to treat money AS power, respect, etc.
Maybe. But, that doesn’t mean that you look at a commencement speech to pump up AI stocks. It’s more likely that you look at that kind of a speech as a way to prove to the world how smart and influential you are.
This was a very well-said take. No notes.
Doing my humble, unassisted meatsack best.
Uh-huh. Sounds like something an AI would say. Let’s see what’s really behind that mask…
rips off face Ah-HA!!!
OH, GOD! There’s so much blood! Whyyyy 😭
Adding a gore Art warning
When Scooby Doo went really dark 🤣💀
Got a little Hannah Barbaric
Ok, I have a note (and happy to run the risk of being ‘boo’d’ for making a ‘speach’. There, I feel better now).
It seems to me most of the (current) animosity is very squarely aimed at the large corporations, but comes under the general heading of ‘anti-AI’. I was working in that field in the early ‘90s and it had some interesting applications which we’ve seen deliver some real benefits. The recent avalanche of ‘our LLM can replace everything else you have’ is the problem, not AI. And large groups of people tend to prefer a nice black & white answer not a nuanced conversation. I’m not for a second defending Schmidt on that, but I worry the real important stuff will get lost in the noise.
We’re on the same page about the problem, I think. And as I said in my original comment, there are absolutely reasonable applications for LLMs, they just won’t pay back the investments chucked into the research quick enough. So we get instead our current “AI” moment.
Now, as a counterpoint to your argument about black and white positions — I see a lot of people filling the gray areas with what is essentially whataboutism:
- “The next model will be much better”
- “People said the same thing about the internet”
- “Sure it sucks and make stuff up, but it’s good enough for me”
- “You can’t stop progress”…
In that context, I think it’s important to take a black and white stance, staying off that slippery slop(e) of bad faith arguments. “AI” as it is being marketed to us is bullshit, and needs to stop.
But once that bubble is burst (and it will one way or another), research needs to continue in a more focused manner into the fields where LLMs can actually make a positive difference (hint: it’s neither search engines or your operating system).
Those are not “whataboutisms” lol
Of course the AI bubble will pop massively, but LLMs not being useful in search engines or your OS is utterly delusional. Of course, I’m not talking about AI on Winblows, but having a locally running LLM could prove incredibly useful for providing support for Linux box. Please be charitable and assume that I’m talking about a well designed system and not some slop that would even dare suggest running commands in the terminal. If you have the hardware, might as well use it right?
- Prompt: How do I reduce input lag in my game?
- Response: Disable full screen compositing for full-screen applications via Settings > Display
Yes, I suspect we are. Having said that, LLMs even today are sometimes useful for search—perhaps only because traditional search has become so poor.
Whether they are any use or not is a totally different question to whether they’re worth the money being piled into them though. And that’s my original point really—it’s the behaviour of large corporations that’s more of an issue than some large matrix operations doing clever things with language tokens.
It’ll be sad and unnecessary if we throw the cancer diagnostics out with the work stealing, resource wasting, slop machine.
It would be a tragedy if we accepted the latter so that we can obtain the former.
It’s a question of using the right tool for the right job, but CEOs that don’t even know the job, nor the tools it needs, fall for charlatans selling them snake oil that’ll magically increase revenue, cut expenses or otherwise make them look good when the time for allotting their bonus comes around. And why wouldn’t they? They’re not the ones to pay for their fuckup. They’ll step down, get a chonky farewell gift and the employees taking pay cuts, losing their jobs or just suffering under the increased workload are left holding the bag.
For text processing with negligible precision, LLMs may be a great fit. For repetitive, primitive coding tasks in the hands of a senior coder, they can save time. For replacing humans, they lack critical thinking and semantic understanding.
Add to that the issue that, even if AI did bring the promised savings, that wouldn’t benefit the general public, particularly the people whose prospects for a job are now fucked along with their prospects for a living. This is a social factor that no discussion of tool aptitude or AI applications can solve.
Limited models trained on good datasets have limited applications in analysis of similar data.
LLMs are a gigantic soul-sucking scam with no practical usage.
You are creating a distinction without a difference.
You think there’s no difference between a technology and a corporation pushing a technology?
I think there is no difference between the title AI and the word grift. No matter how magnanimous 1% of the technology is it’s still harmful on the whole.
Agreed
The problem is pushing a business model that likely seeks to put many of the graduates he’s speaking to out of a job.
Yes, the other things you say are also true, along with the tactless use of a commencement speech to advertise said business, but telling the people about how great AI is while failing to consider the effects on them is…well, very Billionaire of him.
If a machine can do my job better than me, then a machine should be doing that job. That’s progress. Eventually all of this mindless toil should be done by machines so that people have the ability to pursue their dreams. The actual problem is that we’ve built a society where people need to toil mindlessly in order to live. This could be solved with something like a Universal Basic Income, so if my job gets taken by an LLM I can go back to school and learn a new trade. Or write some books. Or go ramble around Europe as an art bum. Or whatever.
Having said that, I think that LLMs are being used to replace jobs where the machine can’t do it better than a human. It saves the company money in the short term, but it’s going to catch up with them in the long term. On the other hand, some people are doing jobs that don’t need doing, and replacing those with an LLM doesn’t change anything, because the job was bullshit to begin with.
At the end of the day, people need food, lodging, and healthcare. They don’t need “jobs”. We should be fighting to get people’s needs met, not fighting to keep people in their shitty jobs that they hate anyway.
We don’t need machines to do everything to get that. We already have everything for a post scarcity-society. It’s there now. But a lot of assholes want a bigger pile of money, and honestly, I’m pretty sure they don’t actually want you or I to exist to get in the way of their utopia which is them hanging out on beaches while robots do everything for them.
At the end of the day, people need food, lodging, and healthcare. They don’t need “jobs”. We should be fighting to get people’s needs met, not fighting to keep people in their shitty jobs that they hate anyway.
On one hand, I agree with you.
On the other hand, what you’re saying is, “Life would be better if we would become wholly dependent on a white supremacist, genocidal, colonial institution”.
I don’t think what you’re suggesting is possible on the land known as the United States of America until it’s no longer called that.
You’re assuming everybody in this conversation is American? 🤔 I for one am not part of the “we” you describe there…
Your nation is either beholden to the imperialist pigdogs which run America or you will be targeted by them. So sorry (truly), but yes, you are “we”, even if it’s a more extended “we”. Maybe you can fly under the radar if your country is both poor and resource-poor.
…Aside from that this is a thread about an American university, so
Your nationality or ethnicity has little to nothing to do with who is making these systems.
Economics should be people centered not robots
You do realize the main reason we don’t have slavery in many countries is because of the Industrial Revolution, right?
like wise we shouldn’t have poverty wages anymore.
I completely agree with everything here, and I just want to reiterate:
👏 Universal 👏 Basic 👏 Income
Counterpoint, we don’t need a society that requires universities to churn out graduates who need jobs. That’s it, we have everything we need as a society already, and we are well past the post-scarcity part, but someone always wants a bigger boat.
We’ll all do what we need to in order to get food, shelter, and all the basics. But we are past the point of needing a 40 hour work week, and putting people into menial positions just so they can get a paycheck.
You might as well say people shouldn’t have children.
What about my response gives you the impression that I think people shouldn’t procreate?
LLMs absolutely have a market. It’s a market that’s probably in the low tens of billions of dollars worldwide. Non-critical translation, content writing, image generation, mockup. Etc etc. there are absolutely uses for LLMs and other generative AI.
The problem is that hundreds upon hundreds of billions have been invested, with hundreds more on the way. The current investment will never be recovered.
And these aren’t durable investments, the equipment has a very limited shelve life, the chips aren’t going to last nearly long enough to recover their cost, and the data centers are already obselete for the next generation.
Edit: getting downvotes for recognising that there is in fact a market for generative AI, by people who didn’t catch that “the low tens of billions” is about 1% of what AI boosters are proclaiming.
LLMs absolutely have a market. […] content writing, image generation
Hard disagree on those two examples. That market is exclusively made up of people who a) can’t write or make images themselves, and b) have an utter disregard for people who spent their lives doing so.
I do, however, agree completely with your points re the feasibility of returns on investments into “AI”, and the expiration dates on the technical infrastructure. We have been presented with a solution without a preexisting problem — but oh boy, what exciting new problems comes after! /s
LLMs shouldn’t be used in place of artists because LLMs can’t make art. There’s a quote I heard somewhere that sums this up perfectly: “LLMs should be used to help creative people do tedious things, not to help tedious people do creative things.”
That’s a very good way of framing it, yes! But at the moment it feels like the tedious people are at the wheel.
That market is exclusively made up of people who a) can’t write or make images themselves, and b) have an utter disregard for people who spent their lives doing so.
And that market is, unfortunately, absolutely huge. There is a frighteningly large demand for mediocre crap.
The LLM age has shown us how quickly the market is willing to settle for “not nothing” instead of “something good”.
And a worldwide market in the 20 billion range is by no means remotely near the multiple trillions needed to actually fulfills what the AI boosters are promising.
The LLM age has shown us how quickly the market is willing to settle for “not nothing” instead of “something good”.
You’re on to something there. During the “AI” hype, I’ve seen several people claim that this could be the last gasp for late stage capitalism. Growth has plateaued, and they did not have anything more to sell us at a profit.
So they introduce a new artificial need, and promote it like their continued existence depended on it… because it does. But that was exactly my original point: nobody needs “AI”, except the people peddling it.
In my experience, there are a lot of places very content to do a pretty bad job of stuff if it’s low effort on the part of the person collecting the surplus labour value, and is making money.
The greatest deprogramming I’ve had through corporate experience is that capitalist myth that competition forces companies to try and make a better product.
Maybe in the odd case it does. But, for the most part, capitalism is pretty happy to just race to the bottom. A 2% worse product that costs 5% less to manufac6that I can sell for the original price? THAT is what every company is trying to do. Make a better product? Get the fuck outta here.
There is a market, for AI slop… because it’s just a special case of a preexisting major market of “slop”. We already had shovelware. Low effort high volume content creators. Telemarketers with accents so think you have to wonder if the costs saved by offshoring those workers could possibly recoup the reduced sales rates. It’s all just slop. AI can absolutely disrupt the Slop Market. And it is.
But, as the other commenter pointed out… it’s a tens-of-billions global industry, and AI is being invested in as if its a trillions global industry.
They need to make AI better, or make the slop industry larger. They won’t meaningfully do the first, but can make some headroom on the second. Either way, not nearly enough for profitability.
Right now my money is on industry to repurpose barely used datacenter hardware which will become available for pennies on the dollar back to consumer-usable hardware.
Although I agree that there will always be produced “content” that is worse than other, I don’t think there’s any cause to compare human labour to “AI” slop. People can be stuck in jobs they don’t care about, most often because of unreasonable work conditions or wages.
“AI” produces slop because that’s what it is made for. That’s its dire success criteria, making something that’s statistically just above but not quite terrible quality. Manufacturers and employers prefer that over human labour performing similarly, i.e. quiet quitting. Because so far “AI” doesn’t have workers’ rights. Or higher aspirations.
And I cannot agree with your point about “telemarketers with accents” as a marker of low quality. That phrasing is a whole thicket of weeds that I’m not wading into.
I’m actually not saying anything is “better” than anything else. I’m saying there is a distinct industrial strategy that involves maximizing engagements primarily through volume of attempts at the minimal cost. It’s very much a bimodal reality, clustered around trying to maximize completions against a constrained set of touches, or merely maximizing touches. I didn’t mention it earlier, but “scams” also fit this profile. And I’m just calling it all slop. It’s the cheapest thing that you can feed the pigs that’ll eat anything anyways. Maximize channel saturation at the absolute lowest cost possible, the message itself being largely irrelevant.
AI excels at that specific task. You can agree or disagree all you want but studies trying to establish “is anyone actually seeing material profit gains out of AI”, are seeing this exact pattern. People trying to use the slop machine to do anything besides making slop aren’t having a great time. People who’s business model is slop are doing great.
Unfortunately, those things are pretty much the only things it’s good at and the companies losing billions on them are going to try to recoup as much as possible by doing as much of that as they can.
those things are pretty much the only things it’s good at
No. It most definitely is not.
The problem is that it isn’t ours to decide in many countries. Billionaires control everything, or at the very least have a 10 ton thumb on the scale and have a monopoly on violence.
Look at the US, vehement opposition to almost all datacenters over the entire country, the entire voterbase tells their politicians on every level that they all don’t want them. What happens? The politicians completely ignore the population and the people that voted for them, use the people’s tax money to build the billionaire surveillance complexes that will literally suck all of the water out of the ground and cause blackouts and create maybe 10 jobs.
We see that here is Europe more and more too, especially with anything having to do with banks. We data centers popping up everywhere and half of new automation engineer jobs are for data center pop ups here in Belgium with 0 option to even publicly dissent, much less vote against them.
Shame these kids got an advertisement instead of a commencement speech.
Can’t escape targeted ads
A billionaire praising AI as the next big thing doesn’t belong at a graduation ceremony.
Imagine working 2, 4, 8, whatever number of years, then you get to a night meant to honor your accomplishments… then you have to sit through a billionaire performing autofellatio in the form of an advertisement
Not just any advertisement. An advertisement for something that is likely limiting their job opportunities that they have been studying years for.
CEOs paid some marketing team to go out to all these universities saying we can get some giant CEO to come up and speak to your graduates about the wonders and excitement of the new AI future.
This is the second or third CEO that is getting booed at so far. I’m wondering how many more will come out as grad season continues.
🍿
Read the room, dickhead.
It’s not often the room is quite this easy to read.
I loved the double down “if you let me make this point” followed by an ever increasing sound of boo’s
AI aside, this was incredibly disrespectful to the graduates. He basically stole the ceremony to pitch his business. These people have no shame.
Glad he’s getting booed. In this clip he’s saying things that are potentially true about AI. The biggest problem though is that assholes like him will be the ones designing AI. They want to own the source of all information to shape the world as they wish it to be.
They already own the media, now their AI will be what they want it to be, say what they want it to say.
Google does not own “the media”
The billionaires do.
The google news feed has so much power, it makes news companies adjust what they are reporting on.
Most people use it as their primary search tool. No, it is not a newspaper or evening news, but it is the first stop for most people such that it displaces traditional media.
Kids are SO Ungrateful! WHY can’t they just APPRECIATE the Epstein Class for ELIMINATING their Job Prospects like GOOD SEXY Kids?
-Rich People!
I’m rather proud of humanity here.
A narcissist with psychopathic tendencies promotes his next bullshit way of him getting richer, and people just showed him what they think of it
Good
I’m a huge fan of booing. Its the best way to simply show you dislike something. I’m glad the younger generations are hanging onto that one.
Holy fuck. It’s their big day, and he uses it to pitch his fucking shitty fucking products. Read the room dumbarse
Ads on graduation speech. What a time to be alive!
Usually they also like to tell you it’s the new industrial revolution. Then you look at the industrial revolution and see 100 years of poverty, living in slums, child labor, ridiculous working hours and protesting the elites.
And notably, the exploitation didn’t let up until we stopped protesting the elites, and started doing other things to them.
Damn I wish I had a guillotine in my camera roll. My bad
Give people affordable healthcare
-No
Give people affordable homes
-No
Give people liveable income
-No
Give people a product marketed as pseudo-beneficial to humanity, while making yourself richer.
-Hell yesss
make computers expensive.
make travel expensive.
burn the atmosphere up.
yeah at UofA of all places, a place that has quite a big CS department. these kids are graduating in hopes of getting jobs that simply don’t exist for them. they have every right to boo him.
I went to high school in Tucson and would routinely go to the UofA for LAN Parties. They also had an awesome Arcade on campus. UofA is the last place to go gloating about AI taking jobs.
Im still not totally convinced that its going to take entry level CS jobs. I have the concern, but part of me thinks the job will expand to things like MCP server building, harness creation or implementation, etc. In other words, any jobs lost to llm efficiency in producing code will be offset by needing to build more stuff.
In addition, even if agents are doing some of the gruntwork, they wont be fully autonomous as they currently are. Anyone doing that (unsupervised coding) is going to get burned. Therefore, the new bottlenecks is review, but also business contezt complexity.
Can i build things faater than before? Yes, but my new problem is keeping track of it all.
Im still not totally convinced that its going to take entry level CS jobs.
When will the entry level CS jobs come back? In time for these kids to pay off their loans?
When the AI companies have to start charging more to actually turn profits.
Right now their prices are artificially cheap to grow their user base, but they’re losing money. Eventually they have to recoup those losses, and when that happens LLMs are going to look a lot less attractive than they do right now.
Might be soon if the energy crisis gets much worse. Market crashes usually happen in October after all…
If you asked me last year, i might say its an existential crisis and they wont come back. Now though, I dont think thats necessarily a guarenteed outcome.
The more I use AI at work, and the more I experiment with custom harnesses/agents, the more clear it is that every task it does provides an output that must be validated and checked. Therefore, its a convenience tool.
Before VisiCalc, peoole had to make spreadsheets by hand on litteral paper. Manual calculations with a seperate calculator. Did VisiCalc (and later Excel) get rid of entry level jobs? I dont think it did.
We already have ample evidence of large companies trying to replace people with AI, with disasterous results. For the companies that have been reducing headcount because of AI, all they are doing is exposing themselves to future competitors. MS and Google become IBM and Bell Labs. New, hungry competitora take their place, and they hire like mad so their competitors dont get the talent.
We are seeing this play out right now in the case of hardware. Buying up all current and future supply to prevent competitors from having enough compute (without them getting a taste of course), but thats another story.
As to when? Beats me man, i work for a small startup that is still in “hire people we know” mode.
and CS already has a problem with job prospects for the last 10years, are employers even hiring them as undergrad, i feel like any stem would need some form of grad school.
Love to see it. I’m not usually proud of the younger generation(s), but this is beautiful.
It would have been more satisfying if they rushed the stage to rip the fucker apart then just rioted. But I guess we’re not quite there yet.
How long you think that’s gonna take?
Let’s be honest, if it starts to look like that’s a possibility then these fuckers won’t appear anywhere in public without their own personal Secret Service accompanying them, complete with high-powered weaponry, and to smooth over the resulting massacre they’ll fill the media with hand-wringing about violence and awfulness and how could this be prevented, and the answers won’t at all be about fixing the conditions that led to the riot in the first place.
When enough people go hungry.
Conditions have to be pretty severe for a crowd of people to make that kind of decision.
Yes, hunger will do it. Being hungry makes you angry and primal. And it won’t take long to get there.
Thought we’d be there by now with all the Epstein stuff tbh.
Monday at the latest.
The annoying thing is that generative AI actually has real, positive applications for humanity.
Unfortunately, dickheads like Schmidt have applied it to the things it’s least good at because it’s the most likely to enslave the populace by denying them of jobs and make the most money.
I’m curious what positive applications you see in it? Genuine question, not trying to fight, just looking for other views
Programmer here. They can be a useful tool if used correctly. They are great at writing unit tests, useful for upgrading older code, and really useful as a semi-intelligent autocomplete.
If used incorrectly they will generate a giant mess that works briefly but becomes impossible to expand on, full of duplicated sections that makes maintenance super difficult, and have weird logical flaws.
I prefer using agents running on my own desktop rather than paying somebody for it.
The one off scripts ive had it write to do something for me usually work great, but when I glance at the code its horrific. But its a one off, it does its job then goes bye bye.
Like I had to scrape a website the other day and only needed it to work for a few days. Claude did it.
Honestly, that’s fine. I’ve been coding for 30 years now, not one bit of it from 20 years ago still remains.
Everything is ephemeral in the end, we are all only but dust on the wind.
Nice. I appreciate actual programmers sharing their actual use cases for AI.
I want to add my use case here because it mirrors yours, and should get a few laughs.
I’ve had the same experience writing a quick one use messy script with AI - but it contained a very subtle bug that pretty much wiped out the data I was trying to convert.
I did have a backup, but it wasn’t particularly recent, so I only lost a couple of days of work.
I lost my appetite for AI help on full quick scripts, but I still use AI for a line of code here and there.
I feel like I should use AI more to generate unit tests, the risk/reward is probably better.
Yeah so far all the “advantages” have been “cutting corners inaccurately.”
I’m generally an AI skeptic/hater, but finding new medicines, detecting cancer earlier on, IT security auditing, discovering new battery chemistries…for things that are predicated on pattern recognition, are audited by a human, and basically regurgitating a blended up version of previously established data is what you’re after, it’s really good at those things and I’d argue there is a real use case for generative AI in these places.
As a means of mental health therapy, customer support, computer programming tasks that aren’t reviewed, or basically any task that is NOT audited by subject matter experts, it fucking sucks and, unfortunately, it’s being broadly applied in these roles that it sucks at. Per usual, it’s because those things make money and the things that actually could help humanity don’t always.
The capitalists are driving AI adoption. They want to use it to make the unwashed masses lazy and stupid by being dependent on their product and make trained, skilled employment a thing of the past. That is the problem with generative AI.
Exactly. It’s best for problems that both:
- Have a vast possible space of potential solutions.
- Can be quickly checked for accuracy.
- Has more than one right answer.
You want to come up with a new chemical to do a thing? Have an AI run through billions of permutations to find the one compound that can do that thing best. Then test that compound. See if it’s more effective than current solutions. Maybe it missed a better compound somewhere in the universe of potential compounds. But if what it found is still better than the current solution, that’s still progress and has real value to the world.
For an example, think of an AI built to search for high temperature superconductors. There’s an endless variety of possible compounds that might lead to this. But the time to test any individual compound isn’t that large. At a basic level you just need to synthesize it, confirm it’s a superconductor, and measure its critical temperature. Simple stuff (apart from maybe the synthesis.) Testing one compound for superconductivity isn’t hard. Trying to screen through trillions of candidate high temperature superconductors is. So you let the AI churn through the vast universe of possible options. Have it spit out the top ten candidates. Then you go to the lab, synthesize them, and try them out. If it hallucinates and is wrong? Very little cost beyond some lab time. If it misses one? Oh well, maybe we’ll find it later. Say the current record for a superconductor is 151K. The AI predicts a compound with a transition temperature of 155K. Maybe it misses one that could do it at 157K. But oh well, a better high temperature superconductor is still a better high temperature superconductor!
This is where AI shines. When incremental progress is acceptable and when the solution is easily verifiable.
I suspect these useful applications will get a new name, when this is said and done. Statistical Compute Models. Something like that. “AI” is a marketer’s misdirection, not an actual description.
I propose we name them something silly-sounding, in the spirit of Walkie-Talkie.
I’ve been impressed by the benefit derived from Carbon AI. It’s is a deep learning model trained on massive data sets and can identify 150mil weeds near instantly. When paired with a laser delivery system and pulled over a field, the weeds are id’d and precision killed with the laser, which spares the crop. This has great potential for reducing the use of commercial herbicides, which also means we can get away from the “RoundUp Ready” gmo seeds engineered to survive devastating chemical bombardment.
Currently the delivery system is tractor pulled, but I’d be interested to see if it could be made into a compact, low impact form. It could be a tool for wildland restoration crews to use to cleanly eradicate invasives while another crew seeds natives in their wake. Obviously not something that could be used in every terrain, but there’s plenty where you could. Even a consumer grade model could be a boon, instead of people dousing their property with weed killers that drain into local water supplies and nearby rivers, drive your mower-sized laser blaster across your property and zap your weeds.
It’s one of the few applications of AI where I’ve felt like its ability to recognize, process, and respond quickly is worth the application it’s used for. But also, it’s not generative. It’s trained on data collected and input by humans, it just reduces the effort (and side effects) of mass agriculture. Doesn’t eliminate ag workers, it makes an already difficult job easier and cleaner.
See that sounds like a legitimate and actually net positive implementation of Neural Networks and Generative AI. Not replacing traditional algorithms for search result data on Billy Bob’s question of “Why do farts smell?”.
In most of your examples it’s revealed after the fact that AI didn’t discover anything it just defeated the test.
How does discovering a new battery chemistry or showing reproducible cancer detection “beating the test”? Look…I fucking hate most implementations of GenAI and generally can’t stand it, but those specific use cases seem very much valid, even if the other 97% of applications are absolute shit.
Well…fuck. Thanks for informing me.
I do get your sentiment, and can see it applicable in these cases… But I also think we should put a lot more focus on creating models specialised for these important tasks, instead of using these super large and heavy genAI models.
As it currently stands, the research seems to be largely focusing on just pushing the expensive limits of these models, and pushing the olligarch agendas, which is a bit unfortunate, since this field has potential to be super beneficial.
Agreed. My comment was more GenAI in general. Not utilizing a general purpose model shoehorned into a specific task.
All the GenAI art, video and even vibe coded websites can dramatically speed up prototyping and seeing how something might look or work.
Yes that costs jobs even if its only at the early stage and is done by humans after, but its real value and can overall speed up development on ideas.
Like I was building a new feature in my software, I knew the constraints, what I wanted it to do, and I asked it to start making some visual mockups of what might work. There’s no way I could manually generate that many ideas and then fine tune them before finally coding it myself for real faster. Like it or not, that is positive.
Yeah, fuck AI art, there’s no ethical use of wholesale theft these shitbags scraped and regurgitate without consent.
Ethics and useful are two different things. Im curious though, have you ever pirated a song? A TV show? A movie? A game? Bypassed ads on a website with an ad blocker? Bypassed a paywall? Shared account credentials on something like Netflix?
The cats out of the bag at this point though.
“I downloaded a file somebody shared with me” vs. “I downloaded every file on the Web in order to train my plagiarism machine, which I charge people to use”.
Lol thats how you want to frame yourself pirating stuff? The cope is strong with you. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Also i dont pay anyone to use stable diffusion or any of the countless models on hugging face. (Edit and i don’t charge anyone for whatever i toy around with either)
I think it’s good for pattern matching. However, I think LLMs are mostly useless because it lacks human context. It’s a chat bot at best.
There are a few, yeah. Whether it’s enough to balance the massive weight of all the externalities, I have no idea. Currently leaning no. Could be wrong about that, who knows.
Basically: we now have the tech to make sense of language and language semantics, and use language as a universal interface. You and I are fine clicking buttons in programs, sure, but you and I are also having this discussion on an obscure federated social media platform the general public has never heard about. Interacting usefully with a computer system through language alone becomes possible in a way that it wasn’t before. I’m not quite sure how valuable this is going to be in the long term, but then, I’m also a tech nerd who is used to clicking buttons and writing command lines.
We can now process large amounts of text fast for data extraction, which is a deceptively hard problem. You can do things like importing itemized PDF bills into an accounting database with no prior knowledge of how those bills are formatted. This extends beyond text. We can now generate a textual description of arbitrary images and videos. That too is a very hard problem. It can now be done on a regular desktop computer using a small local LLM.
It’s an even harder problem when the text is computer code and the data being looked for is the cause for a specific behavior. The process of debugging an obscure issue can now be massively accelerated.
Given a reliable corpus of knowledge, that corpus can be queried more or less instantly using natural language. That’s also something we could not do before.
LLMs suck at designing software but can produce code to spec faster than a human, which means they can be used to increase throughput where a skilled human does the design and is limited only by the speed of implementing it. Given the prevalence of software in the economy, the impact of that alone will be significant.
All of these come with major drawbacks and sometimes intractable problems. Language is squishy and ambiguous. LLMs don’t THINK, they extrude statistically probable continuation tokens. AI content sucks, be it writing, images, videos, because the probable tokens there are the median of the training corpus, and median is a cognate of mediocre for a reason. I hope AI slop goes away. But I don’t think it will. The ability to generate custom porn on demand alone will likely sustain a market.
And I didn’t think we can go back to the world of before. But personally, I wish we could. Because the externalities here are, and remain, enormous.
LLMs are really good at pattern recognition, making them an excellent tool for scientists and medical researchers.
They can’t infer shit. They don’t recognize numbers as actual numbers, just tokens. They can only repeat what they’ve seen before.
Combine that with the mathematical certainty of hallucinations and that makes a dangerous combination for scientists and medical researchers.
For me, AI is great at comparing large data sets. It can detect the most miniscule change in the night sky and is great for measuring luminosity changes over time.
Other than that, it’s kinda useless for me. Maybe I’ll play with it and change out actors in famous scenes for cats like those kungfu clips of late.
I’ve heard the underlying maths is good for doing statistical analysis of particle physics. It won’t “find” new physics, but it will point to models that are at least mathematically sound.
Of course, researchers will still have to test those models with real world experiments. Science is mostly establishing how the universe doesn’t work.
Schmidt has applied it to collaborate with the USSA imperialist mass-murdering regime.
https://www.projectcensored.org/ai-warlord-eric-schmidt-money-media-maim/It does not. “Generative” AI is anything but and does absolulty nothing but harm.
Google’s AI is horribly invasive and has accused so many innocent people of being child abusers that it is making it harder to find actual children who are being abused and bad actors. Their AI falsely calls childhood photos and legal adult content and even cartoons as child abuse. There is no oversight. AI has its uses, but should not be used to destroy people’s lives. This is just one of many examples of a poor use of the technology that can have read world impacts like destroying a person’s reputation even when no crime was committed. Google needs to be broken up! We need data privacy and data protection laws ASAP.
You can never have the good side of a technology without the bad. It’s like black magic and that’s why most technology should not exist.
They say as they post from a device connected to the one of the most complicated pieces of tech ever created, the internet.
Firefighters have to go into the burning building to get people out
Don’t you have a university to bomb or something?
