The best explanation I've found about the state of AI hype and hysteria
The best explanation I've found about the state of AI hype and hysteria
Fedigest
Fedigest
The best explanation I've found about the state of AI hype and hysteria
Thank you for the cute polar bear achievement badge, attractive computer science video essayist.
Exactly. We currently have no reason to assume that the RSI graph is exponential rather than logarithmic, and if I were forced to place a bet today, I’d go with the later. Maybe it could go exponential at some point, but my bet would be that that isn’t on the near horizon.
Right, there's this assumption that LLM improvements will just keep scaling indefinitely. It's far more likely that that the architecture has limits which we seem to be approaching, and then you just get diminishing returns, so the graph looks more like a sigmoid where we saw a ton of rapid progress, and it starting to flatten out as the easy gains get plucked.
I know I'm not the only one who has been scratching their head at all the doomsday cries around AI that have suddenly rose up. Especially as it seems as if all those calls are coming from inside the house.
Play on fear hard enough and you have people not worrying about the actual limitations of LLMs. My worry is that they shift the goalposts hard enough that instead of them asking for a bailout, the narrative becomes them being nationalized for our safety with guys like Elon sitting at the head of a new governmental department or something. Government buys all this dead weight of an industry and the tech fascists get a permanent seat at the table.
They want you to think AI is going to destroy the world so that you forget that the rich are already destroying the world right now
Which is likely: Climate models and observations match with a current 3 ° C warming path, and 3°C warming would destroy our human civilization, and lot of other living beings. What climate models can't predict is economic developments and political processes.
It is the "accusation in a mirror" pattern.
Are you incapable of nuance?
ye
What nuance?
Like,... But trickle down economics?
https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/48304886/22312070
I liked this take: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/
An excerpt:
The argument is, these companies cant be profitable as long as there is competition (from open or chinese models), so the US companies want those to be banned and be allowed to collude with each other to ramp up the money extraction without fear of consumers moving to other services.
I'm fond of the conspiracy theory that each of the AI companies has realized that revenues are not growing anywhere near fast enough to justify their spend rate, but none of them is willing to be the first to slow down and risk losing market mind-share. Government decree lets them stop their unsustainable growth without having to tell investors that their whole business model was unsustainable.
Manufacturing consent for a bailout. I'm with you on this one.
Basically what they want is regulations that they can write so nobody else can spin up an AI company, or run an independent AI model on their home lab for example. And yes, you can download an llm and run it on a beefy enough computer, independent from any LLM company.
Basically they want laws that develop a Monopoly so we have to rent out AI agents rather than make our own, and have that written down in law.
They also do not want say, smaller companies developing their own AI systems and instead be forced to rent from them.
Are there dangers in AI? Yes very so. Misaligned AI have done things in a lab setting that is concerning, but these regulations are calling for aren't there to deal with that, it's to create a monopoly because they realise that everyone from hobbyists to governments can run their own AI system if they can afford to.
Idk probably the rich want to divide us over another issue so we don't eat them.
There is a very interesting upper echelon video with an explanation for the sudden doomsday narrative we are currently being fed.
Right now in my Lemmy feed there is a post with a screencap from a FOX News segment where the their screen says:
Fear = Control = Power.
Fox would know all about that.
It's a privacy nightmare, but no no, these killer robots could kill us all with their killing!! Restrict their use to just us, so that the privacy issues are... all ours baby YEAH!!!
They want to regulate away their biggest fear: open weights LLMs.
And, as a bonus, draw attention away from how harmfully Big Tech has packaged LLMs for the public. That’s the dangerous part.
That’s all the Terminator meme is. I’m not surprised influencers are being payed, given all the previous astroturfing in this space.
Yup. The problem isn't the large language models, it's the business models
i find it convenient that at the same time that AI cluster supposedly broke out of their “secure” sand box and “hacked” huggingface, “on their own”, as the AI ceo’s all individually wrote a paper about how there should be legislation constricting ai development in very specific yet seemingly the exact same ways, then they all had a meeting to agree on how to lobby the government, at the same time i am getting paid anti ai advertisements and news articles.
I'm sure all of these restrictions conveniently prevent other companies from developing the same level of AI that OpenAI and Anthropic have because it's so "dangerous." Thereby granting them a duopoly. I fully expect that Chinese AI companies are going to be restricted as well for "security reasons."
Exactly. They have no 'moat' in vulture-capital-speak. So they're now trying to buy one via ~~lobbying~~bribes, legislation to cement their leading position. This is also why they've bought up all the RAM and SSD storage for the rest of this decade, to make the next gen of PCs and GPUs unaffordable for everyone else. This is phase two of forcing everyone into the cloud; a war against home computing.
Read a short article about a study by Microsoft claiming most people around the world think AI is good enough and restrictions are needed. All of these tech giants are full of it.
Sounds about right
Inb4 "We would have been profitable, but the regulations mean we have to be safe. Sorry investors. The government will bail us out now though because we're so powerful and dangerous."
They're all pretending blowfish blowing each other as one big blowfish Ouroboros.
AI-pushers: "The Apocalypse is nigh!" mom, tired: "we have The Apocalypse at home..." The Apocalypse at home: CAPITALISM
Lol, you anti-capitalism people are hilarious.
Is capitalism in the room with us right now? Does it want to drink our bones?
Yes, late stage capitalism in the US and many countries is a problem, but no... It's not the source of all the problems in the world.
I told this sort of thing under the same category as religion at this point.
haha you are hilarious, is this brain of yours in the room with us right now?
yes late stage brain tumors in sh.itjust.works users and on many other instances is a problem, but no... it's not the source of all the problems on fedi.
i told this sort of thing under the same category as bigotry at this point.
Notice how the big AI companies are now in on the 'scary AI' bandwagon, just because they see the impending AI bubble cracking, and they need a scapegoat in the form of government regulation to blame, when it eventually cracks.
can someone tell me who this influencer is? I already know enough about Sabine Hossenfelder to have an opinions about her.
She's got a PHD in computer science, she gives a good explanation of exactly how the recent advancements in self improving AI work and under what conditions.
She's not a racist (as far as I've seen), like Hossenfelder.
I've seen enough of Hossenfelder to take what she says with a grain of salt, but can you explain how she's racist? I haven't heard that before.
She's defended "race realists" when that Cambridge professor was fired not too long ago
Yikes...
Here you go: https://youtu.be/BdB79BUcLV0
There's 5 more videos on the bullshit that Sabine spouts in his playlist
It is a big red flag though that you're not linking to her actual videos, but a summary that doesn't include a link to her videos. Where's the actual racist video? So easy to take these things out of context.
Professor Dave is pretty good at including ample material to demonstrate why people are full of shit. There’s no reason to give that sociopathic shitstain any more views.
Never heard of her, but all of her videos are anti-AI. I'm not sure how sincere she is without watching a lot of them (which I won't do) but her early videos have AI-generated thumbnails.
an anti-ai channel with ai-thumbnails? lol, not even clicking that
I've watched some of her stuff and she isn't anti-AI or even anti-LLM, she is purely against the industry.
She's no Ed Zitron, but computer science is her field and I've found nothing egregious in the videos of her's I've watched. She seems to be against AI for the proper reasons.
Regardless, if you were to look at my last two submissions to the sub I'd want the takeaway to be that there's money being put into hands to shout about AI doomsday from the mountaintops. But not for the correct reasons.
She started the AI channel relatively recently, her main channel House of El is more focused on macro economics. Usually watch a video from her main channel every few days, from what ive seen she knows her stuff and tries to present things in an unbiased manner.
As other comments have said, I think she's anti-AI industry, which is great. That being said, she has said many times she's optimistic about AI as a technology. So, I find myself on the fence about her views. These days, I try not to be too critical of even partial allies. Still, I disagree that LLMs are a technology to feel overly positive about.
Sabine is an idiot fraud
Thank you, that's the first thing that came to mind. She's a horrible person both to listen to as well as in terms of not being an empathetic human being.
She's no prize to look at either.
Honestly - that's low, dude. Don't diss people's looks. Weak.
I have this theory that when you are public facing, it behooves you to put your best foot forward.
For example, if you are going to talk to people in a grocery store trying to sell your pasta sauces, make sure your breath doesn't smell like a seagull died behind your uvula. (I'm looking at you, Stefano Faita)
Pull your dick off your ear next time you're speaking
What an interesting idiom! Thanks for believing me when I say my dick is three feet long.
You have no idea how much I suffer.
the most important part of her ugly inside is her face true
I don't even know what about her is supposed to be ugly on the inside. She bores me.
Yeah, this is paid for by the AI companies to put roadblocks up for any competition.
Offered money by whom exactly?
1:43
So "an AI advocacy group" and "specifically for this kind of topic".
The person in the image above reported and repeated the claims about AI's potential to wipe out humanity without irony or sceptism on a recent video. I used to watch her but found her tangled neverending analogies tiresome... Always something like "XYZ is spending money like an ABC, with an QRS sized hole In the money bucket while DEF does ZZZ to scoop up the dropped pennies... we all know what that is like, don't we?".
I used to follow hossenfelder's channel on youtube after hearing her on an episode of the Mindscape podcast. It seemed like a good place to get a skeptical point of view on some issues. Over time it became apparent to me that it waa pretty much just skepticism for the sake of skepticism. I don't know of any actual controversy she is involved in, though some of the other comments here seem to imply there is some, but I definitely didn't get good vibes.
She started on a sincere goal of knowledge translation, but then she got obsessed with the YouTube algorithm and many of her videos are hot takes she's not qualified on.
Same here, watched a few of her videos. Was good in the beginning, and I liked her critical stance. But I think she got worse and worse over time, now it's painful to watch her.
Video too long. Is there an AI summary?
If AI is so dangerous it needs to be immediately banned. The only allowed usage (If any) is research and it is heavily restricted, with heavy oversight from multiple governments. Otherwise its just bullshit
That's what they want. To cement their market position and continue under government regulation while putting up a regulatory barrier to entry to competition. Their entire business model is predicated on building trillions of dollars worth of compute capacity to provide AI as a service, while the market trajectory appears as though all of the AI demand could be fulfilled with small models running on local hardware.
This is why they are simultaneously destroying the consumer hardware market by hoarding the component supply. If we can afford new devices with local NPU capabilities we won't need to pay for their services.
This is true but it’s much deeper than that. With the component market captive, it’s about offering all services via the cloud. Every app, every piece of media, every opinion, every trade secret, every financial report: controlled, monitored, removed at-will, but never forgotten.
The most all-encompassing pantopticon ever conceived.
They named the fucking company Palantir for fucks sake!
The video isn't about how this is all BS, conclusion from section 1:
The caveat in the second section is:
That's still scary, yeah it probably won't lead to human extinction, but it has serious implications for both economic and social life moving forward
You don't need judgment to be dangerous. People on lemmy like to mindlessly parrot, "AI isn't intelligent!!!!", ignoring that they are not using the word "intelligent" in the same way the AI researchers do. Lemmy users use "intelligence" to refer to human intent and will. The AI field uses "intelligence" to refer to the ability of a system to execute complex tasks towards some goal. An ant colony has no conscious will of its own. An ant queen is just one cell in a body, she's not a mind consciously controlling the colony. Yet an ant colony as a whole is intelligent, it's capable of performing complex tasks. Same thing with AI. It has no will, ego, or sense of self, but it still has intelligence in this sense.
And that's the real risk. When people refer to superhuman intelligence, they mean a system capable of vastly overperforming humans in many tasks. There doesn't actually have to be a consciousness there to produce that intelligence. Some fool could tell a superintelligent AI, "make me the richest person in the world." And then it grants the wish monkeys-paw style. It decides the easiest way to make them the richest person on Earth is to engineer some bioweapon that is lethal to everyone except the one person who asked to be the wealthiest man on Earth. Everyone else dies; they now own the world.
The real danger isn't conscious AI. At least something like that we could potentially reason with. The danger is a hyper-capable AI that completely lacks discernment or judgment. It's capable of doing incredible things, but it has no care for the consequences of its actions.
"the medical field uses 'retarded' to refer to a person with mental ..."
The dumb nerds need to use better words.
The fact that GenAI is styming entry-level is not good. People will be slow to enter their career, which’ll push back economic growth. Basically, we’re f-ing ourselves ten ways to Sunday.
It's worse. With new wannabe programmers using AI and not learning much about programming, then moving into work where they use AI and don't do much manual programming
When something goes wrong where will they find experts to fix it?
It might be good for open source, the people who like programming and don't use AI to do all their work might end up working for open source companies
Evolution doesn’t use judgment yet it’s made many being that have judgment
Anyone remember Max Clifford? He was (is?) a publicist and his modus operandi was to generate infamy. He was hired by Rockstar Games to get "Cop Killer Game" headlines about GTA on the front pages, for example. There's no such thing as bad press, after all. This whole "Killer AI" routing smacks a lot of that.
I think all the anxiety around AI would significantly diminish if we had trust worthy leaders in tech overseeing it all.
Like, I'd have trusted the google of the early 00s.
Data centers are coal/methane pigs. AI will (help) kill us. Just not in the way that's being suggested.
I've been standing on a soap box on a street corner for fifteen years holding a sign saying "The End Is Nigh" and nobody paid me nuttin'!". /s
Lol!! This is literally her AI channel. So, someone was dumb enough to offer her AI bot money, to say that AI is bad?
It's more that they want to say "AI Dangerous". It's step 2 in the oligopoly playbook:
I am less afraid of artificial super intelligence getting out of control than artificial super intelligence being controlled. I dont know what an intelligence superior to us would do to us but I sure as hell now what humans would do to other humans if they have absolute control enabled by artificial super intelligence.
The important thing to keep in mind is that we are not currently at risk of anyone inventing a super intelligence. The word guessing engines are getting amazingly good at guessing words, but the huge jump from that to actual intelligence, super or otherwise, remains out of reach with currently known technology.
I agree that if we did manage to invent that, the biggest threat would be the humans doing short-sighted, greedy and generally stupid shit with it. No coincidence that that's also the biggest threat from current LLMs.
Edit: "Super-hammers could break containment and kill us all if we don't invest more in controlling them!" shouts man wildly swinging around a hammer in a crowded room. "The government needs to regulate this technology so that only people like me, who use it responsibly, can have access to it," he added. He tried to say more, but was out of breath after some particularly enthusiastic hammer swings.
Best responses so far in this thread. People need to stop calling these 'whatever'-intelligence engines. They're NOT INTELLIGENT. They are probabilistic text-synthesizers. Stochastic Parrots. Or one of many other terms people have begun using, any of which are much more accurate and do not incorrectly assign 'intelligence', agency or motivations to what is still only an algorithm. One with 'temperature' (randomness) parameters thrown in, to jiggle the retrieved phrasing of sentences somewhat, and so on.
The reason these things always 'hallucinate' (some are advocating we drop that term as well, and simply say the algorithms yield incorrect results) can NOT be fixed, as it's a side-effect of the fundamental way they synthesize their answers.
You're simply not using "intelligence" in the same way the literature does.
more pro llm propaganda
Interesting point @13:12 of the video though; agents showed good performance improvements in limited scopes, but human researchers still showed much better improvement, over a factor of 2, '...showing better returns for increasing time budgets'.
There may be evidence of some 'recursive self-improvement' in research models rigged to modify and re-evaluate themselves, but it's still only in very tight, limited knowledge areas. This isn't SkyNet.
the problem with blackbox technology is their is no oversight or vetting methods. its literally the creators words being like 'hey did a thing' kind of like a 2 year old tanking at moms leg while shes busy...