"Right now, the math for profitability doesn’t work, influence on productivity of GenAI has been minimal, and prospects for pure scaling aren’t looking great."
Yes, it is completely unproductive for all the claimed benefits. However, what makes it worse is that it is actually productive for filling the internet with mindless noise. The scale of content farms using bots is enormous. They said AI would empower the individual. Instead it is empowering those with vast resources to drown out your voice with mass produced hallucinations.
"Gary Marcus apologizes for repeating himself with minor variations. But minor variations seems to be all that is emerging, despite the enormous investments." made be laugh out loud.
I do wonder how you keep it up, though, as having to constantly correct a relentless stream of nonsense/hype is so much negative energy.
We just have to figure out how to harness negative energy in order to beat them. They, AI, are only able to harness the electric power grid. When/If that shuts down, or gets turned off, all AI will "be no more than dust before the wind."
Gary, those in the know -- know why it won't. As the data becomes biger and bigger, and bigger still, non ergodic pieces are added to pile. For statistical inference to be reliable, the data need to be ergodic, this is a given. Deep Learning, being based on staistical inference, is able to provide good correlation, Reliability, causality and undertanding is beyond its territoty.
I've been very happily retired for some time and don't live in the US. But I got a big laugh imagining what I'd report to those parasites as my "top 5 things" if I was a federal employee 2025. They'd throw me out for sure but I'd be laughing my backside off. 😃
A more honest naming convention would be "Baka-Tensai 1", "Baka-Tensai 2", ..., "Baka-Tensai N". Baka-Tensai means "Stupid-Genius". It's impossible to simply scale the "Stupid" part out.
The background use of AI is beginning to become surprising, to me, I have multiple projects now on to deliver things simply not possible for corporate clients as recently as 5 years back, with my first AI project a team delivered in 2019/2020, and is in use.
“Luddites said” nobody would watch TV, nobody would listen to FM radio, nobody would use a telephone, talking movies, home computers, cellphones, 1000 cable channels, VCR, records CD, and apparently nobody is using AI, it’s all pure hype and has no application anywhere for any thing at any time for now or the foreseeable future.
News folks, I used AI two years ago to rewrite and construct large-scale frameworks for process control with large ERP teams, coming online now, more complete and cheaper than I could have believed possible.
The reaper for IT jobs has begun. They will be the gigantic gigantic casualties, since marketing has already been decimated.
Is everyone not aware?
AGI is nonsensical, since we can’t even define it, but we have amply defined neural-network based LLM’s supporting GPT models.
> The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper
Yeah that one didn’t age well.
I agree with you. I’m a software engineer and over my 25-year career this is by far the biggest transformation in the field. It’s not so much how much time it saves but how it opens up possibilities. I had never done any GUI work but last Sunday I managed to write an application that was useful to me within a day. Without LLMs I wouldn’t have completed it due to the number of issues I had to solve. Now I just ask one LLM to solve my issues and if it fails I ask another one.
I read somewhere that even just a few years ago there were Getman business leaders and politicians who did not believe the Internet was important.
When I read Gary Marcus and the comments from most of his readers I have the feeling they’re missing the forest for the trees — yes LLMs make mistakes but regardless they’re very useful.
Thank you for your comment. I feel a bit more sane.
Wen, I calculated that the speed gain I has with AI coding is 1000:1
Never having used Python (but a lot of experience coding) I wrote a video editors in 2 days. I don’t use Adobe anymore.
I wrote a series of work tools for myself when a client asked a very hard question and I built a prototype in 4 hours. My team wanted to sell it for $2M
I have an illustration library manager which took me an hour, better than anything on the market hands down.
It’s crazy.
People keep imagining the tool must be autonomous, and they utterly miss the point.
That wine glass is priceless. Did it mention if the glass was half empty or half full? I'd love to see what it produces with the phrase, "my cup runneth over." Can you run that one for me, Gary?
I often find myself wondering what the AI cheerleaders online think will happen if AGI is ever achieved. Unless your net worth is at least in the high nine figures, you have exactly zero reasons to be excited about it.
Obviously they plan to worship this mythical AGI as a god and surrender all their privacy, freedom and individuality to its will, since it will presumably either save the world or end it.
That’s nice. We’ll see how excited they are when they’re with the rest of us plebians in the bread line hoping that almighty AI deems us worthy of sustainence.
Many of them would literally prefer that to their current lives, because then they could be part of the epic story of #AIresistance. They're John Connor wannabes.
Honestly I think they genuinely think they'll get a super nice UBI check and never have to work again. People who believe that are what we in the biz call "not very smart"
Kinda ominous in a depressingly humorous way that WALL-E, as opposed to I Robot or Terminator, is the most accurate prediction of our future with technology thus far. That is, instead of being controlled by superintelligent robots and software, its more likely we'll have intelligent, but still very dumb robots running around doing near everything for us, while we increasingly become reduced to helpless cattle that rely on these bots to run our lives. Also, the Earth is screwed and getting wrecked too, that one always gets overlooked, but it's an equally ominous future for the world with its own significant consequences.
Pro tip: You can tell a cow's religion by the language it speaks. That's how the rabbis tell.
If they hear Latin it's Roman Catholic, Presbyterians speak Gaelic, evangelicals speak in tongues... you get the idea. Only Hebrew-speaking cows can be slaughtered and prepared Kosher.
Anyone else see the WSJ article this week on one of the big banks, I believe JP Morgan, and genAI? The exec kept insisting on the value while quietly admitting that there were no measurable gains, in spite of an enormous user base….
It’s called The Rise of Artificial Intelligence at JPMorgan, from the Feb 24 WSJ. I can’t share a link as I read it via an aggregator. When asked about tangible productivity gains, she said it was “early innings” and went on to hypothesize about future gains without evidence. She also declined to provide specific areas with good returns on AI and said all businesses 🤣😱
"Right now, the math for profitability doesn’t work, influence on productivity of GenAI has been minimal, and prospects for pure scaling aren’t looking great."
Yes, it is completely unproductive for all the claimed benefits. However, what makes it worse is that it is actually productive for filling the internet with mindless noise. The scale of content farms using bots is enormous. They said AI would empower the individual. Instead it is empowering those with vast resources to drown out your voice with mass produced hallucinations.
Something I posted about recently here FYI - https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
"Gary Marcus apologizes for repeating himself with minor variations. But minor variations seems to be all that is emerging, despite the enormous investments." made be laugh out loud.
I do wonder how you keep it up, though, as having to constantly correct a relentless stream of nonsense/hype is so much negative energy.
We just have to figure out how to harness negative energy in order to beat them. They, AI, are only able to harness the electric power grid. When/If that shuts down, or gets turned off, all AI will "be no more than dust before the wind."
Gary, those in the know -- know why it won't. As the data becomes biger and bigger, and bigger still, non ergodic pieces are added to pile. For statistical inference to be reliable, the data need to be ergodic, this is a given. Deep Learning, being based on staistical inference, is able to provide good correlation, Reliability, causality and undertanding is beyond its territoty.
In my darker moments I wonder if generative AI's lack of economic rationale matters.
Are these digital Potemkin facades being created to turn a profit, or to impose political and social regimes?
There's every likelihood that we're going to hear excuses for chaotic failures that sound like this: "It's the best policy. AI says so."
I have no idea if this will happen, but the odds worry me about my grandkids' future.
And the responses to the "top 5 things I did last week, sir" email are to be pushed into some AI tool to analyze who's doing worthwhile work.
This is fine.
I've been very happily retired for some time and don't live in the US. But I got a big laugh imagining what I'd report to those parasites as my "top 5 things" if I was a federal employee 2025. They'd throw me out for sure but I'd be laughing my backside off. 😃
I'd be worrying about a lot sooner. One doesn't need AI to be more than it already is to wreak havoc on the world, especially in the ways you mention.
Musk must have consulted Grok, as to whether he should have done a Nazi salute and it's impact on Tesla sales. Obviously it must have hallucinated. 😀
I like you, Gary, you’re like the “grumpy old” man on the porch of the AI neighborhood- just calling it as it unfolds.
🤣 I wanna be in a Spike Lee movie, playing myself.
A more honest naming convention would be "Baka-Tensai 1", "Baka-Tensai 2", ..., "Baka-Tensai N". Baka-Tensai means "Stupid-Genius". It's impossible to simply scale the "Stupid" part out.
Or maybe Half Baka-Tensai
I constantly have the feeling nobody here is aware of the spectacularly bad “predictions” from Clifford Stoll about “the internet”
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306
As they repeat the same naive statement.
The background use of AI is beginning to become surprising, to me, I have multiple projects now on to deliver things simply not possible for corporate clients as recently as 5 years back, with my first AI project a team delivered in 2019/2020, and is in use.
“Luddites said” nobody would watch TV, nobody would listen to FM radio, nobody would use a telephone, talking movies, home computers, cellphones, 1000 cable channels, VCR, records CD, and apparently nobody is using AI, it’s all pure hype and has no application anywhere for any thing at any time for now or the foreseeable future.
News folks, I used AI two years ago to rewrite and construct large-scale frameworks for process control with large ERP teams, coming online now, more complete and cheaper than I could have believed possible.
The reaper for IT jobs has begun. They will be the gigantic gigantic casualties, since marketing has already been decimated.
Is everyone not aware?
AGI is nonsensical, since we can’t even define it, but we have amply defined neural-network based LLM’s supporting GPT models.
> The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper
Yeah that one didn’t age well.
I agree with you. I’m a software engineer and over my 25-year career this is by far the biggest transformation in the field. It’s not so much how much time it saves but how it opens up possibilities. I had never done any GUI work but last Sunday I managed to write an application that was useful to me within a day. Without LLMs I wouldn’t have completed it due to the number of issues I had to solve. Now I just ask one LLM to solve my issues and if it fails I ask another one.
I read somewhere that even just a few years ago there were Getman business leaders and politicians who did not believe the Internet was important.
When I read Gary Marcus and the comments from most of his readers I have the feeling they’re missing the forest for the trees — yes LLMs make mistakes but regardless they’re very useful.
Thank you for your comment. I feel a bit more sane.
100%%%%%
Wen, I calculated that the speed gain I has with AI coding is 1000:1
Never having used Python (but a lot of experience coding) I wrote a video editors in 2 days. I don’t use Adobe anymore.
I wrote a series of work tools for myself when a client asked a very hard question and I built a prototype in 4 hours. My team wanted to sell it for $2M
I have an illustration library manager which took me an hour, better than anything on the market hands down.
It’s crazy.
People keep imagining the tool must be autonomous, and they utterly miss the point.
That wine glass is priceless. Did it mention if the glass was half empty or half full? I'd love to see what it produces with the phrase, "my cup runneth over." Can you run that one for me, Gary?
I believe “My cup runneth LLMty” would be the applicable phrase in this case.
I often find myself wondering what the AI cheerleaders online think will happen if AGI is ever achieved. Unless your net worth is at least in the high nine figures, you have exactly zero reasons to be excited about it.
Obviously they plan to worship this mythical AGI as a god and surrender all their privacy, freedom and individuality to its will, since it will presumably either save the world or end it.
/s
The cheerleaders just want to live in exciting times during which the world changes dramatically.
That’s nice. We’ll see how excited they are when they’re with the rest of us plebians in the bread line hoping that almighty AI deems us worthy of sustainence.
Many of them would literally prefer that to their current lives, because then they could be part of the epic story of #AIresistance. They're John Connor wannabes.
Happily, true AGI is at minimum decades away.
Honestly I think they genuinely think they'll get a super nice UBI check and never have to work again. People who believe that are what we in the biz call "not very smart"
Kinda ominous in a depressingly humorous way that WALL-E, as opposed to I Robot or Terminator, is the most accurate prediction of our future with technology thus far. That is, instead of being controlled by superintelligent robots and software, its more likely we'll have intelligent, but still very dumb robots running around doing near everything for us, while we increasingly become reduced to helpless cattle that rely on these bots to run our lives. Also, the Earth is screwed and getting wrecked too, that one always gets overlooked, but it's an equally ominous future for the world with its own significant consequences.
Surely, the bots will save us from ourselves.
And from Shirley.
Pro tip: You can tell a cow's religion by the language it speaks. That's how the rabbis tell.
If they hear Latin it's Roman Catholic, Presbyterians speak Gaelic, evangelicals speak in tongues... you get the idea. Only Hebrew-speaking cows can be slaughtered and prepared Kosher.
Doesn't everyone know that?
I thought all cows were moo-slim.
Bravo.
But are they halal or haram? I forget.
It's going to implode when the models are trained on internet content that is based on the output from the previous generation of models.
That generation will deserve the name ouroboros.
Anyone else see the WSJ article this week on one of the big banks, I believe JP Morgan, and genAI? The exec kept insisting on the value while quietly admitting that there were no measurable gains, in spite of an enormous user base….
If you can dig this one out, it would be really appreciated. It might help with the hype over here.
It’s called The Rise of Artificial Intelligence at JPMorgan, from the Feb 24 WSJ. I can’t share a link as I read it via an aggregator. When asked about tangible productivity gains, she said it was “early innings” and went on to hypothesize about future gains without evidence. She also declined to provide specific areas with good returns on AI and said all businesses 🤣😱
A librarian at my employer found the article for me. Thanks for the title.
That tripe bit is priceless.
The new Claude does seem good, for what it is.
Get of the nazi cesspool that is x. Its destroying your credibility.
That wine glass would overflow until it was empty.
You’d have to drink fast.