Mastodawn

Alpacalypse 🇵🇸Jun 19, 2024

The AI industry is a grift so big that it's really hard to explain it to people not familiar with the tech industry.

Yes, Google is perfectly aware their AI-powered search is way worse than their "classic" mode.

Yes, Apple knows their integration with chatGPT is flaky and ads nothing useful to their products. And

They.

Don't.

Care.

Because the goal is not making their products better, the goal is to ride the hype wave so the investors are happy and their stock price keeps growing.

That's almost entirely what's powering the AI industry.

It's a multibillon dollar grift. One so big and so obvious that most people think they have to be missing something, that they don't understand something that makes everything to make it makes sense as a business.

No. That's everything. It's pure snake oil selling.

Phil Johnston Jun 11, 2024

@javi totally. The question has shifted from “what can we build to help our customers, regardless of how” to “how can we build something with Ai”?

And often the answer is “nothing that useful or even profitable”.

David Colquhoun on Bluesky Jun 11, 2024

@javi Spot on!!

Skivling Jun 11, 2024

@javi This!
I believe that after a few years most traces of ai will be gone and only a few legitimate uses remain.

Ian Douglas Scott Jun 22, 2024

@Skivling @javi And most of those uses will just be things they were already using machine learning for, but without the word "AI" prominently advertised.

Frank Bennett 🇯🇵Jul 2, 2024

@Skivling @javi The GPUs and data centers will remain, scattered across the landscape like so many abandoned malls and derelict amusement parks.

Nazani Jun 12, 2024

@javi I thought crypto was a bubble & would be gone by now, yet here we are. 🤷‍♀️

Cassandrich Jun 12, 2024

@Nazani @javi This is crypto rebranded. They even get to reuse the same hardware (GPUs) and the main pusher (nvidia) gets to keep selling them.

Nazani Jun 12, 2024

@dalias @javi
My main concern is all the energy these use up- while so many struggle to afford AC.

System Adminihater Jun 19, 2024

@Nazani @dalias @javi If you cared about that you would probably have stopped them from getting tax abatements to build their shitty datacenters. Oh also they get discounted power too.

Nazani Jun 19, 2024

@systemadminihater @dalias @javi Yes, I'll just single-handedly revoke everything our Trump-loving governor has done, and override the governments of counties I don't live in. 🙄
https://www.vedp.org/industry/data-centers

Data Centers | Virginia Economic Development Partnership

Building on a rich history of federal investments in fiber optics as well as pioneering tax advantages, Virginia hosts the largest data center market in the world and is home to more than 35% (~150) of all known hyperscale data centers worldwide. America’s East Coast Tech Hub Brochure

VEDP

mark Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @Nazani @javi the really fun part here is that the nft mining gpus are basically useless in this bubble. Everyone needs the latest and greatest, and Nvidia keeps cranking new models out to feed the junkies.

You could buy a house for the price of these on release day.

Jørn Jun 15, 2024

@ATLeagle @dalias @Nazani @javi So we’re still growing the electronics graveyard. That is a fun part indeed.

@dalias @Nazani @javi the current AI wave was *caused* by a glut of coprocessing chips that were produced by Nvidia and purchased by al cloud hosting providers with the plan to sell blockchain/"bitcoin mining as a service" to corporate customers.

But that bubble popped and they were left with tremendously expensive servers, specifically useful only for parallel computation, that nobody wanted to use.

Cassandrich Jun 15, 2024

@tob @Nazani @javi Nobody wanted to use it because parallel computation is largely useless. All the interesting parts of computation have data dependent code paths. GPUs are the computational version of the mass production capitalist brainworms of "amortize cost by doing the exact same thing at a scale much larger than anyone needs" rather than optimizing efficiency at small or single unit.

Allan Chow Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @tob @Nazani @javi look I need to be able to run my python scripts at the command line multiple times at once

Allan Chow Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @tob @Nazani @javi death by run on sentences

Punctuation is the Weapon of Choice: Thoughts about Punctuation Attacks Against LLMs.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/punctuation-weapon-choice-thoughts-attacks-against-llms-robi-sen?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&utm_campaign=share_via

Punctuation is the Weapon of Choice: Thoughts about Punctuation Attacks Against LLMs.

Note: This is an early draft and poorly done. If you would like to add your criticism, feel free to let me know in the comments.

samiamsam Jun 15, 2024

@tob @dalias @Nazani @javi techbros are not smart

example 1,345,671

Octorine Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @Nazani @javi My personal conspiracy theory about all of this is that that's the whole point.

A lot of people bought Nvidia stock during the nft bubble and then had to create the ai bubble to keep the stock price up long enough for them to sell out. Only now the ai bubble looks like it has legs, so some of them decided to stay in.

Cassandrich Jun 15, 2024

@octorine @Nazani @javi Yep. We could really use some direct economic action against nvidia...

Cassandrich Jun 15, 2024

@octorine @Nazani @javi The fucking end of the world is going to be thanks to fucking AAA gaming asshats who couldn't be content with the perfectly good 3D we had with software rendering in 1999.

Peter Ashford Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @octorine @Nazani @javi those AAA gaming asshats can't buy Nvidia GPUs at the top end because they're all being purchased by other big players in the the tech industry. People who just want to play games aren't the reason Nvidia is suddenly one of the most valuable companies in the world

Cassandrich Jun 15, 2024

@kaffiene @octorine @Nazani @javi I mean they're what launched nvidia into existence 20-some years ago.

Peter Ashford Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @octorine @Nazani @javi Ah sorry, they're responsible for Nvidia in the first place. Yeah, that's true., but also nvidia is just an enabling technology for AI. You could just as easily blame IBM for creating the PC. What nvidia were setting out to do was not all *this*

Cassandrich Jun 15, 2024

@kaffiene @octorine @Nazani @javi Yeah, I meant it more as an unintended consequences shitpost.

zeruch Jun 20, 2024

@kaffiene @dalias @octorine @Nazani @javi blaming gamers for this debacle is like blaming people who use plastic straws for climate change. At some minute level, sure they are a contributing factor, but in no way are they moving the needle compared to the big players really pushing and expanding the problem.

Andrew Zonenberg Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @octorine @Nazani @javi I mean I'd love to see the bubble pop, if nothing else so I can get some heavy floating point compute on the cheap lol.

Idgaf about all of the fp16/fp8/fp4 AI nonsense. But I'll happily grab all the float32 flops and memory bandwidth I can get for waveform processing and scientific number crunching.

Octorine Jun 15, 2024

@azonenberg @dalias @Nazani @javi I just want to play video games. My 1080ti is getting a little long in the tooth, but replacing it is going to cost an arm and a leg.

Andrew Zonenberg Jun 15, 2024

@octorine @dalias @Nazani @javi Yep. I just wish they'd come out with something that has a lot of memory and is less power hungry than the ludicrous 4090 and less expensive than the datacenter cards.

Where can I get like a 4070 with 48GB of RAM? The tooling i work with eats VRAM for breakfast but typically gets bottlenecked on memory so after a point adding more shader cores doesn't help that much.

wrosecrans Jun 15, 2024

@octorine @dalias @Nazani @javi

"This time it's different!!!" is the core slogan/belief/delusion of every bubble. So of course the people involved have convinced themselves "sure, crypto was empty hype (I believed in at the time), but now the AI hype is completely real because that means I'm investing my money/resources/tulips wisely and I want to feel wise therefore it must be true!"

Peter Ashford Jun 15, 2024

@dalias @Nazani @javi it really isn't. The tech is completely different and nvidia didn't create either, they're just right place right time for what other people are doing.
I think what's going on is like the early www days where every business had to be on the Web but they had no idea why.

chx Jun 20, 2024

@dalias @Nazani @javi ChatGPT launched on Nov 30 just three weeks after the FTX collapse. It is obvious the usual hustlers took whatever was ready at OpenAI and rushed it to market, hence the odd version number of GPT 3.5.

INPC Jun 12, 2024

@javi to add on… maybe they’ve just run out of ideas?

SaaS is so omnipresent there’s nothing left to do.

All that’s left is actual physical things and they don’t know how to do those.

@[email protected]Jun 19, 2024

@mxtthxw @javi Kind of - it's definitely a kind of all-in bet, but they absolutely know how to do physical things, it's just that the profit margins are a lot smaller, and there's not a lot of capital accumulation left to do there.

@[email protected]Jun 19, 2024

@mxtthxw @javi It's the Tendency innit

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall)

Tendency of the rate of profit to fall - Wikipedia

@javi EXACTLY THAT...

#DigitalSnakepoil and #HypeBasedDebelopment / #BuzzwordDrivenDevelopment being demanded ny #shareholders that want to see The #LineGoesUp!

Daniel Jun 13, 2024

@javi It's that. But it's also a massive bet that if it will work out (definition pending) that you'd better be on the right side.

javi Jun 13, 2024

That's the thing. It can't work out. They are selling something that not only doesn't exist, but also something that there is no actual path to get to from the current technology

Daniel Jun 13, 2024

@javi They believe there is a non-zero chance to make it work.

It's repeating the pattern we have seen with autonomous driving and every car company jumping on it because they're scared what would happen to them if it did work out.

Thomas Favre-Bulle 🏳‍🌈Jun 19, 2024

@javi How do you know?

das_menschy Jun 13, 2024

@javi It's worse. Do you know where all the money for the AI hype is coming from? #CuiBono

It's coming from dictator regimes like SaudiArabia (that murdered Kashoggi and spies on journalists) who have too much money because of their fossil fuel exports. And guess what that AI will be used for? It will be used for surveillance and spying. To suppress democracy and freedom, to suppress people critical of fossil fuel capitalism.

Leendaal Jun 15, 2024

@das_menschy @javi surveilance, spying and propaganda. The only three essential skills that llms excel at. Because it does not really matter if a high error rate exists. It is the fascist dream machine.

AlinskyDidNothingWrong Jun 13, 2024

@javi remember how a couple a shitheels figured out the subprime mortgages were going to implode and made a fortune betting on that collapse? How do we do that with AI?

@WNC_Wobbly @javi the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

A lot of people predicted the subprime meltdown, but only a handful got the timing right. We don't hear about the 100,000 guys who lost their shirt shorting subprime lending. Only the lucky 5 who made millions.

Alper Çuğun-Gscheidel Jun 13, 2024

@javi It's the VCs realizing they leveraged themselves to the hilt on another sketchy technology and now need to show some returns on it willy-nilly because they can't afford to strike out like they did with crypto and AR/VR.

Garrett Wollman Jun 15, 2024

@alper @javi There's been a very-long-term decline in achievable investment returns as productivity and communications technology have improved, making it difficult to find information asymmetries that lead to above-market returns. This improves the business case for insider trading, fraud, vaporware, and hype cycles.

Naomi Jun 13, 2024

@javi And their biggest investors are more than likely those also invested in the multi TRILLION dollar fossil-fuel extraction/consumption industries, who are going to be /very/ happy to have people pissing away ever increasing amounts of energy on this crap, given the success society has had in moving towards greener transport and energy production/consumption, /anywhere else/.

"Since 2019, electronic integrated circuits and microassemblies have overtaken cars and crude oil for the number one position in terms of overall exports by value."

I WONDER WHY?

Kirtai 🏳️‍⚧️Jun 13, 2024

@javi
It also upsets me that when the AI (i.e. LLM) bubble bursts it's going to take down all the other, useful "AI" techniques with it.

arceuthobium Jun 19, 2024

@kirtai @javi to an extent it already has, many companies have defunded in-house machine learning projects to jump on the LLM bandwagon

Frances Larina Jun 13, 2024

All while adding to the power needs of datacenters that puts coin mining to shame (not that nvidia is complaining).

FreediverX Jun 19, 2024

@Frances_Larina @javi
Let's see how Nvidia is doing, say, 12-18 months from now.

Frances Larina Jun 19, 2024

@freediverx @javi

That's what people said as the blockchain / bitcoin madness was dwindling, too. Except we're nowhere near peak AI as far as sales go since AI computing centers are still being built. But even if the AI trend collapses the way blockchain did (and I hope it does), Nvidia can always go back to paying attention to graphics.

FreediverX Jun 19, 2024

@Frances_Larina @javi
And while generative AI has more practical utility than crypto, we’ll still have this to contend with:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/13/hey-look-over-there/#lets-you-and-he-fight

Pluralistic: Bullies want you to think they’re on your side (13 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Frances Larina Jun 20, 2024

@freediverx @javi

I really don't think company decision makers care if quality drops, even precipitously. All that maters is investor returns. Over the last 5 years or so, we've already seen drastic drops in the quality of so many goods and services. AI is merely an accelerator, but a very efficient one. And let's not forget the strangely ignored influence of hedge funds and private equity companies.

Tess Arnold Jun 14, 2024

@javi I don't know if principle is the right word, but it's the one that comes to mind, but there's a principle in the con game that says, "The bigger the lie, the more people are likely to believe it." This is because most people have a hard time believing any lie that big hasn't already been exposed.

ana frango analógico Jun 15, 2024

@javi I would say yes to the first half, but I don’t think it’s just a hype/grift. What these companies see with AI functionalities is a way to deepen economies of scope and further deepen the data they gather from their users, by implementing more sophisticated virtual assistants for example. Nothing these companies do isn’t directed towards getting more and more precise data from users.