Jason GormanWe're 2.5 years into this gold rush, and I still haven't seen any gold. I've seen people selling picks & shovels. I've seen "gold experts" selling maps to the gold. I've seen CEOs announce they're going "gold-first". I've seen people selling land where they claim there's gold. But no actual gold.
Matteo Capucci@jasongorman uhm assuming this is about AI, what qualifies as gold for you? surely AI is hyped beyond disfigurement but my experience (esp outside academic circles) is that so many people use LLMs daily for their tasks... so there's gold everywhere by that standard.
@mc At massive losses and a huge environmental cost. Who is actually making money from them?
@mc Take Microsoft Copilot as an example. Almost everyone I know doesn't use it and doesn't want it.
@jasongorman well you could have made the same argument for search engines 20 years ago. massively energy-intense, unprofitable, used by (comparatively) few people. and take Bing as an example: nobody I know uses that.
I don't want to say everything AI is cool and unproblematic, but the nihilistic, Manichean rethoric is kinda tired by now. there's lots of good (many still potential---the tech is like 3 years old) uses of the new AI tools and the environmental concerns are weirdly specific (I've heard maybe 2 people in my entire life ever complaining about the environmental impact of social media or search engines... what's the sudden worry?)
James Widman@mc @jasongorman
> you could have made the same argument for search engines 20 years ago. massively energy-intense, unprofitable, used by (comparatively) few people.
what are you talking about.
We were all using google in 2005, because it was damn good, practically all the time.
There was no debate about whether google was good for anything, because people generally found what they were looking for.
@mc @jasongorman
> I don't want to say everything AI is cool and unproblematic, but the nihilistic
*nihilistic*.
What the fuck are you talking about.
if i criticize "a.i.", that doesn't imply that i think there's *nothing* worth believing in.