This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Whoever thought that this machine that can predict next word in a sentence, next sentence in a conversation etc. should be used in place of all human intellectual work... should have his elderly care taken over by LLM.
What you have to understand is that the CEOs and upper management of these companies genuinely believe that human intelligence is just a predictive model. They are so divorced from humanity, from actual people, that they only trust each other, and even then, barely. Some psychologist posited that consciousness is in part predictive, then Curtis Yarvin latched onto that half-baked headline and wrote on it, and then these sick fucks all had the same ideas: That they each are always the smartest man in the room, that their genuinely shallow creativity is deeper than anyone else's, and that if the next guy who they consider almost as smart as themselves says it's because humans are just complex llm's then it must be true; that if they are barely smarter than this shittu technology, then all of humanity must be at or below it.
That's what is wild about it. At any given point in time, the model is wholly consumed only with the very next token. Maybe that token is a running narrative of 'reasoning' or directly in the output, either way, the AI does not have anything to model anything beyond the very next token. It doesn't have a destination in mind and is just finding the words to get there, it's building it up word by word. The overall 'meaning' is an emergent property of just picking the very next token and seeing what happens.
Honestly, it's shocking it works as well as it does. More shockingly, there are AI enthusiasts that argue that's how the human brain works, which I can't imagine someone going through life with every thought rooted in building it up word by word.
My masters degree in intelligent systems wept in the corner after seeing your explanation.
But I guess cars are just four wheels and a fancy basket people sit in.
Look, if you know a way to convert a PDF to text with less than 500GB of VRAM and 2000W of power used for twenty seconds, I'm all ears.
Runs on anything that runs Linux:
NAME
pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03)
SYNOPSIS
pdftotext [options] PDF-file [text-file]
DESCRIPTION
Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.
Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file. If text-file is not speci‐
fied, pdftotext converts file.pdf to file.txt. If text-file is ´-', the text is sent to stdout. If
PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.
Upvoted for the sheer mic drop moment. Well done.
In 1897, they built the first music synthesizer. It worked, but it took up the basement of an entire city-block sized building, so it was essentially useless. After a few decades of development, it could fit in a suitcase, and be carried around.
Data Centers are like that 1897 synthesizer. Sure, it works, but at what cost? It clearly isn't ready for prime time. Go back to the drawing board, tweak the problems, including regulations, and maybe in a couple of decades, we take another run at the new and improved version.
Data Centers are like that 1897 synthesizer. Sure, it works, but at what cost? It clearly isn’t ready for prime time. Go back to the drawing board, tweak the problems, including regulations, and maybe in a couple of decades, we take another run at the new and improved version.
The issue with AI is not a technical or development problem. It's not even a regulation problem. It's a capitalism problem. Infinite growth will still be as unscalable in a hundred years as it is now no matter how good and mature the tech is.
There are also hard mathematical limits stalling AI growth. Frontier models haven't improved in like a year despite being fed money by basically the entire global economy. Diminishing returns on steroids basically. They're already at the limit of what they can make, and going further gives a much smaller improvement in the model, and now I hear there might not be enough human written material on the internet to train them.
It also looks like hallucinations are inherent to LLMs and you can't get rid of them. It's a side effect of the model. What commercial applications are there then, if you can't guarantee the output? It's worse than a human for most things since it doesn't know truth from lie and will confidently say both as if they're fact. It also looks like prompt injection isn't something you can fully guard against either.
What's the value proposition when you can't trust the output and the model might give a massive refund or discount to a customer and the courts rule the AI speaks on behalf of your company?
I feel like calling „hallucinations“ a side effect isn’t really describing the issue properly. They’re not a side effect, nor are they hallucinations. It implied that there’s somehow something that distinguishes „correct“ output from „incorrect“. There isn’t, it’s all just output. The output resembling actual factual reality is statistical chance.
Diminishing returns on steroids? No, clearly we just need to pump EVEN MORE MONEY AND DATA into this
In 1897, they built the first music synthesizer. It worked, but it took up the basement of an entire city-block sized building, so it was essentially useless. After a few decades of development, it could fit in a suitcase, and be carried around.
As per the 1890s, it probably also had to be lubricated with orphaned child blood.
We are repeating an old pattern in computing: throw more hardware at the problem until efficiency becomes impossible to ignore. Bigger models have delivered remarkable gains, but they’re increasingly expensive. The next breakthroughs may come less from adding parameters and more from smarter architectures, better algorithms and more efficient inference.
DeepSeek has really led the way here, especially as they are a bit more hardware constrained. Plus they openly publish their findings and release open source models, so high hopes there.
It's probably China's play to pop the AI bubble, but I'm all for it (:
Except there likely won't be a lot of further breakthroughs if we burn down our planet faster than we already do.
This is all an expenditure of vast amounts of energy for literally no gain for anybody except a handful of billionaires and their corporations.
AI is the idea of putting a million monkeys in a room with a typewriter and waiting for Shakespeare.
The smart people already knew the monkeys would just starve to death. The business majors are just now figuring that out.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
The ten thousandth monkey typed out the word "the" , fund them everything they'll type out Shakespeare!
Dude, the math says it would be cheaper to fund research into necromancy to revive the actual Shakespeare than this.
It isn't about content generation at all. It's about pattern recognition and prediction, which, in the hands of those with the most power to change the world, offers insights into our collective behavior that rulers from every age would have committed genocide to get. AI will tell them how to better build the prison the poor are being impoverished into.
Well if you have a better way to generate Jurassic Park "but everyone's fat" videos I'd love to hear it.
Yeah no shit Sherlock. AI chat bots are just a way to market and sell a dystopian surveillance apparatus to the masses wrapped in the guise of it will right your bullshit corporate emails and messages for you all the while the government and the corporations are fucking you in the ass.
It was a barely functional technology that provides convenience and laziness well hiding it’s true purpose, Machine learning algorithms for facial recognition license prints tracking making it efficient and relatively economical to spy on and control an entire population.
He's sadly right.. My wife is Chinese, she watches AI Chinese dramas and she has told me that most of China watch AI dramas. And Gen Z watch AI, Everyone younger than 30 relies on AI.
Now before you downvote me, I'm 37 and I've worked in IT since I was 19.. AI gives me nothing I can't find for myself. The only time I've used AI was when chat GPT was fresh and new and I told it to be more sarcastic and snarky in it's answers and I argued with it for 2-3 mins before I got bored.
Humans are much better at arguing with me and being sarcastic to me.
I don't care for AI, Turn off all the air conditioners and AI burns out.
What are AI Chinese dramas? How much is AI? Just the script, or is the entire thing AI animated? Where do you see these programs?
There’s an entire genre of these weird “fruit Love Island” AI dramas that pop up on my TikTok. It’s terribly animated anthropomorphic fruit, and the plot is usually that the wife is cheating on the husband with the boss and gets pregnant.
It is no more different with the gold rushes to California, Oregon, and Alaska, where the real winners are the merchants selling pickaxes and work overalls.
If only the mainstream media would have said this since 2023. We maybe even have dodged the bullet called the Trump second term, but now we're heading towards a global financial collapse.
Efficiency deserves more attention than hype.