alt Hacker NewsRelatable. AI is something I only bring up to the most trusted of trusted friends. Politics is more approachable these days.
I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions. The "AI overview" you see on search results, or that summarizes your iPhone notifications, is ... not as advanced as frontier models, and I think it negatively affects people's view of the technology.
I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
I agree with authors that write about alignment issues ("please take this test", "ok i'll hack the bazel remote cache, turn it into a message board, and coordinate with other agents to steal the answers from Hugging Face"; this really is the Paperclip Maximizer with today's technology) and I do think we should be addressing that. But this never seems to be the objection, it's always stuff from 2022 like "it hallucinates". I don't get it, but I'm probably in too deep to see what it looks like from the outside.
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>I don't find it logical that people are mad we helped invent the turbo whip 9000. Don't they know whips have always existed??
You're so right
I think you might be slightly "too deep" in the sense that you mostly encounter AI when someone has deliberately chosen an expensive, capable model to solve a real problem
This is a very relatable comment. I think it's demoralizing to see common objections to AI, it feels to me like we failed and haven't done our communication job. I'm always temped to go, "Yes, but there's worse!"
> But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions....
> I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.
Yes, data centers "existed forever," but compared to a hyper-scalar AI datacenter; they were small, used far less electricity, and their generators were used for backup, not primary power.
Yes, there were computer programs that could "mess up your life," but they were narrow in function so not such an existential threat. I'm sure you understand the difference between a phone tree and Claude Mythos.
And maybe develop a little empathy? You said "people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many." Why is that? Do you think part of that might be that people have gotten the chair kicked out from under them. And along comes AI, which has been promised to be a bigger chair-kicker than anyone's ever seen?
> I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
Oh, but why would people be so "illogical" to be mad at such a thing as AI? It's so hard to understand, right? [Insert Upton Sinclair quote here]