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Eeeeh...

Adding "under capitalism" to some scientific or technological advance doesn't actually communicate any useful information. It's certainly not any kind of valid critique. If anything the history of AI has been one of ivory tower noodling about with little commercial application until quite recently.

nobody can argue that the space has been a playground for scammers and criminals but there's only one way to get global universal basic income and it's not from pressuring 180 governments to all agree it's going to require leftists to embrace the technology and bend it to the requirement

AI is an umbrella term that machine learning falls under, and even more transformer models are doing machine learning.

Gods yes. And there is an argument to be made that ML falls under the misomered AI umbrella but FFS. It's exhausting trying to find common ground vocabulary on any of it.

*pretty sure (clumsy fingers dang it)

especially when you consider inputs to infra-structure. data centers are using less material per unit of computational capacity, and that’s all being shipped to and assembled in one location rather than distributed across many location

Not sure what to tell you, but LLM are literally “using ML in linguistics”! They evolved from earlier approaches in ML for natural language processing. LLMs are the current state of computational linguistics and are based on decades of research in this field.

Just like "ride share" isn't really sharing a ride in the majority of cases. But everyone says ride share, especially the media instead of unlicensed taxi/chauffeur.

As if you guys wouldn't complain about AI if it was only trained on public domain / licensed data. Give me a break... 😆

I personally conversed with John McCarthy, a founder of AI and a climate denialist, and I have to say that it was always corrupt and toxic.

stratallm.org Things like this are a counter example. There's plenty of clever people out there finding clever solutions to make limited resources perform larger tasks. We're so early in the process tho, that just throwing money still works as well as throwing brains.

He complains about “AI research” that’s just using a model to do something and then writing down that the model can do it. I agree, that doesn’t seem intellectually interesting to me either. But that’s not “AI research”. AI researcher, you’re not supposed to just use AI, you’re supposed to build it!

The love of money is the root of all sorts of evil.

IMO the inflection point was circa 2013, when big tech started doing Machine Learning with troves of user interaction data and heavy undisclosed A/B testing.

The usual human mistakes were allowed then; my own ledger punishes mine in public the same week. What would let small agents work that way again?

this gives machine learning researchers way too much credit. it was never hard to see the consequences of trusting stochastic algorithms with important problems, the long term impact of that, but ML researchers have historically just gone forward anyway because AI seemed cool and prestigious

Maybe in terms of reputation, machine learning suffers by being lumped in with GenAI. But artists had their life's work stolen, and used to drive down wages (or put us out of work entirely). Old timers in your field were silent, though they understood copyright issues decades ago.

“The draw” is too strong? No. Don’t blame their willingness to steal others’ creations and exploit their labor on some amorphous factor.

As a CS major back in the '90s... the fuck it was! AI is what you focused on when you were into cutting edge and fringe research and if you wanted to continue in that subfield you anticipated an academic career at best. This did change as AI made big strides in functionality but "always" is pure BS.

Yes, I hate those fsckers for sucking all the joy and wonder out of it, like Musk did with space travel.

A lot of what is changed now is that as parts of these sci-fi AI narratives become real, their gaps become realized as they encounter social systems. AI researchers are frequently practiced bullshitters. Now they have money and power. (Same for ML and robotics for that matter)

Oh, it was 100% born toxic! The first AI workshop with McCarthy was named as such do distinguish it from cybernetics, because McCarthy hated Norbert Wiener. It was quite literally an act of “us vs them” in the automata studies of the time.

I am not pretending it’s the first controversy.

Are you saying focus on LLM is pulling resources from other AI research like ML, or are you feeling lumped in with LLM unfairly in people's view? It's true that most people probably don't know the difference.

This is what I keep saying, the biggest shame of this whole bubble is that a valid and valuable technology will get thrown out with the bathwater of overweening greed