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Sure, but that's a separate claim, and I guess to my mind I dunno if we'll know how it shakes out for a few years, since everyone's still figure it out.

It does seem like a problem that these tools depend on humans to create new information that they can regurgitate and that they’re creating the economic conditions that will make those people even rarer than they already are

Yeah, I see that as a problem if the models don't develop, and I think in particular the effects on journalism are very concerning.

The models can develop all they want to but *they can’t go out into the world and collect new information*.

If scraping is going to be allowed without regards to IP laws then we will just increasingly see locked down data made available only to subscribers and licensees. Everything will become silo’d in the future.

In biotech this drives me mad. You need RAs. You need bench scientists. You need data.

Ag sci tech: nobody has built a robot that'll go collect soil samples for nearly as cheap as my hourly rate. And I'll adjust sampling locations on the fly based on years of training and experience, for no additional cost, because that's how human brains work!

Ah, sweet sweet memories of testing our first crop literally on the field, plant by plant with an eppendorf tube and a BB because we couldn't afford a gene that would screen properly, so we had to use little strips like a pregnancy test and guess how many gene copies were had.

My father asked me why AI couldn’t just take over monitoring the weather and I was going “Okay. Let’s start with how exactly AI is going to place the weather stations…”

But that also goes back to “people do not understand how much actual manual labor goes into many things we take for granted.”

It is a common working solution in tech to use "mechanical turk" as a strategy in the handwave-y sense that you'll eventually automate it. See: all these stories of LLMs actually using cheap labor in <country> to manually process data. Also see: the Amazon service literally called Mechanical Turk.

The people who use LLMs for travel planning are already running into this in that those LLMs can only exploit info a human has ready put into an accessible online system, and travel information is inherently constantly volatile and shifting

And currently LLMs seem to be depending on travel bloggers and online reviews but as they’re already killing travel bloggers businesses and I suspect that online reviews are declining rapidly…

anyway hi @travelfish.bsky.social

AI slop training on AI slop ad infinitum

Especially for travel to places that are generally fine but can get scary fast. I do a lot of work in Kingston, Jamaica which is a great city and so much fun, but whoa buddy I would not take advice from an LLM about where to go.

The self-pwning delusion of people like Musk and Kalnick is that somewhere in that mountain of data is a connection someone has missed, but LLMs can, with their massive connectivity of words alone, ferret out the one detail that grants FTL, or immortality, or a true moral basis for selfishness.

The precedent is mathematics. Modern mathematicians use highly diverse and seemingly unconnected parts of the discipline to craft proofs, like using hyperdimensional geometry as a foundation for Fermat's Last Theorem. They think there's something like that in physics or biology.

Discussed this recently. My buddy codes & told me AI will take over EVERYTHING. Because it codes really well. I said that it codes well because computer guys write what they know into AI & that it’s shit on anything that’s not already written. I could see that he’d legit never considered this.

this just has me questioning how well your buddy codes

The biggest limitation of LLMs is that the data ingestion rate they require to maintain relevance is greater than the rate humans produce data. They gobbled up all the information on the internet and need another internet's worth of new data NOW

I mean, you’re 50/50 on this, I think. Anything that does exist in online readable form, an LLM can consume, and their existence relies on us having done that to all relevant info consistently for 2 decades. However, they’re killing the incentive systems that made us do that so the future is unclear

yes that’s in fact exactly what I’ve been saying: lots of information in the world does not exist in online readable form and LLMs have no mechanism for collecting that information

like I have in fact made this exact point repeatedly