Post

All of the LLMs stole from me. Most of the big "A.i." billionaires are horrifying right wingers. Consumer-facing generative "A.i." "writing" and "art" tools deskill people, cheat kids out of real education, spread falsehoods and disinfo, and violate privacy. So no, I ain't using that shit.

I've always said there are legit uses for machine learning in science. That's great! Go for it! But I will likely never be interested in the consumer-facing generative and LLM bullshit that's linked with fraud, cheating, theft, right-wing ideology, deskilling, and even murder & suicide.

It should also be noted that the ML technologies that are "useful to science" existed at least as far back as the 1990s. Those models are focused, dedicated tools for investigating specific problems. I remember running protein folding programs to "help science" as a '90s kid in my bedroom.

LLMs are at BEST generalized tools that can perform a poor imitation of these "useful science tools". The majority of their training data doesn't pertain to your problem, and actively makes the tool worse at investigating your problem, you're always better off making a dedicated tool.

Meanwhile, they've gobbled up TRILLIONS of dollars of investment, while vaguely promising to cure cancer or solve climate change - knowing full well their technology can't and won't do that. Imagine if we had put a trillion dollars each into renewables infrastructure and medical research instead?