this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
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If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. LLMs are not AI. It is a natural language tool that would allow an AI to communicate with us using natural language...
What it is being used for now is just completely inappropriate. At best this makes a neat (if sometimes inaccurate) home assistant.
To be clear: LLMs are incredibly cool, powerful and useful. But they are not intelligent, which is a pretty fundamental requirement of artificial intelligence.
I think we are pretty close to AI (in a very simple sense), but marketing has just seen the fun part (natural communication with a computer) and gone "oh yeah, that's good enough. People will buy that because it looks cool". Nevermind that it's not even close to what the term "AI" implies to the average person and it's not even technically AI either so...
I don't remember where I was going with this, but capitalism has once again fucked a massive technical breakthrough by marketing it as something that it's not.
Probably preaching to the choir here though...
We also have hoverboards. Well, "hoverboards", because that's the branding. They have wheels, and don't hover.
Yep, a great summary.
I keep telling people that what they call AI (e.g. LLMs) are fancy autocomplete. Little more.
They're sentence-constructing machines. Very advanced ones. There was one in the 80s called Racter that spat out a lot of legible text that was basically babble. Now it looks like it isn't babble and that's sometimes the case.
Essentially auto-predict 2.0
Fucking cool and it annoys me to no end that it gets slated because of unrealistic expectations.
Well it seems like a pretty natural fallacy to think that if something talks to us, in a language that we understand, that it must be intelligent. But it also doesn't help that LLMs, aka. fancy text generators built with machine learning algorithms, are marketed as artificial intelligence.
The LLMs can also be EXTREMELY useful, if used correctly.
Instead of replacing customer service workers, use the speech processing to highlight keywords on the service workers PC, so they can quickly find the right internal wiki page? Atlassian Intelligence works pretty neat in that way, a Help desk ticket already has some keywords highlighted and when you click on it, it shows an AI summary of what this means from resources in the Atlassian account. Helps inexperienced people to quickly get up to speed and it's only helping, not replacing.