this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that's different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.

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[–] Water1053 29 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Why would people think he knows anything about AI?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Because we often look up to public figures for stuff they are not qualified to comment on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can we get a second opinion from Dre?

[–] Fungah 3 points 1 year ago

But what does ja rule think?

[–] Inmate -2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If he's an unqualified bystander, then what the fuck are you?

I'm always surprised that the people with all the answers only share them with thirty other assholes on the Internet.

I'm confident a 14 year old can write their own AI, maybe even a smart 10 year old.

Here's instructions for kids:

https://youtu.be/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib

You think Obama can't wrap his head around a little algebra?

Why, when speaking intelligently and thoughtfully in the subject, is he so wrong in his assessment, when you, in one lazy sentence, are so right?

I'm really worried about would-be wise people just throwing in the towel cause they don't know how much better they could be with a little discipline, and settle for being clever here and there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As far as I know, Obama has nothing to do with IT and doesn't have a big interest in it. A lot of people on here are probably more qualified than he is when it comes to these topics simply because they spent a lot of their free time learning about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Because he's a world leader and AI programs are answering search engine queries with what you want to hear now, not actual answers. Ain;t no way hes unaware that.

[–] Inmate 1 points 1 year ago

Why are you acting like it's at all difficult to understand?

[–] Inmate 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because you can teach a teen to do it in two weeks. He was a constitutional law professor, as well as the first elected African-American president in the United States. I learned LLMs in a couple months and I never used a comp until 2021. Why are you gatekeeping?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Using the end product and having any idea how it works are two VERY different things.

[–] Inmate -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree, my argument is that both aren't challenging for even the average person if they really want/need to understand how these models produce refined noise informed by human patterns.

There are electricians everywhere you know.

This isn't a random person thoughtlessly yelling one-sentence nonsense pablum on the Internet like you.

You think this person can't understand something as straightforward as programming, coming from law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Please link your Wikipedia below 🫠

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a bit more complicated than you're making it out to be lmfao, there's a reason it's only really been viable for the past few years.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The principles are really easy though. At its core, neural nets are just a bunch of big matrix multiplication operations. Training is still fundamentally gradient descent, which while it is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things, isn't super hard to understand.

The progress in recent years is primarily due to better hardware and optimizations at the low levels that don't directly have anything to do with machine learning.

We've also gotten a lot better at combining those fundamentals in creative ways to do stuff like GANs.

[–] lledrtx -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

AI researcher (PhD) here and for what it's worth, Obama got it extremely right. I saw this and went "holy shit, he gets it"

[–] gmtom 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I dont believe you at all. I got my master in AI 8 years ago and have been working in the field ever since and no one with any knowledge would agree with you at all. In fact I showed a couple of my colleagues the headline of this article and they both just laughed.

[–] Azhad 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you don't think ai will get there and surpass everything humans have done in the past, you should change career.

[–] lledrtx -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm saying this because I do this for a living. It has become obvious to everyone in research (for example - https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00059) that "AI"s don't understand what they are outputting. The secret sauce with all these large models is the data scale. That is, we have not had real algorithmic breakthroughs - it's just model scale and data scale. So we can make models that mimic human language and music etc but to go beyond, we need multiple fundamentally different breakthroughs. There is a ton of research attention now so it might happen, but it's not guaranteed - the improvements we've seen in the past few years will plateau as data plateaus (we are already there according to some, i.e we've used all the data on the Internet). Also, this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2

[–] Azhad 1 points 1 year ago

You do it for a living and you can't even understand what a general ai is. Alas I long since understood that mostly everyone is profoundly incompetent at their own jobs.