The first country to adopt LLMs for everything is the one that will collapse first. This is a race where the winners never start and at best stop before they reach the end.
AI will move past LLMs
Great. We’ll wait, then we’ll see.
How so?
Other algorithms and combination architectures will be invented/rediscovered.
Now AI has relationships between tokens. AGI needs concepts to be related, amongst other things.
I doubt that for the foreseeable future. Llms aren’t new at all the scientific space is old it’s just now popping up because they can do a lot with enormous data sets
Transformers were the kick-start for this generation of AI. Given the flood of money and brains into the area there will be more innovation.
Maybe. Could also be that humans never invent anything that comes close to a biological brain. Either because we simply aren’t smart enough, or because civilization regresses before we get there. And there’s several trends going on currently which could cause civilization to regress. For example, climate change and declining birth rates (While we could set up an economic system that can deal with a shrinking and aging population, our current one cannot).
Fasciam and religion are bigger threats than ‘declining birth rate’, that one’s just billionaire propaganda. Stop repeating it.
So, why are declining birth rates not a problem?
Because the big rationale for it being a problem is that GDP declines as population declines. But GDP is an aggregate measure that’s dependent on population, so that’s not a problem, it’s a tautology.
Why are they? Fewer people, fewer mouths to feed, more value on labor, more natural resources and real estate for the rest of us.
We cant grow forever. Dropping total population in the most ethical way then keeping things steady seems like the most nonviolent cool way to do this.
Tor fucks sake there’s like ten billion people we could keep everything we need going, easily, with half that.
Anf imagibe if we actually valuee people instead of treating them like disposable garbage to throw away in poverty and wars! Wouldn’t that be cool?
Yeah, but my point was that our current economic system can’t deal with, not that we can’t deal with it in general. Migrating away from the current system would require the powerful to give up their power, which they won’t do willingly, even as the walls are closing in. (In fact, when it comes to global warming, the walls are closing in).
Systems adapt. Extrapolation based on current state is often fallacious.
Migrating away from the current system would require the powerful to give up their power
Implicit in that statement is a huge and largely unfounded assumption that there’s only one possible future state, and that it’s as you say it is.
And, even if it means that the powerful are forced to give up power, well, that’s happened before and it’s not impossible that it’ll happen again.
Wait, since when population is shrinking? And since when it’s a bad thing too?
It’s not shrinking yet, the birth rate is declining, and the world population is projected to start declining 2050.
I don’t think it is shrinking globally, yet. But, some countries (e.g. South Korea) are in dire situations due to shrinking and aging population already.
in dire situations
That’s just repeating the assumption that’s being questioned.
But it’s mostly caused by social issues, imo it is nowhere near being a real problem
I agree with your premise, but I don’t think it implies your conclusion, which I disagree with.
Might be bad now but it leads to a better future. Infinite growth was always impossible, this is just the result of decades of mismanagement.
The future for S. Korea looks bleak, not better.
I agree that infinite growth was always impossible, but in some countries birth rate is well below replacement rate (if they matched, population would be stable, not growing), and in many birth rate + immigration rate is also below replacement rate – we are failing not at growth, but “mere” stability.
Idgaf about replacement rate. I don’t want the old to be replaced. I want the economy to get smaller and for the wealth to be better distributed.
Technically there should be a ratio of young to old to take care of all of the elderly, but IMO fuck’em it wasn’t the young’s choice to be born and suffer for the sake of the old.
Lower population will make resource allocation easier and improve quality of life, and obviously is necessary to prevent further environmental damage. There will be momentary suffering for a brighter future.
Technically there should be a ratio of young to old to take care of all of the elderly
That’s a rule of thumb that assumes a lot of things about elderly people’s need for care, how much that’s funded by the young, productivity in how that care is provided, and a huge number of other variables.
Lower population will make resource allocation easier and improve quality of life, and obviously is necessary to prevent further environmental damage.
The environmental damage is more to do with bad choices about the mix of technology currently used to power the economy, and the poor ratio of GDP per unit of energy consumed. So I dispute that “obviously.”
The environmental damage is more to do with bad choices about the mix of technology currently used to power the economy, and the poor ratio of GDP per unit of energy consumed.
Your opinion runs counter to every single dataset to ever exist.
Gotta hand it to the fossil fuels industry, they got what they wanted and their propaganda worked.
And now Americans have a janky grid, slower / more expensive transportation, and bigger power bills.
they got what they wanted and their propaganda worked
So far.
At least we are free*
*Terms and conditions apply
- Be rich
- Be white
- Be male
- Be “Christian”
- Be straight
- just kidding be rich
The last ones the one that matters most but their supporters can’t read a list that long in one sitting.
6 is the “one of the good ones” clause
“free” is the sound that natural gas makes as it is released from its underground prison …
“Natural gas.”
Oh, right, the benign-soundingmarketing term for methane.
Capitalism doesn’t solve for society, it solves for capital.
There is no profit in making the world a better place.
That depends on the incentives. Society can change those to some extent.
It turns out that there is a lot of profit in making the world a worse place.
And likely those statements will not change anytime soon in the foreseeable future.
I don’t really give a shit about the AI race and I genuinely hope that we lose it, because I feel like being a winner in that “industry” is inherently unsustainable.
The AI hype is so infuriatingly frustrating.
Further, fear mongering about China’s data center/powergrid infrastructure superiority is also the PERFECT excuse techbros need to rationalize building data centers in parts of the US that are in desperate shortage of water for human beings and with precarious electrical grids that are ready to fail in the middle of the next heatwave.
The US is essentially in a second Civil War and this will be one of the main methods in which people are killed, i.e. purposefully setting up the conditions for people to die in a heat wave and have no water so they are desperate… and the only way people in the US are going to stomach it is if they have been truly convinced they have to accept these brutal conditions “because we are hopelessly behind China and we can’t afford to stop building data centers!!”.
Oh man I’d love some of what you’re smoking or popping
I just want anyone else to win. All the things. I want US Hegemony to end. At any cost. If that’s AI then good.
I hate this country the way Saw Gerrera hates the empire.
Sure, but this isn’t going to do that, and it’s going to harm–no, scratch that, continue harming–a bunch of people in the process.
I have found one use for generative AI that I have liked. I’ve thrown it at aggravating searches for me.
Use case example: I stopped traveling across the country and got a job at one location. It’s across the city. I’d like to find an electric bike to get there. The location is 12 miles away as the crow flies. Unfortunately my city is absolute crap at any kind of non-car transportation so it needs to get myself up to 40 mph at minimum. Honestly if I’m going that speed, I’d like a scooter like the a burgman. Trouble is “scooter” runs the gambit from competing to motorcycles like the Burgman, to little ones like the Vespa, and stand up ones like you see dumped all over cities downtown. Electric motorcycles start getting into “I might as well buy a new motorcycle” prices.
Alright, I do a search for electric scooter, I get all standing scooters. I’ve attempted changes and maybe find a sitting one that is made for not getting over 25 mph. Finally getting frustrated I remembered one of my younger coworkers talking about using AI for searches, fine… ten minutes later I had a series of results of bike that fit my criteria as well as small little dealers across the city that DuckDuckGo nor Google bothered to pull up, and that’s with me specifically asking for links because I didn’t want made up bullshit.
Now if we get to the point of AI becoming overlords, I’m sure I’m going to be among the first against the wall because the first couple searches of it not getting things right involved me calling it a dumbshit so…
So yea… that’s my territory of using an AI, it’s a better search engine for weird esoteric shit… I kind of wish it wasn’t an app or a website because if it was a physical device I’d have it next to a hammer which I guess shows how much I trust it.
I hope we loose it so we can get humbled. But if we loose, knowing how we are, we’ll likely invent a reason to go to war and steal their talent.
Ai isn’t an arrow, you can’t loose it.
You can’t even goose it.
And you’re too young to choose it.
I understand you’re frustrated about the AI race. That’s an excellent point, and it deserves careful consideration. First, in considering the AI race we need to consider what AI is…
Lol
I’m glad somebody got the joke.
Nah.
we considered attacking you, but couldn’t think of a way to ruín anything worse than you already had. Every idea we came up with, you had already done, but worse. I spent two years writing software to take down the grid in texas, and another two getting it into your systems. Then you just did it all manually, and some nazi asshole shot the infected substation until it blew up a month later! Fuck you, i liked this job. I went to college for this shit. You have ruined me. What the fuck am i gonna do now?
-some chinese saboteur
The race was over in 2021-2022 when every model that uses the only algorithmic approach we have hit a wall when they ran out of training data.
It does not matter how much power we dump into these, it has quickly diminishing results.
Yeah, this isnt AI, its just able to detect and help re-arrange what we already have but it doesnt do anything new.
And we have a lot of info but we dont know everything actually.
The race to have the magic box that tells you lies that you want to hear while also consuming incredible amounts of resources…why is this a race again?
The telling lies part is not good, but I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems. Cure for cancer, sure that will be $10k a pill. Eternal life? Sure that will be 1 million dollars a years for all eternity. Robot army to protect you? Top of the list.
Question I have is, is the AI we see the same AI the teck bros see? Is there a public interface that is made to appear a little buffoonish so the masses can laugh it off, but the real interface is much much better?I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems
Yeah, that’s the hype. The reality is that with current LLM tech, it’s a slightly more capable text-prediction algorithm.
Those things are being solved by other forms of AI, not LLMs. AlphaFold is about the most useful thing AI has done so far and it’s not a chatbot.
We get access to entertainment AI, but there could be different forms of AI in use in medical science that have nothing to do with image or text generation.
AlphaFold’s success seems to be largely linked to its use of attention-based architecture, similar to GPT, i.e. the architecture used by LLMs. Beyond that, they are both building on work in machine learning and statistics, so I don’t think they are nearly as independent as you are making out.
Yeah, but LLM innovation now is not in more clever architectures, but rather larger and larger models with more training data.
I don’t hate the existence of LLMs but rather how they’re being shoehorned everywhere and how much power is being spent for just a little bit better results.
The only answer I need from an AI is 42.
Because it was a race for simulating more deadly nukes till now. But that got silly, so they need something new to compare their pp.
I really don’t understand this perspective. I truly don’t.
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Like. Do you honestly think this is the one technology that researchers are just going to say “it’s fine as-is, let’s just stop improving it”?
You don’t understand the first thing about how it works but people like you are SO certain that the way it is now is how it will always be, and that because there are flaws developing it further is pointless.
I just don’t get it.
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Say you start with a prototype for a perpetual-motion machine. Then those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
It is intrinsic in some technologies tthat they’re a dead end. That doesn’t mean all of them are, but some are just worthless crap and throwing more good money after bad isn’t going to change that.
I’ve actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I’ve built RAG architecture backends for self hosted FOSS LLMs, i’ve fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I’ve even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research). I also enjoy TTS and STT use cases and have FOSS models for those on most of my devices.
I’ll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It’s like saying you study medicine, it’s a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it’s being marketed for to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.
This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more or less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between proprietary and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.
There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.
The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that’s cool. But we don’t need AI to make improvements to them right now.
I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.
the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in
Even more, it’s being used to milk the taxpayers for more subisidies that get translated (in a very lossy way) into more executive bonuses.
Appreciate you expanding on the earlier comment. All fair points.
Right. You don’t get it. You hear people talk about a new technology but actually they haven’t talked about anything, they are trying to sell you snake oil, but you convince yourself that you understand what they mean, and that it’s somehow meaningful.
We could talk about the history of AI in software development, you know it goes back decades, and there are legitimate areas of research. But the bubble that people are riding right now, they are throwing LLMs at the general public and pretending those LLMs are good enough to replace large swaths of the current workforce, but that’s not going to happen because it won’t work, because that’s not how those models are designed. And then the snake oil salesman, they do classic bait and switch, and they start talking about expert systems and minor improvements to them, as if that is something new.
But even if my prediction is wrong, what that actually means is that people shouldn’t need to work full-time jobs anymore.
To be fair, if your argument is that some day AI research will be legitimate and no longer snake oil, then you could easily be right. But there’s no good reason to think that day is going to be in the next few years, rather than the next few decades or even the next few centuries.
There’s a lot of indication that LLMs are peaking. It’s taking exponentially more compute and data to get incremental improvements. A lot of people are saying OpenAI’s new model is a regression (I don’t know, I haven’t really played with the new model much). More foundational breakthroughs need to be made, and these kinds of breakthroughs are often the result of “eureka” moments which can’t be manifested by just throwing more money at the problem. It’s possible it will take decades before someone discovers a major breakthrough (or it could be tomorrow).
Feelings don’t care about logic. It’s that easy.
Have you considered that if the worlds two superpowers are dead certain on this being an important area that they are willing to throw coutless billions of investment into, that they might know more than you do?
No. I don’t think that either Trump’s idiots, nor the CCP, know more than I do.
Yeah. But then i remembered some history facts and how lobbying and vulture capital works and decided it unlikely.
You think venture capital dictates to the politburo what its priorities are in China?
Governments fail to implement incredibly obvious, easy, and proven solutions all the time so yeh they can be pretty dumb. Not to mention historical examples of governments (paricularly the UK when it was a world superpower) investing their entire economies in nigerian prince tier scams.
Governments are people, and people are stupid.
Good, fuck the AI industry, we can’t even go to the doctor over here
But you have so many obese guy fart videos to choose from now.
True wealth
AI is not the panacea they’re making it out to be. This article is attempting to influence readers to support American AI business models to ‘complete’ with China. Except that AI doesn’t make my job easier and is very bad for the environment.
In my case, AI assistants are even confusing and annoying, but since they cannot be turned off, in my case I have to endure it.
Given that part of my job is evaluating applicants’ ability to do the job, and given that LLMs are very good at answering the sort of questions many people ask in interviews, AI is making my job significantly harder.
If someone could make a prompt that actually made an LLM write good code, I wouldn’t have nearly as much of an issue.
It’s only made worse by the people who treat it like the Master Computer from Star Trek, claim that it can solve all the problems, and thus attempt to shove it into anything and everything.
It’s baffling why my notepad needs to be hooked up to an LLM in the first place. It’s a notepad, for quick scribbling. If people want to write something serious in it, there are far better things for that.
Turns out stubborn contrarianism and anti-science bias are not viable philosophical foundations for progress; what a surprise.
But knowing what’s real and what’s bullshit is an absolutely essential prerequisite for progress.
Exactly my point, I wouldn’t trust progress to the country that elected a mentally challenged pedophile twice.
But for a few fleeting moments we did create a lot of value for the shareholders. Totally worth it to flush it all down the drain.
renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, [Rui Ma]
Is the person they’re talking about who is “stunned” at how super double awesome China is at powering AI.
Ffffffffffffffuck this.
Eastern European born American guy who is living at eastern Europe right now.
I don’t know about china, but a lot of things in the country of my birth are a lot better than USA. Energy grid and energy pricing is one of those.
I got back to country of my birth because my parent got dementia. I’m seriously considering permanently staying here. It has its drawbacks. But a lot of things are also a lot better.
Sorry to hear about the health reasons. Stay connected with people local, you’ll need help, as that’s super hard. Best wishes and be nice to yourself.
I like how Americans propaganda themselves - china doesnt even have to anything as Americans will gladly put them on a pedestal to spite themselves.
Crazy how apparent this is on TikTok especially. People with LGTBQ flags are salivating about China while their flags are literally censored there
Anything’s possible when you make shit up kiddo
Yeah. Kind of amazing that for all of their America first bullshit rhetoric, Republicans have consistently and routinely neglected our infrastructure to focus time and money on gays, immigrants, and giving out blowies to billionaires
Look at other corrupt governments and you can see some even more startlingly disfunctional infrastructure.
to purposefully distract with gays, immigrants so they could keep giving out blowies to billionaires
Conservatism is collapsing into irrelevance as a long term commitment.
Close. Conservatism is collapsing the United States of America into irrelevance.
Don’t worry. They’ll just ask AI about the grid and it will tell them how great it is.
Edit: or it’ll say FEED ME MORE!
“good catch! That’s a very astute observation. Here’s a bunch of paragraphs explaining (incorrectly) how you’re wrong!”
Just like next quarter’s finance numbers for USA will coincidentally just all the great stuff Trump has achieved!
So, a few months ago China launched Deepseek and the narrative on US media was all “the fact they didn’t have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper”.
Now the US is getting behind on “AI wars” because China has more energy for huge data centers?
How about the US get creative and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?
china has also been investing in solar for decades since the us gave up on it and became the leader
Yeah but in defense of the US, solar makes big oil sad
/s
To be fair in 2024, China’s electricity supply was primarily based on coal and renewable energy sources, with coal accounting for the largest share at approximately 57.77 percent. Renewable energy, including hydropower, contributed around 20.27 percent. Nuclear energy played a relatively minor role at about 4.47 percent. So it’s mostly coal power plants in used for AI in China.
53.2% coal, ~20% renewables. Not disagreeing, just adding context.
Percentage dont make sense when the OP posted a out solar leadership. Raw numbers is where it’s at.
The OP did not show where AI and solar intersect, because in power supply they do not. AI power infra is mostly reliant on hydro and coal
enough talk already i wish the us empire would just hurry up and actually collapse.
