[surgical_fire]

Apologies. I should not presume malice when other options are available.

All facts below are true in regards on how I think of AI

- AI is useful. I use it daily. In some tasks it speeds me up greatly, in other tasks not so much. I don't question that it is useful, although I do disagree on how much AI maximalists overhype it.

- I think AI is a technology deadend. Due to limitations inherent to how LLMs work, they cannot achieve what the people selling AI claim it can do. Or at least multiple unprecedented technological revolutions would be needed for it to happen.

- AI is hellishly expensive. All companies building it are bleeding an insane amount of money in a reckless manner. At some point, the bill will have to be paid. I am concerned about this in terms of employability - I suspect a major economic downturn is brewing in the horizon, and how companies are burning money in AI will compound on it.

- Perhaps naively, I think that this technology should be built up and incorporated responsibly, instead of this FOMO-fueled "winner takes all" mentality. I recognize that the system we live in has all the wrong incentives however.

I very much disagree my opinions fit neatly in between the categories you defined.

And this brings me back to my original point: You asked your questions presuming the answers. It's not a matter of knowing what you think better than you do, it is a matter of getting the things you declared and deriving your intentions.

[thunky]

Thanks for your response. I agree my two buckets were too narrow to fit everyone into. It was a quick take and I shouldn't have insisted on carrying it through.

FWIW: imo AI doesn't need to cure all disease and end poverty in order to prove incredibly useful and have a major impact on how we work and live. I don't care what AI maximalists say and that shouldn't be used against me. My daily life has already completely changed due to AI and I don't need a billionare CEO or the Pope to hype it for me. Even if it freezes in place (which it won't) there is no undoing that.

I'm also happy that the technology is approachable and doesn't require massive datacenters or major expense to run. And doesn't necessitate a winner takes all outcome imo.

Consider this: how much energy and expense does it cost to play Call of Duty on a local GPU for 4 hours compared to casual LLM use for 4 hours? You're going to hate this, but I just had Gemini do this comparison and it was interesting.

Yes, millions of people aren't all playing Call of Duty all the time, so the cumulative numbers are very different. But if Call of Duty could research or write code, they would.

[surgical_fire]

Depends on the size of the model? I had Ollama set up on ny 7 year old laptop and could run some modest models. It was an interesting experience, but state of the art models, the stuff you run to do some actually useful stuff is not at all cheap to run.

The most interesting bit about AI, is that I find it the least useful the less I know about the subject matter. It needs a guiding hand to do things well, if I feed it with shit, shitty is the output.

When I use it for things I have ample knowledge of, it does feel like a superpower. Things that would have taken me days now take hours. But I am not oblivious to the cost. All that inference is extremely expensive, those companies are not bleeding money randomly.

And you may not care about what AI maximalists say, but they are the ones poisoning this particular well. Technology does not exist in a vacuum.

[thunky]

I see comments on here all the time from people getting a lot of mileage out of local models. But the main point is, the technology is within reach. It's not like it's some giant quantum brain in a vault under Google headquarters.

I don't care about what AI maximalists say because I shouldn't have to defend their words. I'm only sharing my own experience. My job is drastically different than it was a year ago. The way I interact with computers to learn, research, and consume information is also entirely different. Whether or not that translates into massive social disruption or a major bubble pop, or both, I don't know. But the tech is already amazing imo and that's not a prediction or hype.