Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End
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IBM used to controll the hardware as well, what's the moat?
How many governments were using computers back then when IBM was controlling hardware and how many relied on paper and calculators ? The problem is that gov are dependend on companies right now, not companies dependent on governments.
Imagine Apple, Google and Microsoft decides to leave EU on Monday. They say we ban all European citizens from all of our services on Monday and we close all of our offices. Good Fucking Luck !
What will happen in Europe on Monday ? Compare it with what would happen if IBM said 50 years ago they are leaving Europe ? Sure ok we hace
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And the tragedy of the whole situation is that they can‘t win because if every worker is replaced by an algorithm or a robot then who‘s going to buy your products? Nobody has money because nobody has a job. And so the economy will shift to producing war machines that fight each other for territory to build more war machine factories until you can’t expand anymore for one reason or another. Then the entire system will collapse like the Roman Empire and we start from scratch.
Why would you need anyone to buy your products when you can just enjoy them yourself?
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If his business can't afford to pay someone qualified to do the work, the business shouldn't exist.
I can stand by this for an established business. But we live in a capitalist society where you need money to make money. Until that changes, your ability to pay for work doesn't have any bearing on the value of your new business venture.
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I think the first llm that introduces a good personality will be the winner. I don't care if the AI seems deranged and seems to hate all humans to me that's more approachable than a boring AI that constantly insists it's right and ends the conversation.
I want an AI that argues with me and calls me a uselles bag of meat when I disagree with it. Basically I want a personality.
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It peaked when it was good enough to generate short somewhat coherent phrases. We'd make it generate ideas for silly things and laugh at how ridiculous the results were.
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It's ironic how conservative the spending actually is.
Awesome ML papers and ideas come out every week. Low power training/inference optimizations, fundamental changes in the math like bitnet, new attention mechanisms, cool tools to make models more controllable and steerable and grounded. This is all getting funded, right?
No.
Universities and such are putting out all this research, but the big model trainers holding the purse strings/GPUs are not using them. They just keep releasing very similar, mostly bog standard transformers models over and over again, bar a tiny expense for a little experiment here and there. In other words, it’s full corporate: tiny, guaranteed incremental improvements without changing much, and no sharing with each other. It’s hilariously inefficient.
Deepseek is what happens when a company is smart but resource constrained. An order of magnitude more efficient, and even their architecture was very conservative.
wait so the people doing the work don't get paid and the people who get paid steal from others?
that is just so uncharacteristic of capitalism, what a surprise
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I think the first llm that introduces a good personality will be the winner. I don't care if the AI seems deranged and seems to hate all humans to me that's more approachable than a boring AI that constantly insists it's right and ends the conversation.
I want an AI that argues with me and calls me a uselles bag of meat when I disagree with it. Basically I want a personality.
I'm not AI but I'd like to say thay thing to you at no cost at all you useless bag of meat.
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LLMs are fundamentally limited, the only interesting application with them is research more or less. There are some practical applications, but those are already being used in industry today, so meh.
Whether or not it's a dead end, is questionable, because scientific research is often met with many a dead end, that's just how it is.
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I'm not AI but I'd like to say thay thing to you at no cost at all you useless bag of meat.
To be hkoId welcome that response in an AI I have chat gpt set to be as deranged as possible giving it examples if the Dungeon Crawler AI among others like the novels of expeditionary force like skippy.
I want an AI with attitude honestly.
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The oligarchs running these companies have suffered a psychotic break. What the cause exactly is I don't know, but the game theyre playing is a lot less about profits now. They care about control and power over people.
I theorize it has to do with desperation over what they see as an inevitable collapse of the United States and they are hedging their bets on holding onto the reigns of power for as long as possible until they can fuck off to their respective bunkers while the rest of humanity eats itself.
Then, when things settle they can peak their heads out of their hidie holes and start their new Utopian civilization or whatever.
Whatever's going on, profits are not the focus right now. They are grasping at ways to control the masses...and failing pretty miserably I might add...though something tells me that scarcely matters to them.
inevitable collapse of the United States
Which they are intentionally trying to cause, rather that deal with their addiction to wealth and power.
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I used to support an IVA cluster. Now the only thing I use AI for is voice controls to set timers on my phone.
That's what I did on my Samsung galaxy S5 a decade ago .
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I remember listening to a podcast that’s about explaining stuff according to what we know today (scientifically). The guy explaining is just so knowledgeable about this stuff and he does his research and talk to experts when the subject involves something he isn’t himself an expert.
There was this episode where he kinda got into the topic of how technology only evolves with science (because you need to understand the stuff you’re doing and you need a theory of how it works before you make new assumptions and test those assumptions). He gave an example of the Apple visionPro being a machine that despite being new (the hardware capabilities, at least), the algorithm for tracking eyes they use was developed decades ago and was already well understood and proven correct by other applications.
So his point in the episode is that real innovation just can’t be rushed by throwing money or more people at a problem. Because real innovation takes real scientists having novel insights and experiments to expand the knowledge we have. Sometimes those insights are completely random, often you need to have a whole career in that field and sometimes it takes a new genius to revolutionize it (think Newton and Einstein).
Even the current wave of LLMs are simply a product of the Google’s paper that showed we could parallelize language models, leading to the creation of “larger language models”. That was Google doing science. But you can’t control when some new breakthrough is discovered, and LLMs are subject to this constraint.
In fact, the only practice we know that actually accelerates science is the collaboration of scientists around the world, the publishing of reproducible papers so that others can expand upon and have insights you didn’t even think about, and so on.
This also shows why the current neglect of basic/general research without a profit goal is holding back innovation.
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I'm not AI but I'd like to say thay thing to you at no cost at all you useless bag of meat.
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wait so the people doing the work don't get paid and the people who get paid steal from others?
that is just so uncharacteristic of capitalism, what a surprise
It’s also cultish.
Everyone was trying to ape ChatGPT. Now they’re rushing to ape Deepseek R1, since that's what is trending on social media.
It’s very late stage capitalism, yes, but that doesn’t come close to painting the whole picture. There's a lot of groupthink, an urgency to "catch up and ship" and look good quick rather than focus experimentation, sane applications and such. When I think of shitty capitalism, I think of stagnant entities like shitty publishers, dysfunctional departments, consumers abuse, things like that.
This sector is trying to innovate and make something good, but it’s like the purse holders and researchers have horse blinders on. Like they are completely captured by social media hype and can’t see much past that.
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LLMs are good for learning, brainstorming, and mundane writing tasks.
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LLMs are good for learning, brainstorming, and mundane writing tasks.
Yes, and maybe finding information right in front of them, and nothing more
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Misleading title. From the article,
Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
In no way does this imply that the "industry is pouring billions into a dead end". AGI isn't even needed for industry applications, just implementing current-level agentic systems will be more than enough to have massive industrial impact.
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It's ironic how conservative the spending actually is.
Awesome ML papers and ideas come out every week. Low power training/inference optimizations, fundamental changes in the math like bitnet, new attention mechanisms, cool tools to make models more controllable and steerable and grounded. This is all getting funded, right?
No.
Universities and such are putting out all this research, but the big model trainers holding the purse strings/GPUs are not using them. They just keep releasing very similar, mostly bog standard transformers models over and over again, bar a tiny expense for a little experiment here and there. In other words, it’s full corporate: tiny, guaranteed incremental improvements without changing much, and no sharing with each other. It’s hilariously inefficient.
Deepseek is what happens when a company is smart but resource constrained. An order of magnitude more efficient, and even their architecture was very conservative.
Good ideas are dime a dozen. Implementation is the game.
Universities may churn out great papers, but what matters is how well they can implement them. Private entities win at implementation.
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I agree that it's editorialized compared to the very neutral way the survey puts it. That said, I think you also have to take into account how AI has been marketed by the industry.
They have been claiming AGI is right around the corner pretty much since chatGPT first came to market. It's often implied (e.g. you'll be able to replace workers with this) or they are more vague on timeline (e.g. OpenAI saying they believe their research will eventually lead to AGI).
With that context I think it's fair to editorialize to this being a dead-end, because even with billions of dollars being poured into this, they won't be able to deliver AGI on the timeline they are promising.
There are plenty of back-office ticket-processing jobs that can, and have been, replaced by current-gen AI.
