TechTakes

How do I find product-market fit for my terminators?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41825473

This week's Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 really hit home. It's about a startup trying to sell "The AI Scientist." It even does reviews!

Can “AI” do your science for you? Should it be your co-author? Or, as one company asks, boldly and breathlessly, “Can we automate the entire process of research itself?”

Major scientific journals have banned the use of tools like ChatGPT in the writing of research papers. But people keep trying to make “AI Scientists” a thing. Just ask your chatbot for some research questions, or have it synthesize some human subjects to save you time on surveys.

Alex and Emily explain why so-called “fully automated, open-ended scientific discovery” can’t live up to the grandiose promises of tech companies. Plus, an update on their forthcoming book!

https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/s1Eyp5R4cdSZVm3y2q58xq

New piece from Brian Merchant: Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.

Pulling out a specific paragraph here (bolding mine):

I was glad to see some in the press recognizing this, which shows something of a sea change is underfoot; outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and even Inc. Magazine all published pieces sympathizing with the longshoremen besieged by automation—and advised workers worried about AI to pay attention. “Dockworkers are waging a battle against automation,” the CNN headline noted, “The rest of us may want to take notes.” That feeling that many more jobs might be vulnerable to automation by AI is perhaps opening up new pathways to solidarity, new alliances.

To add my thoughts, those feelings likely aren't just that many more jobs are at risk than people thought, but that AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit), and leaving the dangerous/boring jobs mostly untouched - effectively the exact opposite of the future the general public wants AI to bring them.

@BlueMonday1984 Yeah, I don't get it. If you want to be a "hacktivist", why not go after one of the MILLIONS of organizations making the planet a worse place?

In other news, Hindenburg Research just put out a truly damning report on Roblox, aptly titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids", and the markets have responded.

i wouldn't want to sound like I'm running down Hinton's work on neural networks, it's the foundational tool of much of what's called "AI", certainly of ML

but uh, it's comp sci which is applied mathematics

how does this rate a physics Nobel??

the mozilla PR campaign to convince everyone that advertising is the lifeblood of commerce and that this is perfectly fine and good (and that everyone should just accept their viewpoint) continues

We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it

try, you say? and what's your plan for when you fail, but you've lost all your values in service of the attempt?

For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.

are you fucking kidding me? "we can only be who we are if we maybe sorta listen to you while we keep doing what we wanted to do"? seriously?

Don't know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I'm not inherently familiar with (is there a "welcome guide" of some sort somewhere I missed).

Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:

The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

I just... don't have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we'll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text "work" for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).

I hope some people watch this closely, I'm sure there's going to be some gold in this mess.

PC Gamer put out a pro-AI piece recently - unsurprisingly, Twitter tore it apart pretty publicly:

I could only find one positive response in the replies, and that one is getting torn to shreds as well:

I did also find a quote-tweet calling the current AI bubble an "anti-art period of time", which has been doing pretty damn well:

Against my better judgment, I'm whipping out another sidenote:

With the general flood of AI slop on the Internet (a slop-nami as I've taken to calling it), and the quasi-realistic style most of it takes, I expect we're gonna see photorealistic art/visuals take a major decline in popularity/cultural cachet, with an attendant boom in abstract/surreal/stylised visuals

On the popularity front, any artist producing something photorealistic will struggle to avoid blending in with the slop-nami, whilst more overtly stylised pieces stand out all the more starkly.

On the "cultural cachet" front, I can see photorealistic visuals becoming seen as a form of "techno-kitsch" - a form of "anti-art" which suggests a lack of artistic vision/direction on its creators' part, if not a total lack of artistic merit.

Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj

https://mastodon.social/@Meyerweb/113267932851356871

The Internet Archive's been hacked and had a data breach

Someone shared this website with me at work and now I am sharing the horror with you all: https://www.syntheticusers.com/

Online art school Schoolism publicly sneers at AI art, gets standing ovation

And now, a quick sidenote:

This is gut instinct, but I'm starting to get the feeling this AI bubble's gonna destroy the concept of artificial intelligence as we know it.

Mainly because of the slop-nami and the AI industry's repeated failures to solve hallucinations - both of those, I feel, have built an image of AI as inherently incapable of humanlike intelligence/creativity (let alone Superintelligence^tm^), no matter how many server farms you build or oceans of water you boil.

Additionally, I suspect that working on/with AI, or supporting it in any capacity, is becoming increasingly viewed as a major red flag - a "tech asshole signifier" to quote Baldur Bjarnason for the bajillionth time.

For a specific example, the major controversy that swirled around "Scooby Doo, Where Are You? In... SPRINGTRAPPED!" over its use of AI voices would be my pick.

Eagan Tilghman, the man behind the ~~slaughter~~ animation, may have been a random indie animator, who made Springtrapped on a shoestring budget and with zero intention of making even a cent off it, but all those mitigating circumstances didn't save the poor bastard from getting raked over the coals anyway. If that isn't a bad sign for the future of AI as a concept, I don't know what is.

Not a sneer, but I saw an article that was basically an extremely goddamn long list of forum recommendations and it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Nobody likes Bryan Johnson’s breakfast at the Network School

A cafe run by immortality-obsessed multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson is reportedly struggling to attract customers with students at the crypto-funded Network School in Singapore preferring the hotel’s breakfast buffet over “bunny food.”

Any mild pushback to the claims of LLM companies sure bring out the promptfondlers on lobste.rs

https://lobste.rs/s/qcppwf/llms_don_t_do_formal_reasoning_is_huge

Plenty of agreement, but also a lot of "what is reasoning, really" and "humans are dumb too, so it's not so surprisingly GenAIs are too!". This is sure a solid foundation for multi-billion startups, yes sirree.

In other news, an AI booster got publicly humilitated after prompting complete garbage and mistaking it for 8-bit animation:

And now, another sidenote, because I really like them apparently:

This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.

Beyond the slop-nami flooding the Internet with soulless shit whose creation was directly because of tech companies like OpenAI, its also given us shit like:

• Google's unholy 'Dear Sydney' ad, and the nuclear backlash it got.

• Apple crushing human creativity for personal gain and being forced to apologise for it

• Mira Murati openly shitting on artists as gen-AI steals their artwork and destroys their livelihoods

• Gen-AI boosters producing complete shit and calling it gold (with Proper Prompter and Luma Labs providing excellent examples)

• And so much goddamn more, most of which I've likely forgotten

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

Just something I found in the wild (r/machine learning): Please point me in the right direction for further exploring my line of thinking in AI alignment

I'm not a researcher or working in AI or anything, but ...

you don't say

from this article

Amazon asked Chun to dismiss the case in December, saying the FTC had raised no evidence of harm to consumers.

ah yes, the company that's massively monopolized nearly all markets, destroyed choice, constantly ships bad products (whose existence is incentivised by programs of its own devising), and that has directly invested in enhanced price exploitation technologies? that one? yeah, totes no harm to consumers there