There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.
What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.
AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse. The AI revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.
This is a very one sided way to look at things. Yes, people will use AI to generate spam and stuff. What it is missing is that people will also use AI to filter it all away. The nice thing about ChatGPT and friends is that it gives me access to information in whatever format I desire. I don’t have to visit dozens of websites to find what I am looking for, the AI will do that for me and report back with what it has found.
Simply put, AI is a possible path to the Semantic Web, which previously failed since ads and SoC were the driver of the Web, not information.
Sometimes I really wonder in what magical wonderland those people complaining about AI live, since as far as I am concerned, the Web and a lot of other stuff went to shit a long while ago, long before AI got any mass traction. AI is our best hope to drag ourselves out of the mud.
The real problem is that AI isn’t good enough yet. It can handle Wikipedia-like questions quite well. But try to use it for product and price information and all you get is garbage.
which previously failed since ads and SoC were the driver of the Web, not information.
Can you elaborate on why you think the ads wouldn’t sneak in again? The semantic web is a fantastic concept, but I don’t immediately see the AI connection. AI doesn’t magically pay for authored content and there is still an incentive to somehow get ads into LLM answers.
Can you elaborate on why you think the ads wouldn’t sneak in again?
You can run a LLM at home on your own PC. Think of it less as a replacement for Google and more like the computer from StarTrek. You tell it what you want and it goes to search the net for you. What you see is just the answer, in a format specified by you, not the websites they came from.
Google, Bing and Co. will of course add ads into their services, but that’s a short issue. AI will fundamentally reshape how we interact with computers and information in the long run.
The semantic web is a fantastic concept, but I don’t immediately see the AI connection.
The semantic web relies on human doing the markup, that’s doomed to fail, nobody has the time for that and even if they spend the effort, they would miss a whole lot of information that is in the text. A LLM can extract semantic information directly from the text without any markup and you can query that information with natural language. That’s not only way easier on the creators side, but also way more powerful on the users end.
You can run a LLM at home on your own PC. You tell it what you want and it goes to search the net for you.
Unless it’s open-source and connected to a proper crownsourced dataset, hosted on a paid server managed by a community instead of a big corporation, I don’t see how ads are NOT getting in.
Thank you very much. My concern is rather in the direction of inserting ads or “promotional information” into the training material, much like SEO plagues search today. If the info is from the web it can still be malicious, even if you run your own LLM.
You never wanted to have the computer from StarTrek, the Holodeck or the Universal Translator? Modern AI provides a fundamental shift in how we can interact with data and allows us to do things that would have been impossible by classic means.
And it’s not like you can escape it anyway, phone cameras use AI, spell checkers use AI, mobile phone keyboards use AI, it’s already everywhere and we have barely started.
