That opening caricature was so off-putting and dismissive (and extremely wrong, that's not at all what the discourse is about generally speaking), I failed to conclude the reading session.
One does not need to embrace a tool to recognize its horrendous effects and side-effects. I can critique assault rifles without ever having handled one. I can critique street narcotics without taking drugs, and I can critique nuclear weapons without suffering from a blast personally. The idea that if you don't use a tool you can't form conclusions about why it's bad is devoid of any factual or historical grounding. It's an empty rhetorical device which can be used endlessly.
Literally 100% of the inventions which come out now or in the future can be handled in the exact same way. Somebody invents a robot arm that spoon feeds you so you never need to feed yourself with your own hand ever again? Oh this is revolutionary, everybody's going to install this in their home! What, you haven't? And you think it's a bad idea? Gosh, you're so backwards and foolish. The world is moving on, don't be left behind with your manual hand feeding techniques.
This article is like 1.5 years out of date. The discourse around genAI as a tech movement and its nearly uniformly terrible outcomes has moved on. OP hasn't. Seems the gap is widening between writers who are talking about these tools soberly and seriously, and writers who aren't.
But, to be fair, that wasn't the kind of critique it was talking about. If your critique guns is moral, strategic, etc, then yes, you can do it without actually trying out guns. If your critique is that guns physically don't work, don't actually do the thing they are claimed to do, then some hands-on testing would quickly dispel that notion.
The article is talking about those kinds of critiques, ones of the "AI doesn't work" variety, not "AI is harmful".
I don't know any engineers, any reports, or any public community voices who claim GenAI is bad because "AI doesn't work because I tried ChatGPT in 2022 and it was dumb." So it's a critique of a fictional movement which doesn't exist vs. an attempt at critiquing an actual movement.
Yeah, but also the violence already started via hacked brains. OpenAI is having to fend off multiple lawsuits because its chatbot users started taking their own lives.
The level of cynicism here is astronomical. After discovering the strategy of "fire juniors and let a few seniors manage autonomous agents" was an abject failure, now the line is "actually juniors are great because we've brainwashed them into thinking AI is cool and we don't have to pay them so much". Which makes me want to vomit.
The only relevant point here is keeping a talent pipeline going, because well duh. That it even needs to be said like it's some sort of clever revelation is just another indication of the level of stupid our industry is grappling with.
Every time I see a CyberTruck out in the wild, I feel like reality is broken.
The level of disaster of that rollout, combined with D.O.G.E. and "Mechahitler" Grok, has forever tarnished the Tesla brand. I suspect there is a sizable group of people who will never buy a product by that brand ever again (or at least as long as Musk is at the helm).
Every time I see a CyberTruck out in the wild, I am still just stunned by the crappy design — like a dumpster designed for anti-performance — the wheel positioning and size is all wrong, and the metalwork always looks cheap because the 'flat' surfaces are always wavy or rippled, and the seams don't match up properly.
I am definitely one of those people who used to look forward to buying a Tesla next time I change vehicles, but will never consider it now (and I'm big on electric vehicles).
So, I've not seen one in the wild (I'm in Europe they're not road legal here), so the only things I see are either distance shots or close-ups; the distance shots are mostly beauty shots, the close-ups are mostly showing one of the many production problems the design has.
From a distance, the design looks cool to me… as a child of the 80s who grew up with low-poly graphics.
But "looks cool" doesn't mean "I approve"; given the sharp edges, the traditional American car design with worse visibility for children crossing too close in front of you than an Abrams tank, even just given the physical size, I'm glad the EU already had rules preventing it from being road legal here.
And that's even if they fix all the issues that led to the unglamorous close-ups.
Yes, when he said the Jews were intentionally importing substandard humans into western nations to undermine the US, I didn't need hand gestures to think he's a Nazi either.
When Musk purchased and rebranded Twitter as X he also unbanned a large number of accounts famed for Nazi and similar race based content.
He has famously thumbs-ed up significant chunks of such content and in the event mentioned here replied to an explicit statement (as outlined about) as being "the actual truth".
He is an unquestionable fan of Nazi like content, many will shrug it off as his grandfather was an actual Nazi fan (having to move from Canada(?) to South Africa because of such beliefs), and his uncle (IIRC, certainly a close family relative) was a senior member of the South African apartheid government.
If it wasn't, though, why wouldn't he apologize and unequivocally denounce nazi-ism after it happened instead of trolling, playing gotcha games to pwn the libs and doubling down? His jokes about the Holocaust and mocking critics made it worse. He loves reckless, performative provocation and to stir the pot.
Terrible branding for Tesla of him to singlehandedly permanently alienate the majority of his customer base.
That might be true in the US, but it doesn't appear to be so for Tesla in the rest of the world. For example, Tesla is the number 1 selling EV in Norway. They have also opened Tesla dealerships in India. Potentially, whatever damage they have done to themselves in the US, they might be able to offset that with good sales in other friendlier countries.
While they've hurt their image in the US, for now, that might change over time. 5 or 10 years from now, possibly aided by more success from SpaceX, Tesla's or Musk's image could recover.
Yeah I think it will probably go down as the biggest mistake Tesla has made.
They could have spent all the effort building EV delivery trucks with built in self driving which would help them collect even more data for FSD to tell them rollout robotaxis.
Even if camera-only does work*, it's still a mistake, because it was a bet that LiDAR wouldn't get cheap.
* I think it will, eventually, but "eventually" can be a long time, and the point is that this no longer even matters because of how cheap LiDAR is now.
Volkswagen was handed over to be run by a British military officer immediately following the war.
Tesla’s board decided after the war was lost to not only let the nazi sympathizer continue running the company, but to give him an egregiously disproportionate compensation package. The guy who single handedly pushed the biggest failure in the history of the company (cybertruck) is apparently the only one who can save the company.
I expect at some point they’ll be acquired for pennies on the dollar by a Chinese company or if Trump gets his way he’ll insist on a government takeover.
The board and shareholders had their chance to dump Musk a few weeks ago; they could have just turned down his ridiculous pay package and he would have left. They didn't so he'll be dragging them down for at least another decade.
The weird thing I find with the Cybertruck is that I never see anyone using it for obviously truck-y things. For example, I've never seen a CT in the wild with the bed open.
You'd expect to see it hauling ladders or tools or towing horse boxes and so on, but nope. It makes me curious why. Is the truck overpriced for anyone who needs a truck to work? That seems unlikely, trucks are already north of 70,000 bucks. Are there no accessories like towing hitches? Seems unlikely. Is it just not a usefully sized bed? That would be a bizarre miss for a truck designer. I just dont understand it.
Honestly, you could say the same things about most trucks. They’re used more for posturing than as tools at this point. Though the CT does seem to be particularly unreliable based on its frequent recalls.
Irony is that, at least moving forward, you can see a child in front of a cyber truck before you crush them. But if you hit any anyone with those sharp edges...
US truck customers are getting smarter. The fleet trucks, for HVAC, plumbers, and appliance installation and repair, I see in my area are almost all vans now. Butch pickup trucks still have the gender affirming care market.
Shareholders must be the weakest most by-passable interest group in corporate america.
Would I stand by and allow my shares and future profits flounder while the head guy goes rogue? No blankin' way.
Regardless of personal preference for politics, no serious organization should ever want to come within one light year of DC politics. It can only use, besmirch, tarnish, degrade the organization's credibility and from there hit into money. Trump makes it exponentially worse.
Believing we even know what AGI "is", let alone that we understand a direct path to achieving it, is truly an article of faith. There is no scientific basis for a development of human-level intelligence within our lifetimes, let alone the buzzword du jour of "superintelligence".
I'm convinced that we'll get AGI within the decade. But only because these large AI companies are controlling the narrative for the most part, and it's in their best interest to actually be the first one to announce that they achieved AGI.
Whether the AGI that they announce is actually AGI or not is a completely different debate. The goalposts will just continue to be moved until the statement is true.
Correction: (a) we can observe the effects of human-level intelligence but we don't actually know what human intelligence is because intelligence is best described as a side-effect of consciousness (aka the experience of qualia) and science has yet to provide a convincing explanation of what that is exactly.
I can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files. We have traditional search technology which would be excellent for that!
> can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files
Kati’s Research AI is genuinely great at search. It tries to answer your question, but also directly cites resources. This can help you when you’re not sure where the answer to a question lies, and it winds up being in multiple places.
Unless your query is super simple and of low consequence, you still need to open the files. But LLM-powered search is like the one domain (apart from coding) where these fuckers work.
One does not need to embrace a tool to recognize its horrendous effects and side-effects. I can critique assault rifles without ever having handled one. I can critique street narcotics without taking drugs, and I can critique nuclear weapons without suffering from a blast personally. The idea that if you don't use a tool you can't form conclusions about why it's bad is devoid of any factual or historical grounding. It's an empty rhetorical device which can be used endlessly.
Literally 100% of the inventions which come out now or in the future can be handled in the exact same way. Somebody invents a robot arm that spoon feeds you so you never need to feed yourself with your own hand ever again? Oh this is revolutionary, everybody's going to install this in their home! What, you haven't? And you think it's a bad idea? Gosh, you're so backwards and foolish. The world is moving on, don't be left behind with your manual hand feeding techniques.
This article is like 1.5 years out of date. The discourse around genAI as a tech movement and its nearly uniformly terrible outcomes has moved on. OP hasn't. Seems the gap is widening between writers who are talking about these tools soberly and seriously, and writers who aren't.
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