Who needs Skynet

Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.

We definitely don't need AGI for AI technologies to be useful. AI, particularly reinforcement learning, is great for teaching robots to do complex tasks for example. LLMs have shocking ability relative to other approaches (if limited compared to humans) to generalize to "nearby but different, enough" tasks. And once they're trained (and possibly quantized), they (LLMs and reinforcement learning policies) don't require that much more power to implement compared to traditional algorithms. So IMO, the question should be "is it worthwhile to spend the energy to train X thing?" Unfortunately, the capitalists have been the ones answering that question because they can do so at our expense.

For a person without access to big computing resources (me lol), there's also the fact that transfer learning is possible for both LLMs and reinforcement learning. Easiest way to explain transfer learning is this: imagine that I want to learn Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. What should I learn first so that each subject is easy for me to pick up? My answer would be Math. So in AI speak, if we spend a ton of energy to train an AI to do math and then fine-tune agents to do Physics, Engineering, etc., we can avoid training all the agents from scratch. Fine-tuning can typically be done on "normal" computers with FOSS tools.

all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.

IMO that can be an incredibly useful approach for solving problems whose dynamics are too complex to reasonably model, with the understanding that the obtained solution is a crude approximation to the underlying dynamics.

IMO I'm waiting for the bubble to burst so that AI can be just another tool in my engineering toolkit instead of the capitalists' newest plaything.

Sorry about the essay, but I really think that AI tools have a huge potential to make life better for us all, but obviously a much greater potential for capitalists to destroy us all so long as we don't understand these tools and use them against the powerful.

Idk. I find it a great coding help. IMO AI tech have legitimate good uses.

Image generation have algo great uses without falling into porn. It ables to people who don't know how to paint to do some art.

Define art.

AI is a tool used by a human. The human using the tools has an intention, wants to create something with it.

It's exactly the same as painting digital art. But instead o moving the mouse around, or copying other images into a collage, you use the AI tool, which can be pretty complex to use to create something beautiful.

Do you know what generative art is? It existed before AI. Surely with your gatekeeping you think that's also no art.

there is no intelligence and there is no art.

People said exact same thing about CGI, and photography before. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody scream "IT'S NOT ART" at Michaelangelo or people carving walls of temples in ancient Egypt.

But not al users of AI are malignant or causing environment damage.

Saying the contrary would be a bad generalization.

I have LLM models running on a n100 chip that have less consumption that the lemmy servers we are writing on right now.

Technology is a product of science. The facts science seeks to uncover are fundamental universal truths that aren't subject to human folly. Only how we use that knowledge is subject to human folly. I don't think open source or open weights models are a bad usage of that knowledge. Some of the things corporations do are bad or exploitative uses of that knowledge.

Sure, technology is a product of the culture and it in turn influences how the culture develops, there's a dialectical relationship there.

Nah, human ideology is much broader than a single economic system. The fact that people who live under capitalism can't understand this just shows the power of indoctrination.

This sounds like some Žižekian nonsense. Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek

Don't worry, they will figure out that without humans releasing gasses they have no purpose, so they will cull most of the human population but keep just enough to justify their existence to manage it.

Although you don't need AI to figure that one out. Just look at the relationships between the US intelligence and military and "terrorist groups".

I feel like you're being incredibly generous with the usage of AI here. I feel as though the post and comment above refer to LLM/image generation AI. Those "types of 'AI'" certainly don't run all those things.

The problem is the concentration of power, Sam "regulate me daddy" Altman's plan is to get the government to create a web of regulation that makes it so only the big tech giants have access to the uncensored models.

I guess someone needs to tell google.

Not a small community by any means. It inherently is opposed to the unnecessarily large and wasteful models of corporations. But when people just lump i al l under "AI", the actually useful local models are the ones most likely to get harmed while Google, meta, and the other megacorps will be able to operate with impunity.

Which magical country is this? Can I come?

;-)

I'm actually curious (kind of desperate for some good news nowadays). Not trying to make fun of you

Can understand that, but I feel it's dumbed down. Better to state the increase and then say it's relative to [some relatable fact] perhaps?