8mo ago

Dreams of AI

205 comments

Both of those sound kinda dystopian. Because you just know the first one will start getting gamed by every company from the grocery companies trying to SEO the AI, to the big fossil fuel companies trying to get you to drive your car more.
- How is making a picture of me as an astronaut "dystopian"?
  
  The same technology can be used for widespread, low-cost, highly convincing misinformation and propaganda campaigns
  
  Uses tons of energy which could ironically be used to get you to space for real (a lot more energy but at least you get a real experience).
- I can’t wait for the technology to get basic enough where I can roll my own self hosted instance of it without it taking months. Because I can see a way it’s doable without a centralized service to get around that. But for mass consumer level, I can see that becoming true. But this can be applied to every bit of software currently. All of it can be ran by you, if you have time. Hell I’ve got my own cloud (hosted at my home ) music streaming service.
  
  A lot of that is doable now - like, how many grocery stores are even nearby to someone, so writing a custom bit of code to check the website of each, one by one, and looking for previously manually-identified items could be automated.
  One major downside is prioritization of large chain stores at the expense of smaller mom & pop ones that don't maintain a constant inventory system accessible via the web. Someone could even volunteer their time to build them a database backend, but still they'd have to see the value in actually scanning the items every time or else it would quickly fall behind.
- In other words, we need to recognize that the real problem is that companies will always try to game the system for product differentiation/market segmentation purposes, so the real solution is for the government to create and enforce standards.

You don't need "AI" for that. All you would need is some standardized APIs for the various shops, and you could easily solve this with computer technology from 20 years ago.
- The reality is, though, that there are no such APIs. LLMs on the other hand could be a valid tool for the use case.
  
  It's not that there's no API. It's that there's probably a different API for every single grocery store. And they make random changes and don't have public documentation. That's why we need the AI.
  
  LLMs are not a good tool for processing data like this. They would be good for presenting that data though.
  
  there are no such APIs
  Yes there are. You can obtain access to the Kroger API, the Meijer API, the Walmart API, and I'm sure others that I didn't bother to Google. Failing getting access to the actual APIs, there are tons of web scraper projects that just parse those stores' websites for product information, and web scrapers are still orders of magnitude more efficient than LLMs.
  
  At the cost of huge amounts of wasted energy and the whole litany of concerns that are always co-morbid with AI, but technically yes they could work for this lol. Ideally we'd have standardized APIs and mandated pricing transparency, but unfortunately we live in a capitalist society where that will literally never happen ever.
- All you would need is some standardized APIs for the various shops
  Stores: "I'm going to stop you right there"
- Calling it now, some tech bro trust fund kid is going to make a start up for this and call it something markety like fresh4u or some shit. Then when everyone is using it they'll sell your data to China.
- We need somebody to wear a 360 camera and go walk every aisle every day. Use image recognition to get the SKU and price from the labels + estimate stock level. Upload the data to an API that's accessible to all for like $5/month.
  Kind of like the Streetview cameras but for spying on actual in store prices.

And it's a service because AI
And the service costs a subscription fee
And the service quality drops once it saturates the market
And the service now contains ads
And the grocery stores can pay to promote their store when it is not the most affordable option
And now it's not economically feasible to not use their service
- This is disgusting, but true.
  Upvoted

I was working on this with a friend over 10 years ago but the only grocery store that made a decent effort at organizing their website to be scrapeable was Loblaws and all the others had APIs that cost $100,000
- Which is one area ML models might (with the right investment) actually be useful. A model trained to look at web pages and relay information from the content visually like we do would be very powerful. The newer ChatGPT models have visual capabilities, I wonder if you could give it a website screen capture and ask it for prices.
  
  Why would you want a model trained on outdated prices? This is not really something LLMs are particularly suited for.
  Maybe to crunch historical data, but not for daily comparisons.
- Flipp allows for some of this desired capability now through digital flyer scraping and online feeds, APIs. Maybe things have gotten better on the API side over time.
  Pretty sure it’s a Canadian app, coincidentally.

The cheapest way to get groceries in the States has always been do all your grocery shopping in the same store, preferably a discount store like an Aldi, instead of cutting coupons and going to multiple different stores due to the simple fact that the gasoline used for driving around is most likely going to cancel out any saving from shopping around, an unfortunate side effect of America's car centric infrastructure.
You don't really need an AI to make this list, plus, I think there are apps that already trying to do exactly that.
However, getting a computer to draw yourself in ridiculous situations (usually with an equally ridiculous number of fingers) is great entertainment.
- This kind of small scale optimization is not really the best use case for AI anyway. Considering the actual cost of running that kind of code at a large scale... I'm not convinced the savings are worth it even setting aside the petrol issue.
  AI doesn't need to be in the hands of consumers. It should be a step removed, working behind the scenes to make all those basic foods cheaper before you even go shopping. It should be optimizing supply chains, reducing production costs, and otherwise making us more efficient at a societal level.
  Which, well, in some cases it already is. Sadly many companies just use it to optimise their marketing 🙄
- going to multiple different stores due to the simple fact that the gasoline used for driving around is most likely going to cancel out any saving from shopping around
  I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Here in suburbia, there are different stores every couple miles. Figure even a 5-mile detour to go to another store, and that "simple fact" of gasoline used turns out to cost less than a dollar. I save that much on a pair of salad kits by going to one store over another, and it's really more of a one-mile detour anyway. Plus, there are simply things that one store does better than the other and I like to take advantage of that too.
  
  Seriously. Sale items are often several dollars cheaper per item. It is well worth the time and gas driving to several stores unless they are very far apart, then just roll that into another trip. Some big "what could it cost, 10 dollars?" vibes off that comment.
  
  Standard IRS reimbursement rate per mile driven is 67¢ per mile this year, which is essentially the per-mile average cost for driving a car. But like, with this sort of thing everyone has their own personal calculus for what they want to optimize for. Do they want to save as much money as possible? Do they want to have fun while shopping? Do they want to shop as quickly as they can? A lot of people will balance these priorities against each other and come up with a solution that isn't optimal in any one specific area.

Any generative AI that was trained using the entirety of the Internet is gonna suck as an information tool, since it will have more bad information in it than correct information and its goal isn't to make sure the info is accurate; its goal is to output text that looks intelligent and isn't obviously generated by a computer.
Even if you fed it nothing but correct information, it will still end up blending multiple things into a single output, generating inaccurate information.
I don't want AI that just generates shit anywhere but in a video game. I want a tool that can go through real data and give me the relevant stuff I am asking for. Which was handled better with whatever Google was doing 20 years ago than whatever the fuck AI shit they got going on now.
- I don’t want AI that just generates shit
  You vastly underestimate the demand for mediocre crap that exists in the world.
- Then why not train an AI on the entirety of Wikipedia? I know it's not all correct, but that should ensure most of the information is decently accurate. Would make for a great tool if it allowed to get the same info but explained in a more casual manner.
  
  I know it’s not all correct, but that should ensure most of the information is decently accurate
  The problem is that a generative AI does not generate correct content, it generates associated content. It looks at words/term/tokens that are frequently used together to generate a context, and will extrapolate on that, continuing to provide content that looks the teaching content.
  The problem is that this will generate materials that LOOKS LIKE CORRECT material, but it doesn't generate material that IS CORRECT. Thankfully for AI, those things overlap a lot, but they don't always.
  
  You need an absolutely insane amount of data to train LLMs. Hundreds of billions to tens of trillions of tokens. (A token isn't the same as a word, but with numbers this massive it doesn't even matter for the point.)
  Wikipedia just doesn't have enough data to make an LLM off of, and even if you could do it and get okay results, it'll only know how to write text in the style of Wikipedia. While it might be able to tell you all about the how different cultures most commonly cook eggs, I doubt you'll get any recipe out of it that makes sense.
  If you were to take some base model (such as llama or gpt) and tune it in Wikipedia data, you'll probably get a "llama in the style of Wikipedia" result, and that may be what you want, but more likely not.
  
  Would make for a great tool if it allowed to get the same info but explained in a more casual manner.
  There's a simple English Wikipedia.

Yeah, im skeptical of AIs to accurately do any of that, at least not any LLM. Like, LLMs aren't going to be could at decision making based on ever-changing real time information.
However tradition software and apps with good data practices can do this...indeed some of them have existing for like a decade in certain markets....they themselves becoming systems people and companies try to gamify to sometimes counter-productive outcomes.
- Yeah, llms are a really great advancement in language processing, and the ability to let them hook into other systems after sussing out what the user means is legitimately pretty cool.
  The issue is that people keep mistaking articulate mimicry of confidence and knowledge as actual knowledge and capability.
  It's doubly frustrating at the moment because people keep thinking that llms are what AI is, and not just a type of AI. It's like how now people hear "crypto" and assume you're talking about the currency scheme, which is needlessly frustrating if you work in the security sector.
  Making a system that looked at your purchase history (no real other way to get that data reliably otherwise), identified the staple goods you bought often and then tried to predict the cadence that you buy them at would be a totally feasible AI problem. Wouldn't be even remotely appropriate for an llm until the system found the price by (probably) crudely scraping grocery store websites and then wanted to tell you where to go, because they're good at things like "turn this data into a friendly shopping list message "
  
  To be completely fair, the confusion is because of the marketing. You and I both know that Tesla cars can't really drive themselves for the same reasons you outlined but the typical person sees "autonomous mode" or "self-driving" applied to what they are buying.
  People treat llms like something out of a super hero movie because they're led to believe it to be the case. The people shoveling in the money based on promises and projections are the root cause.
  
  I would even say llms is an important part of what eventually will become an AI and not a type of AI in itself.
  
  People are just really bad at prompt engineering and so they aren't good at getting LLM's like gemeni and GPT to do what they want
  You can train it, within conversations to get good at specific tasks. They're very useful, you just gotta know how to talk to them

Yeah, but I want AI to make a picture of you as an astronaut but with two extra domes on the suit so I can see ur sweet tits at the same time.
- Ladies and gentlemen....THE INTERNET
  
  If this isn't the purpose of mass communication, then I don't want it.
- Now THIS is pod racing.

I want people to use the right acronym, its a LLM not an AI.
- LLMs are a form of AI.
  
  AI covers so many things that it's inappropriate to hate "AI" when what you really hate is corporate applications of machine learning.
- shut up nerd! /j
  
  You wait till I get home and run your comment through my LLM for a witty response, then you'll see... You'll all see!
- Initialism.
  
  What if I pronounce it lim?
  
  Ahhh looknat me, living the gimmick.
- TBF an LLM would not be a solution to their problem.
- You have to understand that normal people have no idea what the difference is, nor do they care. To them, AI is just a term that loosely describes "computer does magic that appears somewhat intelligent". This type of person would just as likely consider Google Maps to be AI as it would ChatGPT, Alexa, or Siri.

AIs use will never see it reach its full potential because companies are liars and deplorable entities that have historically demonstrated they will screw over everyone and everything for profits.
In another universe, AI would help people. It would tell you that you are eating too much bread. It would alert you that you do not eat enough foods in vitamin A. It would tell you that your late night habits of staying up lead to poor health. It would tell you that going to be before 12am leads to you having much better restorative sleep. It would tell you you’re sitting in one position too long. That if you left now, you’d make it 5m early. The list is endless. A machine always calculating and monitoring your status; in an effort to improve your life.
In our universe it’s going to tell you to buy Anamin’s sleep aid, now 50% off. Then track how much you take it so the company that sell you more. Or pass the data to their “partners” so they can sell you more crap.
- Your proposal sounds bad too. Not malicious like AI in this universe, but unbelievably annoying.
  
  Then don’t listen to it. You’re trying to catch cases like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1d7zbvv/til_that_steve_jobs_had_tendency_to_eat_only_one/

Yeah electronics lately instead of helping people squeezes money from us
Android smartphones are just elaborate ad viewing devices with extra stuff to not throw it out. Apple are subscription milking devices where you effectively pay monthly tribute to be less of a walking data stick. pick ur poison
- Crazy thing is... I'd pay for a service like the one mentioned in the post. As long as it was still a net savings of course. Even if I broke even it would still be taking the mental load of doing that off my wife and I.
  
  It's called a Costco membership
  /S
- Name 1 Apple subscription that improves privacy as you are describing.
  
  What I meant is that apps on the App Store are sub based usually. At least the good ones. It's even rare to have ad revenue, pay to remove ads model. Effectively you have to pay subs to use device to the full on top of hefty apple tax.
  On the play store way more apps are free but shitty quality or riddled with ads from top to bottom. data harvest fest + google selling u as product. Truly dystopic OS.
  Subscription company vs ad company. Pay a lot to not be enslaved by google and I mean a lot like 4000$ (MBP+iPhone+pods+iPad+tv) + 50+$ monthly

Best we can do is sell you a $200 piece of plastic that promises to but doesn't actually do these things, then automate your job away.

I want self organising files and things so bad. I need an algorithm to look through my digital library and fix the metadata.
- Look up llama fs

I don't want AI to give me coupons for the cheapest food available.
I want to be able to use my bike or walk to buy tasty, nutritious, locally produced goods every days.
- OMG, is AI going to stop us from doing that?
  
  Don't you understand that everything bad is ai?
  
  No, but it's absolutely burning through huge amounts of power and water to churn out garbage. Can't bike to the store if it's 130 degrees due to unrestrained climate change.
  Less, 'we're using AI wrong', more, 'is AI even worth it?'.
  
  In it's current iteration and implementation, yes. This iteration doesn't have people's interest at heart and saying otherwise is dishonest. All it is going to do is continue with the status quo, continue isolating people, and set the infrastructure for mega corp agricultural stores like how Amazon does it.
- "I don't want AI to do this thing that some people find useful, I want to do this other thing myself."
  Okay, you're welcome to do so. What does that have to do with AI?

It is, sadly, all very poorly focused on the things that won’t benefit society as a whole, but once again, the ruling class. I really wish AI had not been developed with the intent to make white collar jobs obsolete. If only these same brilliant minds had been focused on robotics and processes that humans don’t want to participate in.
- They are, look at modem factory or mine they're full of robotics, now injuries are incredibly low and many of the most dangerous jobs are as safe as a well run office
  We're in a big transition as new technologies are developed, it's going to take time but there are are some huge things coming soon - llms and cv are enabling fsctory toolarms to leave the factory so expect cooking arms, repair arms, construction arms, micro factories bringing manufacturing back to local markets... sure it sucks we don't have it now but don't hate the early stages of it just because it's not finished yet.
  
  What does creating pictures of astronaut kittens or videos of perpetual zooming have to do with any of that, let alone creating poems about robots and ninjas?

That would be currently possible with a combination of AI and standard computing.
Have a camera on all the places you store food, let AI analyze it to tell you what's missing.
Do some standard web scraping for prices.
Use some clever algorithm to calculate the route (might not be always optimal, but there are some good algorithms for the travelling salesman problem).
Let a LLM write some bullshit around the data to appear human.
???
Profit
- You don't need a clever algorithm for #3. You'll likely only have 4-5 potential targets. You can brute force that in reasonable time.
  
  True enough.
- Suddenly carbon footprint x10
  Frankly we can’t do shit anymore without fusion. We just have to grit our teeth and hope it comes sooner rather than later or maybe… maybe develop in more intricate ways than just more energy per monkey
  
  We can get a whole Egypt's worth of energy back if we stop wasting it with crypto, so not all is lost
  
  I saw that there was a startup trying to make deep, location-agnostic geothermal drilling a thing. Sounds promising if it works.
- Do some standard web scraping for prices.
  Do you understand how hard that is? Most websites do not just let you scrape them entirely because they think you're a competitor. Web scraping involves staying one step ahead of each site. You might as well just pick a site and buy most things there.
  Plus you can just have everything delivered. It's easier and you can get access to sales.
  
  There are 3rd party APIs that handle scraping.... Eg Red circle API. Problem is they don't really have produce and everything up to date.
  
  Yes, I do indeed, for example the AutoTL;DR bot you might have seen around Lemmy (that does web scraping) is mine.
  Sure, you can do an entirely different thing than I was talking about, but then you're replying to something entirely else, aren't you? This was a reaction to a post in the OP which doesn't talk about getting everything delivered.

For that you need an expert system managing a data warehouse/Smart agent. That's not Ai per se
- For that you need companies that find value in cannibalizing sales of their more expensive products even if the quality is better.
  Most stores in general rely on certain sales driving you in and you spending money on the more expensive items because your already there.
  
  What? Man any standard order management system does that and to have one you don't need to be any of those things.
  Y'all nibbas need Jesus
- Expert systems are totally AI
  
  How?
- not Ai That's the original AI that's the Good Old Fashioned AI!

Fuck that. I want AI to power a robot boyfriend.
- Here you go https://boyfriend.myanima.ai/

Ok am I wrong or was this not what Google Assistant used to be in the 2010s?
- It still is. Problem is if you ask it this you might have to triple check what it tells you because it will most likely be wrong.
  
  This is so sad. I bet Alexa can't even play Despacito anymore if I ask her to.

The first iterations of Google Now felt useful in a similar way. Google was already squeezing data out of me, but it did so by marketing a palatable service.
- Yeah, but then idiots felt it was too invasive, so now Google just collects the same amount of data or more... but without as much benefit to the user.

That's not AI, that's just a program easily able to do that without all the "AI" garbage technology. Why do we all of a sudden think that every solution computing does is "AI" now? For fuck's sake.
- Because the average person out there could not make "just a program"... the promise of AI is that anyone can be a programmer now...
  In reality, I would bet a full morning of prompting ChatGPT wouldn't produce what the lady is asking for accurately
  
  So AI can magically see everything in your refrigerator, pantry, etc, right? Oh wait. You need a program created so you can enter what you have and don't have.
  Goddamn, AI is now literally magic to you people. Pathetic.
- A program that can deduce what groceries you need to buy is a type of AI. AI is a much broader category than the LLM stuff that everyone is currently paying attention to. Most things in the field of AI don't have particularly awe inspiring appearances, so companies don't feel compelled to advertise that it's AI because people expect AI to be "like people" which precludes the vast majority of applications.
  
  if (amount_of_bread < bread_threshold) list.bread++;
  That's not AI. That's simple programming. Holy fuck, people have no idea what computing even is any more now that this sci-fi buzzword AI is out there.

I want AI to die and be replaced
- Magic 8 ball says: zombies. Yay!

Should we tell her?
- Scarlett Johansson
  
  I mean should we tell her that programmer can write program that will do exactly what she described

They already have these for browser extension but it's a privacy nightmare

I want both.

Best I can do is give you a list of the worst deals for you that will bring your money to the corporations who paid me the most with a nice helping of targeted ads for all eternity.

It’s honestly not that far off I bet. Though I bet once it does become viable, we’ll find that the best option is buying all your groceries from Amazon, or something like that.
- Or, it wouldn't ever be truly accurate. That would be an anti-capitalism tool and mangled or completely killed in order to ensure profit
- The thing is, you don't need technological advances for that. Someone could have built that ten years ago. No one did, because it's a lot of individual, non-trivial steps.
  Those stores may have that data online somewhere, but how you request it and in which format you get it, that's going to be different for each store. Then you also need information where those stores are and need to integrate some navigation functionality between them.
  And ultimately, your target users aren't exactly willing to spend money, so good luck covering costs for your service.
  
  You are basically giving all the reasons for why this hasn’t been done yet without AI, but none of the reasons for why this can’t be done with AI.
  I know we like to be cynical about the advances of things like chat gpt, but I have found many uses that are very similar to what you describe below. Taking a problem that could be solved with tedious brute force and combining data from multiple sources and knowledge of a scripting language, but instead I ask chat gpt in just the right way and it will get me the answer.
  Also worth noting, grocery store prices are easily accessible online now whereas 10 years ago they were not. It’s just a matter of time before AI gets access to this data and can integrate into whatever models it uses.

Reality. 'AI' application just spyware that tracks your spending habits and sells them to mega corps that then adjust the products and pricing to you to maximise profits. Uptake is below investor expectations as most intelligent people realise the service is an expensive con. VC funds run out and backend is shut down. User left with expensive non-functional device.

Well, Google tried it with their Assistant many years ago, people got scared how smart it was and it got nerfed into a ground.

They're working on that, the easiest bits come first and creativity is easier than ordered thinking and data analysis. People with diminished brain function often use art as therapy and create very creative things, they never analyze and compare datasets for therapy though...
Image gen is a huge part of making useful tools, what we see as the final product- an image generator is actually just a side product of teaching CV to recognize items and apply human labels, this is what will allow you to tell it 'look for red shoes with funky tassels' and it can do it for items not tagged with those descriptions. Plus a million other really useful things, like 'watch granny for signs of distress' without having to explain yes having her hand caught in a loom is distressing.
Also current ai are mostly toys because it's safer to practice and explore toys than tools, it won't be long before you're saying 'you kids don't know about old search, you had to know she what you were looking for and where it should be...'

The farmer would like to not work to make food for these kinds of people. She would love for these kinds of people to feel the heatwave of summer on their back as they pinch yet another tomato for tomorrow's salad.
- What the fuck are you talking about? How is wanting lower grocery prices a bad thing?
  
  The farmer, who works really hard, would get paid less money.
- Before AI, farmers never had to deal with the market and compete for customers :(
  Thanks AI is becoming the new thanks Obama.
  
  But they could make AI work for the farmers too! Like maybe grow vertical farms and let AI robots pick the fruit.
- Yeah farmers hates AI.
  
  I mean, if they could focus AI on farming so she doesn't have to, she probably would be happy?

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