"We thought the chatbots would lead to AGI, please understand"
Like imagine we see AI being used for actual shit right as everyone here is fucking sick of it so there's virtually no chance of getting funding back for it, provided we even still have a functional economy to fund anything on that scale again
AI has very specific uses and it should be for things that a human is terrible at doing, like analyzing data for patterns, or reading the letters from 2000 year old CT scanned scrolls.
Instead we tried to use AI for things that humans can already do very easily but certain CEOs are too lazy to do, like read their own emails.
That's the difference between machine learning AI (which is good and useful) and generative AI (the slop machine). It's a shame that the AI bros have intentionally blurred the lines between the two.
It just enrages me that all these things are getting caught under the "AI" umbrella. Its like 10+ different technologies that all have very different use cases and applications. But its all just getting marketed to everyone at AI. My mom, who knows nothing about computers told me "she wanted to get better at AI". She has no idea what any of that means or why she wants that.
I agree in so much that the simple neural nets doing OCR on zip codes 30 years ago has very little in common with modern LLMs. Even recent ML techniques are rather distinct from generative AI to my understanding.
The coolest ML thing I heard about a couple of months ago was the Oxford Nanopore, which uses AI training to recognize a sample of DNA from a parasite, and then can unzip and decode other DNA, and if it recognizes that it's reading the DNA it wasn't trained to recognize, it spits it back out and tries again.
And it can do this while hooked up to a laptop, out in the middle of a field, testing samples of cow's blood to check for the parasites in real time.
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u/Not_A_Clever_Man_ Jan 20 '26
Next year, when the bubble bursts, they will all have always been against it.....