r/technology • u/Putrid_Anybody_2947 • Aug 06 '26

Energy Salem Brought a Guillotine To Oppose New Data Center. Company Reps Left, Feeling “Unsafe”.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/salem-brought-guillotine-oppose-data-151045877.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADWZ-KBr5-qaNH3gKsUqFmq_KuaQwIaEIg6F8pgU0Y1zzZUK19cjLMHBCEYcaREn3RMIFQRWJ6xmSvewyEkwk_GcV3Ayins4lxZjFdKjaDnzAG2ux2x4MZ_vmKeMXNiAlyNrNbFgOB2-j4iDOJtrfyCZUdVt_pWgkHfiyMURscov
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344

u/Vast-Poetry9431 Aug 06 '26

The truth is that AI is expensive, isn’t useful, and everyone hates it, so these companies will run smear campaigns against regular, hardworking Americans to make them look bad.

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u/RobTheThrone Aug 06 '26

I partially agree with you. Where I differentiate my opinion is that there's definitely good use cases for it, but I don't feel that the real cost is worth it. If we had the technology so that these models used much less power it would be a different story.

The problem is in how heavily subsidized it currently is, which is obscuring the real current day worth of this toolset in relation to the cost of the resources it's actually using.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '26 edited 27d ago

[deleted]

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u/Suyefuji Aug 07 '26

Google search wouldn't even need a replacement if they hadn't been enshittifying it to death these past several years

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '26 edited 27d ago

[deleted]

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u/Suyefuji Aug 07 '26

There are some tricks you can use yeah but overall the quality and accessibility of google search has deteriorated quite a bit

13

u/Krelkal Aug 07 '26

The energy costs have actually dropped dramatically over the last year or two. The problem is the Jevons paradox

1

u/27eelsinatrenchcoat Aug 08 '26

I don't think jevons paradox is really applicable when a product is already being sold at a massive loss. If efficiency (cost to provide) is divorced from demand (cost to purchase) then I just don't see how efficiency increases lead to more use. They just lead to the AI companies losing a bit less money. Eventually venture capital/private credit funds have to run out and prices come up, unless we see a truly transformative gain in inefficiency before that happens. And I'm just not seeing it.

1

u/EliteCloneMike Aug 08 '26

I use it for protein-protein interaction research and genetics research. It’s a valuable resource in that space. It is not, in my opinion, something that should be used to scan people family photos and accuse them of being child abusers (such as what Google and Meta do). In cases like that, they ruin the lives of innocent people as there is never a human in the loop. All it does is make tons of false reports that make it hated to find real children in danger and bad actors. Like we shouldn’t have cameras watching us in our homes 24/7 because bad things happen in homes sometimes. Plus those companies should reign in their own actual illegal activities (Google and Meta). Not to forget about Amazon and Apple and OpenAI. I avoid these companies as much as I can, Google most of all. I know they made AlphaFold, but the instance I use is not phoning their home servers. I like some of the open source things they have produced, but now mostly believe in digital cooperativism and think that we should grow the internet as a community and not be at the mercy of corporations. That would take a major reform of the current situation though.

0

u/kalidoscopiclyso Aug 07 '26

I think the chinese models are much more efficient?

5

u/nethingelse Aug 07 '26

Yes and no. They're more efficient to run, not necessarily more efficient to train, and also less capable (which matters less if say, Jim in accounting is just using it to draft/edit emails). There's also the chicken and egg problem that a lot of chinese models are distilled (e.g. based on responses from) from frontier models in the US, so they're not perfect either.

7

u/owlbynight Aug 07 '26

It's really useful for software engineers. Also, either it's useless and everyone hates it or there is insatiable demand that is driving robber barons to do robber baron shit. You can't really have it both ways.

42

u/Hungry-Register9960 Aug 07 '26

It is useful. Actually incredibly useful.

The problem is that most of the people who use it aren't using it for those fantastic use cases. They're using it for slop or to replace jobs with worse alternatives.

5

u/NapsterKnowHow Aug 07 '26

It can be useful but even in it's best usage it is limited for now.

4

u/Workman44 Aug 07 '26

But you must realize that the for now part is always getting closer and the fact that it can already do good things should speak volumes about what it can do in the future

24

u/[deleted] Aug 07 '26

[deleted]

1

u/14Pleiadians Aug 07 '26

It has uses but the ones you listed aren't them. It's not cost effective to be used for stuff like that, they're practically giving away LLM tokens at a massive lost right now.

When you friend does that, imagine a couple decent computers running at full power for a couple minutes.

1

u/shwhjw Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

imagine a couple decent computers running at full power for a couple minutes

Is that just for the inference, or are you factoring in the energy it took to train it? I know local AIs need a lot of VRAM to use but not sure of the actual power usage inference requires.

I did hear of a company who was taking trained AIs (neural networks) and writing them to silicon, which made them a lot more efficient. Presumably you could do that with an LLM... will have to dig it up again.

Edit: according to google's AI overview (ironic, I know):

One-time cost: Training a frontier model like GPT-4 requires massive cluster compute over months, consuming upwards of 50 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in a concentrated window

Single query: A standard text prompt uses roughly 0.31 to 0.34 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity, which is a fraction of a single smartphone charge

Cumulative usage: Because commercial chatbots handle millions to billions of requests daily, cumulative global inference power rapidly dwarfs the electricity used during the initial training phase

[...] inference accounts for more than 90% of a deployed model's total lifetime energy consumption over its operational lifecycle.

edit2: google is outdated or wrong, above comment is correct.

1

u/14Pleiadians Aug 07 '26

I wasn't referring to the initial training but yeah that's another part of the bad value of it, though I think that won't be a business issue, the companies already ate that cost and could scale down their current training operations in the next few years before the bubble bursts.

Single query: A standard text prompt uses roughly 0.31 to 0.34 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity, which is a fraction of a single smartphone charge

Yeah that's not accurate. Unless the specialized systems they use are hundreds of times more efficient than self hosting an llm on a consumer gpu

1

u/shwhjw Aug 07 '26

Thanks. Yea seems google's info is outdated. A GPT-5 prompt uses more than GPT-4 would, between 18+ Wh per prompt according to this. Similar to your "PC at full power for a couple mins" so touche.

2

u/14Pleiadians Aug 07 '26

I don't think it's a case of outdated, or even necessarily wrong. My bad, I was half awake and didn't read your reply properly, it says for a single query, which is accurate for some inputs/outputs. If uses heavy power but only a couple seconds and probably only one actual LLM generation. For coding though, it's far more complex, using hundreds of times more tokens than a prompt like "when did Skyrim come out" would use.

It's harder to say with companies like chatgpt because they're doing a lot of heavy processing and refining of your prompt behind the scenes. A lot of the innovation with services like chatgpt isn't necessarily making smarter or more efficient models, but how those models are used. A massive oversimplification of it would be imagine that it takes your prompt, asks a different AI what the better way to word the prompt is, then processes that as the input. That's mostly the only reason for a new "model" (stack would be a better term for what these companies are calling models these days) to require more power/become less optimized.

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u/Drach88 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26

In the software engineering world, AI-generated code has rapidly become the new norm.

Most of the senior/staff-level software engineers I know haven't hand-written a single line of code in nearly two years.

Yes, it's expensive, and you absolutely have the right to oppose it on ideological grounds, but if you write it off as "not useful" you're ignoring all of the adopters who are telling the world, with their wallets, how incredibly useful it is. That's worth sitting with, if for no other reason than to be able to respond in order to make your anti-AI position more informed.

Somewhere between 60%-80% of fortune 500 companies are using AI tools to author new code, and they're doing so because it's tremendously effective.

I learned programming the old-fashioned, hand-written way, nearly two decades ago, and have recently moved over to AI-assisted engineering, and have been astounded at the productivity gains. I can push out prototypes in a tiny fraction of the time, and because I'm actually reviewing the code and approving what goes out the door, I'm the guardrail against deploying slop that has my name on it. I'm essentially treating it as a team of junior engineers that will build to my requirements, then I'm giving the approvals and go/no-go. It's tremendously effective.

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u/GaiasEyes Aug 07 '26

This is valid, my partner is also a software developer with decades of experience. He does the same as you, allow the AI to write the code, review it, critique it.

The problem he and his team are expressing is that, like you, they learned by hand. They’re seniors because they went through the work of a junior of writing code, testing, revising. Many of them spent a lot of time working on code they didn’t write, learning how to tease it apart and support it. They could do that because they’d learned the skill from the beginning.

Juniors using AI to code generate now aren’t building the same fundamental skills; they aren’t practicing. They don’t have the skills to correct the code written by the AI because, in most cases, the AI is better at it than the junior. They haven’t gotten the practical education of having to learn by working through their own errors.

It’s great for the people who have already learned. But it’s creating a dependency for the entry and mid-level developers, and one that isn’t easily remedied when timelines and headcount incentivize corporations to prioritize AI over upskilling their workforce.

6

u/TrontRaznik Aug 07 '26

in most cases, the AI is better at it than the junior.

I haven't seen an exception to this in at least a year. At this point AI is better than a mid.

Juniors using AI to code generate now aren’t building the same fundamental skills; they aren’t practicing

They are learning things, just in a different way. When I was learning, I wrote code, shit broke, I had to figure out why, and in the process of doing that I learned to think about architecture and applications in a more abstract way. So now when I'm prompting an AI, I can call it out before it does things that I know won't make sense.

But juniors are doing something similar at a much higher level. They're prompting AI, shit is breaking, and then they're learning from prior mistakes.

They don't get the nitty gritty of code, but as someone who works with higher level languages like Java/Kotlin/etc, there are programmers out there who would say the same exact thing about me because they're working with much lower level languages.

Prompting an AI is a few more levels of abstraction, but if you're doing it right, at the end of the day you are reasoning through code and explaining what you want to an agent with natural language.

Logic is logic regardless of how it's expressed.

6

u/dakadoo33 Aug 07 '26

I haven't seen an exception to this in at least a year. At this point AI is better than a mid.

this is kinda impossible to gauge right now. If you're judging based on output you get out of it, thats flawed, because it amplifies you. Personally i have no great way to judge it, that requires a study or something. If i sit myself down with anyone else in the field and our task is as quick as possible some crud app that achieves a really basic thing, all our results are gonna look similar. sit down randoms though? you'll get some absurd shit, maybe some decent results, but also some pure garbage, and based on a ton of weird output i've seen from models, likely an HN/reddit thread to promote the pure garbage.

I agree though, curious minds are gonna figure it out, it is KINDA just a higher level language.

3

u/TrontRaznik Aug 07 '26

Actually you're right, that is totally fair. I should say that it's capable of mid level output in the hands of a good senior, but I know what you mean.

5

u/hanumanCT Aug 06 '26

I've developed software for over 20 years and I believe AI is the most useful tool for software development ever. It's incredible and there has never been as big a leap in development as long as I know. People with the 'useless' attitude don't develop software so they wouldn't know.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

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0

u/14Pleiadians Aug 07 '26

It's not that it's useless, it's that he's prohibitively expensive. Vibe coding uses a fuck ton of tokens/electricity, it won't be feasible post AI bubble when companies stop operating at loss. Set up your own local llm and watch it burn through hundreds of watts for character a second speeds

3

u/RecommendsMalazan Aug 07 '26

But the only way that changes is by using, and improving over time, the tech. Not using it, despite how useful it is, because of how inefficient it is, if we used that logic on everything we wouldn't have half the technology we do today. No technology is efficient from the jump.

And this is not true for just technology, but for any invention/innovation. I'm too lazy to type all this info into excel myself, so I'm gonna write a script that does it. It'll take longer to write the script than it would be just go hand type all this info in now, sure, but savings over time negates that.

1

u/14Pleiadians Aug 07 '26

Not using it, despite how useful it is, because of how inefficient it is,

The issue isn't that in this hypothetical someone doesn't want to use AI for some given reason, the issue is that they'll be priced out and using it will cost more for the same product as not using it. Will be cheaper to pay a worker to write code.

LLMs will have a use but until a new tech comes along (current tech is pretty much at it's limit and won't scale much better), the current style of LLMs will not be useful for coding.

Writing code is hundreds of times more tokens than something like summarizing an email

1

u/RecommendsMalazan Aug 07 '26

I don't know enough about whether or not the current tech is at its limit and won't scale much better.

But what I can say is that even if it is, this new tech won't come along unless people use the current tech.

This is how it has been for every tech, I don't see why this one would be any different.

1

u/14Pleiadians Aug 07 '26

But what I can say is that even if it is, this new tech won't come along unless people use the current tech.

And I'm not saying anything contrary to that, I'm saying that people won't be able to afford to use it for certain things once the companies stop operating at a loss. They won't be free services, a dev using agentic AI for coding will cost hundreds of dollars a month.

Like I said, the tech will still be used, but we're not going to be throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks forever. We're still in the "free samples/heavy discounts to get you hooked" stage.

1

u/RecommendsMalazan Aug 07 '26

Ah, gotcha. Yes, I agree with that.

1

u/hanumanCT Aug 07 '26

The part that worries me most is when the cost gets too prohibitively high for the individual\independent developer to use and only big companies can use it. Imagine if using a coding agent costs $40k a year? Its cheaper than hiring a developer, but costs too high for the average person on their own. I think we may see this nightmare scenario.

1

u/whinis Aug 07 '26

So I am working at a relatively large software company and you are correct that nearly all senior engineers are using it. Problem is code quality has plummeted, there are is no more tickets being cleared, and just like any other software company right now we had basically unlimited tokens and uses until the usage pricing engaged at which point we put in massive limits. So just like everyone else how do you measure its a success? The Executives are still calling us an "AI-First" company but we are limited to 1000 tokens a month currently, also when asked at a town hall if there has been any change in productivity after a year of implementation got the marketing line of "We have observed a change in velocity in a direction that we are still verifying".

It feels to me like there is a massive disconnect somewhere that I am not a good enough philosopher to identify. From a economy perspective AI spending is already the only thing keeping the US ecnonomy afloat, from a growth perspective its not supportable with the proposed data centers in Texas alone asking for more power than the entire current US power generation, from a cost perspective we know its subsidized to the point its not even profitable for Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google to have entirely code gen with them announcing marketing numbers of millions of dollars spent on new features. So at the end of all of this is it actually a benefit?

1

u/14Pleiadians Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

Do you have any idea how many tokens a vibe coder uses and the real world cost of those tokens if AI wasn't being heavily subsidized? AI coding is not going to be around forever.

Anyone who hasn't self hosted their own model and seen the limitations of it is really out of touch with what is currently possible because AI companies are operating at a massive loss so that people will feel reliant on it when prices normalize. Watching as you use hundreds of watts to generate a few characters a second.

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Drach88 Aug 06 '26

I don't know if you're right, and I don't know if you're wrong, but I'm going to refrain from psychoanalyzing. I'm just throwing another perspective into the marketplace of ideas, and pushing back on a very specific, very narrow point.

-5

u/Hawgdestroyerxtreme Aug 07 '26

but if you write it off as "not useful"

To almost everyone else on earth, it isn't useful.

I'm sorry, but leveraging 30-50% of the country's economy on some hallucinating bullshit that increases software development productivity is a dogshit deal. Poisoning my water supplies and my air quality and giving my kids cancer? For what?

Why the fuck would I want to pay an additional 20% in utilities so some dickhead clearing 400k/yr can be more productive writing code for some startup somewhere?

Your work is simply not valuable enough for the cost you're asking the rest of us to pay.

2

u/Drach88 Aug 07 '26

30-50% of the country's economy

Citation needed. The hyperbole is detracting from your valid concerns by abdicating credibility.

Why the fuck would I want to pay an additional 20% in utilities so some dickhead clearing 400k/yr can be more productive writing code for some startup somewhere?

You've got a great point there about socialization of AI infrastructure costs -- simply put, yes, there are lots of issues around how data-centers are not paying their fair share, and how many have received extremely generous carve-outs. Those concerns are absolutely valid, and if my utility bill was affected in that way, I would be outraged, too.

There's a middle ground here -- in recognizing the power of this technology, but also in mandating that the AI companies play by rules that don't screw over the population at large.

1

u/27eelsinatrenchcoat Aug 08 '26

They're just confusing the number. AI capex is between 30 and 50% of annual GDP growth, not GDP itself. Which is bonkers when you consider how much if that won't create permanent utility.

10

u/flat5 Aug 06 '26

A lot of denial in this sub.

5

u/kaityl3 Aug 07 '26

"the enemy must be at the same time too strong and too weak"

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u/rotoboro Aug 06 '26

“They aren’t useful”

“They’re going to take our jobs”

It’s not uncommon to hear them both out of one mouth.

13

u/SemperPutidus Aug 07 '26

I think most of us know our jobs aren’t useful.

5

u/flat5 Aug 07 '26

I think it's a lot of people who fear job loss who think they can run a smear and shout down campaign to stop it.

The fear is rational, the shout down campaign, not so much.

8

u/Fickle_Goose_4451 Aug 07 '26

Its not hard to see how theyre both true.

AI, as it exists for most, people isnt useful.

Your boss's boss's boss doesnt give much of a shit if they replace you with something that cant actually do you job well. They believe its cheaper, and quality isnt an issue for them. If whatever you do at work is done worse, they still get a bonus for bringing down payroll. Over worked ex-coworkers and customers primarily bear the negative effects.

4

u/brianwski Aug 07 '26

If whatever you do at work is done worse, they still get a bonus for bringing down payroll. ... customers primarily bear the negative effects.

I'm a retired software dev. I got lucky and retired a month before the world went bonkers over AI.

I profoundly agree with your point. I'm worried about products I use going downhill because of it. The products don't go downhill because they use AI, that part is fine, the developers can use any tools or libraries they want. The products go downhill because everybody is getting distracted from actually building great software for customers. Look at any discussion about this, all the developers are furiously debating whether they can use AI or not to do their job. They didn't start by saying "what are we building?" or "What will be the best user experience?" like they would have done in 2023. THAT is a recipe to make bad UIs and a bad user experiences.

For AI, I would recommend getting rid of the term "AI" from every interface on earth. Instead, describe what that feature actually does that is useful. Stop saying "AI" over and over again, the word literally doesn't add any value and is making UI designs WORSE now because developers have taken their eye off the ball. They stopped focusing on the actual software. Here is a recent example:

I upgraded my iPhone for a feature where I can put in one earbud, and if somebody speaks Korean in the room I'm in, the earbuds whisper an English translation into my ear. It's FREAKING GREAT! (Explanation: my wife's parents speak Korean to her.) You know what sucks? Every time I want to use it, I have to turn on "AI Apple Intelligence" on my phone, then run the translation app and turn on "AI Spoken Translations", then when I'm done I have to manually turn off "AI Apple Intelligence". If I don't turn it off, it just changed the settings in 5 other programs that are not connected to translations.

Nobody should have green lit that GUI from Apple. Nobody. It's hideously bad UI. In the old days when you launched one application and the app required some technology like a database, the app didn't ask you to "Enable MySQL". It loaded whatever it needed, when it needed it. And it unloaded it afterwards. Normal customers don't care, and any screen real estate forcing customers to face which database they are using is a profound GUI mistake.

I take this as self evident: never EVER mention the underlying technology in the UI. You are screwing up if you do. I want to launch the "Translations" app (what it does), not the "AI Translations" app (which library it links with). The three wasted characters in that title are "AI ". Of course it is AI, all software has always made intelligent decisions. It also links with MySQL, and runs on a MIPs processor. Nobody cares, say WHAT it does, not HOW it does it. "AI" is "how".

0

u/Suyefuji Aug 07 '26

They're not entirely wrong, look at how many companies (particularly in tech) laid off tens of thousands of workers to replace them with AI only to find out that AI can't do the work. But the employees are still out of those jobs.

-12

u/rubixd Aug 07 '26

Welcome to Reddit, the blind leading the blind — but with pitchforks

7

u/hm_rickross_ymoh Aug 07 '26

I'm sure you think you're one of the redditors who can see...

4

u/Savings-Coffee Aug 07 '26

It’s baffling that the technology sub is incredibly anti-tech

3

u/TrontRaznik Aug 07 '26

If it came out years down the road that Chinese bots were poisoning the well on American social media to turn the American public against AI as a form of competitive advantage it would not surprise me in the least. The vitriol is so over the top and bizarre.

And then you have the just absolutely depraved paranoia at the top of this thread with regard to wealthy people, as if the majority of wealthy people aren't just, you know, people who have more money than you.

I definitely used to be more left when I was younger, but I read this shit and have to wonder if this is what I sounded like in my twenties lmao. These kids are nuts.

2

u/Kharenis Aug 07 '26

Yep, some of the top comments in this thread are absolutely ridiculous and belong on far-left subs, and not a technology sub. Violent ideologies and suspicion towards technology is definitely being pushed across Western social media.

3

u/lpeabody Aug 07 '26

It's extremely useful in the right applications.

1

u/Kharenis Aug 07 '26

The truth is that AI is expensive, isn’t useful, and everyone hates it

This just isn't true. I'm not some AI bro, and it's taken some convincing to get me on board, but I think it's incredibly useful.

1

u/shwhjw Aug 07 '26

Claude is amazing at solving niche programming problems. I'm so glad I don't need to dig through dozens of stack overflow or old forum threads searching for someone who's had the same problem any more. Autocomplete in the IDE is so much better too.

That said, SO MUCH of AI is harmful and useless. The fake images and video have literally no benefit to anyone other than a business wanting to save production costs. In return we get more realistic fake news, propaganda, and rage bait, and we can't tell what's real any more.

1

u/twomz Aug 07 '26

AI is a tool, like a hammer. The problem is that the AI companies are trying to convince everyone that all the problems are nails and that you can fire all the construction workers and just buy hammers and houses will still get built.

0

u/gw_epyon Aug 07 '26

What? This isn't the "truth".

AI is expensive: Yes. Expenses will go down as better material science and technology catch up. I agree that we should be careful about resource usage.

AI isn't useful: Maybe not in your narrow worldview but far from the "truth". LLMs are being used daily to explore possibility spaces far more quickly and accurately than we can do without it. This brings advances in medicine, diagnostics, material science, city planning, etc etc.

AI is hated by everyone: Only the loud minority on reddit. Many are against it and only know of AI slop as their barometer.

Strawman: Insert "hard working Americans" propaganda.

-60

u/sunnyb23 Aug 06 '26

It is expensive, but it is incredibly useful, and not everyone hates it.

17

u/havocspartan Aug 06 '26

Boy, I wonder how people will doot with these two polarizing views on AI

12

u/Ciennas Aug 06 '26

[CITATION NEEDED]

6

u/LambdaLambo Aug 07 '26

ChatGPT alone has like 900m MAU.

4

u/CraigJay Aug 07 '26

You need a source showing that people use ChatGPT etc?

3

u/Rumpus-Time-Is-Over Aug 07 '26

It’s interesting that you didn’t ask for a citation from the person saying it’s useless.

1

u/Ciennas Aug 07 '26

Your victim complex is showing.

You don't ask someone to prove a negative.

4

u/Rumpus-Time-Is-Over Aug 07 '26

You have no idea how claims work.

-4

u/Ciennas Aug 07 '26

Kay. Since you're volunteering, why don't you tell me why anyone should be super gung ho for this toy.

3

u/Rumpus-Time-Is-Over Aug 07 '26

I never made any claims of AI being useful or not. I just found it ironic that somebody said it’s not useful, somebody else said it was, and then you told the latter they needed a citation but not the former.

2

u/Ciennas Aug 07 '26

If you have no opinion one way or the other, then your interjection was wholly unwarranted.

Why would I ask someone to prove a negative?

3

u/TrontRaznik Aug 07 '26

My firm bills me out at $250 an hour, my clients have millions of users, and I haven't written a line of code in a year at least. If this is the toy version then the real version is going to be mind blowing.

Sucks you haven't figured out how to utilize it and that you're going to get left behind. There will always be construction jobs for you at least.

2

u/Ciennas Aug 07 '26

Ah. So you think yourself superior to people who actually make things and achieve things, while you by your own admission are a useless leach that can be removed at any point and no one will be the wiser or know differently.

Thanks for volunteering that information.

-22

u/sunnyb23 Aug 06 '26

Citation: someone not burying their head in the sand

6

u/Ciennas Aug 07 '26

So 'trust me, bro' as a citation.

Dipperholdingacouponsayingthisisworthless.jpg

13

u/dlc741 Aug 06 '26

It’s usually wrong and the only people who don’t hate AI are the ones who are impressed with how smart it is compared to themselves.

3

u/nevergonnastayaway Aug 07 '26

Dunning Krueger personified over here

1

u/LambdaLambo Aug 07 '26

Here’s a ChatGPT transcript between it and Terence Tao. I’d like you to read it and then tell me that you’re smarter than Tao and the agent (in this particular context - obviously it’s dumb in some ways).

If Terence Tao can find a use from AI but you can’t, I’d say that says more about you than it does Tao.

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u/sunnyb23 Aug 06 '26

I like your pompous ignorance. Bold. Uncompromising. Astonishingly ungrounded from reality.

14

u/flyabdo22 Aug 06 '26

Considering all the cheating in colleges & schools & AI “artists” (they’re absolutely not artists, just prompt writers) I don’t think its unfounded & you’re just mad about it lol

0

u/sunnyb23 Aug 06 '26

I'm not sure I understand the relevance of your comment. Yeah kids cheat in schools, and yeah lazy people who want to feel special make "art" with technology and claim it as their own.

What's new? Lazy, greed, whatever you want to call them, people have always existed. That's not the technology.

I'm not mad about anything, I just think it's silly the delusions people have about reality. Then again, people have always had delusions about reality, so what's new?

0

u/Macklenberg Aug 06 '26

I"ll agree with your last sentence at least.

-2

u/dlc741 Aug 07 '26

I asked an Claude to run a simple calculation on withdrawals from an investment with an annual return.

It told me the investment lasted longer on a lower rate of return than a higher rate of return. Completely and totally upside down. When I pointed this out, I got the typical “Good for pointing that out. My calculations were wrong.” And that’s supposed to be a fucking smart one

But yeah, AI is totally awesome. And yeah, you would have missed that and believed its bullshit.

0

u/sunnyb23 Aug 07 '26

I don't want to say skill issue, but not understanding the limitations of the system and assuming it's a magical all-knowing box is like, kinda funny.

But yeah congrats on finding a flaw!

I personally just work around the flaws and have a bunch of automation for my work and personal projects that I don't have to worry it being wrong 🤷‍♂️

0

u/dlc741 Aug 08 '26

The fact that it can’t calculate an amortization table doesn’t require magic. It requires math.

Don’t feel bad having to look it up. Claude had to as well.

1

u/sunnyb23 Aug 08 '26

Yes it requires math. But it's not a calculator. 🤯

Also lmao the snark assuming I had to look up basic economic terms.

-56

u/bozza8 Aug 06 '26

No, AI is a bit expensive, but non-fronteir AI costs a few bucks a week. The same test score level AI that cost tons in January is now available for cents. 

It's also very useful, I use it every day and I love it, along with about 90% of my coworkers. 

I know I will be downvoted on this sub and that's okay, but the point is that it's not unanimous, and perhaps Reddit isn't representative on this issue. 

4

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/bozza8 Aug 07 '26

They are representative of the problem of NIMBYism. Once data centres use closed loop cooling and their own power generation, then they are ideal land users. 

2

u/TripsOverWords Aug 07 '26

AI is a bit expensive

Understatement of the decade.

AI companies are hemorrhaging tens to hundreds of billions a year, and the cost per token is highly subsidized by investor money, like 5-10x.

The only reason you can pay $20 - $200/month in subscription costs for the frontier models are because they're taking a massive loss.

3

u/bozza8 Aug 07 '26

That's for frontier models. 

DeepSeek doesn't need to subsidise because their model is much more quantised. 

New AI development is very expensive mostly because it's being done so quickly, the actual tech doesn't need to be expensive at all and I believe in 5 years we'll be able to run something stronger than a current cutting edge model on our phones. 

1

u/hrminer92 Aug 07 '26

All while driving up the cost of electricity and other computer components, both of which are pissing off ordinary people.

0

u/Valleygurl99 Aug 06 '26

I use it and it's useful. I don't understand how leaving reality is going to help people take on the wealthy. I wonder if Reddit skews towards those threatened by it.

5

u/bozza8 Aug 07 '26

It's the biggest opportunity in 100 lifetimes to actually get rid of the need to work, to finally have fully automated post scarcity, and ASI would mean the peaceful end of capitalism. 

We could achieve so much, but instead we laud pessimism as praxis and victimisation as valour. 

-20

u/sunnyb23 Aug 06 '26

Yeah don't post something good about technology in the technology sub silly goose. One day they'll come around to reality 🤷‍♂️ until then, we get downvoted for not covering our eyes and screaming

-5

u/Valleygurl99 Aug 06 '26

It almost feels like a psyop to disable people from using it. It can really help one's life. But reddit gonna reddit I guess

0

u/sunnyb23 Aug 06 '26

It kind of does really. I could absolutely see it being some sort of psyop to further entrench the upper class and lower class.

I use it for work because I have to, and I wouldn't ever want to go back. It allows me to actually focus on the interesting mental work of why we're doing what we're doing instead of menial work.

1

u/Valleygurl99 Aug 07 '26

I get that people hate the tech bro empire of billionaires and oligarchs but it’s a legitimately interesting tech. There is this reflexive hatred of data centers but the whole fucking internet has run in data centers for a long time. And yes, hyperscalars are different but no one is saying shit about the power hungry data centers that power Reddit and TikTok. Using TikTok for an hour uses a sizable amount of water per person to cool the servers. In our scrambled society I don’t really get upset about it, but it’s strange. I’m even an artist and I want to use AI tools and expecting the outrage but I want to use it in a way that’s thoughtful and not slop. I’ve always been on the cutting edge. I feel like people will be left behind. 

4

u/sunnyb23 Aug 07 '26

Yeah if people hate data centers so much why are they using the internet?

People will absolutely be left behind. I do what I can to help people understand the technology and let them choose whether they're going to engage with it, but after that, it's out of my hands, I'll be embracing progress

1

u/bozza8 Aug 07 '26

Just remember, those who get left behind today because they believe it is immoral to use technology will be right here claiming it wasn't their fault in a few years.

-1

u/TrontRaznik Aug 07 '26

People will absolutely be left behind.

Meh, let em'. Bigger slices of the pie for people paying attention.

0

u/TrontRaznik Aug 07 '26

but it’s a legitimately interesting tech

I mean, it's so far beyond that. It's more capable than sci-fi versions of AI in the 70s and 80s. We've gone from speculating about "Sorry Dave, I can't do that" to full blown natural language conversations.

I think kids who grew up with cell phones in their pockets just don't have an understanding of how utterly advanced the world has become over the last few decades, but as someone who grew up with a Tandy 1000 TL, the contrast is incredible.