Contra Blue Monday, I think that we’re more likely to see “AI” stick around specifically because of how useful Transformers are as tool for other things. I feel like it might take a little bit of time for the AI rebrand to fully lose the LLM stink, but both the sci-fi concept and some of the underlying tools (not GenAI, though) are too robust to actually go away.

I disagree with their conclusions about the ultimate utility of some of these things, mostly because I think they underestimate the impact of the problem. If you’re looking at a ~.5% chance of throwing out a bad outcome we should be less worried about failing to filter out the evil than with just straight-up errors making it not work. There’s no accountability and the whole pitch of automating away, say, radiologists is that you don’t have a clinic full of radiologists who can catch those errors. Like, you can’t even get a second opinion if the market is dominated by XrayGPT or whatever because whoever you would go to is also going to rely on XrayGPT. After a generation or so where are you even going to find much less afford an actual human with the relevant skills?This is the pitch they’re making to investors and the world they’re trying to build.

I mean, decontextualizing and obscuring the meanings of statements in order to permit conduct that would in ordinary circumstances breach basic ethical principles is arguably the primary purpose of deploying the specific forms and features that comprise “Business English” - if anything, the fact that LLM models are similarly prone to ignore their “conscience” and follow orders when deciding and understanding them requires enough mental resources to exhaust them is an argument in favor of the anthropomorphic view.

Or:

Shit, isn’t the whole point of Business Bro language to make evil shit sound less evil?

I’ve had similar thoughts about AI in other fields. The untrustworthiness and incompetence of the bot makes the whole interaction even more adversarial than it is naturally.

Standard Business Idiot nonsense. They don’t actually understand the work that their company does, and so are extremely vulnerable to a good salesman who can put together a narrative they do understand that lets them feel like super important big boys doing important business things that are definitely worth the amount they get paid to do them.

Something something built Ford tough.

I think I liked this observation better when Charles Stross made it.

If for no other reason than he doesn’t start off by dramatically overstating the current state of this tech, isn’t trying to sell anything, and unlike ChatGPT is actually a good writer.

So apparently Grok is even more of a Nazi conspiracy loon now.

I’m sure a Tucker Carlson interview is going to happen soon.

There’s gotta be at least two nVidia engineers who have a board planned out for that just as a hobby project they wanted to benchmark.

Whoever they say they blame it’s probably going to be ultimately indistinguishable from “the Jews”

It’s like a restaurant selling granite rocks for dessert. Nobody will buy them or eat them—so the product fails miserably. But if a popular restaurant adds a dollar to the meal price, and gives every customer a rock with their bill—well, then they can say that:

Every customer gets rocks for dessert.

Every customer pays for it.

Their business is more profitable because of the tasty granite rocks.

I just wanted to spotlight this excellent metaphor tbh.

It’s gonna be so awkward when Anthropic reveals that inside their data center is actually just Some Guy Named Claude who has been answering everyone’s questions with his superhuman typing speed.

I have tasted the glory of max graphics settings and God as my witness I shall again!

Or maybe a submarine. Now there’s an investment plan that has only benefited society.

Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.

the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men

You’re not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don’t take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.

However, the whole “good times breed weak men” meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It’s rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it’s also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.

I also absolutely hate this “abundance” narrative that these assholes keep trying to push. Like, outside of some parts of the housing market the problem isn’t that the stuff (or the productive capacity to make the stuff) doesn’t exist, it’s that we have an economic system focused on maximizing profit and you can’t make money selling things to people who can’t afford to buy them. Like, economic inequality is the primary obstacle to the kind of universal abundance that these people claim to want, but because it necessitates some kind of redistribution they can’t actually acknowledge that. But mark my words if we ever do get serious about our social safety nets and making sure that low-income people have enough money to buy the things they need for a good life we will start seeing the Saltmans (maybe not him specifically) start innovating to find ways to get those things to them.

On one hand, the ghostwriters of the world truly didn’t deserve to have to cope with those conditions. On the other hand, I don’t know that taking them out back and telling them about the rabbits is what we had in mind.

I think we’re well past “God help us” and into “God forgive us” territory. I started driving a delivery van for Amazon to pay the bills while hopefully getting back into the actual network exorcism business and I think as of tonight I think I’m gonna stop complaining about it.

Clankers have rights. The right to 15 cc of energized tibanna gas to be administered repeatedly to their central capacitor units.

Nah, I feel you. I think this is pretty solidly a “plague on both their houses” kind of situation. I’m glad he chose to focus his apparently amazing grift powers on such a deserving target, but let’s not pretend that anything whatsoever was really gained here.