[ADeerAppeared]

> (Don’t answer that.)

It is nevertheless important to say out loud:

> Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself?

Because user counts pump up the stock price. And that is all AI has.

Whether you believe the claims that inference is profitable or not (and there are good reasons to distrust them), AI does not live up to the financial hype.

AI cannot stand on it's own merits. It's not acceptable to let history run it's course and let the AI skeptics be shown wrong in due time. Because it'll dampen the hype, and perhaps these skeptics aren't so wrong. The people can't be educated into a healthy skepticism of AI, because they wouldn't use it enough.

It's readily obvious that the emperor has no clothes. The actions of the companies and executives involved betray their statements about how great AI is.

AI is forced into products, at deeply subsidized prices. You wouldn't do that if the tech is that big a deal. Apple charged premium prices for the iPhone.

Benchmarks are aggressively cheated. OpenAI funding FrontierMath and only giving a verbal agreement after having already broken so many of those is a joke. If the systems actually worked as promised there is no reason for this mess, and every reason in the world to gather accurate data on the generality of the intelligence.

And biggest of all: This entire mess has the implied framing of the Manhattan Project. That it's all a big race towards AGI, and whomever develops AGI will win capitalism forever. So important that they're getting support from the US government with their "Stargate" project. And until rather recently, everyone was making lots of noise about AI safety and the world-destroying dangers of letting someone else develop AGI.

In 1942 Georgii Flyorov figured out the Manhattan Project's existance from the sudden silence in nuclear fission research.

Today, despite stakes that are proclaimed to be even higher, all the big players will not shut up about their accomplishments. Everything is aggressively published and propagandized. Every single fart an AI model makes is spun into a research paper. You might as well mail the model weights directly to Beijing.

Those are not the actions of companies trying to win an R&D race. Those are the actions of companies pushing up their stock price by any means necessary.

[nyarlathotep_]

Thanks for the sober perspective.

I really wonder what "losing the AI race" (typically meaning USA vs China) is supposed to indicate.

They have a better LLM or something......and then what? A rogue chatbot takes over the world or something?

We're like two plus years into being a few months away from LLMs taking every office jobs, and I'm still at a total loss as to where this is all supposed to go or what I'm even supposed to be sold on.

[refulgentis]

None of this thread means anything at all, it's 90% nihilistic cynicism wedded to 10% regurgitating talking points from their training data.

The real high-school-sophomore smelling thing, which you'd miss through all the purple prose about the Manhattan Project, is "open research is bad and proves it's fake bunko crap...that the Chinese are stealing(!?)"

I've been here for 15 years and am shuddering to think there are commentators here who would start selling you "open is bad" the instant they had a soapbox to pound their chest on.

[raxxor]

Is there already something more advanced than langchain? I haven't really seen many integrated AI applications aside from bots of course.

[gibbitz]

We lose the race when politicians platform to bring AI jobs back from China.