30 year IT Professional here.

The thing about AI that most people do not understand is the sheer amount of processing power required and just how much that requirement impacts everything. Entire data centers dedicated to one thing that can require the output of a power plant and the associated cooling requirement. I believe Microsoft is in the process of reactivating Three Mile Island TMI-1 reactor. TMI-2 was destroyed in an accident in 1979.

For what? What is it actually doing that is truly worth investing those kind of resources?

That’s not even considering the financial investment. Which has resulted in tech companies taking a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” tactic to get it to start making money. Tactics like that usually result in a bubble where the technology is perceived to have more value that it really does. The problem with this is people won’t spend their money on something that does not return their investment. So it’s a matter of time that we have these huge data centers sitting all over the country abandoned.

I was initially impressed when ChatGPT and Midjourney came out and I was playing around with them. But the novelty quickly wore off, and as I learned more about the flaws in how they operate and the negative environmental effects, the more I came to dislike it. Now, I actively hate and avoid AI.

Actual AI for scientific research I’m OK with.

But AI shit crammed into literally everything. No sir, I hate it sir.

I dont work in IT so I may have misconceptions so I’m open to being corrected. What I dont understand is general AI/LLM usage. One place I frequent, one guy literally answers every post with “Gemini says…”. People just dont seem to bother thinking any more. AI/LLM doesnt seem to offer any advantage over traditional search & you constantly gave to fact check it. Garbage in, garbage out. Soon it’ll start learning from its own incorrect hallucinations & we won’t be able to tell right from wrong.

I have succumbed a couple of times. One time it actually helped (I’m not a coder, it was a coding related question which it did help with). With a self host/Linux permissions question it fucked up so badly I actually lost access to an external drive. Im no expert with linux, Im learning & managed to resolve it myself.

AI answers have been blocked from DDG on all my devices.

I dedictated my science fair on machine learning. I think it was one of my special interests, since I learned linear algebra and calculus + some statistics to understand how to make one.

I tried making an AI that would learn how to play PuyoPuyo, but I used a single DQL neural network, so it was pretty bad 😅. It just spent its time putting the pieces on the side instead of actually getting more chains.

I even remember telling my classmates about ML during an unrelated presentation, telling them that they should get ready for a new era of advanced AI (I cringe everytime I remember this. Hopefully they forgot lol)

But yeah, chatGPT (or its predecessor. I remeber it being called something else) was pretty fun. I remember annoying my best friends by asking it te generate a donald trump speech on their favorite characters. They were verry annoyed, but nowadays they use AI like it’s their second brain haha.

Needless to say, I got to experience beforehand how capitalism ruins certain aspects of innovation. Don’t get me wrong, good progress has been made, but I feel like slapping LLMs on every AI problem (or transformers in general) is not the way to go, even if it pleases investors. There are many types of machine learning algorithms out there, for different types of problems. I feel like LLMs are a part of the puzzle, but not enough for AGI, and putting all the ressources into trying to make LLMs what it’s not best at doing a waste.

Also for the environmental side… All I’ll say is that companies knew the devestating effects on the environment that a large scale ML AI would have. I even remember feeling bad training my AI for the science fair, because I was essentialy leaving my computer open for hours running at max power. If a 14 year old knew this was bad for energy consumption and the environment, you bet google, meta and the rest knew as well.

I studied Machine Learning in college and was excited by the developments being made in Neural Networks.

I followed the tech closely the entire time, even today.

But once we got a good working general use LLM then marketing teams went fucking hog wild promising things that the tech wasn’t capable of, just because they knew they could trick idiots into thinking they had created “Artificial Intelligence” -_-

The tech is cool and revolutionary, but Machine Learning is still only capable of doing the things we were using it for before the LLMs got slapped onto them, and the use cases for LLMs are very limited too.

It’s overhyped and an inaccurate name since it isn’t intelligent in any way. A waste of water and electricity for work that can’t meaningfully replace any human work.

I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.

Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts

I disliked it from the moment they called a glorified language database and collator “AI.”