this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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"The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent," he added. "Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."

Needless to say, we haven't seen anything like that yet. OpenAI's top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail's pace and requires constant supervision.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

That is not at all what he said. He said that creating some arbitrary benchmark on the level or quality of the AI, (e.g.: as it's as smarter than a 5th grader or as intelligent as an adult) is meaningless. That the real measure is if there is value created and out out into the real world. He also mentions that global growth is up by 10%. He doesn't provide data that correlates the grow with the use of AI and I doubt that such data exists yet. Let's not just twist what he said to be "Microsoft CEO says AI provides no value" when that is not what he said.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago

I think that's pretty clear to people who get past the clickbait. Oddly enough though, if you read through what he actually said, the takeaway is basically a tacit admission, interpreted as him trying to establish a level-set on expectations from AI without directly admitting the strategy of massively investing in LLM's is going bust and delivering no measurable value, so he can deflect with "BUT HEY CHECK OUT QUANTUM".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

microsoft rn:

✋ AI

👉 quantum

can't wait to have to explain the difference between asymmetric-key and symmetric-key cryptography to my friends!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Forgive my ignorance. Is there no known quantum-safe symmetric-key encryption algorithm?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

i'm not an expert by any means, but from what i understand, most symmetric key and hashing cryptography will probably be fine, but asymmetric-key cryptography will be where the problems are. lots of stuff uses asymmetric-key cryptography, like https for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Oh that's not good. i thought TLS was quantum safe already

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

Joseph Weizenbaum: "No shit? For realsies?"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 21 hours ago

He probably saw that softbank and masayoshi son were heavily investing in it and figured it was dead.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

That's because they want to use AI in a server scenario where clients login. That translated to American English and spoken with honesty means that they are spying on you. Anything you do on your computer is subject to automatic spying. Like you could be totally under the radar, but as soon as you say the magic words together bam!...I'd love a sling thong for my wife...bam! Here's 20 ads, just click to purchase since they already stole your wife's boob size and body measurements and preferred lingerie styles. And if you're on McMaster... Hmm I need a 1/2 pipe and a cap...Better get two caps in case you cross thread on.....ding dong! FBI! We know you're in there! Come out with your hands up!

[–] epicstove 7 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux is some college software (Won't need it when I'm done) and 1 game (which no longer gets updates and thus is on the path to a slow sad demise)

So I'm on the verge of going Penguin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago

You can just install Linux besides windows. It’s easy, I did it last month.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 20 hours ago

Just run Windows in a VM on Linux. You can use VirtualBox.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago

Yeah use Windows in a VM and your game probably just works too, I was surprised that all games I have on Steam now just work on Linux.

Years ago when I switched from OSX to Linux I just stopped gaming because of that but I started testing my old games and suddenly no problems with them anymore.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

What software / game is that? it could still run in Wine or Bottle.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

You're really forcing it at that point. Wine can't run most of what I need to use for work. I'm excited for the day I can ditch Windows, but it's not any time soon unfortunately. I'll have to live with WSL.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

But..... i am still curious.. what are you trying to run 😆

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

MobaXTerm namely. It will start up, but it misses a lot of features when used in Wine. To the point it's not usable for work purposes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Not the same person with the program. Just another person making an excuse.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 day ago (14 children)

I've been working on an internal project for my job - a quarterly report on the most bleeding edge use cases of AI, and the stuff achieved is genuinely really impressive.

So why is the AI at the top end amazing yet everything we use is a piece of literal shit?

The answer is the chatbot. If you have the technical nous to program machine learning tools it can accomplish truly stunning processes at speeds not seen before.

If you don't know how to do - for eg - a Fourier transform - you lack the skills to use the tools effectively. That's no one's fault, not everyone needs that knowledge, but it does explain the gap between promise and delivery. It can only help you do what you already know how to do faster.

Same for coding, if you understand what your code does, it's a helpful tool for unsticking part of a problem, it can't write the whole thing from scratch

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Exactly - I find AI tools very useful and they save me quite a bit of time, but they're still tools. Better at some things than others, but the bottom line is that they're dependent on the person using them. Plus the more limited the problem scope, the better they can be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, but the problem is that a lot of these AI tools are very easy to use, but the people using them are often ill-equipped to judge the quality of the result. So you have people who are given a task to do, and they choose an AI tool to do it and then call it done, but the result is bad and they can't tell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

True, though this applies to most tools, no? For instance, I'm forced to sit through horrible presentations beause someone were given a task to do, they created a Powerpoint (badly) and gave a presentation (badly). I don't know if this is inherently a problem with AI...

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago

Makes sense that the company that just announced their qbit advancement would be disparaging the only "advanced" thing other companies have shown in the last 5 years.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is fun to generate some stupid images a few times, but you can't trust that "AI" crap with anything serious.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I was just talking about this with someone the other day. While it’s truly remarkable what AI can do, its margin for error is just too big for most if not all of the use cases companies want to use it for.

For example, I use the Hoarder app which is a site bookmarking program, and when I save any given site, it feeds the text into a local Ollama model which summarizes it, conjures up some tags, and applies the tags to it. This is useful for me, and if it generates a few extra tags that aren’t useful, it doesn’t really disrupt my workflow at all. So this is a net benefit for me, but this use case will not be earning these corps any amount of profit.

On the other end, you have Googles Gemini that now gives you an AI generated answer to your queries. The point of this is to aggregate data from several sources within the search results and return it to you, saving you the time of having to look through several search results yourself. And like 90% of the time it actually does a great job. The problem with this is the goal, which is to save you from having to check individual sources, and its reliability rate. If I google 100 things and Gemini correctly answers 99 of those things accurate abut completely hallucinates the 100th, then that means that all 100 times I have to check its sources and verify that what it said was correct. Which means I’m now back to just… you know… looking through the search results one by one like I would have anyway without the AI.

So while AI is far from useless, it can’t now and never will be able to be relied on for anything important, and that’s where the money to be made is.

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[–] [email protected] 250 points 1 day ago (21 children)

Correction, LLMs being used to automate shit doesn't generate any value. The underlying AI technology is generating tons of value.

AlphaFold 2 has advanced biochemistry research in protein folding by multiple decades in just a couple years, taking us from 150,000 known protein structures to 200 Million in a year.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago

I think you're confused, when you say "value", you seem to mean progressing humanity forward. This is fundamentally flawed, you see, "value" actually refers to yacht money for billionaires. I can see why you would be confused.

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