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] 24 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

YES

YES

FUCKING YES! THIS IS A WIN!

Hopefully they curtail their investments and stop wasting so much fucking power.

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[–] [email protected] 249 points 1 day ago (4 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] 58 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Well sure, but you're forgetting that the federal government has pulled the rug out from under health research and therefore had made it so there is no economic value in biochemistry.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

Yeah tbh, AI has been an insane helpful tool in my analysis and writing. Never would I have been able to do thoroughly investigate appropriate statisticall tests on my own. After following the sources and double checking ofcourse, but still, super helpful.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Thanks. So the underlying architecture that powers LLMs has application in things besides language generation like protein folding and DNA sequencing.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 day ago (8 children)

alphafold is not an LLM, so no, not really

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You are correct that AlphaFold is not an LLM, but they are both possible because of the same breakthrough in deep learning, the transformer and so do share similar architecture components.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

Image recognition models are also useful for astronomy. The largest black hole jet was discovered recently, and it was done, in part, by using an AI model to sift through vast amounts of data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC1lssgsEGY

This thing is so big, it travels between voids in the filaments of galactic super clusters and hits the next one over.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 21 hours ago (8 children)

R&D is always a money sink

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Very bold move, in a tech climate in which CEOs declare generative AI to be the answer to everything, and in which shareholders expect line to go up faster…

I half expect to next read an article about his ouster.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

If it seems odd for him to suddenly say that all this AI stuff is bullshit, that’s because he didn’t. He said it hasn’t boosted the world economy on the order of the Industrial revolution - yet. There is so much hype around this, and he’s on the line to deliver actual results. So it’s smart for him to take a little air out of the hype ballon. But the article headline is a total misrepresentation of what he said. He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board. That’s very very different from “no value.”

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

My theory is it's only a matter of time until the firing sprees generate enough backlog of actual work that isn't being realised by the minor productivity gains from AI until the investors start asking hard questions.

Maybe this is the start of the bubble bursting.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago

I’ve basically given up hope of the bubble ever bursting, as the market lives in La La Land, where no amount of bad decision-making seems to make a dent in the momentum of “line must go up”.

Would it be cool for negative feedback to step in and correct the death spiral? Absolutely. But, I advise folks to not start holding their breath so soon…

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And crashing the markets in the process... At the same time they came out with a bunch of mambo jumbo and scifi babble about having a million qbit quantum chip.... 😂

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Tech is basically trying to push up the stocks one hype idea after another. Social media bubble about to burst? AI! AI about to burst? Quantum! I'm sure that when people will start realizing quantum computing is another smokescreen, a new moronic idea will start to gain steam from all those LinkedIn "luminaries"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Quantum computation is a lot like fusion.

We know how it works and we know that it would be highly beneficial to society but, getting it to work with reliability and at scale is hard and expensive.

Sure, things get over hyped because capitalism but that doesn't make the technology worthless... It just shows how our economic system rewards lies and misleading people for money.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

It also can solve only a limited set of problems. People is under the impression that they can suddenly game at 10k full path ray tracing if they have a quantum cpu, while in reality for 99.9% of the problem is only as fast as normal cpus

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

That doesn't make it worthless.

People are often wrong about technology, that's independent of the technology's usefulness. Quantum computation is incredibly useful for the applications that require it, things that are completely impossible to calculate with classical computers can be done using quantum algorithms.

This is true even if there are people on social media who think that it's a new graphics card.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago

Absolutely, but its application is not as widespread as someone not into science might think. The only thing it might actually impact the average Joe is cryptography I think

[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

AI is burning a shit ton of energy and researchers’ time though!

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago (1 children)

LLMs in non-specialized application areas basically reproduce search. In specialized fields, most do the work that automation, data analytics, pattern recognition, purpose built algorithms and brute force did before. And yet the companies charge nx the amount for what is essentially these very conventional approaches, plus statistics. Not surprising at all. Just in awe of how come the parallels to snake oil weren't immediately obvious.

[–] Arghblarg 19 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I think AI is generating negative value ... the huge power usage is akin to speculative blockchain currencies. Barring some biochemistry and other very, very specialized uses it hasn't given anything other than, as you've said, plain-language search (with bonus hallucination bullshit, yay!) ... snake oil, indeed.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Is he saying it's just LLMs that are generating no value?

I wish reporters could be more specific with their terminology. They just add to the confusion.

Edit: he's talking about generative AI, of which LLMs are a subset.

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