This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm a software developer and I know that AI is just the shiny new toy from which everyone uses the buzzword to generate investment revenue.
99% of the crap people use it for us worthless. It's just a hammer and everything is a nail.
It's just like "the cloud" was 10 years ago. Now everyone is back-pedaling from that because it didn't turn out to be the panacea that was promised.
I like my project manager, they find me work, ask how I'm doing and talk straight.
It's when the CEO/CTO/CFO speaks where my eyes glaze over, my mouth sags, and I bounce my neck at prompted intervals as my brain retreats into itself as it frantically tosses words and phrases into the meaning grinder and cranks the wheel, only for nothing to come out of it time and time again.
COs are corporate politicians, media trained to only say things which are completely unrevealing and lacking of any substance.
This is by design so that sensitive information is centrally controlled, leaks are difficult, and sudden changes in direction cause the minimum amount of whiplash to ICs as possible.
I have the same reaction as you, but the system is working as intended. Better to just shut it out as you described and use the time to think about that issue you're having on a personal project or what toy to buy for your cat's birthday.
I think my CEO is doing something wrong then because he seems to be trying to maximize IC whiplash sometimes.
Better to just shut it out as you described and use the time to think about that issue you’re having on a personal project or what toy to buy for your cat’s birthday.
Exactly. Do the daily corpo dance and cheer if they babbling about innovation, progress, growth and new products. Do not fight against it. Just take your money and put your valuable time and energy elsewhere.
Right, that sweet spot between too less stimuli so your brain just wants to sleep or run away and enough stimuli so you can't just zone out (or sleep).
It's ironic how conservative the spending actually is.
Awesome ML papers and ideas come out every week. Low power training/inference optimizations, fundamental changes in the math like bitnet, new attention mechanisms, cool tools to make models more controllable and steerable and grounded. This is all getting funded, right?
No.
Universities and such are seeding and putting out all this research, but the big model trainers holding the purse strings/GPU clusters are not using them. They just keep releasing very similar, mostly bog standard transformers models over and over again, bar a tiny expense for a little experiment here and there. In other words, it’s full corporate: tiny, guaranteed incremental improvements without changing much, and no sharing with each other. It’s hilariously inefficient. And it relies on lies and jawboning from people like Sam Altman.
Deepseek is what happens when a company is smart but resource constrained. An order of magnitude more efficient, and even their architecture was very conservative.
wait so the people doing the work don't get paid and the people who get paid steal from others?
that is just so uncharacteristic of capitalism, what a surprise
It’s also cultish.
Everyone was trying to ape ChatGPT. Now they’re rushing to ape Deepseek R1, since that's what is trending on social media.
It’s very late stage capitalism, yes, but that doesn’t come close to painting the whole picture. There's a lot of groupthink, an urgency to "catch up and ship" and look good quick rather than focus experimentation, sane applications and such. When I think of shitty capitalism, I think of stagnant entities like shitty publishers, dysfunctional departments, consumers abuse, things like that.
This sector is trying to innovate and make something efficient, but it’s like the purse holders and researchers have horse blinders on. Like they are completely captured by social media hype and can’t see much past that.
The actual survey result:
Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe
Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.
It's becoming clear from the data that more error correction needs exponentially more data. I suspect that pretty soon we will realize that what's been built is a glorified homework cheater and a better search engine.
what's been built is a glorified homework cheater and an ~~better~~ unreliable search engine.
I agree that it's editorialized compared to the very neutral way the survey puts it. That said, I think you also have to take into account how AI has been marketed by the industry.
They have been claiming AGI is right around the corner pretty much since chatGPT first came to market. It's often implied (e.g. you'll be able to replace workers with this) or they are more vague on timeline (e.g. OpenAI saying they believe their research will eventually lead to AGI).
With that context I think it's fair to editorialize to this being a dead-end, because even with billions of dollars being poured into this, they won't be able to deliver AGI on the timeline they are promising.
The bigger loss is the ENORMOUS amounts of energy required to train these models. Training an AI can use up more than half the entire output of the average nuclear plant.
AI data centers also generate a ton of CO². For example, training an AI produces more CO² than a 55 year old human has produced since birth.
Complete waste.
I have been shouting this for years. Turing and Minsky were pretty up front about this when they dropped this line of research in like 1952, even lovelace predicted this would be bullshit back before the first computer had been built.
The fact nothing got optimized, and it still didn't collapse, after deepseek? kind of gave the whole game away. there's something else going on here. this isn't about the technology, because there is no meaningful technology here.
I have been called a killjoy luddite by reddit-brained morons almost every time.
What’re you talking about? What happened in 1952?
I have to disagree, I don’t think it’s meaningless. I think that’s unfair. But it certainly is overhyped. Maybe just a semantic difference?
Companies aren't investing to achieve AGI as far as I'm aware, that's not the end game so I this title is misinformation. Even if AGI was achieved it'd be a happy accident, not the goal.
The goal of all these investments is to convince businesses to replace their employees with AI to the maximum extent possible. They want that payroll money.
The other goal is to cut out all third party websites from advertising revenue. If people only get information through Meta or Google or whatever, they get to control what's presented. If people just take their AI results at face value and don't actually click through to other websites, they stay in the ecosystem these corporations control. They get to sell access to the public, even more so than they do now.
I used to support an IVA cluster. Now the only thing I use AI for is voice controls to set timers on my phone.
That's what I did on my Samsung galaxy S5 a decade ago .
I use chatgpt daily in my business. But I use it more as a guide then a real replacement.
Misleading title. From the article,
Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
In no way does this imply that the "industry is pouring billions into a dead end". AGI isn't even needed for industry applications, just implementing current-level agentic systems will be more than enough to have massive industrial impact.
LLMs are fundamentally limited, the only interesting application with them is research more or less. There are some practical applications, but those are already being used in industry today, so meh.
Whether or not it's a dead end, is questionable, because scientific research is often met with many a dead end, that's just how it is.
I think the first llm that introduces a good personality will be the winner. I don't care if the AI seems deranged and seems to hate all humans to me that's more approachable than a boring AI that constantly insists it's right and ends the conversation.
I want an AI that argues with me and calls me a useless bag of meat when I disagree with it. Basically I want a personality.
I'm not AI but I'd like to say thay thing to you at no cost at all you useless bag of meat.
To be honest I welcome that response in an AI I have chat gpt set to be as deranged as possible giving it examples like the Dungeon Crawler AI among others like the novels of expeditionary force with Ai's like skippy.
I want an AI with attitude honestly. Even when it's wrong it's amusing. Don't get me wrong I want the right info just given to me arrogantly
The problem is that those companies are monopolies and can raise prices indefinitely to pursue this shitty dream because they got governments in their pockets. Because gov are cloud / microsoft software dependent - literally every country is on this planet - maybe except China / North Korea and Russia. They can like raise prices 10 times in next 10 years and don't give a fuck. Spend 1 trillion on AI and say we're near over and over again and literally nobody can stop them right now.
There are some nice things I have done with AI tools, but I do have to wonder if the amount of money poured into it justifies the result.
LLMs are good for learning, brainstorming, and mundane writing tasks.
It's because customers don't want it or care for it, it's only the corporations themselves are obsessed with it
It doesnt matter if they reach any end result, as long as stocks go up and profits go up.
Consumers arent really asking for AI but its being used to push new hardware and make previous hardware feel old. Eventually everyone has AI on their phone, most of it unused.
Current big tech is going to keeping pushing limits and have SM influencers/youtubers market and their consumers picking up the R&D bill. Emotionally I want to say stop innovating but really cut your speed by 75%. We are going to witness an era of optimization and efficiency. Most users just need a Pi 5 16gb, Intel NUC or an Apple air base models. Those are easy 7-10 year computers. No need to rush and get latest and greatest. I’m talking about everything computing in general. One point gaming,more people are waking up realizing they don’t need every new GPU, studios are burnt out, IPs are dying due to no lingering core base to keep franchise up float and consumers can't keep opening their wallets. Hence studios like square enix going to start support all platforms and not do late stage capitalism with going with their own launcher with a store. It’s over.
Why won't they pour billions into me? I'd actually put it to good use.
The funny thing is with so much money you could probably do lots of great stuff with the existing AI as it is. Instead they put all the money into compute power so that they can overfit their LLMs to look like a human.
I went to CES this year and I sat on a few ai panels. This is actually not far off. Some said yah this is right but multiple panels I went to said that this is a dead end, and while usefull they are starting down different paths.
Its not bad, just we are finding it's nor great.
