- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- technology@beehaw.org
Grumbles about generative AI’s shortcomings are coalescing into a “trough of disillusionment” after a year and a half of hype about ChatGPT and other bots.
Why it matters: AI is still changing the world — but improving and integrating the technology is raising harder and more complex questions than first envisioned, and no chatbot has the magic answers.
Driving the news: The hurdles are everything from embarrassing errors, such as extra fingers or Black founding fathers in generated images, to significant concerns about intellectual property infringement, cost, environmental impact and other issues.
An option that nobody uses isn’t really an option.
It’s clear that you’re not getting my point, and I’m not sure how else I could explain it. Both of those things are true, crypto is dead and the zombified corpse that remains is still trying to sell worthless tokens to what few gullible marks remain before the market gets wise and the bottom falls out.
The relevance to AI is that large language models are following the same trajectory. The whole market is propped up by big tech investments, and the firehose of money they have pointed into that bonfire will only last so long as it takes them to realize that that language models aren’t useful enough to justify their expense.
And it’s clear that you don’t know how cryptocurrency is actually being used, so it’s not a useful analogue to AI. Except to the point that you don’t know how AI is being used either.
The things that LLMs are being used for are already justifying their expense, otherwise they wouldn’t be used in the first place. There’s no “bubble” to pop on the usage side of things where jobs have been replaced by it, AI isn’tgoingto"go away." It’s possible that some of the big providers like OpenAI or Anthropic might go out of business or get bought out, that’s always a risk for first movers in a field like this, but if they fail it will be because others have stepped up to provide those services even more cheaply.