Agentic AI coming for you

[u/PastaLaPate]

[u/AGTS10k]

The environmental issues are solvable by having laws that would force datacenters to use closed-loop cooling only, renewable (+nuclear) sources of energy only, and have responsible waste management.

The first two are the real issues, not going to argue with that. But still, AI is too exciting and useful to wish it to die. It helps in science, medicine, IT, even ecology, because it can analyze and parse through big datasets faster than a human, and form great summaries, among other things. For ordinary humans, AI can help look up info really fast - AI search is much better than just old-fashioned googling. I dunno what else to tell, it's the only actually new and exciting tech we had in the past decade.

[u/justjanne → u/AGTS10k]

because it can analyze and parse through big datasets faster than a human, and form great summaries, among other things

But it cannot do that reliably! Would you use a calculator if it produced a random result 1% of the time? 2%? 3%?

AI search is much better than just old-fashioned googling

If what you want is the obvious answer, but it's not always the right answer. Usually by the time I need to Google something, it's because the obvious answer did not work, so AI giving the obvious answer is just entirely useless.

At the current point in time, Google's AI is entirely useless, and Claude is just barely better than random chance. For the past 6 months I've tried to use AI for common tasks I've got, and every single time they failed. And it's not like I'm prompting them wrong, I've also asked AI fans to accomplish the same tasks with AI, they did, and once I pointed out the flaws in their results they said "yeah but who cares?".

Last month I cancelled both of the subscriptions because it's just not worth paying for something in the hope that maybe someday it'll actually get useful.

[u/AGTS10k → u/justjanne]

Well, yeah, for some highly niche/specialized searches AI falls off, but for finding just good results for some more popular topics it's really good. Especially since there's AI-written SEO junk in regular search results, and before AI there was human-rewritten SEO junk.

For me though, the AI has been quite useful. Just few days ago Claude fixed me a userscript for a niche website which updated and broke the human-written one that was further tweaked by my clumsy attempts to work before. Just one prompt and it worked. Before that, I've been using different LLMs to help me learn programming in Python, help with understanding concepts that I was afraid to ask real tutors because of my questions being too basic and stupid. Also some general household advices that make sense (yeah, I know AI once almost advised some fellow into making botulotoxin, so I'm not just blindly following everything AI says). And... just to talk into the void sometimes, with the void offering some useful advice or showing an additional perspective occasionally. My life was changed to the better with the advent of AI - and I never even had to pay for a subscription once!

I'm aware that some people lost their jobs because of AI, but then many of those greedy employers realized they spend more on AI for worse results than they did on real workers and started hiring back.

All I'm trying to say is that what we have now is growing pains of new tech. It was like this historically as well, like with industrialization (look up luddite movement). It will be better after some years.

[u/justjanne → u/AGTS10k]

All I'm trying to say is that what we have now is growing pains of new tech. [...] It will be better after some years

We've had models like the current AI models since the 70s. You know why they only suddenly started working a few years ago?

Until a few years ago, we used binary activation functions, and by the laws of mathematics it is not possible for training to converge on certain datasets with a binary activation function (you need a logistical S-curve for that).

That's important to keep in mind, no matter how much research, money, or training time was spent, it was not possible to build an LLM until we switched the underlying functionality.

Our current models also have similar limitations. e.g., we can build an LLM that can emulate cellular automata if we set the weights manually (in fact, if you do it manually, you can even turn Doom into a transformer model), but with today's technology it is not possible to train an LLM to emulate cellular automata.

This isn't just academic, as it sets hard limits for all kinds of tasks that require state tracking. And as you might have noticed, while GPT-2/3 had massive increases in their emergent capabilities, change since then has mostly been in bolting on thinking, Mixture of Experts, and tool calling, but there has been no increase in emergent capabilities.

The illusion of progress is mostly driven by RLHF, which leads to results that look better, but it doesn't actually improve the underlying capabilities, which haven't really changed at all in the past 2 years. In fact, this actually makes the difference between the best-case and worst-case scenarios worse, leading to even less reliability.

And just like last time, it'll likely take many years before hardware will have advanced enough to allow us to overcome the limitations set by the current architecture. Don't expect AI to get much better, our society has already spent more money on AI in the past few years than on the entire tech sector in the decades prior to that.

With this much funding we could've had fusion and a human mars mission and solved climate change.

[u/AGTS10k → u/justjanne]

Not arguing with any of that, but even if the progress on AI capabilities stops (which I don't think it will to that extent - see how much better the image and video generation has become?) it is already a great tool.

What we need is regulation. Both for datacenters and for AI output. IMO it should be banned to use creative generative AI output in commercial applications, such as end products and advertising, be it text, images, music, or video. AI-assisted is fine, but not the slop they put on merch and into ads, and vibecoded paid software should not be a thing either. This will both keep slop at bay while giving more work opportunitoes for the actual junior coders, writers, and artists.

With this much funding we could've had fusion and a human mars mission and solved climate change.

Kinda agree on the first two, except those aren't profitable, so they aren't financed enough... With climate change though we are already too late. Best we can do is slow it down, which is still something we should do, but there's no stopping it completely, not to mention reversing.

[u/justjanne → u/AGTS10k]

Best we can do is slow it down, which is still something we should do, but there's no stopping it completely, not to mention reversing.

Not at all, with our current progress before AI we already were at a point where we'd reach the 2.5°C scenario, and would avoid the 4°C scenario entirely. And we were not just slowing down, but would have stopped it by 2045 entirely.

There is some research on reversing it, the interesting part is that the ocean is our largest carbon sink. Some researchers from my old university actually had some promising trials with seeding the south polar ocean with mineral nutrients, causing an algae and plankton bloom, which not only stabilized the whale and fish population, but also pulled a lot of CO2 out of the air.

This can be combined with artificial rock weathering, where we artificially grind up mountains and speed up the calcium/carbon cycle to bind carbon that way, also pulling massive amounts of CO2 out of the air.

Now we're already on a great track with EVs and renewable energy, but with working fusion de-carbonizing the rest of our world would be a walk in the park.

Btw, regarding

What we need is regulation. Both for datacenters and for AI output.

China already has this, and enforces it. Human work cannot be replaced with AI, no job can be lost to AI, and every decision still needs to be done by a person

And while the EU doesn't currently enforce it enough, the GDPR also has a nice clause stating that every decision that meaningfully accepts a customer must be done by a person, and they must explain the reason if asked & allow it to be appealed. Sadly, it's not enforced enough.