[FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype

[Merle Lefkoff]

Roger, can you send me the full article about Hinton in the M.I.T. review.
Thanks.

On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 4:39 PM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:

> Didn't read Cory's blog, though I'm still laughing at the blurb for Red
> Team Blues.
>
> But I read Geoffrey Hinton's interview with MIT Tech Review yesterday.
>
>
> https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey-hinton-google-why-scared-ai
>
> It's not hype that chatgpt dazzled everyone with a model which is much
> smaller than a human brain, even though it took a fairly huge budget for
> OpenAI to build it.
>
> And I read this posting from an anonymous googler today via hackernews.
>
>    https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
>
> It's not hype that the open source community has rapidly figured out how
> to produce equally dazzling models with drastically smaller budgets of
> resources, and is continuing to iterate the process.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:11 AM Gary Schiltz <gary at naturesvisualarts.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I love the graphic! I've had the misfortune of twice jumping on that
>> roller coaster just before the Peak of Inflated Expectation - once for the
>> AI boom/bust of the mid 1980s and once for the dotcom boom/bust of the late
>> 1990s. Jumped on too late to make a killing, but didn't get too badly
>> damaged by the Trough of Disillusionment either.
>>
>> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:34 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> https://doctorow.medium.com/the-ai-hype-bubble-is-the-new-crypto-hype-bubble-74e53028631e
>>>
>>> I *am* a fan of LLMs (not so much image generators) and blockchain (not
>>> so much crypto or NFTs) in their "best" uses (not that I or anyone else
>>> really knows what that is) in spite of my intrinsic neoLuddite affect.
>>>
>>> Nevertheless I think Doctorow in his usual acerbic and penetrating style
>>> really nails it well here IMO.
>>>
>>> I particularly appreciated his reference/quote to Emily Bender's "High
>>> on Supply" and "word/meaning conflation" in the sense of "don't mistake an
>>> accent for a personality" in the dating scene.
>>>
>>> A lot of my own contrarian commments on this forum come from resisting
>>> what Doctorow introduces (to me) as "CritiHype" (attributed to Lee
>>> Vinsel)...  the feeling that some folks make a (a)vocation out of kneejerk
>>> criticism.   It is much easier to *poke* at something than to *do*
>>> something worthy of being *poked at*.   I appreciate that Doctorow doesn't
>>> seem to (by my fairly uncritical eye) engage in this much himself...  which
>>> is why I was drawn into this article...
>>>
>>> I also very much appreciate his quote from Charlie Stross:
>>>
>>> *corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that
>>> consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them
>>> try to steer them in better directions:*
>>>
>>>
>>> *https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
>>> <https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future> *
>>>
>>>
>>> I could go on quoting and excerpting and commenting on his whole article
>>> and the myriad links/references he offers up but will curb my enthusiasm
>>> and leave it to the astute FriAM readers to choose how much to indulge
>>> in.   It was a pretty good antidote for my own AI-thusiasm driven by long
>>> chats with GPT4 (converging on being more like long sessions wandering
>>> through Wikipedia after the first 100 hours of engagement).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  (303) 859-5609
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