For the longest time, Mozilla was synonymous with the Firefox browser, but for the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox, especially
I don’t think AI will be a fad in the same way blockchain/crypto-currency was. I certainly think there’s somewhat of a hype bubble surrounding AI, though - it’s the hot, new buzzword that a lot of companies are mentioning to bring investors on board. “We’re planning to use some kind of AI in some way in the future (but we don’t know how yet). Make cheques out to ________ please”
I do think AI does have actual, practical uses, though, unlike blockchain which always came off as a “solution looking for a problem”. Like, I’m a fairly normal person and I’ve found good uses for AI already in asking it various questions where it gives better answers than search engines, in writing code for me (I can’t write code myself), etc. Whereas I’ve never touched anything to do with crypto.
AI feels like a space that will continue to grow for years, and that will be implemented into more and more parts of society. The hype will die down somewhat, but I don’t see AI going away.
A lot of people put a lot of money into it and they won’t give them up. They’ll keep buying and selling, keeping it sort of artificially afloat even if it has no real world usage. Well there is actually one which leads me to the next point
The illegal market (and gambling) has a use case for cryptocurrencies so they actually use them
But to put it simply - they don’t die because they don’t have to. There is no single company that would pull the plug. By it’s design, they can coexist in our world and no one can stop it, doesn’t matter if people use it or not
It’s like a torrent with millions of seeders. As long as there is at least one seeder, the torrent will exist even if the files it contains aren’t really useful
And that’s really the thing about cryptocurrency, isn’t it… It doesn’t need to die to stop being useful, it just needs to stop growing in value (because the people investing in it are using it as a speculative asset, not as a serious form of currency - it’s too volatile for that). And unless it keeps on bringing in new people who are willing to purchase tokens at an increasing price, the value won’t increase.
The thing is, AI has been around for a really long time and has lots of established use-cases. Unfortunately, none of them are to do with generative language/image models. AI is mainly used for classifying data as part of data science. But data science is extremely unsexy to the average person, so for them AI has become synonymous with the ChatGPTs and DALLEs of the world.
Yeah, so far we’ve had discriminative AI (takes complex input, gives simple output).
Now we have generative AI (takes simple input, gives complex output).
I imagine, the discussion above is about generative AI…
I’ve found good uses for AI already in asking it various questions where it gives better answers than search engines, in writing code for me (I can’t write code myself), etc.
I’d caution against using it for these things due to its tendency to make stuff up. I’ve tried using ChatGPT for both, but in my experience if I can’t find something on google myself, ChatGPT will claim to know the answer but give me something that just isn’t true. For coding it can do basic things, but if I wanna use a library or some other more granular task it’ll do something like make up a function call that doesn’t exist. The worst part is that it looks right, so I used to waste time trying to figure out why it doesn’t work for me, when it turns out it doesn’t work for anybody. For factual information, I had to correct a friend who gave me fake stats on airline reliability to help me make a flight choice - he got them from GPT 4 and while the numbers looked right, they deviated from other info. In general you never want to trust any specific numbers from LLMs because they’re trained to look right rather than to actually be right.
For me LLMs have proven most useful for things like brainstorming or coming up with an image I can use for illustration purposes. Because those things don’t need to be exactly right.
I don’t think AI will be a fad in the same way blockchain/crypto-currency was. I certainly think there’s somewhat of a hype bubble surrounding AI, though - it’s the hot, new buzzword that a lot of companies are mentioning to bring investors on board. “We’re planning to use some kind of AI in some way in the future (but we don’t know how yet). Make cheques out to ________ please”
I do think AI does have actual, practical uses, though, unlike blockchain which always came off as a “solution looking for a problem”. Like, I’m a fairly normal person and I’ve found good uses for AI already in asking it various questions where it gives better answers than search engines, in writing code for me (I can’t write code myself), etc. Whereas I’ve never touched anything to do with crypto.
AI feels like a space that will continue to grow for years, and that will be implemented into more and more parts of society. The hype will die down somewhat, but I don’t see AI going away.
If it was a fad then why does the crypto currency simply doesn’t die? Because I’m waiting on that for some time and nothing really happens.
I’d see 2 reasons:
But to put it simply - they don’t die because they don’t have to. There is no single company that would pull the plug. By it’s design, they can coexist in our world and no one can stop it, doesn’t matter if people use it or not
It’s like a torrent with millions of seeders. As long as there is at least one seeder, the torrent will exist even if the files it contains aren’t really useful
And that’s really the thing about cryptocurrency, isn’t it… It doesn’t need to die to stop being useful, it just needs to stop growing in value (because the people investing in it are using it as a speculative asset, not as a serious form of currency - it’s too volatile for that). And unless it keeps on bringing in new people who are willing to purchase tokens at an increasing price, the value won’t increase.
The thing is, AI has been around for a really long time and has lots of established use-cases. Unfortunately, none of them are to do with generative language/image models. AI is mainly used for classifying data as part of data science. But data science is extremely unsexy to the average person, so for them AI has become synonymous with the ChatGPTs and DALLEs of the world.
Aka my least favorite part of every web and image search respectively
Yeah, so far we’ve had discriminative AI (takes complex input, gives simple output).
Now we have generative AI (takes simple input, gives complex output).
I imagine, the discussion above is about generative AI…
Don’t worry, once the hype fades, we can start calling LLMs “machine learning” again
I’d caution against using it for these things due to its tendency to make stuff up. I’ve tried using ChatGPT for both, but in my experience if I can’t find something on google myself, ChatGPT will claim to know the answer but give me something that just isn’t true. For coding it can do basic things, but if I wanna use a library or some other more granular task it’ll do something like make up a function call that doesn’t exist. The worst part is that it looks right, so I used to waste time trying to figure out why it doesn’t work for me, when it turns out it doesn’t work for anybody. For factual information, I had to correct a friend who gave me fake stats on airline reliability to help me make a flight choice - he got them from GPT 4 and while the numbers looked right, they deviated from other info. In general you never want to trust any specific numbers from LLMs because they’re trained to look right rather than to actually be right.
For me LLMs have proven most useful for things like brainstorming or coming up with an image I can use for illustration purposes. Because those things don’t need to be exactly right.