I've seen things that are wildly hobbled, and wildly inaccurate. I've seen endless companies running around, trying to improve on things. I've seen people looking in wonder at LLMs making mistakes 2 year olds don't.
Most LLM usage seems to be in two categories. Replace people's jobs with wildly inaccurate and massively broken output, or trick people into doing things.
I'd have to say Bitcoin is far more useful than LLMs. You have to add the pluses, and subtract the minuses, and in that view, LLMs are -1 billion, and bitcoin is maybe a 1 or 2.
bitcoin is only negative. It consumes terrawatts of energy for nothing.
What?! Whole industries have been changed already due to products based on them. I don't think there's a single developer who is not using AI to get help while coding, and if you aren't, sorry but you're just missing out, it's not perfect but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be better than StackOverflow and googling around for the docs or how to do things and ending up in dubious sites, and it absolutely is.
My wife is a researcher and has to read LOTS of papers. Letting AI summarize it has made her enormously more efficient at filtering out what she needs to go into more detail.
Generating relevant images for blog posts is now so easy to do (you may not like it, but as an author who used to use irrelevant photos before instead, I love it when you use it tastefully).
Seriously, I can't even believe someone in 2024 can say there has not been useful applications of LLMs (almost all AI now is based on LLMs as far as I know) with a straight face.
You are in a bubble.
> It just needs to be better than StackOverflow and googling around for the docs or how to do things and ending up in dubious sites, and it absolutely is.
Subjectively. Not absolutely.
It's banned at my company due to copyright concerns. Company policy at the moment considers it a copyright landmine. It does need to be "perfect" at not being a legal liability at the very least.
And the blog post image thing is not a great point. AI images for blog posts, on the whole, are still quite terrible and immediately recognizable as AI generated slop. I usually click out of articles immediately when I see an AI image at the top, because I expect the rest of the article to be in line: low value, high fluff.
There are useful LLM applications, but for things that play to its strengths. It's effectively a search engine. Using it for search and summarization is useful. Using it to generate code based on code it has read would be useful if it weren't for the copyright liability, and I would argue that if you have that much boilerplate, the answer is better abstractions, libraries, and frameworks, rather than just generating that code stochastically. Imagine if the answer to assembly language being verbose was to just generate all of it rather than creating compiled programming languages.
That field has made a leap forward with LLMs.
Positive impact on society includes automated extraction in healthcare pipelines.
And why is this better than employing a human. Or reducing complexity. It's not as if human wages are what causes hyper expensive US healthcare costs.
This seems like a negative.
At some point we need to be optimistic and look for incremental progress.
What I mean by structured is: invoices, documents containing tables, etc.
Extracting useful data from fully unstructured content is very hard IMO and potentially above the capacity of LLMs (depending on your definition of "useful" and "unstructured")
Why are firms sending around invoices, tables instead of parseable data. Oh I know the argument, because "so hard to cooperate" on standards, etc.
Madness.
LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's not LLM's fault - marketing is what it always has been, it's just people waking up from their Stockholm syndrome. You've always been screwed over by marketers, and Internet has already been destroyed by adtech. Adding AI into the mix doesn't change anything, except maybe that some of the jobs in this space will go away, which for once I say - good riddance. There are more honest forms of gainful employment.
LLMs, for all their costs, don't burn energy superlinearly. More important, for LLMs, just like for fiat money, and about everything else other than crypto, burning electricity is a cost, upkeep, that is being aggressively minimized. More efficient LLMs benefit everyone involved. More efficient crypto just stops working, because inefficient waste is fundamental to cryptos' mathematical guarantees.
Anyway, comparing crypto and LLMs is dumb. The only connection is that they both eat GPUs and their novelty periods were close together in time. But they're fundamentally different, and the hypes surrounding them are fundamentally different too. I'd say that "AI hype" is more like the dot-com bubble: sure, lots of grifters lost their money, but who cares. Technology was good; the bubble cleared out nonsense and grift around it.
This is pure, complacent nonsense. "We have always been surrounded with spam, 10x more won't change anything."
Yeah, why improve the status quo? Why improve the world? Why recycle when there's a big patch of plastic in the ocean.
It's an argument based on a nonsensical, cynical if not greedy position. "Everyone pollutes, so a little more pollution won't be noticed."
Value is a subjective concept. One could argue that its value is that arbitrary quantities of it cannot be created by dictat.
> - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees.
One could argue that it takes a lot worse to maintain any currency such as USD as a currency. Full force of government law enforcement will be unleashed on you if you decide to have your own currency. There is a lot of "wastage" that goes to safeguard currency creation and storage and to prevent counterfeiting.
I do not hold BTC. Nor do I trade it. But to discuss as if other currencies have no cost is not rational.
Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem yet which is fundamental to our society and a fiat system like the trust issue:
If i exchange 1 bitcoin with you for any service or thing outside of the blockchain, i need the whole proof of stack system protection of our normal existing money infrastructure like lawyers, contracts etc.
And no smart contracts do not solve this issue.
What is left? Small amount of transactions per day with high fees 'but' decentralized infrastructure run by someone we all don't know aggregated probably in data centers owned by big companies.
Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.
What do you do when you want to exchange 1 bitcoin for 1 car and the person with the car doesn't give you the car after the 'absolut fairness/ security' of transfering bitcoin to their wallet? You go back to our Proof of Stake system. You talk to a lawyer. You expect the police to help you.
The smallest issue in our society is just transfering money from left to right. This is not a hard problem. And pls don't tell me how much easier it is to send a few bitcoins to africa. Most people don't do this and yes western union exists.
Or try to recover your bitcoins. A friend has 100k in bitcoins just doesn't know the password anymore.
What do you do when someone breaks into your home and forces you to give them your bitcoin key? Yes exactly anonyms moving of money from you to them. Untraceable, wow what a great thing to have!
And no Satoshi 'himself' is not an expert in global economy. He just invented bitcoin and you can cleary see how flawed it is.
you're ending up with the entire rest of civilisation on the other side of that
* Bitcoin, 0.5% of all energy use: 7 transactions per second total worldwide
* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION AND EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO, 199x the energy use, really quite a lot more than 1,393 transactions per second worldwide, and all the other stuff civilisation does too
What an amazing comparison for you to suggest.
Thats so fun because apparently everyone doing bitcoin does it for a different reason.
Anyway do you believe that when the world goes down and you need your gold, you will be able to use bitcoin?
Yes. But the point I'm making is, none of that benefits from waste. The waste is something everyone want to reduce. With Bitcoin, the trend is uniquely opposite, because the crypto system is secured through aggregate waste being way larger than any actor or group can afford.
* the VCs are often literally the same guys pivoting
* the promoters are often literally the same guys pivoting
* AI's excuses for the ghastly electricity consumption are often literally bitcoin excuses
I think that's an excellent start on the comparison being valid.
Like, I've covered crypto skeptically for years and I was struck by just how similar the things to be said about the AI grifters were, and my readers have concurred.
That's why I created EtherGPT, an LLM Chat agent that runs decentralized in the Ether blockchain, on smart contracts only, to make sure that value is created and rewards directly the people and not big companies.
By providing it just a fraction of just a bit north of 10% of the current fusion reactions occuring in our sun, and giving it a decade or two on processing time and sync, you can ask it simple questions like "what do dogs do when you're not around" and it will come up with helpful answers like "they go to work in an office" or funny ones like "you should park your car in direct sunlight so that your dog can recharge its phone using solar panels".
Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a country and has basically done nothing besides moving money from one group of people to a random other group of people.
And bitcoin is also motivated to find the cheapest energy independent of any ethical reasoning (taking energy from cheap chinese hydro and disrupting local energy networks) while AI will have energy from the richest companies in the world (ms, google, etc.) which already working on co2 neutral 24/7.
[0] https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/230503-ai-discover...
It's continuing to widen the wealth gap as it is.
We house, heat and give access to knowledge to a lot more people than ever before.
Cheap medical procedures through AI will help us all. The AI which will be able to analyse the x-ray picture from some 3th world country? It only needs a basic x-ray machine and some internet. The AI will be able to tell you what you have.
I'm also convinced that if AGI is happening in the next 10 years, it will affect that many people that our society has to discuss capitalisms future.
For example alphafold: Protein folding. It is also now used in fusion reactor plasma control
May I recommend reading Derek Lowe's "In The Pipeline" blog for a realistic discussion of the actual impact of Alphafold? [0]
And seeing as we don't have viable fusion yet, saying it "solved" it is really reaching. I'm sure it's helping, but solved? No.
[0]: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/ai-and-machine-l...
Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.