Exciting is one word for it. The dot com crash was also "exciting", I suppose.

I see it as a chance for the capital class to sell everyone shovels and build railroads that will further cement their power and influence, all the while insisting software and art are more democratic than ever. All the while using the same tools to build surveillance infrastructure that will make any dissent impossible.

So yeah, exciting is one word you could choose.

Well the railroads aren't the seat of power that they used to be---the progress ebbs and flows in mysterious ways. Even their arguable replacement, air travel, is not the paradigm of economic dominance.

Everybody is now excited about the top end: more parameters, larger context window. Justly so, but I think that it's more important in the long term what will happen at the low end, both in the software and hardware direction. Software obviously has started (c.f. DeepSeek). As for hardware, Google TPU ASIC is six years old, and has presumably 4096 ALUs and uses few watts of power to perform 4 TOPs. Several years later, I would hope that it's reachable goal for those 4 watts to do as many TOPs as say H20 (400 or so).

Once the models stabilize, I could see a low power inference peripheral design with huge TPU matrix with an embedded model parameter Flash EPROM feeding it. This could go into anything from white goods to computers. Imagine a thermometer that you speak symptoms to and ask for diagnosis; is it a good idea? I don't know... but is it possible? I could see that it is.

> Well the railroads aren't the seat of power that they used to be

You don't think that Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Goulds, etc don't have outsized influence and wealth?

Is it though ? I feel like what ML can achieve is amazing, but, call me a pessimist, I'm bracing for the influx of elaborate scams, propaganda, deep fakes etc who will manage to drive a wedge even further in our society than social networks did. As for programming, my skills are not good enough not to risk an atrophy if I use code completion. I do ask Claude for feedback though. I've always been a tech enthusiast but this is the first time I want to build a cabin in the woods and live off-grid. The tech itself is amazing but I'm not looking forward to all the slop we're going to be flooded with.

Oh absolutely. If the history of the internet, social media, and smartphones is anything to go by, those negative consequences are coming like a freight train and this will all end in tears in a decade or two. Or even sooner, because that cycle seems to be accelerating too - education probably being the prime example.

But like the OP said, we can’t even predict what’s going to happen even three years out so I’ve just resigned myself to “going with the flow” and enjoying the ride as much as I can. If the negative consequences are coming for us, might as well get as much benefit as we can now while we’re all still wide eyed and bushy tailed.

Yea i think a lot of wars have come about from a change in communication technology (eg, radio, film), and can imagine AI might cause a lot of chaos until we learn how to deal with AI-generated video, audio, text, and images. Imagine if Goebbels or the Rwandan genocide had access to AI?

As exciting as nuclear armageddon, sure.

> and ads

Ha this is so true. All the major LLMs have a surprisingly ad free experience right now. Likely because they’re all aggressively competing for customers. But as soon as one of them realises the money that can be made from ads and how that will pay for daily operation costs after the investors give up investing, then the game is up

They're not ad-free. Ads are integrated into the content of the responses. For example, ChatGPT biases towards itself as a provider of services even when asking it not to. This behavior is easy to see and probably will be replicated out for paying clients.

Yes for sure companies are already paying for having their products added to the training set of popular LLMs.

Source?

Meta is an advertising company.

Google is an advertising company.

Microsoft, in fits of jealousy and veiled rage, wishes it were an advertising company.

OpenAI is not profitable yet despite having high charge rates.

If they aren't capitalizing on ad infusion yet, their shareholders should rightfully be getting angry, right? Money left on the table.

Simply because you and I may not be able to buy ads does not mean they arent already there.

Dont forget the pg classic on the topic: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Yes it's obvious this has to happen. AIs tend to promote certain products a lot more than others. If a training set costs billions to process, the incentive to sneak your product into the set... Maybe give it a few additional training rounds of that... It's like an ad which keeps coming back over and over for the life of the model whenever someone asks a related question.

>>for sure companies are already paying for having their products added to the training set of popular LLMs.<<

Is there a source for such claims. I am also interested to know.

That’s not a source, that’s speculation

Wait until their answers steer towards solutions/products via paid promotion... Ugh.

one of the big reasons I'm rooting for AI is it's a valid alternative to search engines and they've baked a paid model into the revenue stream from the very beginning. I'm more than happy to pay a premium for the ad free version

If exciting is worrying that I may lose my job, then yes I’m excited.

Yeah it’s just a matter of time. Marketing executives already realize they aren’t able to control the message as well. If you get product recommendations through AI, you don’t see the company’s website and marketing copy, and don’t go through their various funnels. The company… can’t do marketing. How do you get the message you want into the training data?

While I despise ads, it’s an interesting problem. Even on my personal site, I can’t really control how people learn about me.

A Mastodon post I saw recently hit upon all the "Agentic" stuff is a rerun of the "Semantic Web" era, including its mistakes such as drastically overusing the word "agent" and also expecting Companies to build APIs with free or cheap access that bypass their ads and dark pattern-enhanced (er, "revenue-generating") websites.

After another MCP discussion today got into "Neo4j is the best database for almost every MCP agent, because…" I realized I may have "Semantic Web PTSD" and finally have a name for some of the less than excited gut reactions to "Agentic" I've been having for a while now. (Beyond also the terrible gut reaction to both the "word" "agentic" itself and also naming a key protocol after the villain from Tron.)