TwoCent · HackerTrans

2 năm trướcdiscuss

Precisely. Hallucinations were improperly named. A better term is "confabulation," which is telling an untruth without the intent to deceive. Sadly, we can't get an entire industry to rename the LLM behavior we call hallucination, so I think we're stuck with it.

TwoCent

2 năm trướcdiscuss

>But you're comparing these AI companies to WeWork? Really?

It's the first tool that came to hand: I'm sure there are better historical comparisons if I bothered to look. For professional reasons, I was well acquainted with WeWork when they were a big deal. It was clear to many of us in advance of their collapse that WeWork was heading for a hard crash based on their lease commitments and other public data. In this case, public data, such as for OpenAI and Anthropic, strongly suggests that, like WeWork, the economics of the businesses don't make sense. There are some fundamentals that no amount of innovation can overcome. Committing to leases you can't conceivably cover is one of them. Spending $2.35 for every $1 of revenue is clearly another, absent some breakthrough.

WeWork is not a perfect example. But if OpenAI flames out, it will be mentioned in the same breath as WeWork. The reasons are not the same, but they do sort of rhyme.

TwoCent

2 năm trướcdiscuss

They're selling a commodity product in a Red Queen's Race. OpenAI, Anthropic, and whatever others get spun up while the gold rush is on are each building costly models at a vast cost to try to get a bit ahead of each other. The economics of this are ugly. The business of building massive LLMs looks more like air transport than the dot com gold rush in the '90s. There will probably be much useful stuff in the wreckage when it's all over, but I've not seen much to inspire confidence that the useful stuff will include profitable companies. This looks like it has all the makings of another WeWork, only this time with an epochal AI winter as the aftermath.

TwoCent

2 năm trướcdiscuss

The example from our environment suggests that the apex intelligences in the environment treat all other intelligent agents in only a few ways:

1. Pests to eliminate 2. Benign neglect 3. Workers 4. Pets 5. Food

That suggests that there are scenarios under which we survive. I'm not sure we'd like any of them, though "benign neglect" might be the best of a bad lot.

TwoCent

2 năm trướcdiscuss

They are kind of like pacifiers for adults, aren't they? The term "fondleslab" captures that; I believe I first read that moniker years ago in some article on the Register.

TwoCent

3 năm trướcdiscuss

Smil's recent "Invention and Innovation" is well worth reading, too. Anything by Smil, really, is excellent food for thought and deeply informative.

TwoCent

3 năm trướcdiscuss

Would Mercury be a good candidate, given how far in the sun's gravity well it sits? Perhaps better to start with the asteroid belt.

TwoCent

3 năm trướcdiscuss

It depends on the company. It's kind of like a menu item that says "Market Price". You know it's not going to be cheap. You don't know until you ask if the price is less than the value offered.

TwoCent

3 năm trướcdiscuss

DeGaulle's observation that "nations do not have friends, only interests" comes to mind.

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