“The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent,” he added. “Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we’ll be fine as an industry.”
Needless to say, we haven’t seen anything like that yet. OpenAI’s top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail’s pace and requires constant supervision.
That is not at all what he said. He said that creating some arbitrary benchmark on the level or quality of the AI, (e.g.: as it’s as smarter than a 5th grader or as intelligent as an adult) is meaningless. That the real measure is if there is value created and out out into the real world. He also mentions that global growth is up by 10%. He doesn’t provide data that correlates the grow with the use of AI and I doubt that such data exists yet. Let’s not just twist what he said to be “Microsoft CEO says AI provides no value” when that is not what he said.
microsoft rn:
✋ AI
👉 quantum
can’t wait to have to explain the difference between asymmetric-key and symmetric-key cryptography to my friends!
Forgive my ignorance. Is there no known quantum-safe symmetric-key encryption algorithm?
i’m not an expert by any means, but from what i understand, most symmetric key and hashing cryptography will probably be fine, but asymmetric-key cryptography will be where the problems are. lots of stuff uses asymmetric-key cryptography, like https for example.
Oh that’s not good. i thought TLS was quantum safe already
I knew
Joseph Weizenbaum: “No shit? For realsies?”
Makes sense that the company that just announced their qbit advancement would be disparaging the only “advanced” thing other companies have shown in the last 5 years.
He probably saw that softbank and masayoshi son were heavily investing in it and figured it was dead.
That’s because they want to use AI in a server scenario where clients login. That translated to American English and spoken with honesty means that they are spying on you. Anything you do on your computer is subject to automatic spying. Like you could be totally under the radar, but as soon as you say the magic words together bam!..I’d love a sling thong for my wife…bam! Here’s 20 ads, just click to purchase since they already stole your wife’s boob size and body measurements and preferred lingerie styles. And if you’re on McMaster… Hmm I need a 1/2 pipe and a cap…Better get two caps in case you cross thread on…ding dong! FBI! We know you’re in there! Come out with your hands up!
The only thing stopping me from switching to Linux is some college software (Won’t need it when I’m done) and 1 game (which no longer gets updates and thus is on the path to a slow sad demise)
So I’m on the verge of going Penguin.
You can just install Linux besides windows. It’s easy, I did it last month.
Yeah use Windows in a VM and your game probably just works too, I was surprised that all games I have on Steam now just work on Linux.
Years ago when I switched from OSX to Linux I just stopped gaming because of that but I started testing my old games and suddenly no problems with them anymore.
Just run Windows in a VM on Linux. You can use VirtualBox.
What software / game is that? it could still run in Wine or Bottle.
You’re really forcing it at that point. Wine can’t run most of what I need to use for work. I’m excited for the day I can ditch Windows, but it’s not any time soon unfortunately. I’ll have to live with WSL.
But… i am still curious… what are you trying to run 😆
MobaXTerm namely. It will start up, but it misses a lot of features when used in Wine. To the point it’s not usable for work purposes.
Not the same person with the program. Just another person making an excuse.
I’ve been working on an internal project for my job - a quarterly report on the most bleeding edge use cases of AI, and the stuff achieved is genuinely really impressive.
So why is the AI at the top end amazing yet everything we use is a piece of literal shit?
The answer is the chatbot. If you have the technical nous to program machine learning tools it can accomplish truly stunning processes at speeds not seen before.
If you don’t know how to do - for eg - a Fourier transform - you lack the skills to use the tools effectively. That’s no one’s fault, not everyone needs that knowledge, but it does explain the gap between promise and delivery. It can only help you do what you already know how to do faster.
Same for coding, if you understand what your code does, it’s a helpful tool for unsticking part of a problem, it can’t write the whole thing from scratch
Exactly - I find AI tools very useful and they save me quite a bit of time, but they’re still tools. Better at some things than others, but the bottom line is that they’re dependent on the person using them. Plus the more limited the problem scope, the better they can be.
Yes, but the problem is that a lot of these AI tools are very easy to use, but the people using them are often ill-equipped to judge the quality of the result. So you have people who are given a task to do, and they choose an AI tool to do it and then call it done, but the result is bad and they can’t tell.
True, though this applies to most tools, no? For instance, I’m forced to sit through horrible presentations beause someone were given a task to do, they created a Powerpoint (badly) and gave a presentation (badly). I don’t know if this is inherently a problem with AI…
For coding it’s also useful for doing the menial grunt work that’s easy but just takes time.
You’re not going to replace a senior dev with it, of course, but it’s a great tool.
My previous employer was using AI for intelligent document processing, and the results were absolutely amazing. They did sink a few million dollars into getting the LLM fine tuned properly, though.
LLMs could be useful for translation between programming languages. I asked it to recently for server code given a client code in a different language and the LLM generated code was spot on!
I remain skeptical of using solely LLMs for this, but it might be relevant: DARPA is looking into their usage for C to Rust translation. See the TRACTOR program.
So why is the AI at the top end amazing yet everything we use is a piece of literal shit?
Just that you call an LLM “AI” shows how unqualified you are to comment on the “successes”.
What are you talking about? I read the papers published in mathematical and scientific journals and summarize the results in a newsletter. As long as you know equivalent undergrad statistics, calculus and algebra anyone can read them, you don’t need a qualification, you could just Google each term you’re unfamiliar with.
While I understand your objection to the nomenclature, in this particular context all major AI-production houses including those only using them as internal tools to achieve other outcomes (e.g. NVIDIA) count LLMs as part of their AI collateral.
The mechanism of machine learning based on training data as used by LLMs is at its core statistics without contextual understanding, the output is therefore only statistically predictable but not reliable. Labeling this as “AI” is misleading at best, directly undermining democracy and freedom in practice, because the impressively intelligent looking output leads naive people to believe the software knows what it is talking about.
People who condone the use of the term “AI” for this kind of statistical approach are naive at best, snake oil vendors or straightout enemies of humanity.
Can you name a company who has produced an LLM that doesn’t refer to it generally as part of “AI”?
can you name a company who produces AI tools that doesn’t have an LLM as part of its “AI” suite of tools?
Not this again… LLM is a subset of ML which is a subset of AI.
AI is very very broad and all of ML fits into it.
No and if you label statistics as AI you contribute to the destruction of civil rights by lying to people.
This is the issue with current public discourse though. AI has become shorthand for the current GenAI hypecycle, meaning for many AI has become a subset of ML.
deleted by creator
Correction, LLMs being used to automate shit doesn’t generate any value. The underlying AI technology is generating tons of value.
AlphaFold 2 has advanced biochemistry research in protein folding by multiple decades in just a couple years, taking us from 150,000 known protein structures to 200 Million in a year.
I think you’re confused, when you say “value”, you seem to mean progressing humanity forward. This is fundamentally flawed, you see, “value” actually refers to yacht money for billionaires. I can see why you would be confused.
Well sure, but you’re forgetting that the federal government has pulled the rug out from under health research and therefore had made it so there is no economic value in biochemistry.
How is that a qualification on anything they said? If our knowledge of protein folding has gone up by multiples, then it has gone up by multiples, regardless of whatever funding shenanigans Trump is pulling or what effects those might eventually have. None of that detracts from the value that has already been delivered, so I don’t see how they are “forgetting” anything. At best, it’s a circumstance that may play in economically but doesn’t say anything about AI’s intrinsic value.
Was it just a facetious complaint?
OK yeah but… we can’t have nice things soooo
Yeah tbh, AI has been an insane helpful tool in my analysis and writing. Never would I have been able to do thoroughly investigate appropriate statisticall tests on my own. After following the sources and double checking ofcourse, but still, super helpful.
Thanks. So the underlying architecture that powers LLMs has application in things besides language generation like protein folding and DNA sequencing.
alphafold is not an LLM, so no, not really
You are correct that AlphaFold is not an LLM, but they are both possible because of the same breakthrough in deep learning, the transformer and so do share similar architecture components.
And all that would not have been possible without linear algebra and calculus, and so on and so forth… Come on, the work on transformers is clearly separable from deep learning.
That’s like saying the work on rockets is clearly separable from thermodynamics.
Image recognition models are also useful for astronomy. The largest black hole jet was discovered recently, and it was done, in part, by using an AI model to sift through vast amounts of data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC1lssgsEGY
This thing is so big, it travels between voids in the filaments of galactic super clusters and hits the next one over.
It’s always important to double check the work of AI, but yea it excels at solving problems we’ve been using brute force on
I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn about AI models besides LLMs
AI is just what we call automation until marketing figures out a new way to sell the tech. LLMs are generative AI, hardly useful or valuable, but new and shiny and has a party trick that tickles the human brain in a way that makes people give their money to others. Machine learning and other forms of AI have been around for longer and most have value generating applications but aren’t as fun to demonstrate so they never got the traction LLMs have gathered.
R&D is always a money sink
It isn’t R&D anymore if you’re actively marketing it.
Uh… Used to be, and should be. But the entire industry has embraced treating production as test now. We sell alpha release games as mainstream releases. Microsoft fired QC long ago. They push out world breaking updates every other month.
And people have forked over their money with smiles.
Microsoft fired QC long ago.
I can’t wait until my cousin learns about this, he’ll be so surprised.
I’d tell him but he’s at work. At Microsoft, in quality control.
Especially when the product is garbage lmao
Very bold move, in a tech climate in which CEOs declare generative AI to be the answer to everything, and in which shareholders expect line to go up faster…
I half expect to next read an article about his ouster.
If it seems odd for him to suddenly say that all this AI stuff is bullshit, that’s because he didn’t. He said it hasn’t boosted the world economy on the order of the Industrial revolution - yet. There is so much hype around this, and he’s on the line to deliver actual results. So it’s smart for him to take a little air out of the hype ballon. But the article headline is a total misrepresentation of what he said. He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board. That’s very very different from “no value.”
He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board.
That’s such an odd turn of phrase. “We’re still waiting for the hype to become a reality…” and “…something obvious and impossible to miss…”
So, like, do I have to time to go to the bathroom and get a drink, before I sit down and start staring at the empty space, or…?
Don’t get me wrong. I work with this stuff every day at this point. My job is LLMs and model training pipelines and agentic frameworks. But, there is something… off, about saying the equivalent of “it’ll happen any day now…”
It may just, but making forward-looking decisions on something that doesn’t exist—may not come to pass—feels like madness.
Again, you’re twisting the words.
He said “we’re still waiting” and you’ve twisted that into “any day now.” As if still waiting for something to materialize is the same thing as being certain it will.
Hype always precedes reality. That’s the nature of hype. If someone says hype is nice but we’re still waiting to see it become reality that is not blind faith in the hype. The complete opposite. It’s restraint.
Anyway. People get some kind of emotional catharsis from hating AI and shitting on CEOs so I think a fair reading of this is just going to go out the window at any opportunity. I won’t spend any more energy trying to contain that.
My theory is it’s only a matter of time until the firing sprees generate enough backlog of actual work that isn’t being realised by the minor productivity gains from AI until the investors start asking hard questions.
Maybe this is the start of the bubble bursting.
I’ve basically given up hope of the bubble ever bursting, as the market lives in La La Land, where no amount of bad decision-making seems to make a dent in the momentum of “line must go up”.
Would it be cool for negative feedback to step in and correct the death spiral? Absolutely. But, I advise folks to not start holding their breath so soon…
LLMs in non-specialized application areas basically reproduce search. In specialized fields, most do the work that automation, data analytics, pattern recognition, purpose built algorithms and brute force did before. And yet the companies charge nx the amount for what is essentially these very conventional approaches, plus statistics. Not surprising at all. Just in awe of how come the parallels to snake oil weren’t immediately obvious.
I think AI is generating negative value … the huge power usage is akin to speculative blockchain currencies. Barring some biochemistry and other very, very specialized uses it hasn’t given anything other than, as you’ve said, plain-language search (with bonus hallucination bullshit, yay!) … snake oil, indeed.
Its a little more complicated than that I think. LLMs and AI is not remotely the same with very different use cases.
I believe in AI for sure in some fields, but I understand the skeptics around LLMs.
But the difference AI is already doing in the medical industry and hospitals is no joke. X-ray scannings and early detection of severe illness is the one being used specifically today, and will save thounsands of lives and millions of dollars / euros.
My point is, its not that black and white.
On this topic, the vast majority of people seem to think that AI means the free tier of ChatGPT.
AI isn’t a magical computer demon that can grant all of your wishes, but that doesn’t mean that it is worthless.
For example, Alphafold essentially solved protein folding and diffusion models built on that discovery let us generate novel proteins with specific properties with the same ease as we can make a picture of an astronaut on a horse.
Image classification is massively useful in manufacturing. Instead of custom designed programs purpose built for each client ($$$), you can find tune existing models with generic tools using labor that doesn’t need to be a software engineer.
Robotics is another field. The amount of work required for humans to design and code their control systems was enormous. Now you can use standard models, give them arbitrary limbs and configurations and train them in simulated environments. This massively cuts down on the amount of engineering work ($$$) required.
And crashing the markets in the process… At the same time they came out with a bunch of mambo jumbo and scifi babble about having a million qbit quantum chip… 😂
Tech is basically trying to push up the stocks one hype idea after another. Social media bubble about to burst? AI! AI about to burst? Quantum! I’m sure that when people will start realizing quantum computing is another smokescreen, a new moronic idea will start to gain steam from all those LinkedIn “luminaries”
Quantum computation is a lot like fusion.
We know how it works and we know that it would be highly beneficial to society but, getting it to work with reliability and at scale is hard and expensive.
Sure, things get over hyped because capitalism but that doesn’t make the technology worthless… It just shows how our economic system rewards lies and misleading people for money.
It also can solve only a limited set of problems. People is under the impression that they can suddenly game at 10k full path ray tracing if they have a quantum cpu, while in reality for 99.9% of the problem is only as fast as normal cpus
That doesn’t make it worthless.
People are often wrong about technology, that’s independent of the technology’s usefulness. Quantum computation is incredibly useful for the applications that require it, things that are completely impossible to calculate with classical computers can be done using quantum algorithms.
This is true even if there are people on social media who think that it’s a new graphics card.
Absolutely, but its application is not as widespread as someone not into science might think. The only thing it might actually impact the average Joe is cryptography I think
For a lot of years, computers added no measurable productivity improvements. They sure revolutionized the way things work in all segments of society for something that doesn’t increase productivity.
AI is an inflating bubble: excessive spending, unclear use case. But it won’t take long for the pop, clearing out the failures and making successful use cases clearer, the winning approaches to emerge. This is basically the definition of capitalism
What time span are you referring to when you say “for a lot of years”?
Vague memories of many articles over much of my adult life decrying the costs of whatever the current trend with computers is being higher than the benefits.
And I believe it, it’s technically true. There seems to be a pattern of bubbles where everyone jumps on the new hot thing, spend way too much money on it. It’s counterproductive, right up until the bubble pops, leaving the transformative successes.
Or I believe it was a long term thing with electronic forms and printers. As long as you were just adding steps to existing business processes, you don’t see productivity gains. It took many years for businesses to reinvent the way they worked to really see the productivity gains
If you want a reference there is a Rational Reminder Podcast (nerdy and factual personal finance podcast from a Canadian team) about this concept. It was the illustrated with trains or phone infrastructure 100 years ago : new technology looks nice -> people invest stupid amounts in a variety of projects-> some crash bring back stock valuations to reasonable level and at that point the technology is adopted and its infrastructure got subsidized by those who lost money on the stock market hot thing. Then a new hot thing emerge. The Internet got its cycle in 2000, maybe AI is the next one. Usually every few decade the top 10 in the s/p 500 changes.
