AI Redraws Boston

[bigpicture7]

It's pretty good at giving Wikipedia-level summaries of things with Wikipedia levels of accuracy. (Which given its training data should not be surprising at all.) This is reasonably useful, and something LLMs are quite good at.

I mean I've not done a thorough investigation but it seems fairly okay at this, which again shouldn't be surprising given how many cooking websites it's no doubt scraped.

Personally I've had success with even pretty complex math and physics problems. It can do fairly complicated systems of equations and integrals for example. However I highly suspect it's actually just plugging into Wolfram-Alpha or similar here and using the text conversation more to convey the results.

This seems to me to be by far the biggest use. The more code you write the worse it gets, but for writing adequate code that can do a small task, which is then integrated into a larger program, it's quite good.

Of course we live in a Capitalist society though. How does ChatGPT convert these things into revenue, specifically $1-2tn of revenue?

It doesn't. Coding is the only place I really see it really making an impact, and that's also something that involves a lot of back+forth queries. At 1¢ per query, costs start to add up pretty quick. (That's 20-40x higher than a Google search, for reference.) Nothing about paid ChatGPT is especially compelling to an average joe. Ooh I can play around with higher resolution images, fancy. No that's not worth $10 a month unless you're rolling in it.

Unless they're somehow able to turn a text prediction model into an AGI within about 2 years or so the only place OpenAI & Co are going at this rate is bankrupt, that much seems pretty clear. The whole gravy-train is fueled by a mix of venture capital hype and a game of hot-bag-of-money between OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. If one of them can't pay, all of them can't pay and there goes ~25% of the Dow and your nan's pension. It's not like the telecom bubble either where sure, we spent all this money for not much returns and everything went to $#^@ but now we've got all these fiberoptic cables that are good for many many decades. Any GPUs bought from the current boom will be snails in 10 years time, if they're still working at all.

^I think you're spot on. Cheerleaders and resistors are turning this in to a simple good/bad argument. The issue is instead one of value, taking into account the cost tradeoffs of the parallel harms/opportunity costs: is this a wise investment of $Trillions at the pace that the money is currently being poured into it, considering where else that money could be spent? Almost certainly not. This is thirsty speculation, just like how Boston built too way many labs before taking its foot off the gas.

 

[as02155]

more impactful

I guess the Luddites should've stopped wearing clothes "for impact". But, we live in a society, bro.

They protested unfair labor practices including wage theft and improper compensation. Because of the history of the labor movement and those predecessors, like the Luddites, it was possible for SAG AFTRA to strike to protect the fruits of their labor from devalument by gen AI video models.

 

[type001]

It’s the constant bombardment of AI everywhere you look since 2022 that people can’t stand.

 

[as02155]

AI everywhere you look

Much of it is not even "AI" in the LLM sense, but, "AI" in the marketing department sense. In my experience, generative AI is at best a microwaving of leftovers - can be done well if you know how to use a microwave, but, most folks won't know how to do better than an awesome plate of nachos.

 

[citydweller]

That looks very real, like how Boston could have looked with some different twists and turns in its long history. No Charlestown Naval Shipyard, a smaller Boston Common, no Public Garden, no Fort Point Channel, the Charles River basin configured differently, etc.

and no way to get in or out of downtown.

 

[type001]

Much of it is not even "AI" in the LLM sense, but, "AI" in the marketing department sense. In my experience, generative AI is at best a microwaving of leftovers - can be done well if you know how to use a microwave, but, most folks won't know how to do better than an awesome plate of nachos.

So true! This has been annoying too. So many things are being cast as AI inappropriately.

 

[as02155]

So true! This has been annoying too. So many things are being cast as AI inappropriately.

Obviously, the marketing departments see that billionaires are pumping billions into "AI" - so they lemming what their billionaire (and soon trillionaire) bosses are going for.

 

[Patrick Winn]

This is just categorically false. Have you actually checked the veracity of its "summaries"? They're riddled with hallucinations to the point of it being faster to do it oneself. It's not even capable of giving main ideas a lot of the time. Usually it's just a guess of what the document is about based on the file name or title*

*Edit: Which is charmingly appropriate considering how deeply trained it is on reddit

I use chatGPT and Claude all the time for litigation prep. I find them highly accurate and incredibly insightful at times. Just try loading a .doc or .pdf into it. I get the sense you're not using it right.

 

[KCasiglio]

I use chatGPT and Claude all the time for litigation prep. I find them highly accurate and incredibly insightful at times. Just try loading a .doc or .pdf into it. I get the sense you're not using it right.

You get the wrong sense. I will admit to having not tried Claude but ChatGPT cannot consistently read and summarize an uploaded pdf without hallucinating.

 

[Patrick Winn]

I guess the Luddites should've stopped wearing clothes "for impact". But, we live in a society, bro.

They protested unfair labor practices including wage theft and improper compensation. Because of the history of the labor movement and those predecessors, like the Luddites, it was possible for SAG AFTRA to strike to protect the fruits of their labor from devalument by gen AI video models.

Wow what a historical connection.

 

[Patrick Winn]

You get the wrong sense. I will admit to having not tried Claude but ChatGPT cannot consistently read and summarize an uploaded pdf without hallucinating.

You can't rely blindly on it. It's a tool. A tool that most smart and imaginative people adopted a long time ago. A lot of it is knowing the right questions to ask.