• 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • What I fear is when TikTok’s (or YouTube, Facebook, whatever) shaping of public opinion becomes more dramatic and blatant.

    For instance, let’s say a leader connected to the Tiktok’s owner didn’t like their political opponent? What if they just deprioritized them from the algorithm, so their name is basically unknown?

    Or what if a certain scandal was countered by boosting opposition videos?

    If this sounds like I’m describing extant scenarios, well… yes.

    Censorship is no longer hard. It’s statistical. Truth doesn’t matter if it doesn’t show up in feeds, and this is more scary to me than any mental effects Tiktok may be having.






  • I dispute all of this

    The entire premise of chatbots is to have a simple natural-language interface instead of those scary GUIs and programming languages.

    Absolutely not. This is not what text models were made for, it’s what jerks like Altman and Modi twisted them into with marketing.

    The idea that maybe they didn’t know enough about how to interact with ai, and that’s why it failed to help them, is a little silly, and the more you explain how we’re all using ai wrong, the sillier you look.

    I’m not blaming the user, I’m saying they’re crap services. I think the superlative/cursing is necessary here; they are so bad and enshittified it is astounding.

    You’ve obviously sunk a lot of costs into genai, both in time and money, and that is making you defensive.

    I have paid a total of a few bucks into APIs, I’ve never had a Claude or OpenAI subscription in my life. I don’t know why you would assume this.

    Somebody that isn’t impressed by Claude premium isn’t going to do any of what you suggest, let alone get any more value out of it, and that’s valid for them. You’re not seriously interested in helping them professionally, you are just insecure.

    I’m not insecure about this. I don’t need LLMs or generative ML, though I am interested in it. I have many dire personal issues, but people are free to program however they wish and I’m not going to gaslight anyone about that.

    I do think text models have been bastardized into “a simple natural-language interface instead of those scary GUIs and programming languages.” That is NOT what they were intended to do, no matter how much Claude tries to sell people on it. I think this misunderstanding is extremely important because it’s exactly what’s propping up abominations/scams like OpenAI/Anthropic.

    But they can still be extremely useful tools in narrower scopes, like all machine learning has for over a decade, and I’m not going to shy away advocating for that. I do resent all of LLMs being pigeonholed so tightly, and if people are going to try them, I at least want to point them to a more reasonable/frugal source than Claude premium and Claude Code.



  • Some models like Nemotron use open datasets, and utilize hardware more efficiently than OpenAI and such.

    Its (IMO) also quite different when the weights are Apache licensed. If absolutely zero profit is involved, that gets close to the “fair use” umbrella, IMO, like other noncommercial derivative works of restrictively licensed content (fanfics/fanart).


    You are not wrong about the closed datasets though, for the vast majority of LLMs. Lord knows what the Chinese trainers or OpenAI use to train…

    But anything truly “open weights” is still a different order of magnitude in the ethics scale, IMO. I view the primary issue to be profiting off the scraping and training; take that away, and its not nearly as egregious.


  • I use local LLMs (bad place to state that maybe?) and find them useful, but just like I wouldn’t recommend any level of alcohol to a recovering alcoholic despite it in general being fine in moderate amounts, LLM usage has to be treated the same way.

    Yes!

    I was afraid to bring it up. I almost didn’t. But I just wanted to convey “if your future employer MAKES you smoke, if it absolutely cannot be avoided, be aware DIY nicotine patches exist as an alternative,” as it seems like OP hasn’t done much with self hosted stuff.

    However, I have been using “generative AI” to encompass all text, image, audio, video, etc. generation. I’m curious if you have a preferred term for that without “AI” or if the “generative” is enough of a qualifier to make the term adequately specific?

    I am just more specific!

    For text models, or multi-input models? I use “text generation” or “LLM.”

    For media generation, I use “diffusion” as basically all those models are diffusion models.

    I use “computer vision” for image recognition stuff. “Machine learning” as a more general term.

    Basically, I pretend like I live in 2021/2022 before “AI” became a catchphrase, but the field of machine learning was racing away. TBH I hate the term “generative AI” as ALL machine learning is generative in some way, yet old school machine learning isn’t normally included in that term.