- AI is extremely resource intensive, consuming electricity, water, silicon, etc at levels possibly never seen before in humanity’s history; whether that’s a waste or not is subjective - Massive datacenters are popping up like anthills, and coupled with R-flavored regulation rollback there is a definite risk for environmental impact - just like during our last industrialization push where we poisoned much of the country, leading to a massive rollout of environmental protections in the 1970s and 1980s - Students are taking advantage of LLMs to shirk school responsibilities. Whether this is damaging or not is subjective until proven, and AI may not be causal here (students may not have been getting the expected value from their education without LLMs, again remains to be proven) - Many companies have used AI as a justification for layoffs, who knows what’s actually true though. There is a very real fear across society that it will continue to impact jobs, and senior AI company leaders are fueling this with public predictions of massive labor shifts. Again, maybe they are lying, but can you blame anyone for worrying?
There are counterarguments to all of these, but dismissing the fear as uneducated or brainwashed reveals your own priors and ignores all of these facts. It’s healthy to ingest OP’s criticisms - especially on a form populated most by Smart People (tm).
The problem with this argument is that assumes the world is static. When trains were invented, they polluted a LOT. Technology evolved. Looking backwards, the amount of value unlocked by them outweighed by order of magnitude the short term pollution they generated. Inefficient in the short term. Generation changing over the longer horizon. Extend the timeframe of your argument. Do you think it holds 20 years from now when we have more efficient algorithms and energy generation technologies? I don’t think so.
My biggest annoyance is hiding Thinking tokens; I have little trust in these aliens, and seeing how the sausage was made helped me to be more comfortable with eating it. Anthropic was the biggest provider that did not do this until recently, and they give a good rationale for the switch but that doesn’t make it less annoying. I also dislike the UX they put around it, “Hmm.”, “I should think about this” etc.
I think in the end it all boils down to a trust issue on the big labs
Edit: I shouldn’t admit this, but I even have an ontology defined - RDF and all - for some of my LLM tasks. Its classes contain examples, and so is like a few-shot instruction, and it’s working scarily well for structuring tasks.
Not to even mention looking at solutions for most basic things like prompt injections. Frankly laughable efforts. No where near what I would consider sufficient...
And somehow they are trying to push this crap to everywhere... Before you even have these things in place...
