- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
I remember the feeling of intuitive respect and trust when I was a kid, which transferred to tech bros from companies like Motorola and Sun and DEC.
It’s no longer there, but remember how serious it all felt in 2002.
A lot of accumulated momentum used by wrong people.
Honestly, for me, young me had no fucking clue how bad tech could be for the world just physically. The massive power draw, the massive water consumption, I’m sure there are nestle level employee and child abuse situations to boot.
Noone ever talked about the cost of fucking anything. Just blinders all the way until it crashes and we tally the victims and how much money was lost or it cost to fix it.
The one thing the Crypto bros did was show everyone how absurd this all really could be, and all for less than nothing.
I agree.
It’s very cool to have a personal computer that can play music, display pictures, play videos, render scenes in POV-Ray, so on. But I don’t think I need a new one every year, I don’t think I’d need anything as performant as what I have (not considering network effects), and I’d be happy to use a year 2003 (or even 1993, with dedicated chips Amiga-style one can make it usable for playing video and music too) performance PC with modern power efficiency.
I don’t think there’s any need to press for building machines able of doing even more of mostly useless work.
And about hidden costs of that power efficiency too - making modern chips is so complex that the production is more centralized than that of intercontinental ballistic missiles. That means rot in the society that only shows itself when it’s too late, like with any overcentralization.
So maybe power efficiency doesn’t have to be quite modern, ha-ha.
Overcentralization applies to other things in that industry too, I think I just wanted to add it to your list of hidden costs.