The tech world’s fixation on artificial intelligence has spawned beliefs and rituals that resemble religion — complete with digital deities, moral codes, and threats of damnation.
TL;DR opinion piece: author has a history with religion, there are a few religious nutters in AI who either make outlandish religious claims, or something close enough that they can be interpreted literally. Article spends a very long, marginally painful time trying to imply all AI people are worshiping AI.
For what it’s worth, I think all AI people are worshiping money. They’re not in there because it’s God they’re in there because it’s might make them wealthy.
Once people get over all this BS, We can just make cool tools out of it.
Agreed. It’s nice to see others who see the potential for AI without being some easy solution to all problems
The truth is, it’s incredibly useful, but more like a super intern than a coworker. It knows many things you don’t, it can do things faster than you, sometimes even better, but it’s an intern - it can do menial tasks and sometimes surprise you with unexpected insight, but it doesn’t understand the full picture and will make mistakes, and that’s on you
Luckily, there’s a lot of menial tasks it can help with, and a lot of ways to make small (7-13b) models outperform big ones with conventional programming. Anything that can be done in conventional code should be, and even if it won’t make billions there’s many places it can work like mighty putty to make things that make our lives better
I think it would be really cool to spin up a open source project using conventional programming and one of these light duty models as a teaching device. Do some specific tuning around different subjects, also set up guardrails keeping them boxed into the subject at hand or related topics that have been tested.
It’s very achievable - if you wrote out simple functions to complete larger objectives, you could feed in test results and the code, and you could easily provide enough context to keep it on task
Cynically, I’d say that that’s actually something AI shares with traditional religion - it’s only the followers who potentially invest faith in a set of myths and magical thinking - the leadership is just in it for the money and power, and just mouth the doctrine because that’s what’s necessary to keep the faithful in line and keep the money rolling in.
But really, I’d argue that what the author is ascribing to religion and then, pointedly, to AI is actually just a more fundamental human psychological dynamic that’s notable in religion, but is also part of the driving force behind everything from ethnic identity to sports team fandom.
SV’s god is money and AI is his profit.
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Similar to Republican fixation with Donald.
Except with one of these there’s a chance of developing intelligent life
