China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen
American magic bean companies like Beanco, The Boston Bean Company, and Nvidia have already shed hundreds of billions of dollars in stock value.
Q: What does it take for $1 trillion of "wealth" to evaporate?
A: Say your state-sponsored thinking machine cost 1000 times less to develop.
Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.
Regardless of how much of a bubble we're in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It's proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it "magic beans" is just wishful thinking at best.
Earthing? How is that a scam?
I know for sure that bad earthing in my current residence has been creating significant problems for with appliances.
Sometimes my UPS giving errors, which also, might be due to bad earthing.
i have noticed that there are two competing narratives in the leftwingosphere:
A) ai is 100% slop garbage and a giant waste of electricity, pumping out garbage images with multiple hands and the text is nothing but hallucinations that can’t even count the number of r’s in “strawberry”
and at the same time
B) AI is going to take all our jobs and we will all be homeless and poor while tech billionaire CEOs turn us into slaves
Those are only conflicting statements if you believe that the market will not embrace worse products. It totally will so long as you have a group of people who lack the critical analysis skills to compare the products and arrive at the conclusion that the new one is worse.
It doesn't help that the potential drivers of this action are massive conglomerates, so if a sweeping change comes from the top-down and is paired with a lot of propaganda (Marketing) then people will have no choice but to accept it as the standard.
I think that a lot of criticism about the actual quality of AI art is mixed, though. I feel like it has flaws, but I've seen arguments about flaws I don't think are actually real problems with the technical quality.
Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that's great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.
But yeah, I don't think it's fair to complain about how "inefficient" an early technology is and also call it "magic beans".
Option A feels like wishful thinking or sour grapes or something to me. Community crossover with the humanities and fine arts is significant.
B is feeling a bit less imminent too; it just wasn't clear a couple years ago that it will take more than raw compute. That being said, AGI is still bound to happen eventually, seeing as NGI did.
Fun fact: they are scarily compatible as long as the CEOs are not in their role thanks to meritocracy :)
Hey! Are you up to talking about your opinions on the value of current AI technology? I'm personally opposed due to how our society has chosen to organize itself, but I think the basic concept is interesting.
Agreed. I've been following the technology of neural networks and generative AI since before LLMs were the new hotness and it's fascinating and powerful stuff.
My qualms with what's happening now are more about how we organize our economy and society. Rushing them to market, aggressively trying to cull workers, etc. are critiques of capitalism not AI. In a different world we would all be excited about the prospect of having to work less and reap the benefits of AI, but we wouldn't be reopening coal plants and leaving people to starve on the street.
American magic bean companies like Beanco, The Boston Bean Company, and Nvidia
Omg 🤣
Didn't expect an onion article here.
This article is clearly about beans, not onions.
Well… I thought it was relevant and humorous, and the rules don’t say the submissions have to be news. I might be stretching the definition of “discussions” but, figured it was worth a try :-)