alt Hacker NewsWatched it a while ago. Made me seriously think about AI and what we should use it for. I feel like all the entertainment use cases (image and video gen) are a complete waste.
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Why are images and video a complete waste? This makes no sense to me.
Right now the generators aren’t effective but they are definitely stepping stones to something better in the future.
If that future thing produces video, movies and pictures better than anything humanity can produce at a rate faster than we can produce things… how is that a waste?
It can arguably be bad for society but definitely not a waste.
You might have said the same thing about GPUs for 20 years when they were mostly for games, before they turned out to be essential for AI. All the entertainment use cases were directly funding development of the next generation of computing all along.
Practical things are probably treating diseases and more abundance of physical goods. More speculative/sci-fi is merging in some form with AI and maybe immortality which I think is the more interesting bit.
DeepMind's new [edit: apparently now old] weather forecast model is similar in architecture to the toys that generate videos of horses addressing Congress or cats wearing sombreros. The technology moves forward and while some of the new applications are not important, other applications of the same technology may be important.
The chatbots and image editors are just a side-show. The real value is coming in e.g. chemistry (Alpha fold etc all), fusion research, weather prediction etc.