alt Hacker NewsBurning question: why is this worth paying for as a layman? I can sometimes find a use for all these LLMs for software development, but I can never find a good use for any of this outside of "slightly better search engine".
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I genuinely think the frontier labs are just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. All of the improvements since Fable 5 seem marginal. Most of the quoted AGI "risk" is coming from super large agentic models that are juggernauts that can brute force their way through any problem faster than a human can. Despite that they're no closer to AGI than they were a year ago; the technology's limitations are apparent the more you use it. Doesn't mean it's still not extremely dangerous and/or capable, it's just not the "replace a human in 99% of cases" thing. There are obvious tradeoffs besides just the models being faster and capable of information retrieval and generation at a rate exponentially faster than a human's.
My long-term hope (and call me another Zitron if you wish) is that the labs' hype dissipates if there's no serious improvements beyond stringing together agents to ram through brick wall Millennium Prize style problems and we all just use on-device AI for 99% of cases where it's useful, researchers, governments, militaries, and universities can pay for the more complex models, and image/video gen dies a slow death (if Congress will actually legislate and/or SCOTUS decides that training those specific models does not qualify as fair use unlike training LLMs) and cost for compute rises over time as public interest in the tech sours.
LLMs are such marvelous and incredible technology squandered by genuinely deranged Silicon Valley cultists who are trying to use them as a Trojan horse to force their antisocial visions of the future upon an unsuspecting populace. We could all have just invested in on-device compute and nobody would have lost their jobs in pointless layoffs, productivity would have increased, and maybe we would have forced a conversation about when and when not to use AI and it wouldn't be so ever-present in use cases where it actually does harm to the consumer and society. But sama, PT, and dario just wouldn't have it that way, would they? Because if that were the case, there's no prospective hope where they can assuage their deep-seated insecurities over being antisocial and off-putting by reassuring themselves that there's an imminent realignment of society where they will hold all the cards when the dust settles.
As a complete layman---not worth it. We live just fine. Medical researchers slave night and day to keep you healthy.
But if you have any ambition at all---if you want to map the local school board, or get a quick understanding of your finances, or set up a robot in your backyard---then, quickly proves useful.