The AI dooooooom thread

[Savonarola]

AI will become part of the 3GPP Cellular specifications for 6G (release IMT 2030), (although some companies already use it to optimize/manage their networks.)  It's not yet established how this will work.  I was listening to a symposium last night about how to have an extremely low latency network able to access a LLM.  One of the members said that we couldn't have a local LLM because couldn't put a nuclear reactor at every node, and my immediate thought was "Or can we?"

 

He suggested using a digital twin (and barring the invention of Mr. Fusion from "Back to the Future", that's probably the most realistic way.)

[Savonarola]

Today I read an article in the IEEE Communication Society journal which detailed a plan for a network of satellite data centers.  (I know this is something Elon Musk has pitched, but he's also pitched colonizing Mars, so I'm sometimes skeptical of his ideas.)  From a technical standpoint it looked plausible (a series of distributed solar powered data centers which communicate to the ground through a lower orbiting satellites.)  It wasn't a business plan, so I don't know if the cost of launces would justify whatever benefits it would bring (they pitched the data centers need for energy as a driver.)  It still sounds like something that belongs to science fiction (a cloud beyond the clouds) rather than peer reviewed paper in a technical journal.

[Josquius]

More heralding the popping bubble?
https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies-are-scrambling-to-stop-spending-so-much-on-ai/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

[Valmy]

Good sense starting to prevail? Hope for humanity after all.

After a lot of effort to use AI in many parts of my life I have gradually come to the conclusion it sucks. Sure it seems nifty at first but it just...never quite gets you there. I don't really know how to explain it, I just usually feel so frustrated with it, like it can do what it does just fine but nothing beyond that and eventually it just burns you out.

I know that isn't a very descriptive criticism but I guess I could use this example to illustrate my point: at first it is cool how AI can edit things you write. Really cool and useful but...over time...you start to see how it makes your writing sound generic and like AI wrote it and that is frustrating. So you start finding yourself taking the stuff the AI edited and editing it again to sound like you and at that point why bother? You see what I am getting at?

I don't really know how to think about it but I will take an AI break for a bit and come back to it later with fresh eyes.

[crazy canuck]

Hype can be sustained for a limited time. Eventually reality bites.

[HisMajestyBOB]

At home, I mostly used it for troubleshooting tricky FreeBSD or Linux issues, because it does a decent job of searching through and parsing information spread across a bunch of forum posts and wiki sites.
Professionally I've found it to be pretty much of no use. First, most of our work involves data that contains PII, is proprietary, and is heavily restricted in what we can do with it. Second, our work has to be transparent and correct, and these tools just don't meet that criteria. A tool that just makes stuff up is, to me, like a calculator that sometimes gives you "5" when you ask it to add 2 and 2.

[Jacob]

This is wild:

[Crazy_Ivan80]

It's almost as if when you're a lawful citizen you're just an idiot in today's world.

[Syt]

I'd argue that was true at pretty much any time in history.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

I'd argue that was true at pretty much any time in history.

True, but for most of that time society didn't make the claim to be otherwise. Modern society does, but the pretence is wearing very very thin

[mongers]

Near here is a private school that generates a lot of traffic, so I avoid that village at the end of the school day, so as the summer hols are nearly on us I asked the MS search AI:

 "when does moyles court school summer term end 2026"
Answer:
"The summer term at Moyles Court School in 2026 ends on Wednesday, 22 July 2026."

Quoted source the school website, yet when you look on the site, the actual end of term is Friday 3rd July, and that's inline with what I expected, as private schools tend to close earlier than the state schools here.

So what's the point, if the most basic query results in an entirely misleading, made up answer?