The AI dooooooom thread

[crazy canuck]

Some of the curl bug bounty AI commits are a hoot too.

And some rational soul crying out in the wilderness

Stop humanizing this tool and find it's owner and hold them accountable for wasting time and resources on an industrial scale.

[Sheilbh]

Just to add to my occasional uses that I find helpful, but are in no way transforming the economy

As well as Anki list making I do still find it surprisingly helpful on the language learning/improving front. (I think language translation is still just extraordinary from what I remember in my early days on the internet - it blew my mind when I was in  East Asia and realised I could just turn on my camera to get translation of, say, Chinese characters.)

Also was in a bookshop today looking at two versions of a classic foreign novel with different translations and used it to get some information about the reception etc of the different translations. Which was helpful in itself - but the bit that pleasantly surprised me was that it recommended specific descriptive sections on the first page as a vibe-check I could do against the two. Which was interesting and I found helpful.

[Syt]

Not entirely AI but also.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/

Oh, good: Discord's age verification rollout has ties to Palantir co-founder and panopticon architect Peter Thiel

Discord is "experimenting" with an age authentication vendor whose major investors include Thiel's Founders Fund.
Last week, Discord invited the contempt of its users by announcing it will be rolling out global age verification restrictions in March, which will restrict viewable content and communities for users who don't scan either their faces or government IDs and haven't already been determined to be an adult by unspecified prediction algorithms. Approximately nobody thought this was cool.

Impossibly, despite its attempts to pacify the ensuing outcry by issuing a clarification that merely some users will be required to submit to its child detection matrix, Discord has managed to make the rollout of its global age assurance policy seem even grimier. The company has informed some users in the UK they may be part of "an experiment" with Persona, an age verification vendor whose investors include Peter Thiel, co-founder of ICE's premier surveillance provider, Palantir.

In the days since Discord's age assurance policy announcement, reports began bubbling up on social media from users in the UK—where Discord already requires age verification as a result of its 2025 Online Safety Act—who were presented with prompts to consent to age verification processed by the company Persona.

Sure enough, Discord's support article describing its age verification process now features a disclaimer informing UK users that they "may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona." And while Discord had previously insisted that facial age verification recordings would only be stored and processed locally, the notice about Persona says that "the information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted."

While some users have speculated that Discord is testing alternate age verification providers because k-ID—its primary age authentication partner—has proven susceptible to creative workarounds, Discord doesn't specify why some users will be processed by Persona instead.

Regardless of the reasoning, the partnership with Persona has compounded concerns about privacy due to the company's investors. In its two most recent rounds of venture capital funding, its lead investor has been Founders Fund—the venture fund co-founded and directed by Peter Thiel.

A co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, Thiel is nowadays more often discussed—or reviled—for his work in co-founding Palantir, the data harvesting and surveillance technology firm that furnishes ICE's deportation efforts with a digital panopticon and compiles databases from the private information of American citizens.

And listen, I know people harp on this a lot, but it's a company literally named after an orb that lets the most evil force in the world spy on your thoughts.

If that's not enough for you to be unsettled by Thiel's money being involved in Discord's age verification rollout, the billionaire—who infamously wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" in 2009—appeared more than 2,200 times in the latest release of the Epstein files, where he coordinated years of meetings with the convicted child predator and sex trafficker.

Discord has downplayed the significance of its age verification rules in response to public fears, while critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rindala Alajaji, argue that the outcry is warranted for myriad reasons. A figure like Thiel appearing on the scene within days sure as hell doesn't dispel those fears. IRC's looking more attractive every day.

Also from Rockpapershutgun:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/good-news-uk-discord-users-were-part-of-a-peter-thiel-linked-data-collection-experiment

[...]

I know children aren't responsible for the sins of their parents, but it doesn't seem wholly irrelevant here that Palantir's UK division is headed by Oswald Mosley's grandson.

All told, I would prefer not to participate in any identity verification "experiment" bearing Thiel's fingerprints, particularly not one that uses machine learning to check your identity in the background. And this is before we get into Discord's recent history of privacy breaches involving third parties.

[The Minsky Moment]

Our AI masters still need a little less artificial and a little more intelligence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3400S4qMH6o

Link from Gary Marcus.

[PJL]

Not really, it was a poorly worded question. Classic GIGO in action.

[The Minsky Moment]

"I need to wash my car and the car wash is 100 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

I would say that is above the average for clarity for an oral query from a normal human.

[DGuller]

I tried this myself, making it clear in my question that I need to get to the carwash to wash my car.      

[Crazy_Ivan80]

The internet... soon it'll be the place where only government or corporate approved speech is allowed

[crazy canuck]

Our AI masters still need a little less artificial and a little more intelligence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3400S4qMH6o

Link from Gary Marcus.

Yeah, I follow that guy on instragram, he has a lot of material related to AI getting fundamental things wrong.

[Syt]

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/many-consumer-electronics-manufacturers-will-go-bankrupt-or-exit-product-lines-by-the-end-of-2026-due-to-the-ai-memory-crisis-phison-ceo-reportedly-says/

Many consumer electronics manufacturers 'will go bankrupt or exit product lines' by the end of 2026 due to the AI memory crisis, Phison CEO reportedly says

Is it just me, or does it feel like everything is just about to spiral out of control with this AI-memory-boom-chatbot-slop-crisis thing? We already know that memory prices have gone bananas and that the crisis is complicating the production of all kinds of computing-adjacent devices. Now the CEO of memory specialist Phison is reported to be claiming that the situation is going to drive some makers of consumer electronics to the wall. Many will go bust by the end of 2026.

In an X post, user 駿HaYaO has précised an interview with Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng. You can catch the entire interview on YouTube. However, the discussion is in Chinese and there are no English subtitles available.

To that extent, we cannot confirm Khein-Seng words verbatim. However the salient translated summary of what he said according to 駿HaYaO goes like this:

"Consumer electronics will see a large number of failures. From the end of this year to 2026, many system vendors will go bankrupt or exit product lines due to a lack of memory. Mobile phone production will be reduced by 200-250 million units, and PC and TV production will be significantly reduced." Yikes.

Pua Khein-Seng is also said to have pointed out the implications of Nvidia's next-gen Rubin AI GPUs coming online. "If NVIDIA's Vera Rubin ships tens of millions of units, each requiring over 20TB of SSD, it will consume approximately 20% of last year's global NAND production capacity (excluding subsequent data storage)," is how 駿HaYaO summarises Pua Khein-Seng's comments.

Pua Khein-Seng is further said to have highlighted that memory manufacturers are now "demanding three years' worth of prepayment (unprecedented in the electronics industry)" and that those same manufacturers "internally estimate the shortage will last until 2030, or even for another 10 years."

駿HaYaO concludes with some analysis of Pua Khein-Seng's comments, observing, as we also have, that the outlook for memory production capacity is grim.

"Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Yangtze Memory and other companies have invested, but it takes at least 2 years from announcement to production, and the equipment is in high demand. China's contribution is limited: the new capacity will only account for 3-5% of the global total in the initial stage, which is not enough to fill the 10-20% gap; China's domestic demand is huge, so there will be no outflow of cheap goods."

駿HaYaO also implies that one of the possible upsides to all this is sustainability. "Product lifespan is extended, and products are repaired instead of being discarded when they break," the X user says.

The slight problem with that idea is that, if anything, production of electronics is increasing. It's just that the ratio of output is shifting away from consumer devices like phones or PCs towards commercial devices like servers and AI GPUs. It would take some serious sophistry to explain how reducing the number of phones or laptops being made and replacing them with 1,400 W Nvidia B300 GPUs was an obvious environmental play, that's for sure.

I'm glad I got my new PC last year. I just created a similar config (had to downgrade some components, like CPU or gfx card because the shop doesn't seem to offer them anymore and I still end up with a price increase of almost 20% since September. And while I paid about 1k for my GTX 5080 last year, I would now pay the same for a GTX 5070 (the 5080 sits at 1400). And it's nothing compared to the price for my RAM which went from ca. 150 EUR (in Austria) when I bought it to 750 EUR



Meanwhile, my SSDs have gone from EUR 280 to over 400.

[crazy canuck]

I am waiting for the crash - then I will upgrade.

[The Minsky Moment]

It's not out of the realm of possibility that Open AI could go down. If it did happen that would dump a lot of RAM back onto the market.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting to see where this story goes:
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5740369-pentagon-anthropic-relationship-review/

[Syt]

Interesting to see where this story goes:
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5740369-pentagon-anthropic-relationship-review/

The company wants to make sure that its tools are not used to develop weaponry that fires without human input and that its products are not used for mass surveillance on Americans.

Defense Department officials have argued that those terms would confine the U.S. military and make it more difficult to work under such conditions, the outlet noted.

 

[Syt]

From Reddit.