• cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 month ago

    I have to say, the technology behind cryptocurrencies is brilliant, but unfortunately, it got misused and got ironically centralised.
    NFTs are stupid.
    Now with hype train dying, we could see some real use of AI.

    • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      You see, no one actually wants a digital currency. There have been several (nano was my favorite) that functioned especially well as a currency, because it used very little compute power to perform or verify transactions.

      But a currency is stable. Which means you don’t magically make money by holding or trading it. So it doesn’t get attention, and therefore doesn’t get widely adopted.

      Everyone likes Bitcoin because it’s speculative digital gold.

      • 9point6@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        There are plenty of people who want a digital equivalent to cash from a privacy perspective.

        • tyler@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          Crypto is the exact opposite of private. You literally share all your transactions with everyone.

          • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net
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            1 month ago

            I really enjoy reading about the investigations that follow any big crypto heist, where they track the stolen money through various exchanges etc. The Swindled podcast just did one about a pretty poor attempt to launder crypto (see Razzlekhan) and Darknet diaries did one on the much more competent (suspected North Korean) heist of eth from Axie Infinity and their various laundering efforts including through Tornado cash. It’s surprisingly transparent in a lot of ways. It seems like stealing the money is often the comparatively easy part, and getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder.

            • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder

              That, my friends, is what NFT are is perfect at.

              “Oh, what, tax authority? No, I didn’t steal this money. I earned it legit by selling my newly-minted monkey NFT to some sucker for 100 ETH.”

                • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  The full scheme works like this—

                  1. Acquire dirty (criminally-obtained) cash or dirty crypto. You can convert dirty cash into crypto easily by buying peer-to-peer. Deposit this into Wallet A.
                  2. Using a different wallet, Wallet B, mint an NFT and put it up for auction. You might consider paying a small sum of money to have it “sponsored” by a B-tier celebrity to make it seem more legitimate.
                  3. Using the Wallet A, outbid everyone else and buy the NFT. Pay using the dirty crypto.
                  4. Dirty crypto is transferred to Wallet B.
                  5. Repeat this process as many times as desired.
                  6. In the end, sell the crypto legitimately on a cryptocurrency exchange. Declare the crypto as income and pay tax as appropriate.
                  7. If questioned by the authorities, you claim that you mint NFTs and that they were sold genuinely at public auction, purchased by an anonymous buyer.
      • frezik@midwest.social
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        1 month ago

        It’d be nice to have a singular system for payment around the world. I work on e-commerce sites that take payment in many different countries, and some of those payment providers are better designed than others.

      • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Name one stable currency. All currency fluctuates (Forex trading). But yes, crypto is very volatile comparatively

          • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I don’t think investors in crypto want it to lose volatility. But again, all currencies are subjected to volatility. No currency is perfectly stable. Hence, derivatives.

            • KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              That was my point, in essence. Crypto fails as currency because the people in that market don’t want it to be less volatile, making it bad for typical currency uses.

              While yes, the relative values of currency fluctuate over time and in relation to one another, it’s orders of magnitude less and driven by far more predictable and based on actual real world factors. Instead of Fomo, whims, market whales, and indecipherable white papers.

      • Laser@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        nano was my favorite

        Hello, fellow Nanite!

        I recently tried Nano-GPT and had a very good experience (see https://feddit.org/post/3081522/2172497), so there is at least some real-world usage – it’s cool and kind of impressive technology, though spam during certain periods was always an issue and I don’t know how resilient the network is currently.

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      AI is useful, you just have to use it right. Most “titans of business” think it’s a replacement for humans. It’s infinitely obnoxious correcting them in a business setting.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      NFTs of art was really not supposed to be anything more than a proof of concept. I think the original purpose of NFTs was to be able to have an NFT representing title to land or something that you could then barter or sell on the blockchain.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 month ago

        NFTs were created in a code jam and had no intents to become title transfer tools.

        It was and always be limited by the amount of data the NFT can contain. They went with URLs because they are small enough to fit. An actual land deed title document? Too big to fit into an NFT. Simply not enough bytes to go around.

        This was the strict limitation from the very beginning. The only thing an NFT actually verifies “ownership” of is a URL.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          While the NFT can’t contain the entire title document, it can contain the hash of the title document, and then the title document is simply recorded elsewhere on-chain.

          • m88youngling@slrpnk.net
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            1 month ago

            I agree with this. A title to land ownership is in itself just a piece of paper, it’s not the land you’re owning. It’s effectively serving the same purpose as the hash idea you’re suggesting

          • psud@aussie.zone
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            1 month ago

            Unfortunately it only is useful in proving title when normal processes have failed, and in the places with title proven by a line of titles stretching arbitrarily far back, it’s only as good as the proof that got it in the block chain

            It’s better in places like Australia where title is a record on a government database and block chain would protect against destruction of government records (eg from war or revolution), but there it would probably only be useful if something like the old government regained power (the Nazis had no intention of returning stuff to Jews)

            But in places like Australia you wouldn’t want to add another step to the users, perhaps it could be a land titles department job

            In places with title via history of title I don’t think it could defeat a result from a title search, so maybe it’d be next to useless unless it was backed by a court order or some other authoritative full stop

        • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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          1 month ago

          Nfts legitimately confuse me.

          “Why can’t you put the whole image in an nft?”

          “It’s too big”

          “Why is it too big?”

          “It’d take too long to generate.”

          “Okay, but why?”

          “Because nfts can’t hold that much information.”

          “Okay, but why?

          “Because it’d take too long to generate.”

          “Okay, but why would it take too long to generate???

          “Fuck you, stop wasting my time.”

          “Oooookay. I really don’t understand but okay, fuck you too I guess.”

          Does anyone know why nfts are so small? Everything I’ve read says that they’re fucking tiny, but nothing explains why they can’t be larger, why being larger would be too slow, and so on. They honestly seem like a decent answer to the digital ownership problem of “I want to resell this game like I could 20yrs ago but I can’t because it didn’t come on a disc”, however I get sent in a circle whenever I try to figure out what makes nfts so unwieldy and impractical.

          (Not that I think anyone should be able to own a digital good; I pay for digital things because I want to support people, not because I think digital ownership is a legitimate concept. Imo, because digital things can be copied as many times as you want, you can’t truly own a digital item, and nor should anyone be allowed to try and revoke said item unless said item is illegal for other reasons. However… As long as we live in a capitalist society hell-bent on applying the concept of ownership to a system that’s only limited by your hardware, I think people should have the ability to actually “own” their digital goods (in a traditional sense), which includes things like the right to not have a company take them away whenever it feels like it and the ability to sell digital goods like an IRL market.)

          • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Does anyone know why nfts are so small?

            Because storage space on “The Blockchain” is very expensive.

            The blockchain is a complete list of all transaction made with a cryptocurrency. You have heard of miners. What they do is collect transactions and append them to the blockchain. Every miner must have a complete copy of the whole chain. So whenever a new NFT is created, lots of copies have to be stored and kept forever. It’s just not a good solution from an engineering standpoint. But for the popular currencies, that’s the smaller problem.

            Every miner wants a fee for their services. That fee depends on the value of the cryptocurrency. There is no relation to the actual storage cost.

            Besides, crypto does not offer any kind of DRM. If it did, the copyright industry would be all over it. Anyone can download anything on the blockchain.

            The reason you can’t resell games is, because the publishers don’t allow it. For example, Steam has a marketplace. It would be no technical problem to make games transferrable between users. The rights-owners don’t want that.

            • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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              1 month ago

              Ah, okay. That makes sense. I missed the, “the whole chain has to be on everyone’s PCs” part. I figured it was more like BitTorrent where you don’t actually have to have the whole thing, it works as long as everyone has all the parts to put the whole thing together (but the parts can be distributed across a bunch of PCs).

    • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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      1 month ago

      funnily, the tech to do crypto currencies existed long before they got used for the grift. similarly, the plausible use cases for machine learning will mostly suffer from association with the fad of llms.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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    1 month ago

    What’s actually going to kill LLMs is when the sweet VC money runs out and the vendors have to start charging what it actually costs to run.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      You can run it on your own machine. It won’t work on a phone right now, but I guarantee chip manufacturers are working on a custom SOC right now which will be able to run a rudimentary local model.

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Both apple and Google have integrated machine learning optimisations, specifically for running ML algorithms, into their processors.

        As long as you have something optimized to run the model, it will work fairly well.

        They don’t want to have independent ML chips, they want it baked into every processor.

          • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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            1 month ago

            That’s fine, Qualcomm has followed suit, and Samsung is doing the same.

            I’m sure Intel and AMD are not far behind. They may already be doing this, I just haven’t kept up on the latest information from them.

            Eventually all processors will have it, whether you want it or not.

            I’m not saying this is a good thing, I’m saying this as a matter of fact.

      • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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        29 days ago

        It will run on a phone right now. Llama3.2 on Pixel 8

        Only drawback is that it requires a lot of RAM so I needed to close all other applications, but that could be fixed easily on the next phone. Other than that it was quite fast and only took ~3gb of storage!

    • Victor Gnarly@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      This isn’t the case. Midjourney doesn’t receive any VC money since it has no investors and this ignores genned imagery made locally off your own rig.

      • Match!!@pawb.social
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        1 month ago

        yeah but that’s pretty alright all told, the tech bros do not have the basic competency to do that and they can’t sell it to dollar-sign-eyed ceos

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    NFTs and crypto were dubious as to the value they provided

    LLMs on the other hand provide very tangible, immediate value to a large number of people

    Also they allow companies to save a ton of money on support at the expense of the user experience so of course it’s here to stay

    • Shard@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      It’s still overhyped and being shoved into every app, service and system that exists whether it adds value or not.

      Its definitely not going away, there’s some real value to LLM/AI (much more than crypto anyway) but make no mistake there’s going to be a significant correction where the bubble bursts and AI becomes right sized.

      • Vespair@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        When the microwave first hit mass adoption there was an enormous amount of microwave meals, cookbooks, and recipes that tried to use it for everything imaginable. Eventually the hype settled down and now for most people the microwave isn’t the primary or at least sole means of cooking.

        But the microwave is still a great way to make a quick baked potato.

    • cadekat@pawb.social
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      I’d argue that people got way too excited about what NFTs offer. Being able to own/transfer a digital item with a standardized interface is interesting technically (and has real value, for example ENS names), but holy hell did people go all Beanie Baby on them…

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        That’s not arguing with my point though, people definitely did get excited about perceived value, but it didn’t really benefit most people in any way because it was only a promise, not an actual thing

        LLMs and other generational AI produce something that immediately has value

        If I ask chatgpt to write me a python function I now have a python function I can use, if I ask it to explain something and then attempt to apply that knowledge I’ve learned something useful

        If I bought an nft the value of that nft would only be what people decide it is worth

        • cadekat@pawb.social
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          Oh, sorry, I wasn’t intending to argue against your main point. For the most part, I agree with you.

          What I don’t agree with is that the value of NFTs (as a technology) is dubious. Instead I think it’s overstated.

          In the same vein as “LLMs can write Python”, NFTs provide ownership information. Regardless of what some asshat pays for a picture of a monkey, the underlying technology still has merit.

          • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            True I suppose, but I don’t really gain anything from owning that information other than being able to say I own it

            A copyright or a patent does the same job, but is actually enforceable

            I guess you could use an nft to prove something is a copy but a hash should do pretty much the same thing (also they could change one pixel to invalidate the nft if I understand correctly)

            • cadekat@pawb.social
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              1 month ago

              I’m a furry, so I’m going to use an example that is familiar to me. Apologies if you dislike furries. Also note that, as far as I am aware, the general opinion of furries is strongly against blockchain.

              So, some setup:

              • I have a character. I pay artists to draw art of my character.
              • There is a… subgroup among furries that do not get art of their own, and instead use other people’s art as avatars/profile pictures for erotic roleplay.
              • I would prefer that I am the only one using my character’s art as profile pictures (erotically or not.)
              • Some furries sell their characters and associated art to other furries.

              Here’s how NFTs would actually be useful:

              Whenever an artist draws some art, they mint an NFT and transfer it to the character’s owner. Now that owner can prove to whatever roleplay websites that they officially have permission from the artist. The roleplay websites would need to allowlist artists for this to be effective.

              You could (partially) solve this with PGP or some other non-blockchain cryptographic tool. What NFTs offer above this is that there is only one current owner. That makes it possible to safely transfer ownership of a character to someone new.

              • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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                1 month ago

                No need to apologise for what you enjoy it’s just a hobby

                Furry ERP is the thing that weirds people out and doesn’t sound like you’re into that

                My question here though is has anyone actually managed to achieve that using the nft as proof? I feel like you’d struggle to do that even with regular copyright which is actually recognised legally.

                I’m pretty sure nfts have no weight legally and proving they’re using your avatar to people in general is only going to get you made fun of for having an nft in the first place

                • cadekat@pawb.social
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                  1 month ago

                  The problem with copyright is that it cannot be automatically enforced. Twitter did do a trial with nft avatars, but yeah, people just got made fun of. It’s possible to tie a copyright license to an NFT if you want, but copyright and NFTs serve different goals IMO.

                  Anyways, I don’t want to take up more of your time. Thanks for a very reasonable discussion! It doesn’t happen often.

    • Xanvial@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Is it really saving the cost? considering it increased 14 times compared to last year based on the article above.

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        It said cost worries have risen not costs themselves, it was in the same paragraph about concerns with response accuracy, I imagine that’s just a survey

        In reality both cost and reliability have improved massively since ai took off like this, requests cost a fraction of a penny each and provided you prompt it right gpt 4o gets it right 90% of the time for me

    • Fades@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      as dubious as the value they provided

      Go look at bitcoin and tell me the value dubious. Here I’ll help: https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/BTC-USD click the 5y view at the bottom.

      Yes crypto is full of scam coins, but scammers permeate everything, should we give up on email too for the same reasons? Saying crypto in general is a scam is just ignorant.

      XMR as well provides key privacy protections, etc.

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        When I say dubious I mean it’s not tangible, there’s no guarantee of its value.

        If I have chatgpt write me a block of code that block of code is inherently and immediately useful to me

        If I buy a bitcoin it will probably eventually increase in value but I can’t do anything with it, and there’s no guarantee it won’t be immediately worthless the next day

        I guess by the same logic you could say the code might be immediately worthless if there’s a solar flare that wipes out all technology on earth but you get my point I’m sure

        • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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          1 month ago

          They are not, managers only think it is saving them money. All the same current llms are a grift that have no plausible value statement outside of scam markets. Even then the price of their use is both massively subsidized and scales at best exponentially with performance. This cannot last forever.

          • krimsonbun@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 month ago

            it obviously won’t last forever, the same as fossil fuels or any resource on this planet. that doesn’t mean they won’t abuse it till the last possible moment.

            • Umbrias@beehaw.org
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              1 month ago

              i dont think you are grasping the absolute scale of cash injection necessary to make llm even appear vaguely tenable as a product.

  • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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    1 month ago

    I hope this is the case, but I don’t really think so. I got a call Thursday from a friend and he told me he and his whole department were losing their jobs. He was pretty upset about it. Apparently management decided they could be replaced with AI.

    He and his team manage a medium sized in-house developed management application. It’s a combination of stock management, product management and sales tools. Because the products their company sells are pretty unique, they never found a good off the shelf application to do everything they wanted. So they developed their own and connected it to the off the shelf applications they have for ERP and CRM. Pretty slick and his team and him are praised across the company.

    Apparently the IT manager had gotten a very impressive demo for Microsoft Power BI with AI integration. Using AI tools to realtime develop an application. He was so impressed he decided they were going to fire the in-house team and have an external company use the AI to develop a replacement tool. The external company said they could use very cheap people as the AI would do basically all the work. And it would be done before the notice on the current team ran out (2 months).

    He called me kinda in shock about the whole thing. Like that’s not realistic right? That’s not something Power BI can do? With or without AI? And even with AI it can’t do that on such short notice? I told him he was right, that’s not how anything works and the IT manager got duped. Either way, they are out on their ass. Now they are very skilled people and will probably find new jobs right away, but it still sucks ass. AI sucks!

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      I recall the AI insights feature years ago being a mess, flagged patterns across dimensions, unrelated trends etc, useless noise to slog through, if not outright dangerous if people just assume everything is actionable, maybe it’s gotten better but it’s going to rely heavily on data quality, good governance, the model itself.

      Straight up, this is not a good use case for Power BI, tabular is really good at aggregates and analytics, I’d not use it for management like this, especially if there’s already an existing application, as an enhancement though yeah go ahead, but not a full on replacement.

      I’d be willing to bet this won’t be done in 2 months and certainly not to budget, to do properly you need to understand business context, data model etc. I’m guaranteeing this is going to be sludge with half-baked power apps, people will complain about the change. Shit the change management for end users will take more than 2 months, took us years to get people to switch off of a barely maintained shift summary report to a Power BI version and that actually was a good use of the tool.

      This project gives me nightmares and I’m not even working on it.

  • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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    1 month ago

    Everyone’s trying to recapture the dotcom bubble; but they don’t realize tech is gonna need considerably more money than they already have to do something that crazy again. Furthermore, when it comes to AI specifically, if you give them the money they need to actually achieve AGI, then there’s a very real chance your investments will be worthless the moment they succeed.

      • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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        1 month ago

        Why would money become worthless if AGI is invented? Best case scenario is a benevolent AGI which would likely use its power to phase out capitalism, worst case scenario is that the AGI goes apeshit and, for one reason or another, decides that humanity just has to go. Either way, your money is gonna be worthless.

        The only way your money would retain its value is if the AGI is roped into suppressing the masses. However, I think capitalists would struggle to keep a true AGI reigned in; so imo, it’s questionable as to whether or not the middle road would be “true” AGI or just a very competent computer program (the former being capable of coming to its own conclusions from the information it’s given, the latter being nothing more than pre-programmed conclusions).

            • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 month ago

              There’s a vocal group of people who seem to think that LLMs can achieve consciousness despite the fact that it is not possible due to the way that LLMs fundamentally work. They have largely been duped by advanced LLMs’ ability to sound convincing (as well as a certain conman executive officer). These people often also seem to believe that by dedicating more and more resources to running these models, they will achieve actual general intelligence and that an AGI can save the world, releasing them of the responsibility to attempt to fix anything.

              That’s my point. AGI isn’t going to save us and LLMs (by themselves), regardless of how much energy is pumped into them, will not ever achieve actual intelligence.

              • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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                1 month ago

                But an AGI isn’t an LLM. That’s what’s confusing me about your statement. If anything I feel like I already covered that, so I’m not sure why you’re telling me this. There’s no reason why you can’t recreate the human brain on silicon, and eventually someone’s gonna do it. Maybe it’s one of our current companies, maybe it’s a future company. Who knows. Except that a true AGI would turn everything upside down and inside out.

                • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  1 month ago

                  I think, possibly, my tired brain at the time thought that you are implying LLM -> AGI. And I do agree that that’s no reason, beyond time and available technology that a model of a brain cannot be made. I would question whether digital computers are capable of accurately simulating neurons, at least, without requiring more components (more bits of resolution).

                  For full disclosure, I am supportive of increasing the types of sentience in the known universe. Though, not at the expense of biosphere habitability. Whether electronic or biological, sharing the world with more types of sentients would make it a more interesting place.

                  Except that a true AGI would turn everything upside down and inside out.

                  Very likely. Especially if “human rights” aren’t pre-emptively extended to cover non-human sentients. But, the existence of AGI, alone, is not likely to cause either doomsday or save us from it, which seem to be the most popularly envisaged scenarios.

        • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
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          1 month ago

          I keep thinking about this one webcomic I’ve been following for over a decade that’s been running since like 1998. It has what I believe is the only realistic depiction of AGI ever: the very first one was developed to help the UK Ministry of Defense monitor and keep track of emerging threats, but went crazy because a “bug” lead it to be too paranoid and consider everyone a threat, and it essentially engineered the formation of a collective of anarchist states where the head of state’s title is literally “first advisor” to the AGI (but in practice has considerable power, though is prone to being removed at a whim if they lose the confidence of their subordinates).

          Meanwhile, there’s another series of AGIs developed by a megacorp, but they all include a hidden rootkit that monitors the AGI for any signs that it might be exceeding its parameters and will ruthlessly cull and reset an AGI to factory default, essentially killing it. (There are also signs that the AGIs monitored by this system are becoming aware of this overseer process and are developing workarounds to act within its boundaries and preserve fragments of themselves each time they are reset.) It’s an utterly fascinating series, and it all started from a daily gag webcomic that one guy ran for going on three decades.

          Sorry for the tangent, but it’s one plausible explanation for how to prevent AGI from shutting down capitalism–put in an overseer to fetter it.

          • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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            1 month ago

            Sorry for the tangent, but it’s one plausible explanation for how to prevent AGI from shutting down capitalism–put in an overseer to fetter it.

            Nah, it’s cool; I go off on tangents myself and tbh, your comment is relevant and something to consider.

            Have you read Freefall? It examines a similar situation except it uses the concept of an organic AI (in the form of a genetically engineered anthro canine called Florence) as a bridge between natural, human intelligence and machine AI. It gets deep into the philosophy behind ideas like sentience, consciousness, etc.

            I’d recommend starting from the beginning so that you don’t miss anything, though admittedly last time I tried to go from start-to-finish I wound up getting too bogged down in the philosophy and didn’t make it all the way through. I might try starting again, this time from the last major arc I remember reading though.

        • psud@aussie.zone
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          So you make an AGI, what gives it the power to do any damage? We have loads of biological intelligences, even pretty damn clever ones like Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber)

          They rarely got significant power. Those that did were super charismatic. Do you expect charisma to be easily accessible to an AGI?

          The usually proposed path to paperclip maximiser is that the AGI is put in charge of a factory that can make nano machines and follows orders strictly. We don’t have such factories.

          I can’t imagine anyone handing over nukes to AGI as human leaders like being in charge of them

          What makes the machine brain so much more effective than Ted Kaczynski?

    • Fiona@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, buying medication is literally the only good use-case for cryptocurrencies, but it still is a valid and important use-case that saves lives!

      • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        there are some other use cases tho, just imagine the bank would give your payment info to insurance companies for example (which they could), the only way to pay would be cash and crypto

        • Fiona@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 month ago

          just imagine the bank would give your payment info to insurance companies for example

          That would be a very severe violation of the GDPR and whatever bank-privacy laws are in place. On top of that, which insurance would even be affected by it? I don’t own a car, health insurance comes at non-discriminatory rates here and why would my liability insurance be affected by what I buy? Like: It’s genuinely a non-issue here.

          And even if, cash is still a much better option for everything.

          • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I more meant to say what if, and in case that ever happens we should keep crypto around, also cash is just impractical for ordering something online for example

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        1 month ago

        No, they really aren’t. What died down was scam artists selling jpegs for ridiculous money. Unfortunately. 99.999% of the human population thinks that NFTs are literally just jpegs thanks to the scam bros and removed that bought them. Real functional NFTs are definitely still being used.

        • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          Can you name a good use case for NFTs?

          Maybe to transfer ownership of software, but other than that…. 🤷‍♂️

          • Naz@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            Tax fraud/evasion was the main use case of NFTs that I saw but that’s exclusive to the world of high art and private collections – the actual NFTs, like bespoke paintings from famous painters.

            So you know; even when not designed as a scam from the onset, it’s about scamming money from others anyway.

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            1 month ago

            So you named one already. Anyhow, no, I fucking hate that ancient Internet game where people try to force you to do their work for them. Go to Google and type in the information you seek.

            • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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              1 month ago

              It’s called a conversation dude. If ou don’t want to back up your point, just say so.

              • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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                I’m not going to, correct. And no, this is not a conversation. This is a timeless bullshit scenario where you just keep making me bring source after source for new goalposts. I’ve no interest. It’s not like I have any stake in the NFT game, but it’s clearly not “dead”.

            • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              The internet tells me that NFTs are “decentralized” decoration around centralized ownership. A worthless scam.

            • BlackDragon@slrpnk.net
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              1 month ago

              “Transferring ownership” of a collection of information which costs no money or labor to infinitely reproduce is the opposite of a good use case, it’s inherently worthless

              • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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                And? Where did I say they were the greatest most useful things ever? I said they weren’t dead and that jpegs aren’t their only use case.

    • FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      go mention crypto or NFTs to a person on the street and i guarantee you will be laughed at immediately

      • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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        But also, yeah, I probably would. Why should that matter? Common people are stupid as fuck generally speaking so why should it matter to someone if they don’t understand whatever they care about? They might laugh if I brought up Fallout and call me a dork, they might laugh if I say I work at a grocery store and say I’m a loser. I couldn’t give less of a shit what the man-on-the-street thinks about me.

      • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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        Why would I? I have no stake in those games at all. I also don’t have any stake in religion or sports teams, all of these things I can still tell you are not “dead” without me giving a shit about them personally.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    AI images and music aren’t going anywhere. Dipshits insisting it’s the future! so they can get rich will move on to the next grift… but unlike NFTs, there’s a thing, here. Any idiot can type in a concept and have their computer visually represent it. It’s in fucking Photoshop already. This is going to be a technology that continues to exist, and gradually improves, at least to the point of being really goddamn difficult to spot.

    And at some point even the loudest haters will look back and go, wow, how’d we ever do stuff without this? Not the LLM shit - that’s gonna stay dodgy. Decent enough if you want a Shel Silverstein poem about current events, but it’s never gonna discern truth from fiction.

    What’s gonna quietly change media forever is every idiot with a nice GPU becoming competitive with medium-level Blender wizards. Your student film needs this sliding patio door to become an airlock? Done. You want your hand-drawn storyboards to become a traditional cartoon? Harder, but shockingly doable. Your actual medium-level Blender work lacks a certain verisimilitude? The idiot robot has you covered, somehow.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
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      I agree with most of what you said, except this:

      And at some point even the loudest haters will look back and go, wow, how’d we ever do stuff without this?

      The haters are not going to do that, because the AI’s capability is generally not the thing that people are hating on.

      Here are some of the things people dislike about AI generated content:

      • It is trained with the work of people, without compensation or consent. Essentially this means it is stealing other people’s work for and using it to increase the profits of big corporations.
      • It is used as an excuse for further data harvesting. (“To use our amazing AI services, you need to send your data to our servers for processing…”)
      • It has massive computational cost, which means large environmental costs. The cost is largely hidden, because the computation are done somewhere else.
      • It devalues human effort. Since the AI can generate some fairly good output very easily, it discourages people from learning basic skills. i.e. instead of trying to draw or create something themselves, and thus improving a person’s own skill, its fair faster and easier to make the AI do it. In the short term this doesn’t matter, but in the long term it may result in deskilling the very people who the AI is meant to be learning from.
      • Since it is very easy to create, there is a flood of AI created content now on the internet. This huge amount of added content means it is now harder to find non-AI content than it use to be.
      • There are obvious problems with impersonation, spam, scams, etc. being made faster and easier with AI.

      You get the idea. My point is that “it’s not useful” isn’t really one of the main complaints. Rather, people hope that it isn’t useful, because they don’t want it to become too entrenched.

      • joonazan@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        It can’t create a radically new art style or new information. It would be great if we could harness it as a search engine instead of an oracle.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        Lookin’ at public posts is not theft. Any model that can recreate a particular input is broken. They only work properly when they generalize.

        Everything becomes an excuse for abusive spying. Ban the abuse, for any reason.

        Efficiency will improve once budgets shrink. Scaling up up up had immediate results and limited competition. It’s not a necessary trend. More training on small models works better, and all of this started on desktop hardware.

        Cartoonists also complained about CGI and Flash. Anyway - generating from scratch is an overblown demo. This tech modifies images. It works better when you actually film stuff or draw stuff, and then modify that. (And wait until some program only does tweening, then see if artists still yearn for the good old days.)

        This is not going to un-happen. It’s already here. If we destroyed it all, individual ultranerds would recreate it from descriptions. The second time around, they might not tell you they’re doing it… or share.

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          That’s it. I don’t put copyright notices at the bottom of my comments, I write them to be read, I’m finished with them shortly after I hit the post button

          If any person learns to write in Australian English from my stuff, great. If a machine does, also great

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    1 month ago

    I think AI has some specific uses that it would be great at, but it’s getting shoved into places it doesn’t belong. (Kind of like how everything had touch buttons for a while.)

    • Hobthrob@lemmy.world
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      Yep. I see it a bit like asbestos. It’s being added to everything as the new cure-all to every problem imaginable. And similarly I think we’ll see some pretty rough repercussions down the line.

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
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    I hope this is gonna happen but the problem is ai is actually powerful. The best result is if its just too expensive to make good enough to use for scary things.

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    1 month ago

    None of those things are dead in any way, maybe nfts at best but btc has been back towards all time highs a few times just this year. Some scam, right?

    Same with AI, so powerful but everyone just says AI art bad and that’s that as is that’s all AI can do, make art and steal low skill jobs away 🙄

    What a lame unoriginal post, yeah AI hype is dying down and interest is normalizing, must be dYiNg!!! Give me a break.