The whole situation with A.I. is, to me, honestly, kinda grimly hilarious. The grim part is the way that our leadership is insisting on suspending our entire economy from it; the hilarious part is the reason they’re doing that:
“A.I.” is the largest act of grift I have ever seen.
Lotsa folks on here know that what is currently being touted as “A.I.” is not, in fact, intelligent. Most folks on this backwater of a hellsite know that an LLM is naught but an overcomplicated Autocomplete.
You know who doesn’t know that?
The folks selling it.
One of the key distinctions between the 20th and 21st centuries is that, these days, most of the Leadership of large companies have little-to-no understanding of how their business actually operates. They’re hedge fund managers and financial advisors: Money People, not Engineers.
Elon Musk is a famous example: he has very little formal training in electrical engineering or rocketry or computer science, and largely got to where he is today by being a tech enthusiast who happened to inherit Apartheid Emerald Mine Money. Like the rest of his ilk, he has no need to learn these things; he can just hire the expertise. So the story goes.
But hidden behind the sales pitch for A.I. are certain conversations that you’ll only hear if you listen to boring economic summits intended for people who make more in a day than you do in a year: the Second Industrial Revolution is nigh.
The first time, (the story goes) it was manual labor; the Blue Collar Workers, who were replaced by machines. This time, the machines are going to replace your cognitive labor; you will no longer have to pay for White Collar Work; we have a Machine that does it for you!
For nearly a decade now, very wealthy people who were interested in becoming more wealthy have heard this story, and their ears have perked up, and they have cut very large checks for research and development on this most obvious of investment opportunities.
They did this because the people telling them this story truly and earnestly believed in the story themselves. I know Elon does.
Moneymen do not like cautionary tales. They do not want to hear about Betamax. They are people who have lived statistically improbable lives and have wildly miscalibrated senses of practical ground-level realities. They are that extremely small slice of people who have won everything they have ever tried and have never learned to fear failure.
There’s one major problem with the story: GenAI and LLMs cannot do what they purport to do, and they never will. The Second Industrial Revolution is not particularly nigh.
And now these Tech company’s leaders are on the hook for upwards of a trillion dollars worth of investment capital that, increasingly, is looking like it will never return a fraction of what was invested. A lot of very powerful people are getting increasingly impatient. Something was promised.
So that’s a big part of why it’s getting shoved into everything, everywhere, all at once: the wealthiest people in our society are all grifting each other to the tune of thousands of billions of dollars.
It would be so fucking funny if it didn’t threaten fucking societal systems collapse
This is all very true! Except this part:
> Moneymen do not like cautionary tales. They do not want to hear about Betamax. That part's wrong, but wrong in a fascinating way that super supports all the rest of the points you're making! Tl;dr the CEO class is motivated by stupidity-via-greed/grift , yes, and also fear. There aren't many things that can take an ultra-wealthy person and relegate that person back into less-than-ultra-wealthy obscurity. But a lot of the leadership class of companies currently feverishly following LLM hype are old enough to have lived through the CEO equivalent of a mass-extinction event: The internet. A lot of these leaders remember their peers in the late '90s and early 2000s who said "this internet thing is just a fad, it can't possibly live up to the hype, we'll just keep doing what we've been doing". There were a lot of those people at a lot of businesses! And they all got fucking obliterated by how transformative the internet was. Thousands and thousands of Betamaxes, but much more recent. That kind of burned a hole in the CEO class's collective memory. They're terrified of being the guy who thought the internet was just a fad, who went in months from being a household name to a nobody. Combine that with the repercussions of COVID on the economies of the world, and other economic instabilities (like the end of ZIRP for VC loans), and there's a feeling among them right now that any train leaving the station might be the last one ever. This also explains the amount of hype in the business world for cryptocurrency/NFTs/metaverse-type shit. It's not that all members of the CEO class are so credulous that they thought those things would be genuinely transformative (plenty of them are that credulous, but not all)--even where their credulity failed, their fear of missing the last lifeboat kept them chasing the fads. In other words the current LLM hype wave isn't just because of dollar-signs-in-eyes out-of-touch business leaders who don't know how things actually work but want endless hypertrophy amounts of money. It's also because they're existentially terrified of missing "the next internet". All of which further supports your points @asteroidtroglodyte; the idiocy in the business-leadership class's decisionmaking around LLMs is bad enough when it's just motivated by greed and stupidity. Add existential fear to that mix, and it's even stupider!
Very astute points!
