Consider this. An AI chatbot uses 200 million times more energy than the human brain to perform the tasks it does. Once done the task, the human owner of the brain can then, if he or she so chooses, cook dinner, pick up the kids, run a triathlon, play music, write a letter, unplug the drain, shop for clothes, paint the fence – you name it. But the AI chatbot can simply run variants of the same task.
So why is so much money being sunk into a technology when we already have a cheaper, far more versatile one? The answer is that AI can do specific tasks quicker – sometimes much quicker – and more accurately than the human brain could ever do. If only good at one thing, it can nonetheless be very good.
We’re starting to see the benefits of this in, for instance, medicine and pharmaceutical research, where doctors can now produce faster and more accurate diagnoses and researchers can speed up the pace of experimental research. Similarly, accountants and lawyers are now able to hand tasks like preparation of briefs or spreadsheets, improving their productivity while reducing their need for labour.
The progress isn’t always linear, though. Research has found that doctors using AI to perform diagnostics tend, on average, to lose diagnostic skills. Smarter machines can make for dumber people so for now, at least, AI outputs need to be verified by humans. Nevertheless AI could automate some tasks while enhancing human performance in others, so its potential seems considerable.
You forget we’re not in still in the year 2000, I mean the point is the massive investment into these data centers, along with the necessary energy requirements and investments, the continued fueling of NVIDIA’s bubble itself which relies on stable US-China-Taiwan relations is a ticking bomb. There wont be any good tech that outweights the harm being done to get there. Might as well believe Google is OK because their search engine was better. Look where Google search is today, it took barely them a decade to destroy it.
This is the second point, the “rate of enshitification” is arguably increasing as well. It wont take these companies even 10 or 15 years to destroy their own business, just look at the current power struggle between SAS providers and these model owners.
This will only get worse, these AI providers will keep fighting to somehow start to get money from somewhere and that will already lead to less features and access for more money.
At the end of the day, assume even the best case scenario, who gives a single fuck about “good AI” when that might cost 15-50$ a month or be fucked with unstoppable ads or 10 different tiers or whatever nonsense. The industry is already fucked because there is no path towards a useful product.
Circle back to the web in 2000, and the first principle of its success. The internet was entirely free and open to navigation from everywhere in the world. As long as you got internet access. That is the first issue. It wasn’t realy until the smartphone era and good high speed mobile service that the internet got popular in the 2000s for the majority of the world.
Now go back to 2000 and say to yourself the internet will be a success, except you’ll need to pay 20 different service providers and monthly fees, advertising will be almost unavoidable and btw each provider only gives you like 10% of the internet, the other 90% is locked behind some other provider and monthly plan.
THis is why this AI hopium is garbage. The 2000s business practices were different but arguably not as bad as it is today and that is a key role why these technologies were successful. I look at Apples Vision shit pro and them behaving as if its still 2006, success is not earned but guaranteed, just build some high profile “premium” garbage and people will eat it up… not.