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This is a great comment and I thank you for it.
Let's be specific about three things, however; 1. LLMs/AI as a broad field. 2. Specific models 3. The commercial marketing of those model.
LLMs /AI -- Go for it. As something close to a free speech absolutist, I want progress in all directions on this front at this level.
Specific models. Go for it, again. I don't believe there is such a thing as an inherently "evil" model besides some embarassingly obvious ones (i.e. one trained on pictures of cheese pizza - that's an internet euphemism for the most very bad thing, btw). I have no inherent issue with even "produce marketing slip only!" models. This is where I think your comment operates at -- yes, generativeAI that could make a Shawshank level film would be excellent!
The commercial marketing. This is the level at which I am raging. Not because I don't want to see more AI-slop. I can already do that, I just turn off my computer monitor and phone. I rage because you have OpenAI, which has tens of billions of dollars to burn, sprinting towards the lowest common denominator use for gen-AI that's made even worse by the fact that it's attempting to replicate the attention capture model of social media. They could be putting infinite Dostoevsky in your pocket but they actively are choosing not to. That's the contemptible feature for me. Like my previous comment stated, even Google is going "hey, maybe let's try to make dense textbooks more accessible?" You can draw a straight line path from that to "I want to read Dostoevsky, but I find it hard, hey RussianNovelistGPT, can you explain Roskolnikov to me?"
But, again, the median appetite seems to be a re-hash of attention economy capture processes. Anthropic I am more optimistic about because they seem to be doubling down on using Claude to build agents and to make coding open to people who don't code. But I also worry that will turn into a bunch of MBA types re-building their own shitty versions of SalesForce and pitching it to their boss as "one man AI project to synergize all of the KPIs!"
This is some perfect world thinking, but I want to see the $100 bn of AI spend go to a company that's trying to develop new materials to help humanity economically escape the gravity well (and, no, this is no Elon an xAI). Or some AI company that actually has a non-vaporware approach to analyzing the big diseases that are responsible for the most suffering and death on earth. I'll stop here before I actually veer into "why can't all the good things be!" territory. My point remains; we're selling out early on AI because the charlatans by the bay captured a bunch of money and are re-plowing it into their business models from the 2000s and 2010s. We could be sprinting towards so much more.
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