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I haven't read the Substack article yet, but I did read the Klein interview, and what stood out to me was this:
A big part of the dissonance, it seems to me, is around the perception of what 'AI' is and whether it's valuable. Clearly a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe that this is a massively transformative technology that will be vital to the future of the country if not the world. They're frequently either outright singularitans, or simply believe that it willl turbo-charge the economy, massively increase wealth, change everything about employment, and so on.
But these people, and I admit I think they sound a lot more sensible than the tech people online, actually use the technology and go, "meh". They see it as a mildly amusing toy. Maybe it has some uses, in some niche fields, but for the most part it's just not very interesting. If they didn't get access to it, they would not particularly care.
An auto factory - you at least understand why cars are useful, and why the factories need to be built. A data centre is a huge investment for a thing that... isn't useful. All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
There is the marketing issue as well, of course. Pro-'AI' people tend to sound very cult-y online, at least in my experience. Many of them sound like lunatics. A lot of them also, well, to be blunt, are un-charismatic nerds. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., are not convincing ambassadors for a technology. I can understand nobody believing their promises - none of them project credibility, or even really respectability. The 'tech billionaire' is a cultural archetype at this point, and it is an archetype that one associates with immaturity, frivolity, narcissism, and callous disregard for other people and for human value in general. Last week I was talking about the book destruction story and it fits with the image again, as if there's this small cult-like group of anti-human tech-heads eager to sell the whole inheritance of the human community for digital pottage. I understand, in my gut, the feeling of disgust.
Except the people spending all this money on them? Dave wants his book proofread more cheaply, Pete wants to ERP, Melanie wants dashboards to show key business insights, John wants some spreadsheets analyzed, Dean wants to fix bugs in his software. Even Johnny Jihadi wants to know how to make use of unexploded munitions left by govt forces in the Sahel and he goes to AI for that.
Why would the opinions of people who don't pay for the product because they don't find it useful outweigh those who do?
Because everyone gets an equal vote, and I'll bet less than 5% of people have ever used AI in any form, and even fewer have found it repetitiously valuable.
Almost a supermajority of Americans use AI at least multiple times a week. Let me know how you want to pay up.
I found this study absolutely impossible to believe; I'm a Millennial who's on the internet way too much and have been since the early 90s, and I've never used AI.
But then I remembered that Google force-feeds you an AI answer when you use the search bar the same way you've been doing for 30 years. So, touché. I'll still defend the fact that it's not something that most people go out of their way to intentionally engage with.
Almost half of Americans use chatbots specifically, with about a quarter doing so daily.
Really?? Again, maybe I'm not thinking broadly enough about what "AI" is defined as. I suppose it would include things like Alexa/Google Home/Siri? We called those "voice assistants" in my day.
I wasn't even hearing the term "A.I." as anything other than the movie (or Allen Iverson) in any remotely mainstream sense, unless post-Covid.
Well, no, those are not chatbots.
Huh? The prominence of the AI boom is largely a post Covid phenomenon.
Ok, well then my point is that I can't think of any other technology in history that has achieved 50 percent market penetration in 3-4 years. I just checked Google Trends for both "A.I" and "LLM", and they both start to take off in early 2023, which was about how I remembered when I first started hearing about them.
So, when I say "A.I", I mean specifically utilizing Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/etc. HALF of Americans are doing this weekly? My circle must just be in the stone age, then, because I still know multiple people who don't own computers.
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