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I really hope Democrats do that. As a Republican this seems like it would be the biggest free political gift of the decade. Take a brand new issue very much open for debate and give the best side to President Trump, the most skilled political messenger of a generation.
It seems like a no-brainer. On balance, the current panic will almost certainly pass. The future is a debate between an expanding, triumphant vision of more energy and processing and building a new world, or a reactionary vision scared of change and unwilling to countenance any. Please, please give us this, I would love for Republicans to be the bold party with a new vision of industry.
I don’t think this will go the way you imagine it will. At least, there’s a lot of room for people to change their minds. I don’t think it will help that the concerns about water and toxins are basically fake news. The challenge that AI will rapidly change society is more serious and I think there are a lot of serious anxieties mixed in with that. But if one party wants to retrench and back away and the other wants to go forward into the future that seems like a free gift to me, no matter what the polling looks like right now, thank you, thank you!
I think the problem is that a good portion of the public has these points precisely backwards. They believe in the stupid water and toxin points, while believing that AI is all empty hype that will surely end in a rapture-like bubble pop that will magic everything away and make all technology revert back to 2021 again.
I've had frustrating discussions with people in my life who say that all the data center build out isn't worth it for "a better search engine." I had to make the point that if it is all hype, then they don't need to worry about the environmental effects of data centers, as we'll have a 5-10 year period of build up and usage and then all the infrastructure will be shut down and put on moth balls. The idea that LLMs and generative AI might actually be something new and interesting is not very widespread.
Heck, my D&D group has people who think that Mythos-tier cybercapabilities literally do not exist, and I still have art friends who act as if bad hands are an inevitability for AI art.
Where do you put me, in that I think that data centres themselves are mostly harmless, but also that so-called 'AI' is mostly useless?
I think being AI skeptical is fine up to a point.
Doubting AI can do things it has been able to do for four months is different from doubting capabilities we haven't seen yet, and might never see. I think there are smart reasons to believe AI might never be significantly more capable than it is (though I don't agree with this position.)
Even from a pure business perspective, I'm open to the idea that AI might be a bubble. But I have forced myself to watch Youtube videos by people confidently predicting that AI will all go away when the bubble pops because it is too expensive to run, and I just feel like they genuinely haven't done the first bit of research on the topic. Like, how hard is it to find out about local models for both text and images?
At the very least, now that these things are out in the wild, there's no way that the open weight LLM and image model genie is ever going back in the bottle. The unit economics of frontier AI may never work, but AI slop is here forever.
Yeah, I think it's quite possible that Anthropic and or (especially?) OpenAI have over-leveraged themselves and suffer some horrible fate and possibly derail the economy, but I doubt AI will go away, even if its pace of improvement levels off. I think the worst-case scenario is it becomes a niche for hobbyists and cybersecurity types, like Linux or something.
I think @OliveTapenade is wrong inasmuch as coding and cybersecurity is not "niche" but correct inasmuch as software is something like 5% of the US economy and people who are inside of the AI [information] bubble don't realize that not everything is computer.
If 'niche' is too dismissive, would it be better to say 'bounded'? Thus far bots seem to be very good at interacting with data, but they do not interface with the world beyond that. I think I stand by the idea that they're a wordcel technology. Maybe they will put all the coders out of work, but that leaves the overwhelming majority of the economy. I can't help but feel like people who work in data manipulation are over-generalising from their situation to everyone.
This is closer to what I am getting at.
However I am not sure it will stay this way. Using LLMs [and other AI: LLMs may not be the best model to actually accomplish this, and at best they are probably only part of the puzzle] to do object manipulation will likely become a thing. CAD is already real, 3D printing/cutting is already real, throwing LLMs into the mix comes with real risks but also real upsides.
Everyone is very enamored of software, but robots building houses, if possible (and I expect it will be) will probably be where the money is actually at. I think that AI companies have over-focused on using AIs to write software (although, to be fair, it's the lowest hanging fruit) to the detriment of pushing more mundane but vastly more important and, over the long term, remunerative physical labor.
I usually try to say 'LLMs' or 'bots' because I don't think the systems we're currently talking about are 'artificial intelligence'. Unfortunately 'AI' is the term that the companies themselves use and which the media seems to have accepted, but from where I'm standing, calling these systems 'AI' is a kind of marketing gimmick. I think I would reserve the term 'AI' for something that's genuinely intelligent.
In any case, I'm not sure I buy the leap into the material world? We've had CAD for decades. 3D printing is mostly a hobby technology, isn't it? At any rate, the best case scenario here is, what, that you can use an LLM or similar system to help produce models for 3D printing?
You're right, I think, that what would really make a difference is automated construction. But I don't yet see any reason to think that's on the horizon. Manipulating language is one thing, but we still very much struggle to build robots capable of interacting with material reality.
I think it's fair to term "intelligence" as "the capability to solve problems" - which lets us speak meaningfully about objects with even a very small modicum of "intelligence" on a certain axis - things can be "smart" in some senses without that generalizing. For instance, I think I can reasonably say "the LRASM is more intelligent than a Harpoon," because the LRASM is better at solving the problem (correctly identifying a target ship) than the Harpoon is.
LLMs certainly can solve problems, and thus while they are not intelligent and self-aware in the way that humans are I think it is fair to call them artificial intelligence. "Artificial" doesn't just mean "constructed," it also suggests a replacement - just like when you get an artificial leg. When a naval aviator launches an LRASM, its judgment replaces his in the final stages of the combat engagement. I ask an LLM to vibe-code for me, it is replacing my judgment. An artificial leg does not need to be a real leg, or as good as a real leg, to be an artificial leg, it needs to serve the same purpose as a leg.
I do agree, though, that it is helpful to say "LLM" in part because there are plenty of artificial intelligence models that are not large language models, and it is helpful to disambiguate.
Depends on how you define "mostly." Possible most people doing 3D printing are hobbyists. But it's being used for stuff that's pretty serious (buildings, guns, boats).
I think the best case scenario is that you could send your LLM product specifications and it would churn out a product for you. I am skeptical that the best unreleased frontier models could do this for something as simple as a microwave right now. But I could see them being capable of it in the future, particularly if you conceptualize the LLM as being used as a go-between or manager, not the actual design model itself. Walk in to your manufacturing complex one evening and say "I need a light attack aircraft, two-seater, range 500nm unrefueled, payload of no less than 2000 pounds, compatible with our preexisting parts and weapons stockpile and standing technical specifications" and then go to sleep, while the LLMs spend all night working on the design. This could work because the LLM is not trying to create the aircraft de novo. Rather it's building the aircraft in a computer design software that knows the parameters of the facility and the "parts list" and the other relevant technical requirements. It is guarded against hallucination because the tools it is using serve as an external source of truth that will validate its designs. Imagine it as the difference between trying to build a house with a set of LEGO bricks and trying to figure out how to build a house from scratch.
I would guess that an LLM could do something like that in, say, Flyout today. Now, there is a long list of reasons why Flyout is not real life, and thus I want to stress I am talking about a best case scenario that I think it plausible enough with enough development that it warrants consideration. I am not necessarily making a firm prediction.
I think this misunderstands how this words. Today, right now, you can use Blender to create a design to 3D print. And today, right now, LLMs can design 3D objects in Blender. So the LLM-to-physical-world pipeline that matters already exists, it just remains to be seen if it can handle anything more complicated than novelty coat hangers and such. I think this ability is actually much more relevant to scaling up manufacturing than robotic humanoids and thus all of the problems we're still having with things like computer vision and mobility are largely irrelevant.
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