Technology
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Even open source AI used for needless purposes contributes to wasteful resource usage that harms the environment just as much.
Agreed. The energy use in training and running, its stochastic nature which causes hallucinations and wrong results, and the deeply harmful long-term psychological effects on users who abdicate their own reasoning to LLMs, is ultimately more harmful than useful. Doesn't matter if the models are 'open weight', OSS, and totally 'free'.
And, please, everyone, stop calling it 'AI'. It's not Intelligent. It's a probabilistic regurgitator. Maybe some (human-written!) reasoning systems on top of that, but it isn't intelligent or sentient.
Who decides what is needless?
Ideally, the end user by not partaking in shitty AI products, but I don't have much faith in the average consumer's aversion to slop.
AI is being injected into everything without any consideration for its necessity, privacy implications, or environmental impact.
On top of that, there aren't many AI based consumer-faced products that have really proven successful yet. It's not only about necessity.
What is your measure of success? Profit?
What I meant was useful products that people actually like to use. So far I mostly see chat interfaces, agentic stuff that only works when controlled tightly by a human, and a lot of slop generators. Most of it is using AI because of it being AI. There is no real killer product built on top of AI, it's all just imitations of existing things. Reinvention of existing things, but worse.
What would be an example of a killer product?
Depends on the market, but a few things come to mind... music streaming, movie streaming, smartphones, social media, electric cars, SaaS as a concept, LED lights... They all have one thing in common: They serve a specific need or specific improvement of existing technology. AI on the other hand is marketed as the "improves everything" machine, but what it really does is creating a shallow copy of existing technologies and ideas. In most cases by doing a worse job than the original. It aims to mimick existing things. That in itself is not a killer app. It's just a faster, cheaper, sloppier way of doing things we are doing already.
Btw, I'm not talking about Machine Learning applications here, they are a different animal. What most people think of when talking about "AI" is just LLMs
Well, an LLM is really only as good as the person using it. So I guess that explains why its output is often mediocre.