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United Kingdom says Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Cisco will run experiments in a small city rebranded ‘tech town’. They will apply AI to schools, hospitals and businesses (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/world
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Crossposted from https://sh.itjust.works/post/54636064

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[–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

I don't disagree that technology is value neutral, I disagree that "AI" as such is even a technology or has any value.

Certainly software can have value, and that's all this is. Time will tell if it has any practical application, but it has already revealed that it has significant negative externalities.

I don't think we really even need to involve politics at all in the discussion if you'd prefer not to but since the fascist takeover of the USA is being enabled by the capital being generated through this AI bubble it seems relevant.

If an earnest socialist nation was developing LLMs I'd be critical of that too, and I would hope the workers would. Resource allocation vs return on this tech so far is diabolical.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    It's pretty crucial to note that the fascist takeover of the USA and even the AI bubble has happened after the "AI Spring". Most of the investment that actually produced something was prior to well... most of the investment.

    I agree with you on the fact that AI does seem like a highly inefficient way to do anything - but that only appears to be the case when we look at huge more recent models - just a few years ago FOSS locally run models were practically on par with their significantly bigger versions - models like the Mistral-7b for text or SDXL for image generation have lower hardware requirements than some video games these days and despite some shortcomings are still extremely impressive for what they are without sucking down an entire rainforest to summarize an email.

    As for practical applications, they just make it possible to convert information into various formats, anything from translation to personalized tutorship for learning skills etc. and then there's just the fact that they can make it possible for smaller software (and game) developement to take on much larger projects.

    I'm not saying people should just accept slop either, I think there's a goldilocks zone between this corpo idea of "employee-free" and "skill-free" and "code-free" software and "artist-free" art and complete and total rejection of using the tool at all.

    Heck even just background removal in Photoshop is pretty neat even if it's only marginally better than the magic eraser we've had for years.

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