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China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen
(www.thebeaverton.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Technology
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Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.
Regardless of how much of a bubble we're in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It's proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it "magic beans" is just wishful thinking at best.
Earthing? How is that a scam?
I know for sure that bad earthing in my current residence has been creating significant problems for with appliances. Sometimes my UPS giving errors, which also, might be due to bad earthing.
Hah, see that's what I thought when various family members asked if I had heard about it. Turns out, if our electronics need grounding, so must our bodies...
our bodies
⏚⏚⏚
i have noticed that there are two competing narratives in the leftwingosphere:
A) ai is 100% slop garbage and a giant waste of electricity, pumping out garbage images with multiple hands and the text is nothing but hallucinations that can’t even count the number of r’s in “strawberry”
and at the same time
B) AI is going to take all our jobs and we will all be homeless and poor while tech billionaire CEOs turn us into slaves
Those are only conflicting statements if you believe that the market will not embrace worse products. It totally will so long as you have a group of people who lack the critical analysis skills to compare the products and arrive at the conclusion that the new one is worse.
It doesn't help that the potential drivers of this action are massive conglomerates, so if a sweeping change comes from the top-down and is paired with a lot of propaganda (Marketing) then people will have no choice but to accept it as the standard.
I think that a lot of criticism about the actual quality of AI art is mixed, though. I feel like it has flaws, but I've seen arguments about flaws I don't think are actually real problems with the technical quality.
Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that's great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.
But yeah, I don't think it's fair to complain about how "inefficient" an early technology is and also call it "magic beans".
Option A feels like wishful thinking or sour grapes or something to me. Community crossover with the humanities and fine arts is significant.
B is feeling a bit less imminent too; it just wasn't clear a couple years ago that it will take more than raw compute. That being said, AGI is still bound to happen eventually, seeing as NGI did.
are those competing?
It's being rushed to market and is still very inefficient, but part of the reason it's being rushed to market is because companies are getting ahead of themselves about the opportunity to fire human employees.
But then if they produce garbage with AI people will buy the non-garbage product
Either it produces something of value or it doesn't, if it's producing garbage, lowering output, etc then it's not a threat to our jobs because most people don't like garbage, if it's producing genuine value then it will be.
Early cars weren't a threat to streetcars and trains and urban planning but modern cars have reshaped every North American city. You can criticize the inefficiency, poor quality, energy waste, etc. of the technology today while also pointing out the dangers of tomorrow.
But cars have always had value, we're talking under an article that calls AI "magic beans"
How could magic beans which produce garbage enslave humanity under capitalism? Would you argue that cars which replaced horses as the primary mode of transport in a few years be called this?
You can argue that AI does some things badly, it's still very very early on and the progress people are making is insane, like nothing I've seen before, but you can't argue it is worthless and a giant threat to us at the same time, this is contradictory
The cars that replaced horses were several iterations in, early "automobile" devices included steam powered carriages that moved slower than walking.
A technology may start with limited usage while still having lots of potential.
Technologies are always useless until they're not.
we’re not in the slower than walking era, we’re in the ford model t era, i’m reading someone call the ford model t magic beans (eg. a scam) while millions of people are driving one every day and simultaneously worried it’s going to ruin transportation all over the north america
again, these are contradictory statements, it cannot be both a scam that has no value (eg. magic beans) and going to take all our jobs
It seems you're firmly entrenched and going out of your way to see a contradiction. I'll let you be.
Consider that there's no widespread double-think happening and it could just be in your own head at this point.
https://mstdn.social/@Nickiquote/113901910776808096
Snake oil yesterday, magic beans today.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67977967
Going to hit 40% of jobs in 5 years the next
Is it magic beans and snake oil, eg. a scam or is it a legit threat, you can't have both
I didn't think your point was as shallow as "different people can have different opinions"
I fail to see how this invalidates that someone can hold both the position that current AI is a waste of electricity and pumping out garbage while pointing out the potential social and economic disruption of future iterations of the technology.
If your point was simply that some people hold one position, others hold the other, and others still hold both. Then.... thanks? I think we can also call this a waste of electricity.
hey i’m running on solar and battery so no waste of electricity here ;)
but yeah that was it, i just noticed how here and on mastodon i read ‘ai is a scam’ and then turn my head and read ‘ai will take all our jobs’, makes for a nice whiplash effect
also it’s 4am here i’m going to sleep, appreciate the chat
@Eyekaytee @teawrecks
Fun fact: they are scarily compatible as long as the CEOs are not in their role thanks to meritocracy :)
That can't be possible, if they fire all their workers and produce AI slop then we will simply start a new company with human workers that doesn't.
This isn't communism we can simply start a new business at any time for any reason, with or without AI
@Eyekaytee
You seem to think, once again, that meritocracy is a thing.
It's the exact same dynamic you are used to when it comes to yes-men and bootlickers.
Are they more productive? No. Do they get better paying job? Yes.
You can absolutely leave and fund a "good" company, good luck getting anywhere.
If the product has value then people will buy it*
Humans have always created jobs, we love em, can't get enough of em, in a capitalist system if people want to buy human made goods and services and those systems are profitable then there will be jobs for those people
This isn't a communist dictatorship where you will be forced to buy government sponsored AI produce and no other choice is given to you
*I assume the products would have little logos on them like "non-gmo, organic, human made and farmed fruits!" etc
Wouldn't slop AI crash their motorcade or private jet pretty much immediately?
Hey! Are you up to talking about your opinions on the value of current AI technology? I'm personally opposed due to how our society has chosen to organize itself, but I think the basic concept is interesting.
Agreed. I've been following the technology of neural networks and generative AI since before LLMs were the new hotness and it's fascinating and powerful stuff.
My qualms with what's happening now are more about how we organize our economy and society. Rushing them to market, aggressively trying to cull workers, etc. are critiques of capitalism not AI. In a different world we would all be excited about the prospect of having to work less and reap the benefits of AI, but we wouldn't be reopening coal plants and leaving people to starve on the street.
No opinions whatsoever. I believe I made that clear in my list of things to disregard when considering the objective reality of current AI tech.
Your estimation of what constitutes "objective reality" is in fact the opinion that you're being asked about.
Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don't like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn't make it less real.
Twitter wasn't profitable for its entire existence, it's often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.
Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.
Same for doordash and uber eats.
Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they're not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.
None of that is because they're "magic beans" from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn't, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.
And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).
Hey, I wanted to say I'm sorry for using ambiguous language there. My time studying history has profoundly affected me, so I tend to use "Opinion" to mean "What's your understanding and reasoned analysis of X thing?"
The alternate implications slipped my mind when I posted. My bad!
I wanted to say thanks for sharing your thoughts and I think we're actually on the same page with regards to current AI technology. I do recognize that a lot of people are interested in using it, and that they will continue to highly value the functionality it has. My objections to it are, of course, related to secondary concerns and problematic social issues- which I think you understand based on your post.
You saying your opinion is objective reality does not make it so. I agree that LLMs have their (few, niche) uses, but you're just being arrogant here.
few niche uses? it has heaps of uses that aren’t niche at all
https://aussie.zone/post/16417192/14017352
perplexity.ai is a better search engine than any current ones and that’s about as mainstream a use as you can get
I have made only factual statements. You can believe I'm arrogant for doing so, you can believe the preference of hundreds of millions of people is "niche" or "few" in number. Those are called opinions.
Which statements have I made that you believe to be my opinion?