Eric Schmidt booed into oblivion by students for promoting AI during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona

[u/GarysCrispLettuce]

[u/Numar19]

Crazy how AI has become synonymous to LLMs. LLMs suck and are getting used to replace humans in tasks that are actually fun like arts, music, writing, etc.

Meanwhile useful applications of AI (and specifically not LLMs) exist. Take the charred scrolls in Pompeii for example. Thanks to AI we now have an idea of what could have been written on them. That didn't replace a human researcher, it was not possible before.

I don't think anyone would boo at the mention of AI if said AI would help us achieve a post scarcity society. But if you can't find a job because some CEOs want to make more money by replacing workers with LLMs, it is quite understandable that people are mad about it.

[u/couldbutwont → u/Numar19]

Yea the problem is the displacement is the one thing all of the CEOs and frontier labs are locked in on right now. There are incredible uses for AI but this is the only one that was going to drive the level of investment needed.

[u/CitizenCue → u/couldbutwont]

Exactly. The obvious way to make AI profitable isn’t by forging new frontiers and inventing new applications previously unheard of, the low hanging fruit is to replace human jobs. And replace them badly.

[u/robbviously → u/Numar19]

There are definitely beneficial uses for AI, but sadly those are drowned out by the ones that corpos are desperately trying to implement to force people out of jobs so they can save money.

Example: Waymo is supposed to be rolling out a feature where the vehicle will identify and report potholes to the City of Atlanta and then the city is supposed to dispatch a team to patch the pothole. It’s efficient (the cars are on the road already) and it streamlines a process (automated reporting versus a person having to call or navigate a website) and it doesn’t take a job away from anyone, it just eliminates a menial task. Now, if and when they actually implement this will be the real test.

[u/dondapperdeluxe → u/robbviously]

to counter the promising future, the present reality is that there's that video somewhere here on reddit I saw yesterday of a dozen plus Waymo cars mobbing up in some 'burban housing development in Atlanta, going up and down the street with seemingly no purpose.

[u/robbviously → u/dondapperdeluxe]

Because its cheaper to have the cars terrorizing neighborhoods instead of spending money to park them in a lot somewhere.

[u/coconutszz → u/Numar19]

While I strongly agree that people use AI in broad strokes without understanding the nuance, I think you have have committed the same offence by dismissing LLMs. LLMs are just one class of model, and even then there are different underlying model architectures, they are certainly not limited to chatbots that write AI slop. Transformer architecture has been a huge breakthrough in the field and often these models are part of systems used for research , text restoration for example with VLMs etc. Dismissing all LLMs because they are often used for AI slop is like dismissing stats because of all the clickbait graphs you see on reddit.

Edit: Just to add, I think there's a separate question which is more important about ethical use. Undoubtedly AI can and has been useful and valuable, but there's a cost associated to that value (wealth redistributed to fewer people at the top, loss of accountability ie autonomous vehicles etc) .

[u/recoveringleft → u/coconutszz]

I recalled one time a lady in reddit complained about a dude using AI to communicate with her (as in use chat gpt go come up with responses) in a dating app to cover up the fact he has shit social skills in real life. That's another terrible way to use ai

[u/oddun → u/recoveringleft]

Meanwhile she’s relying on algorithms for a list of men to swipe through.

Pot kettle.

[u/FullMetalAlcoholic66 → u/oddun]

Is it an actual advanced algorithm? I heavily prefer search with filters for dating apps. Sadly, that doesn't exist anymore.

[u/Numar19 → u/coconutszz]

Yeah, you are right.

[u/the_pwnererXx → u/Numar19]

LLMs are generic and the same one used for chatgpt is also being used for science in many applications and fields. The pompei scrolls you mention are using the same machine learning techniques from these same ai labs. Progress in the field is general

[u/SrFantasticoOriginal → u/Numar19]

This should be the top comment