What is the aim of all the AI investment?

Comments

• awmwrites@lemmy.cafe ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  1. The business class has been promised they can cut workers and use AI instead, which has been their dream since forever.

  2. AI has been shown to deskill workers. Experts lose their skills, new workers don’t gain new skills. Then the owners of AI can rent skills back to people at a profit.

  3. If businesses can deskill and fire enough workers, they can take advantage to reinstate things like scrip and slavery.

  You rightfully notice that AI isn’t useful enough for businesses to throw an entire civilization worth of money at because you’re thinking about it as a tool, but it’s not a tool, it’s a weapon. A weapon pointed at you and me.

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  • bigbangdangler@reddthat.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    A fantastic summary.

    Addendum to #2: to add insult to injury, a lot of the training data in AI models was used without consent. That means that the output of skilled people was stolen from them in order to train systems designed to steal from them again.

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    • eleijeep@piefed.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The enclosure of the commons. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

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• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  To culturally associate tech workers as low skilled and low paid so that worker leverage can be reduced.

  The strategy has succeeded spectacularly even though AI is mostly a scam and will never replace skilled human tech workers, just help rationalize dehumanizing them.

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• aramis87@fedia.io ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The purpose of AI is to allow the wealthy to access the benefits of the talented, while preventing the talented from accessing the benefits of wealth.

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I would argue that the purpose of AI is to convince us that technology can actually give the wealthy access to the benefits of the talented. So long as everyone believes it does, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t actually true… until of course the bubble pops.

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• Hegar@fedia.io ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  "You can fire like most of your staff and only be noticably worse"

  LLMs are another (large) step in the broad trend of concentrating more power in fewer hands that has been going on since late mesolithic food storage tech.

  Most things that we've lionized as technological breakthroughs since the ice age ~20kya have been power-concentration tools.

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• ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It has already revolutionized software development. As my friend put it:

  On the subject of claude code, I went to a high-level founder talk about code ai and the general consensus was that CEOs were telling their staff 100% of code must be written by an agent within 6 months or they have to leave the company. And all the focus was switching on to how you verify, for example, a 15000 line PR written entirely by AI.

  100% of my own code is now written by AI. I’ve been programming for 20 years - I can write code myself, but the AI is so much faster than I could possibly be that managing it is far more productive. It makes mistakes, but so do humans.

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  • Asafum@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I guess they just need to pray for 100% accuracy before you retire. There’s going to be a massive issue if hallucinations still exist and we expect software engineers to review AI code, but no one knows how to code anymore or no JR devs were ever hired again to gain experience.

    But that’s a nice can we can kick down the road for future us to deal with. There’s money to be made now so fuck the future.

    /Wrist

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    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I hope I have 30 years until I retire, but given how rapid progress has been, I’m worried about whether or not I’ll still have a job in just a tenth of that time. The technology is just a few years old and still improving rapidly, so my bet would be that current limitations will be overcome. (And the goal isn’t 100% accuracy, because humans don’t have 100% accuracy.)

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• artyom@piefed.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The CEOs are getting paid. In America, that’s the only thing that matters.

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• webkitten@piefed.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Money laundering for billionaires.

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• BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafe ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It has one potential use: to increase profits by replacing the jobs of millions of millions of workers. That is the sole reason that these C-Suite Executives are excited about, not considering the fact that their jobs are among the easiest to replace by AI.

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• sylver_dragon@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  AI is the shiny new tech and investors are more worried about missing out on “the next big thing” than they areabout pissing away a few billion dollars. For investors at that level, it’s all a game of numbers. If they invest a billion dollars in 20 different things, and 19 of those things fail, but one has a return of 100 billion dollars, that’s a win.

  Sure, there is no guarantee that AI will pan out. But, that’s a very hard thing to determine ahead of time. Everyone thought e-commerce would pay off big in the 90’s/00’s. And it did, for a few companies (Google, Amazon). The rest got slaughtered and we got the dot-com bubble. Then folks expected Crypto currencies, EFTs and NFTs to pay off big. Mostly, that didn’t happen, though they do thrive in a few places. Again, investors just wanted to ride that profit wave.

  In short, investments are all about making money. And at a sufficient scale, it’s not about picking winners or losers, it’s about picking everything and making sure the wins from the winners cover the losses from the losers.

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    AI will not pay off as a bet.

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• Iconoclast@feddit.uk ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Are you refering to the companies adopting AI into the workflow or the AI companies themselves investing billions into developing these models?

  In the latter case they’re trying to rush towards AGI because who ever gets there first will have their investments paid back millionfold and the one placing second gets nothing.

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  • dracc@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I find it stilly that they’re still relying on LLMs for the prospect of AGI. It never was and never will be more than a clumsy autocorrect.

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    • 9point6@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’ve seen this one a few times and it’s puzzled me a bit for a while now, I don’t think anyone in these companies think iterating on an LLM model alone is going to give them AGI

      You only have to look at how Claude Code has taken off in the past 6 months. Sure the model is a big factor, but it’s the tooling built on top of it that makes it useful and disruptive. The model is what enabled the utility, when attached to conventionally engineered tooling.

      Whenever the first AGI is created, an LLM will 100% be part of the implementation, it’s just more than a one piece puzzle

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• HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  ai is just the first step. step three is profit.

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• zout@fedia.io ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Tech companies like MS, Meta, Google and Amazon bought a lot if the infrastructure for the internet over the years. In order to monetize this, they need people and companies to generate data traffic. Before they were pushing stuff like block chain and cloud services, AI is the next thing they're focussing on. At the same time there's the pumping around of investments like between NVidia, OpenAI and Oracle to artificially inflate stock value. So, in short, it's all about hoarding money.

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They own infinite shovels and are too incompetent to figure out what use digging holes is to people.

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