The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)
Products and services have been dropping in quality well before ai slop
You overestimate the quality of acceptable work in many industries. AI and a little human editing and oversight is perfectly capable of producing legitimate work product.
The real problem is capitalism driving everything to shit and that really has nothing to do with ai influenced workflows
I went from Windows laptop and Netflix and Hulu to a Linux desktop for a home server running Immich, Mealie, Jellyfin, and the Arr suite in docker containers. All proxied on Cloudflare for remote access. I would never have been able to do that without the use of ChatGPT. I had no knowledge of software development, Linux, networking, etc at all. If you know how to query, AI can be a huge aid in learning. It’s helping me brush up on my Italian right now too since I haven’t spoken it in 5 years.
That’s cool. I did all of that without AI coming from a similar place as you. AI didn’t open up a new path for you, it just showed you a path that already existed, which isn’t any different from what a regular search engine can do. There was nothing stopping you from finding that path on your own except your unwillingness to look.
Willingness to look is a pretty important factor. LLMs reduce the personal cost incurred to look up information, similar to how search engines saved us from having to go to the library for every question we had.
They also introduce much more uncertainty and remove your ability to judge the trustworthiness of the information you’re receiving. That’s not to mention the social and environmental costs.
You could say the same about people who used the early 2000s Google by entering full questions with natural language and clicking “I’m feeling lucky”. There are always going to be wrong ways to use a tool. But we’re discussing whether there exists a right way. And that right way includes verifying the information you receive, just like you would if you found it through a regular search engine.
The social and environmental costs are real. That’s not the criticism you gave and not what the responses are disagreeing with.
They presented to you a reasonable use case (assisted learning) and your response was “lol, you’re just lazy. Do it on your own. I did it, so can you”.
I am in a similar position, networking is Martian to me and if I search guides on how to do stuff, it’s full of people that go “just use X to do a reverse proxy”, as if I have 200h of experience under my belt. I’d rather have a chatbot explain to me like I am 5 in some cases.
I don’t consider myself a “proponent” of ai and I think it gives dependent and lazy people brain damage lol
But these people seem like complete contrarian Luddites who just want to insist it’s bad because they don’t like it and have seen too many negative memes about it
“I think AI is bad but other people who say so are weird”
mmk
I can appreciate what is good and bad about it yes
Many people seem to only think it’s bad and they are simply wrong
I can only imagine you’re the latter if you can’t grasp this nuance
You are being lazy. If “I have to learn how to do this” is too high of a bar to clear for you then maybe you’re just not supposed to do that thing. Setting up a self hosted environment is pointless if you don’t know at the least the basics about how it works. It will break sooner or later and if you just typed whatever random characters your computer told you then you’ll never be able to fix it. You won’t even be able to describe to ChatGPT what the problem is.
AI is making learning harder, not easier. It’s flooding the internet with bullshit and you’re acting like that’s a good thing. When you’re learning something new you need to know that your teacher knows what they’re doing. An AI summary might be pulled from a network engineers blog or it might be the sanitized ramblings of a schizophrenic pedophile who tries to host CSM on his smart toaster. As a beginner, you can’t tell the difference, especially when an AI rewrites the crazy and presents it in an authoritative manner.
Yes, learning new things can be hard but the internet is already the shortcut. Quit trying to outsource even more of it.
Tbh it’s not much different than search engines. You need to learn how to use them and when it’s appropriate to do so…it’s basically a skill issue 🤷♀️
Reminds me of when search engines first arrived and we were taught very early in school how library research works and then when to use digital academic databases vs regular search engines or just hit the books.
And yeah tech support is a great use case and you can just use the Gemini links that send you to the Reddit threads where the information came from to verify it.
I feel like if you’re minimally responsible it’s pretty hard to have AI backfire on you
Did you pay for the AI service you used to do that and if it hadn’t been available would you have just started reading the online resources the AI trained on and got to the same place eventually?
No and no. The barrier to entry would have been too high. I don’t have hundreds of hours to track down the answers I was looking for. It’s not that I’m incapable of finding the information I was looking for in forums. It’s that its such basic knowledge to most tech forum users that I probably would have been seen as a leech. Have you been to tech forums lately? Its a bunch up people telling you to be a better programmer and calling you a fucking idiot. That’s why stack exchange is failing.
Access to information should be free. That’s partially why we’re all here. Everything that we post could be scraped by an LLM and used for free. When it becomes an issue is when AI crawlers quadruple server load.
So the fact you didn’t pay kind of leads I to where I was going, that model isn’t sustainable for AI, would you subscribe to get access to that information? How much would you pay? Because that is what those pushing AI want to happen, they want yo be the gatekeeper and you have to pay the toll to access information.
As for the usefulness of AI for technical questions. Well I’m the other side of the learning curve from you, I need detailed answers to complicated technical questions and AI fails to provide a correct answer 9 times out of 10 and worse is misleading in its answers with basic mistakes or out of date information which would trip up inexperienced users or lead them into bad practices.
It’s only useful in giving me a direction to start, I still have to go to the likes of stack exchange and read and understand the primary sources it was trained on to get a useful answer and understanding. In general it saves me very little time and isn’t that helpful.
For the current quality of information? No. If the quality improves then maybe $5/mo. Purchase lifetime access with a guaranteed open source copy if they were to go bankrupt? Yeah. But for now, I get free access to ChatGPT for Teachers until like 2027.
But even as of right now there’s plenty of open sourced AI models. I just don’t have the hardware to run complicated models efficiently. I don’t game on a PC so my current setup is just an Intel 14100 and 32GB of ram. So if OpenAI decides to inject ads or force subscription on me, I’ll just upgrade to a 14600F and get a 3060. Then its just a matter of deciding which open source LLM I like best.
Sounds like you’re probably doing that for a job and in which case I would strongly advise against AI reliance for work tasks. At least not without training it on your personal work or technical knowledge.
That’s best practice when using AI output for more technical projects anyway. It probably isn’t saving you much time because you’re already proficient. In my case, it saved months of work. I see it as a tool that lowers the barrier of entry to a ton hobbies or areas of knowledge.
Did you read what I wrote, only to rephrase and repost? Good work gustwind