Comment on the tech billionaires have lost the plot
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 19 hours agoAre they? The fact that we aren’t seeing more completed projects on github tells me its not useful for coding beyond peer-review and generating boilerplate. I’ve met 2 non-tech people who managed to get a MVP they have no way to maintain. Who is realizing significant benefits?
Xaphanos@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Github is not the real world. My information is based on our clients. A basic search produced the following…
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High-end, frontier AI models are driving major breakthroughs across crucial domains: Healthcare & Biomedicine Drug Discovery & Protein Folding: Models like AlphaFold predict protein structures in seconds, accelerating candidate target identification for complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer. Early Diagnostics: Advanced computer vision analyzes complex scans (MRIs, mammograms, pathology slides) to detect early-stage tumors and rare systemic abnormalities faster than manual screening. Genomic Medicine: Processing petabytes of multi-omic data helps design targeted therapies tailored to individual patient genetic profiles. Climate, Sustainability & Agriculture Precision Climate Modeling: Advanced neural networks simulate localized weather extremes, helping cities anticipate floods, severe storms, and wildfire trajectories weeks in advance. Grid & Fusion Energy Optimization: Machine learning manages real-time load balancing for renewable power grids and stabilizes plasma containment configurations in nuclear fusion reactors. Precision Agriculture: Satellite and drone computer vision algorithms analyze soil health, crop diseases, and yield forecasts to optimize water and fertilizer deployment. Scientific Research & Discovery Materials Science: Autonomous lab platforms test millions of theoretical chemical combinations to invent better battery chemistry, carbon-capture materials, and superconductors. Astrophysics & Deep Space: High-throughput processing identifies exoplanets, maps dark matter distribution, and filters noise from radio telescope signals. Accessibility & Public Safety Assistive Technologies: Multimodal models enable real-time scene description for visual impairments, instant speech-to-sign translation, and adaptive interface controls for mobility challenges. Disaster Response & Search Operations: Satellite analysis models process post-disaster maps instantaneously to route first responders and locate trapped survivors.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 15 hours ago
The thing is: The amount of compute being planned (it’s often not getting built) can only have one true goal: automated mass surveillance, media manipulation and dismantling of what remains of the middle class. No other task than rolling out Flock 2.0 needs that much compute. All the things you mentioned already work with the EXISTING compute. I agree that some additional datacenters will be needed, but for the things you mentioned the existing compute is already fine, it seems.
Xaphanos@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Fusion.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/…/260903064215.htm?…
Medical
umaryland.edu/…/ai-speeding-discovery-of-new-drug…
Infrastructure
developer.bentley.com/use-cases/itwins-and-iot/?h…
Environmental
rfcx.org/?hl=en-US
The adoption of AI to solve problems is accelerating. It’s just not making headlines. Good news is just not rage bait. Fear sells clicks.
Jako302@feddit.org 5 hours ago
Not sure what about this even is AI. Its a software development platform specialised in Infrastructure projects. I guess the reality capture/mapping API uses AI, but most features are independent from that.
A lot of could, maybe and potentially in an article written during the starting hype in 2024, great source. It would be great if it actually worked, but most studies ive seen so far came to the conclusion that the predictions the AI made were based on entirely wrong assumptions.
Machine learning is a great tool and has been around way before the current hype. It also has very little in common with what people usually mean when they say AI.
The only somewhat proper example you delivered. Sounds interesting.
Let’s face it, the examples you’ve shown have very little in common with LLMs, Generative AI or Agentic AI. Most of it could be done with machine learning algorithms we’ve had before this started or are just nice gimmicks that didn’t revolutionize anything unlike what you claimed. There definetly are a few interesting applications for specialized AI models, but the tradeoffs simply aren’t worth it.
For every 5 years that AI brings us closer to Fusion power, it brings us 15 years closer to a cyberpunk esq dystopian future. Its great that I don’t have to worry about power costs anymore once I’m locked up cause some predictive algorithm said my kids would be against the current regime.
Not to mention that most of the actually useful applications are developed by independent researchers and have little to do with the big AI Industries that build these datacenter. You know, the ones that get the actual hate
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 8 hours ago
That’s nice, but NOT the endgame. I do not contest that AI can be a positive thing too, but there are very powerful forces, concentrated mainly in California among the tech Billionaires, who want to use AI as a tool to ensure that their will cannot be denied.
The US was already using AI in the attack on Iran, minimizing human involvement in target selection and approving the strikes (thats how over 100 little girls died). Russia is experimenting with fully AI automated attack drones based on Nvidia hardware. Flock cameras are analyzing not only license plates, but data points like bumper stickers and what other devices are in the car, making every personal movement transparent even if you leave your smartphone at home. Home security cameras are using facial recognition (which they only pulled back because they were inept in messaging, but you can be sure this functionality will return, and with full access for the authorities). Laws preventing authorities from spying on citizens get bypassed by buying the required data from advertising companies. Social media is getting flooded with LLM-generated content designed to steer public opinion regardless of what the truth is. Entertainment Hardware like Smart TVs are listening in on your conversations in your living room, transcribing your words into text using AI and storing it - even if you keep your TV offline, your chats become company property the moment you TV detects an open WIFI, or in the worst case just use technologies like LoRa to transmit the data home.
The people behind all of this are the same people financing far right parties all over the world, because a divided world is easier to dominate.
Society is under an AI-powered full scale assault. I hate it, because I know how much positive stuff this technology can enable, just as you documented. But giving up all our rights and living in and hyperscaled version of 1984 is not worth it.
sbrodolino_21@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
No point in replying. Everyone here is convinced that AI is exclusively a scam to inflate stock prices and brings 0 benefits or productivity gains in any field ever nor is it going to anytime in the future.
This is not to say that there isn’t a bubble or that AI will solve all problems in the world, but it does have plenty of use cases and many are already in place. For instance many 100s of likely rape/violence cases have been discovered at my local hospital by running the xrays and scans through AI, which hadn’t been identified by the doctors by themselves.
Xaphanos@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
This discussion is not only for today’s participants. I also speak to the lurkers. I believe that this fad of hating AI will pass. That over time the benefits will become obvious.
I also do not conflate AI with the capitalism surrounding it. Just like the industrial revolution brought forth great progress through greed and social malfeasance, this revolution is also a messy birth. But no one can dispute the benefits that came when horse power was replaced with horsepower. In the end, this will be the same.
In the meanwhile, we can hold the industry to high standards. Sound levels. Water usage. Energy consumption. My company supports setting standards on all these. That would produce a level field as we already do it volunterally. I’m all for suing bad actors into bankruptcy. Using on-site gas turbines for primary power is a crime against humanity. As is draining the water supply for cooling.
sbrodolino_21@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Great points.
Especially regarding the environmental aspects, I feel like the whole thing could just be solved by zoning datacentres as industrial and applying slightly stricted regulation.
AI doesn’t kill the environment by itself, it just needs a lot of energy and there needs to be some planning put into providing clean energy for datacentres without spinning gas turbines or raising energy prices immensely for the average Joe.
III@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Cool, you invaded the privacy of numerous people using AI… you must be proud.
The issue isn’t that AI brings no value - it is the cost of that value. And many people aren’t falling for the extremely overrated value that companies are claiming. Promised value coming from people who have a very long track record of not being truthful, lying for their own profit no matter who it harms. And then there are some who would rather not ruin the environment for those unfulfilled promises.
But sure, throw an anecdote out to prove everyone else wrong.
Xaphanos@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Altman and Musk are verified shit. This is common knowledge all across the industry.
Public companies don’t set their value - shareholders do. Insiders know the value hasn’t arrived yet. We build because customers pay us to build. The customer fronts the construction costs based on the signed contract. Investors buy or sell based on public knowledge.
sbrodolino_21@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Nobody’s privacy was violated. Privacy laws are very strict in Italy and before any research is done on health data you have to sign and tick the box to specifically allow it. The data was also not handed to any company as the research was run by a local university.
How was anybody’s privacy violated? Also I didn’t do anything given that I just read this on a newspaper and am not in any way connected to the hospital.
You are judgmental and ignorant. You think, as many other people here on lemmy, that you are right about everything all the time. I don’t deny that the AI industry has very big flaws. I fully agree and I believe that in the long term we will need public ownership of AI companies. I just disagree with the fact that AI is wholly bad and brings 0 positives.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 14 hours ago
I ran your wall-o-text through bullshit.js and it made quite some good replacements!
Xaphanos@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
So you do think that using compute power to distill wisdom from complex information is a useful function.