this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
969 points (99.2% liked)
Fuck AI
5374 readers
955 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The hope still holds that this AI bubble will pop before anything truly terrible can come of it, then it can go back to serving the niches its actually helpful for, rather than being used to screw with everyday working people, and we can all live happily ever after.
Machine learning has niches it's useful in (although it has sometimes been the hammer that makes everything look like a nail). Large language models on the other hand? I haven't seen them be useful in anything. Any results they generate are questionable at best and a lot of the time just plain wrong. With all the costs and other downsides, I think we should classify them as a failed technology and stop using them. The only reason anybody uses them today is the huge amount of marketing behind it and the fact the technology is being given away for almost nothing. If the actual cost would be charged, I doubt there would be a lot of interest. We've seen all those AI companies struggling to generate any revenue, their costs are in the billions and their revenue from AI products is in the millions, it doesn't add up.
The reason big tech is so into LLMs is so they can analyze YOUR data, to make it more appealing to sell to marketers and governments, and to make your rent the privilege from them. Look at every “AI shoved into product unnecessarily”, “app that could run locally being cloud based (especially storage)” and “replaces decision making with our enhanced workflow”; look at every “just one more data center bro please we need to out-bid the entire consumer market, both home and enterprise on-premises” with this in mind. The big picture starts to make sense.
Large language models are very good at translations, probably their only potential profitable use.
LLMs were built for natural language translation and they're pretty good at that.
The hope is in vain.