Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
For those of you in the (West) LA area, there's a panel with Brian Merchant happening tomorrow. Probably no food this school year but still looks good.
https://law.ucla.edu/events/democracy-technology-salon
If anyone does turn up, codeword is banana bread, otherwise I'll assume you're a lawyer (not derogatory).
Until proven otherwise, I assume everyone I encounter is a fellow sneerer (derogatory)
EDIT: The post's been deleted, and the Substack's been seemingly abandoned.
Starting this Stubsack off, I found a Substack post titled "Generative AI could have had a place in the arts", which attempts to play devil's advocate for the plagiarism-fueled slop machines.
Pointing to one particular lowlight, the author attempts to conflate AI with actually useful tech to try and make an argument:
While the idea of generative AI “democratizing” art is more or less a meme these days, there are in fact AI tools that do make certain artforms more accessible to low-budget productions. The first thing to come to mind is how computer vision-based motion capture give 3D animators access to clearer motion capture data from a live-action actor using as little as a smartphone camera and without requiring expensive mo-cap suits.
Why progressives should care about falling birth rates
2 weeks old, but regardless. The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote a very EA-adjacent article basically making the case for “progressive” eugenics. The studies he cites all derive from a behavior-genetic model of intergenerational value transmission, i.e. conservatism is “in the genes” & progressivism is literally getting bred out of the gene pool.
A masterclass in baiting liberals. Take note, NYT & Atlantic!
Belgian AI fails. So there is a big kids pop group popular in Belgium/The Netherlands, called K3. They used genAI images for their show. And apparently it created images of them with with both bikinis and headscarfs at the same time. According to this article https://www.nu.nl/muziek/6368424/k3-geschrokken-van-ongepaste-ai-beelden-tijdens-optreden-jammere-fout.html (in Dutch sorry) lot of people apparently were mad. (I have not seen mad people myself, so not sure if it actually was a problem, and how many people are mad over the four main reasons to be mad possibly (being, 'islamisation', immodesty, being insulting to Muslims, and feeding genAI crap to kids while you are one of the biggest acts around (and can certainly afford professional artists), so take into account this is likely a nothingburger))). I was amused to read first that they had shown inappropriate images, and then read it was just headscarves and bikinis.
e: also note for context, nu.nl is a news site, but usually the quality of their articles isn't the greatest, not a lot of actual journalism, and a lot of bias towards the establishment and a tendency to mainstream pro the current social order stuff no matter how out there. (They had articles going 'no the inflation isn't due to companies rising prizes, as not all inflation is because of that) and a tendency to post a lot of gossip like shit. (nos.nl is our big main news site). And their source, shownews is worse. It is basically on our fox news style tv channel. (they have an eveningshow 'vandaag inside' which is basically causing the people who watch it to become nuts in the fox news style way, esp elderly people. Weird transphobic rants, anti-woke shit, contrarian idiots who don't realize they are idiots but are brave truthtellers, all brought in a 'bar style' sort of setting. Watched some of it (really funny to hear them say leftwingers don't watch their shows) and every hour of it would require several ours to explain why almost everything they say is wrong)). I'm trying to provide context for where my poor country is going.
‘islamisation’, immodesty, being insulting to Muslims, and feeding genAI crap to kids while you are one of the biggest acts around (and can certainly afford professional artists)
Considering those AI-generated images are hitting a pentafecta(?) of ragebait, I'd be shocked if this didn't ignite backlash.
Tbh, from looking it up it seems to have just been a Muslim rights org who complained it wasnt great (which seems fine), reading between the gossip lines. Also seems that the AI images were from the people who hired K3 to play not them themselves.
Nobody seems to have been mad enough to firebomb openAIs offices.
pentafecta(?)
it should be quinella but it isn't, and there isn't a nice name for it, unless you count something like "Super 5"
OpenAI's trying to make an AI-generated animated film, and claiming their Magical Slop Extruders^tm^ can do in nine months what allegedly would take three years, with only a $30 mil budget and the writers of Paddington in Peru for assistance.
Allegedly, they're also planning to show it off at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places. By my guess, this was Sam Altman's decision - he's already fawned over AI-extruded garbage before, its clear he has zero taste in art whatsoever.
Heard about the below last night; apparently survivors are forced into arbitration, so only the dead can sue. IANAL but thats pretty messed up.
gigabyte selling shovels (and not even just random shovels, specialty shovels that need a fixed type of mobo to use)
not gonna spend much effort on it now but if someone runs into an actual worthwhile review showing training performance numbers I'd be keen to see (my expectations are that it still does not do very much, and that runtime quality still underperforms relative to VC-subsidised platforms)
Fascinating how that product page is full of marketing fluff, but nowhere does it say what this actually is...? What does it do? It's some kind of.... memory expansion? But what's beneath the big heatsink then? All they say is that it's somehow amazing:
In the age of local AI, GIGABYTE AI TOP is the all-round solution to win advantages ahead of traditional AI training methods. It features a variety of groundbreaking technologies that can be easily adapted by beginners or experts, for most common open-source LLMs, in anyplace even on your desk.
A variety of groundbreaking technologies, uh huh, okay then. In so many ways this is the perfect companion product for AI.
Oh, it's a CXL board, Compute Express Link. Basically a way to attach DRAM to PCI Express. I know some people working on this stuff for one of the big vendors, but in that context it was a rack-scale box capable of handling multiple terabytes' worth of DIMMs. Having this as a desktop expansion card seems like a bit of a marginal application, but Gigabyte's done weird shit before. For instance, I have an AMD-compatible Thunderbolt 3 card that was only made in limited quantities by them and ASRock.