AI is BORING
By Reid JS on November 7, 2023
I'm your friend who won't shut up about GPT, LLMs, AIs, etc. I've been experimenting with my own models. I trained an LLM on the first 10 seasons of The Simpsons to see if it would start writing funny episodes again. The tech is undeniably useful, interesting, fun to play with, so I'm wondering why is everything around AI so BORING?
Yesterday, I attended a local AI conference. The conference was in the basement of a cheap Marriot hotel. The speaker was rattling off a powerpoint about LLM-OPs and ML-OPs and how he's inserting AI into his pipeline. The room was sparsely filled with middle-manager looking men and women. They were all disengaged with the presentation, tabbing between Slack and MS Outlook on their laptops. I lasted about an hour, then, like the entitled tech worker that I am, went home to complain about it on my blog.
When I got into tech professionally, crypto speculation was peaking. It was like some kind of mad science experiment ran amok on the financial industry. Teenagers were making millions of dollars launching useless tokens. There were "conferences" (massive parties) in exotic cities across the world. As long as you pretended to understand "blockchains," you were invited. Say what you want about crypto, it was fun. Sam Bankman-Fried, a famous crypto scam artist, being thrown in jail for life probably marks the end of those days. Despite all the scams, I found crypto to be loveably wholesome at its heart. After all, the ideas of decentralization, privacy, freedom, are the building blocks of our great country 🇺🇸.
So, back to AI, where are the yacht parties, the memes, the goofy art shows? Has the industry matured, or even scarier, have I matured? Are big corporations to blame? Are we all just sick of this tech nonsense and it's time for something real to take its place? What do you think?
