The important question with any AI-related news story is what is the counterfactual.
Sure, it sucks if your self driving car gets in a crash or your AI scribe incorrectly transcribes something to your medical record. This is news now. What isn't news is humans getting into crashes or doctors making poor medical decisions as a result of low quality or missing notes.
> I think if a real human doctor completely fabricated a drug usage history for one of their patients, that would also be news.
This happens every single day and is effectively never reported. For far more nefarious reasons than a simple scribing error.
Drug seeking behavior enters notes all the time without much evidence and based entirely on a random doctor's (or even a triage nurse) hunch. A significant portion of those notes are outright false and incorrect. Once that is on your file and in a given medical system, you are marked for life.
When doctors make mistakes, they can be held accountable -- their malpractice insurance rates go up, their licenses are subject to suspension or revocation, they can go to jail (eg if they are pill mills) or they/the practice get a bad review.
When AI makes mistakes, what happens? How is it held accountable?
Doctors make mistakes pretty much non-stop, and they are rarely held accountable because the system as a whole works OK. AI makes less mistakes than the doctors do (I read a lot of medical notes).
You know they'd have to be your roommate for that to amount to a positive test, right? They, correctly, assumed that your excuse for having a cannabis-user's dosage of cannabis in you is that you are a cannabis user, not because your neighbor two houses away smokes it.
What the ever living fuck gave you the idea that they even tested me, bro? And why would they? And why would I be positive? Please fuck off with your shitty unfounded accusations!
Ed Zitron also said that consumers were losing interest in ChatGPT in January 2024, that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024, that ChatGPT and similar products were "not particularly useful for anything", that hallucinations could not possibly be reduced in models, etc.
He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.
If you're wondering why these "churls" are increasingly popular, it's the reality that far from being mobbed by skeptics, the entire market economy is being taken for a ride in the name of AI. It's very much like the febrile environment that developed about Crytpo, in which anyone who expressed concern that maybe this tech wasn't going to revolutionize money, programming, and society itself was a "churlish skeptic".
I certainly wouldn't credit Ed Zitron with timing his predictions very well, but that doesn't make them wrong, and it certainly doesn't support the AI maximalism we're all forced to endure.
There's a huge crowd of "wishful thinkers" that want to see AI collapse and will cling to any rationalization that it will do so. This is Zitron's audience.
How exactly is AI "succeeding?" By the numbers, every AI company is on a fast track to going bankrupt at record speeds. All while burning the planet down and making electronics unavailable to literally everyone. This is not sustainable.
Keep a close eye on the "Is AI Profitable Yet?" website. The numbers will open your eyes. Please, enlighten me on how AI is successful.
AI would be profitable today if all companies weren't constantly racing to train the next biggest model, that's the whole reason the numbers look whack.
This is basically the first time we're seeing true competition between massive tech companies, the previous state had each one of them clinging on to their own separate monopoly.
And if the training stops, the existing LLM models will fairly quickly decay in usefulness.
There's no free steady-state of high-quality current models for this; it's either keep investing forever or deal with models that stopped gaining new information in 202X.
Anthropic's Q2 was allegedly profitable, and OpenAI is allegedly pretty close to profitability.
Spending way more money than you earn is pretty common for startups anyways, "going bankrupt" is a silly thing to say when the whole point is to spend more than you earn
People still believe that the model intelligence has plateaud and I feel like they live under the rocks. I get the insane capex spend, I get the hype, I even get certain company will go under but to ignore the capability jump in a year is absurd.
He's been mostly wrong about the potential for AI, but mostly right about the financials. Don't listen to him for opinions, but don't discount his factual reporting because his opinions are off.
I agree. I think LLMs do make specific tasks much faster (like typing code), but these tasks usually make up a small amount of people's actual work.
What I mostly meant was that Ed's view on LLMs is that they won't get much better than they are now, which—so far—has been incorrect every time he made the point. I also think he puts too much weight on things like hallucinations, which aren't much of an issue for many applications of LLMs.
For someone like Ed, it feels like way too much effort to wade through the muck.
I personally can't stand anything that whiffs of "outrage content" . Doubly so if they are stupendously wrong on a regular basis. Triply so if they never own up to those bad calls.
If someone else wants to get their hands dirty, more power to them. I'll wait for anything useful to filter through other sources.
Life is short, and there's so much other high quality material I'd rather give my limited attention to.
This is not a complete picture. I use Zed daily and I have the AI features enabled, but I never use the built in agent in Zed. I reach for an agent in a separate terminal session.
More people are probably using stuff like Claude Code, Codex etc from the CLI or desktop apps, meaning they’re actually using more AI and skipping Zed altogether
Anecdotally: I disabled Zed’s AI features, but I use LLMs more extensively than ever outside of my IDE. So the numbers may not paint a clear story here.
Any YouTube video with him is filled with fawning comments. People love it when others tell them what they want to hear. He'll be able to do his schtick for a long time, well after it should be obvious to everyone the AI is going to change things. I'm not enthusiastic about AI and wish we could pump the breaks somehow but at some point you have to recognize there's something there. I don't think it's helpful that the face of AI criticism says a lot of nonsense.
> that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024,
I’m curious, removing coding as a criterion what is more impressive about the current models than say gpt 4o? Give a prompt example. Keep in mind most consumers of AI are likely not using it for coding so this is relevant.
I doubt anyone could give a not coding example where it’s meaningfully better with current frontier than 4o.
Take humaneval. 4o gets 90, gpt 5.6 gets 94%. So what?
Effective ads absolutely require knowing more about the user than the context on the page it's a 1-2 orders of magnitude revenue difference for the publisher per-impression.
The effectiveness of ads is highly doubtful in general - especially when you're looking at impressions rather than clicks. And that's before we consider advertising mostly being mostly a zero-sum game.
Advertisers are willing to pay more for privacy-invading ads because they believe they are more effective. If privacy-invading ads were illegal they'd just go back to context-dependent ads like they have been using for the thousands of years before the internet was invented, and after an adjustment period the revenue will just bounce back to where it was before.
Most advertisers know this already. If privacy-invading ads were so effective, why are all the major brands now using influencers to market their products? Why go through the effort of finding a specific Instagram channel which might be a good fit and convincing the operator to enter a brand deal, when you could also just directly pay Instagram for a highly-targeted ad one swipe away?
> If no images are released on the internet (and users consume them privately), no one is harmed in the process.
Yikes.
A. They were released all over the internet - from the article..
> The chatbot has a public account on X, where users can ask it questions or request alterations to images. Users flocked to the social media site, in many cases asking Grok to remove clothing in images of women and children, after which the bot publicly posted the A.I.-generated images.
B. There is a bunch of data about consumers of CSAM 'content escalating' and eventually attempting to make real contact with minors.
C. They were sexualizing pictures of real people and posting the pictures online.
> One of the young plaintiffs said she found out about the imagery after she received an anonymous message on Instagram pointing her toward images and videos, including her high school yearbook photo, which had been altered to show her in sexually explicit actions and full nudity.
The material was being shared on a Discord server, a private chat space on that platform, and included similar imagery that had also been altered using Grok of at least 18 other women who were minors, according to the complaint.
A user would go into a women's x profile, find a recent post and publicly @ the grokbot to remove her clothes. You don't believe that this is a well thought out and acceptable design and no fault lies with X?
Tools are neutral so we shouldn't do anything to reduce the possibility of someone consuming alcohol while or right before driving. Tools are neutral, so we shouldn't do anything to mitigate blatantly obvious risks, in fact we should actively engage in the risky behavior, just to show how neutral the tool is!
Grok was replying to public posts on X with the compromising deepfakes. Musk was actively joking about it right up until many countries blocked it, and several European countries, India, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Brazil all started investigations against X for violating local laws against producing intimate imagery without consent. Internet companies often enjoy a lot of leeway for cases where their safety measures are bypassed and they take reasonable actions to mitigate or respond to bypasses, that evaporates when they openly support the abuse.
OP seems to be asking for examples with an intent to dismiss and downplay each of them, and not to actually read into them and challenge his existing beliefs about X/Grok/Musk.
Open to changing my mind. I would be interested in reading positive, uplifting news about xAI/Grok/Musk that demonstrated a repeated pattern of ethical, careful, compassionate, attentive, and/or responsible business and engineering practices.
However after looking at all of these articles, these all seem like instances of users misusing the product. The product happens to reply on social media, so media publications immediately capitalized on this.
Seems less like malicious intent from xAI's part and more like a product with young and/or insufficient moderation controls.
Starkly different. One was a well meaning attempt to squash model bias gone wrong, the other is a deliberately inserted bias. Even ignoring all that, whataboutism is not persuasive.
The reality is both are likely well meaning attempts to squash model bias gone wrong. Since you happen to align with the politics of one more than the other, you are having trouble being intellectually honest about your own biases.
In no way are you being intellectually honest if you think that hamfisted system prompt push to prod manipulation was an attempt to squash bias. And again, whataboutism doesn't make xAI better because others are doing bad, too. You asked for evidence of xAI untrustworthiness and received it.
I see your hamfisted cropping of my quote to downplay xAI's actions, since you brought up intellectual honesty.
Why do we have to quantity badness? The question you posed was what has xAI done to be perceived as untrustworthy? Stop trying to whatabout Google here. I'm no friend of theirs, it's simply irrelevant.
Also, it's Whataboutism: Other Company Y doing something bad/untrustworthy isn't a counter to Company X doing something similarly bad/untrustworthy. Both can be bad.
Both are bad and are examples of untrustworthy behavior from their companies, and I would not chime into a thread to defend either of them. Is one example enough to smear an entire company as untrustworthy? No. But numerous examples and patterns of behavior... possibly?
"Fading superpower" is typical EU cope. It may help to be a little bit introspective about why one might want to oppose EU politics, or its leaders, whose "leadership" over the last decade has led to unprecedented migrant, economic, and energy crises, and stalling growth.
Seeing the word 'cope' lobbed out is usually a sure sign a poster is projecting, and so it is here.
What exactly is there in the USA's destruction of the economic norms that have always served it, or in the pointless dumping of its hard-won soft power, alienation of its allies, deliberate weakening of its intelligence gatherers, rampant open corruption from its leadership, or in any other of the innumerable harms it's inflicted on itself the last 18 months, that you think is conducive to the US maintaining its superpower status?
Proving superiority? Proxy controlling venezuala, creating LLM's and locking down the frontier models while GLM has to distill the models to be remotely competitive, having the hard power to ensure Iran can't fire AK's into crowds and develop nukes... I don't get how this is not percieved as immense strength? How are people defending terrorists who have been consistently saying "Death to the West"
The bedrock of economic trust and co-operation that only ever served the USA's interest. What do you imagine the new coolness towards US companies or US lobbying is going to do to US GDP longterm?
You actually typify the myopia of many of Trump's supporters. "Cash in today: fuck tomorrow."
No, fading is right. The US is willingly and deliberately ceding much of its soft power. The US also caused a global energy crisis by being so completely incompetent in their dealings with Iran in the on again off again toxic s/relationship/war
Even if the US isn't fading, the message is still clear: the country is adopting a more isolationist stance and has no problems alienating its allies. Why would you want to continue to tie yourself to a nation like that?
"If you make the tax too high it starts discouraging the behavior you're taxing, which can paradoxically reduce overall tax revenue."
I am generally against more taxes, but the structure of this one is quite good in terms of the incentives. If wealthy people who only live in the city part-time stay in hotels instead of buying second homes, the net effect should be to increase the cost of hotel rooms and reduce the cost of owned-housing. NYC charges nearly 10% tax on hotel stays, so recoups some of the cost there. Having property in your city mostly being occupied by people who live their full time, particularly when property is already very expensive, seems like a good thing overall.
> increase the cost of hotel rooms and reduce the cost of owned-housing
Reducing the cost of $5M+ homes will slightly help some wealthy people who live in NYC, and there will be a modest trickle-down effect into less expensive properties. But I thought the goal was to generate tax revenue from the taxes, which wouldn't happen to the extent they end up in the hands of NYC residents.
EDIT: apparently it hits all homes over $1M, which means it will hit more homes but also won't generate revenue to the extent the homes end up being owned by New Yorkers.
"I thought the goal was to generate tax revenue from the taxes, which wouldn't happen to the extent they end up in the hands of NYC residents."
You're right, I'm saying I think it is a good tax for reasons secondary to revenue. We all know NYC is going to squander the money, at least they might make housing slightly cheaper for the average New Yorker in the process.
Sure, it sucks if your self driving car gets in a crash or your AI scribe incorrectly transcribes something to your medical record. This is news now. What isn't news is humans getting into crashes or doctors making poor medical decisions as a result of low quality or missing notes.