Tar_Alcaran

I went to school with a Belana (no apostrophe), who didn’t like Star Trek. Mostly because her dad loves it (obviously).

Likewise cold fusion

I don’t personally remember hearing any AI company leader ever claim their LLM is generally intelligent

Not directly. They merely claim it’s a coworker that can complete complex tasks, or an assistant that can do anything you ask.

The public isn’t just failing here, they’re actively being lied to by the people attempting to sell the service.

For example, here’s Sammy saying exactly that: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/01/1091979/sam-altman-says-helpful-agents-are-poised-to-become-ais-killer-function/

And here’s him again, recently, trying to push the “our product is super powerful guys” angle with the same claim: https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-chatgpt/sam-altman-ai-agents-hackers-best-friend

Nobody but quacks is trying to make cold fusion work. Are you confusing it with “regular” nuclear fusion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly users. If just one percent of them are paying, that’s 8 million paying customers. That’s not “nobody.”

Yes, it is. A 1% conversion rate is utterly pathetic and OpenAI should be covering its face in embarrassment if that’s. I think WinRAR might have a worse conversion rate, but I can’t think of any legitimate company that bad. 5% would be a reason to cry openly and beg for more people.

Edit: it seems like reality is closer to 2%, or 4% if you include the legacy 1 dollar subscribers.

That sheer volume of weekly users also shows the demand is clearly there,

Demand is based on cost. OpenAI is losing money on even its most expensive subscriptions, including the 230 euro pro subscription. Would you use it if you had to pay 10 bucks per day? Would anyone else?

If they handed out free overcooked rice delivered to your door, there would be a massive demand for overcooked rice. If they charged you a hundred bucks per month, demand would plummet.

Relying on an LLM for factual answers is a user error, not a failure of the underlying technology.

That’s literally what it’s being marketed as. It’s on literally every single page openAI and its competitors publish. It’s the only remotely marketable usecase they have, because these things are insanely expensive to run, and they’re only getting MORE expensive.

Exactly, a “cure for cancer” is like “stopping accidents”.

There’s still cancer, and there are still accidents. But on both fields it’s much better to be alive in 2026 than in 1926

If people treat it like AGI - which it’s not - then of course it’ll let them down.

People treat it like the thing it’s being sold as. The LLM boosters are desperately trying to sell LLMs as coworkers and assistants and problemsolvers.

The flying car,

Those are called helicopters. They’re literally just cars but every advantage and every downside is amplified.

They’re amazing for taking a small number of people somewhere, at massive cost to the surroundings. They’re noisy, take up a lot of space, require lots of specialized Infrastructure just for them and they are incredibly dangerous to their surroundings.

cold fusion

That’s not a technology, it’s a scam. Regular fusion is absolutely real, it’s just super complicated and hugely underfunded.

AI is great, LLMs are useless.

They’re massively expensive, yet nobody is willing to pay for it, so it’s a gigantic money burning machine.

They create inconsistent results by their very nature, so you can, definitionally, never rely on them.

It’s an inherent safety nightmare because it can’t, by its nature, distinguish between instructions and data.

None of the company desperately trying to sell LLMs have even an idea of how to ever make a profit off of these things.

My previous car had the same problem. He would often start peeing a meter away from the box, and then try to bury it, spreading pee everywhere. The vet taught us to express his bladder twice a day in his last year, and it worked out pretty well.

I’ve spent 3 weeks of my life in Egypt. In that time I was groped and inappropriately touched about as often as in the entire rest of my life.

I’m not excusing anything, but I have to say I do kinda understand it.

You mean, potential new land.

Nuclear war? Best hope you’re in a target zone, you don’t want to try and live through a nightmare where growing food may be impossible. Your canned goods will run out in months unless you can supplement them.

Your food will be fine. Animals are going to die WAY before plants, they’re much more resistant to radiation than we are. System failure is much more likely to kill you than actual fallout.

Global pandemic beyond what COVID-19 was? Yeah, COVID sucked, but it had a rather low kill rate. A super bug that has a rate to kill society as we know it around the globe is going to spread quickly, easily, and be highly deadly by comparison. You’re more likely to contract it and die than survive.

A disease that kills quickly is much more likely not to spread too far. One problem with COVID-19 was that you can walk around spreading it, that doesn’t happen with ebola because by the time you’re contagious, you’re not moving. What you should worry about is a slow spreader like COVID-19, but only a few times more deadly. It doesn’t take much to collapse food and energy distribution.

Climate change? You may be able to survive this one but you’ll need to think of how high waters will rise, how that’ll effect local growing ecology for food, etc. It’s going to be insanely rough.

Nah, sea level rise won’t kill you. It might kill your grandkids, but climate change is mostly going to cause massive storms, and ruin farmland and destroy water supplies. System failure will kill you, not drowning. Unless you live in a river floodplain with inadequate defenses or a low shore, in which case storm-caused flooding might kill you.

Any other plausible event? Again, it requires a massive die off in a short time or just general destructiveness that’ll kill a lot of people initially then everyone slowly afterwards.

Oh yeah, really anything that will stop food, water or power getting to you. Or getting to someone with the ability to come get yours.

You’re not going to enjoy that competition though…

Ohhhh, you’re the mysterium zxqwasball champion?

I don’t have a food-only budget, but our “supermarket + food” spending for 2 humans and 2 cats last year was ~280 euros per month. That includes takeout/delivery but not restaurants, cleaning materials, catfood (but not the vet), alcohol, snacks.

This is truly, truly the stupidest timeline.

All cats look like that

Has it got what plants crave?

Except this is just “some canvas effects” on a picture. It’s not remotely how a real painting in canvas looks