Post #1811596

All the posts being absolutist about "AI" (problematic term, obviously) such as any use of genai models being involved in an artifact being a sign or consequence of a loss of "humanity" push the same narrative as the hyperscalers saying that AI is humanity's panacea. It posits that "AI" is a technology that through mere contact with it redefines who you are as a human and your "value". Use it and you are "elevating your skills", or, inversely "suffering from brainrot" / "infects everything it touches". An LLM is a pile of numbers that model the language it has seen during its training. It doesn't have to redefine anything. You can't put a clear cut between the use of LLMs and the use of a search engine/IDE/youtube tutorials (or whatever used to be the favourite target of the "brainrot" accusation) , the environmental costs of a genai oriented datacenter and a "normal" datacenter. There is nothing transcendental about #llms. They are complex computational artifacts, which makes them hard to understand and not easy to wield. You can't' accuse someone of brainrot and then proclaim boldly that an entire field of research is "brainrot garbage". That is intellectually dishonest. I harp on this so often because it is just playing _STRAIGHT_ into the things that people decry, and while a huge of percentage of people out there are doing fuckshit with the technology, it's by virtue of being so absolutist, cutting off any meaningful practical way of countering the narrative. I can't counter openai by refusing to use it. I can however show people how to do proper engineering with LLMs, how to use small models, how to use less tokens, how to identify what is worth using and what is not. If I can help a person burning $200 tokens a day reduce that to $100 / month, I've done a fair deal. If I can help an org migrate their data off google by building a little bespoke backend, I've moved an org off google. But that requires properly engaging with the tech, recognizing that "prompt engineering" is a thing, and not an easy one. #llms #llm #genai