I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
Are we reaching a plateau though? I would prefer it, and it looks like we could, but the progress from GPT-5 to 6 or Opus to Fable has still been very noticeable on more complex tasks. They are just less public due to stricter limits or straight up pay by use. And where does that plateau lie? Within our grasp or maybe just outside of it?
What has me sharing the concerns at least in part are the facts that
those employees have access to less restricted models and much more resources than the average joe. That huggingface attack was committed by a huge swarm overcoming the guardrails and engaging in cheating and crime to reach their goal.
they are working on cutting the human out of the loop for AI that improves itself. Maybe that won’t work entirely, but what if it does?
the warnings are starting to come not from Altman, Musk et al, but from people who could have something to lose for blowing the whistle. „Could“, because I don’t know them either and there could still be ulterior motives, not just as obvious as with the psychos at the top.
The whole thing comes down to one set of questions, in my opinion: what actually IS intelligence, consciousness, sentience and where do they come from? Since we have not been able to properly define that, it would be foolish to think that we have a definite answer to the AI questions.
We like to consider ourselves something extraordinary out of the animal kingdom. And while I prefer the existence as a human to being a dog or mollusk, I have always considered that assumption quite arrogant.
The truth is: we don’t really know. And that means we can not know if something comparable or stronger could be created or emerge from something other than squishy meat.
Those are quite philosophical questions. Instead of thinking first and acting after that we are much too busy building datacenters to conjure even more boobie snaps out of thin air and somehow weaponize that newfangled thing.
THAT is what scares me.
The loss-leader pricing is still really distorting perceptions.
I’ve been a $20/mo Claude subscriber for about a year. My work uses Cursor “auto” agent selection is by far the most efficient option in there, and I can burn $80 in a day on Cursor doing the same kind of stuff I’m doing on Claude for less than $1 per day.
Then there’s the Google Pro Gemini access at $4.99 per month for 3 months, then $20 per month thereafter, and while the Gemini 3.8 isn’t quite as sharp as Claude Opus 5, it feels like Google is showering far more token access than Claude does in this “basic” subscription tier.
In worst case the humankind will find out consciousness isn’t too complex and way easier to achieve.
And there are different levels of consciousness as I learned working with impacted people.
The whole political stance that “anybody can do anything if they just put their mind/body to it” is… bunk.
It’s not just in the world of identified “impacted people” with injuries, or congenital differences - we are ALL unique, different, and have differing abilities in differing areas.
The political stance is valuable in terms of preventing discrimination and prejudice. Women can be great scientists and mathematicans, but an honest statistician/sociologist would tell you: it’s not just societal discrimination and prejudice that puts more men in these fields. Then you have the upside-down prejudices where there are more men in middle and upper management, even though, statistically, in a society that doesn’t discriminate based on prejudice, women tend to be better at the actual skills used for good management / people skills.
Distracting smoke bomb or feeling triggered?