• @Valmond@lemmy.world
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    2286 days ago

    NFT was the worst “tech” crap I have ever even heard about, like pure 100% total full scam. Kind of impressed that anyone could be so stupid they’d fall for it.

    • @IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
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      1326 days ago

      The whole NFT/crypto currency thing is so incredibly frustrating. Like, being able to verify that a given file is unique could be very useful. Instead, we simply used the technology for scamming people.

      • @Sibshops@lemm.ee
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        6 days ago

        I don’t think NFTs can do that either. Collections are copied to another contract address all the time. There isn’t a way to verify if there isn’t another copy of an NFT on the blockchain.

        • @Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          96 days ago

          Copying the info on another contract doesn’t mean it’s fungible, to verify ownership you would need the NFT and to check that it’s associated to the right contract.

          Let’s say digital game ownership was confirmed via NFT, the launcher wouldn’t recognize the “same” NFT if it wasn’t linked to the right contract.

          • @Sibshops@lemm.ee
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            25 days ago

            But you would need a centralized authority to say which one is the “right contract”. If a centralized authority is necessary in this case, then there is less benefit of using NFTs. It’s no longer a decentralized.

            • @Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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              35 days ago

              Yes and no, with the whole blockchain being public it’s pretty easy to figure out which contract is the original one.

              • @Sibshops@lemm.ee
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                25 days ago

                Lets say you don’t have a central authority declaring one is official. How would you search the entire blockchain to verify you have the original NFT?

                • @Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                  5 days ago

                  The NFT is useful with a central authority though, it’s used to confirm the ownership of digital goods ex: if it’s associated to digital games then the distributor knows which contract is the original since they created it in the first place…

                  Sure for bored apes pictures you copy the code and you go on a random websites and it can tell you the result of the mix of features based on the code, but on the original website it wouldn’t work.

        • There isn’t a way to verify if there isn’t another copy of an NFT on the blockchain.

          Incorrect. An NFT is tied to a particular token number at a particular address.

          The URI the NFT points to may not be unique but NFT is unique.

          • @Sibshops@lemm.ee
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            65 days ago

            The NFT is only unique within the contract address. The whole contract can be trivially copied to another contract address and the whole collection can be cloned. It’s why opensea has checkmarks for “verified” collections. There are a unofficial BoredApe collections which are copies of the original one.

        • ZeroOne
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          126 days ago

          NFTs if anything are basically CryptoCurrency-based DRMs & we should always oppose DRMs

      • @yarr@feddit.nl
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        76 days ago

        I think a big part of the problem with NFT is that they are so abstract people don’t understand what they can and cannot do. Effectively, with NFT, you have people that hold a copy of a Spiderman comic in hand and believe they own all forms of spiderman.

        Essentially, when you boil it down, you can turn this into “it’s provable that individual X has possession of NFT identifier x,y,z”. It’s kind of like how you can have the deed to a piece of property in your desk, but that doesn’t prevent 15 people from squatting on it.

        It’s so abstract you can use it to fleece people. Even after 2 years of hype, people STILL do not understand them properly.

        • @uienia@lemmy.world
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          36 days ago

          Essentially, when you boil it down, you can turn this into “it’s provable that individual X has possession of NFT identifier x,y,z”. It’s kind of like how you can have the deed to a piece of property in your desk, but that doesn’t prevent 15 people from squatting on it.

          It isn’t even that. It’s is identifying which drawer in your desk the deed is placed, but there is no guarantee that the drawer contains the deed.

          • @yarr@feddit.nl
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            26 days ago

            Now imagine trying to explain all this to the unwashed masses… it’s no wonder the explanation they got was “buy this, it’s going to the mooooon!!!”

      • I Cast Fist
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        56 days ago

        But it’s totally legit brah, it’s just like trading cards but on a computer bro, you can make jay pegs totally unique bro, nobody else in the world can have the same image as you brah, it proves you’re the only owner of it bro, trust me bro it’s super secure and technological bruh

        • @uienia@lemmy.world
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          36 days ago

          Because the pyramid scheme is still going strong with them, exactly because new victims are continually falling for them. NFTs lost their hype so quickly that the flow of new victims basically completely stopped, and so the bottom went out of them much faster.

        • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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          76 days ago

          A large majority of “real” money is digital, like 80% non-m1 m2. The only real difference between crypto and USD is that the crypto is a public multiple ledger system that allows you to be your own bank.

          • @Eatspancakes84@lemmy.world
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            05 days ago

            What do you mean with being your own bank? Can you receive deposits from customers? Are you allowed to lend a portion of the deposists onwards for business loans/mortgages? If not, you are not your “own bank”.

            I think you mean that you can use it as a deposit for money, similar to, say, an old sock.

            • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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              -15 days ago

              Banks have multiple ledgers to keep track of who owns what and where it all came from. They also use ancient fortran/cobol written IBM owned software to manage all bank to bank transactions, which is the barrier for entry.

              Blockchain is literally a multiple ledger system. That is all it is. The protocol to send and recieve funds is open for all.

              Locally stored BTC is when you’re the bank. For all the good and bad that comes with it.

              • @Eatspancakes84@lemmy.world
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                15 days ago

                That sounds super cool and stuff, but it has nothing to do with the essence of banking. Banks are businesses that take deposits for safekeeping and that provide credit. Banks in fact outdate Fortran by a 1000 years or so.

        • @Decq@lemmy.world
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          166 days ago

          I’m not defending other cryptocoins or anything, they might be a ponzy scheme or some other form. But in the end they at least only pretended to be that, a valuta. Which they are, even though they aren’t really used much like that. NFT’s on the otherhand promised things that were always just pure technical bullshit. And you had to be a complete idiot not to see it. So call it a double scam.

      • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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        16 days ago

        You don’t need an NFT to see that a file is unique. All that requires is a hash function. Many download sites provide signed cryptographic hashes so that you know that the file you’ve downloaded is the one that they released. None of that requires blockchains or crypto.

    • @MSBBritain@lemmy.world
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      176 days ago

      NFTs could have been great, if they had been used FOR the consumer, and not to scam them.

      Best thing I can think of is to verify licenses for digital products/games. Buy a game, verify you own it like you would with a CD using an NFT, and then you can sell it again when you’re done.

      Do this with serious stuff like AAA Games or Professional Software (think like borrowing a copy of Photoshop from an online library for a few days while you work on a project!) instead of monkey pictures and you could have the best of both worlds for buying physical vs buying online.

      However, that might make corporations less money and completely upend modern licencing models, so no one was willing to do it.

      • @Sibshops@lemm.ee
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        206 days ago

        I think there’s a technical hurdle here. There’s no reliable way to enforce unique access to an NFT. Anyone with access to the wallet’s private key (or seed phrase) can use the NFT, meaning two or more people could easily share a game or software license just by sharing credentials. That kind of undermines the licensing control in a system like this.

        • @real_squids@sopuli.xyz
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          66 days ago

          two or more people could easily share a game or software license just by sharing credentials

          So like disks? Before everything started checking hwids. Just like the comment said, it would make corporations less money so they wouldn’t do it.

          • Well, that’s the point. In order for that system to work as described, you would need some kind of centralized authority to validate and enforce it. Once you’ve introduced that piece, there’s no point using NFTs anymore - you can just use any kind of simpler and more efficient key/authentication mechanism.

            So even if the corporations wanted to use such a system (which, to your point, they do not), it still wouldn’t make sense to use NFTs for it.

          • @Sibshops@lemm.ee
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            15 days ago

            It’s easier to share on a blockchain. I can send the license to a new wallet then have the wallet sign a smart contract which could automatically drain it of any gas if anyone adds it.

            Now I can give out the secret pass phrase and lots of people can play the game without having to give anyone my login credentials.

      • @uienia@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        There is nothing you mentioned which couldn’t already be done, and is in fact already being done, faster and more reliably by existing technology.

        Also that was not even what NFTs was about, because you didn’t even buy the digital artwork and NFTs would never be able to include it. So it would be supremely useless for the thing you are talking about.

      • Cethin
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        46 days ago

        The issue is this doesn’t solve a problem that isn’t already solved. One of the big arguments I always heard was an example using skins from games that can be transfered to other games. We can already do that! Just look at the Steam marketplace for an example. You just need the server infrastructure to do it. Sure, NFTs could make it so the company doesn’t control the market, but what benefit do they get for using NFTs and distributing the software then?

        99.9% of the use cases were solutions looking for a problem. I could see a use for something like deeds or other documents, but that’s about it.

        • @MSBBritain@lemmy.world
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          36 days ago

          Yeah, Sort of.

          Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a huge fan of NFTs and do think there’s easier ways, but I would agree that taking market control away from the companies owning it would kind of be the point (but I do think you can probably still do this concept without any NFTs).

          Sure, steam could allow game trading right now with no need for NFTs whatsoever, but the point would be that I can trade a game I bought through Xbox, to someone on Steam, and then go buy something on the Epic store with the money.

          And all of it without some crazy fee from the involved platforms.

          But that also would probably still require government intervention to force companies to accept this. Because, again, none of the companies would actually want this. NTF or not that doesn’t change.

          • Cethin
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            46 days ago

            Yeah, it only works if they agree to honor it, which they have no obligation to do. If the government wants to step in and force them to, there’s still no need for NFTs. There could just be a central authority that the government controls that handles it. Why would NFTs need to be involved? NFTs are only as useful as the weakest point in the chain. As soon as whatever authority (the government, Steam, whatever) stops working or stops honoring it then it’s useless.

      • @merc@sh.itjust.works
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        Best thing I can think of is to verify licenses for digital products/games. Buy a game, verify you own it like you would with a CD using an NFT, and then you can sell it again when you’re done.

        You could do that today without NFTs or anything blockchainish if the game companies wanted it. The hurdle isn’t technological, it’s monetary. There’s no reason that a game company would want to allow you to resell your game.

      • @altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        -36 days ago

        If said Photoshop had a nft licensing service, it could’ve stayed online for longer. Legit old versions of Adobe software that had one-time purchase licenses can’t be activated anymore due to servers being brought down. And that’s how they want it while pushing subscriptions for 10+ years.

        • @uienia@lemmy.world
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          86 days ago

          The exact same thing would have happened with an NFT licensing service. They would still link to obsolete servers. The problem is not a problem which NFT would solve, the problem is the problem of obsolete servers, which are very easy for adobe to fix without any useless NFT technology, if they really wanted to (but of course they don’t)

          • @altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            16 days ago

            Trying to find any application for NFT, I came to the conclusion that it would work IF you and me could be the servers there, having a copy of blockchain and verifying validity of keys until we get bored and quit that. It would target one particular issue - cantralized validation on Adobe side. It’d be inefficient and all, but it may deny them some power over usage of their legitly purchased product.

            • Cethin
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              36 days ago

              Sure, but what do they get for using that system and giving up control? If they don’t agree to use it then it’s an illegal copy and you might as well pirate it.

    • @DogWater@lemmy.world
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      06 days ago

      The technology is not a scam. The tech was used to make scam products.

      NFTs can be useful as tickets, vouchers, certificates of authenticity, proof of ownership of something that is actually real (not a jpeg), etc.

      • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        36 days ago

        NFT’s are a scam. Blockchain less so but still has no use.

        NFTs were nothing but an URL saved in a decentralized database, linking to a centralized server.

        • @SparroHawc@lemm.ee
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          56 days ago

          That implementation of NFTs was a total scam, yes. There are some cool potential applications for NFTs … but mostly it was a solution looking for a problem. Even situations where it could be useful - like tracking ownership of things like concert tickets - weren’t going to fly, because the companies don’t want to relinquish control of the second-hand marketplace. They don’t get their cut that way.

      • @explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        86 days ago

        But where specifically does it help to not have approved central servers?

        Wouldn’t entertainment venues rather retain full control? How would we get out from under Ticketmaster’s monopoly? If the government can just seize property, then why would we ask anyone else who owns a plot of land?

        • @technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          -16 days ago

          Wouldn’t entertainment venues rather retain full control?

          Pretty sure ticketmaster has all the control.

          How would we get out from under Ticketmaster’s monopoly?

          Using a decentralized and open network (aka NFTs).

          If the government can just seize property, then why would we ask anyone else who owns a plot of land?

          It’s not about using NFTs to seize land. It’s more that governments are terrible at keeping records. Moving proof of ownership to an open and decentralized network could be an improvement.

          FWIW I think capitalism with destroy the planet with or without NFTs. But it’s fairly obtuse to deny that NFTs could disintermediate a variety of centralized cartels.

          • @explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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            16 days ago

            How would we get out from under Ticketmaster’s monopoly?

            Using a decentralized and open network (aka NFTs).

            Sorry to be obtuse, but could you break this down some more? How does the replacement being decentralized and open help against TM’s anti-competitive practices?

  • @Kennystillalive@feddit.orgOP
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    215 days ago

    OP here to clarify: With AI Hype Train I meant the fact that so many people are slapping AI onto anything just to make it sound cool like at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if a bidet company slapped AI into one of their bidets…

    I’m not saying AI is gonna go anywhere or doesn’t have legitimate uses but currently there is money in AI and everybody wants to get AI into their things to be cool & capitalize on the hype:

    Same thing with NFT’s and blockchains. The technology behind it has it’s legitimate uses but not everyone is slapping it onto things like a few years ago just to make fast bank.

  • @jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    I think they’ll be on this for a while, since unlike NFTs this is actually useful tech. (Though not in every field yet, certainly.)

    There are going to be some sub-fads related to GPUs and AI that the tech industry will jump on next. All this is speculation:

    • Floating point operations will be replaced by highly-quantized integer math, which is much faster and more efficient, and almost as accurate. There will be some buzzword like “quantization” that will be thrown out to the general public. Recall “blast processing” for the Sega. It will be the downfall of NVIDIA, and for a few months the reduced power consumption will cause AI companies to clamor over being green.
    • (The marketing of) personal AI assistants (to help with everyday tasks, rather than just queries and media generation) will become huge; this scenario predicts 2026 or so.
    • You can bet that tech will find ways to deprive us of ownership over our devices and software; hard drives will get smaller to force users to use the cloud more. (This will have another buzzword.)
  • @zombie_kong@lemmy.world
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    135 days ago

    You know what pisses me off?

    My so-called creative peers generating AI slop images to go with the music that they are producing.

    I’m pretty sure they’d be up in arms if they found out that an AI produced tune got to the top 10 on Beatport.

    One of the more popular AI movements right now is DJs creating themselves as action figures.

    The hypocrisy is hilarious.

  • @Naevermix@lemmy.world
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    225 days ago

    The AI hype will pass but AI is here to stay. Current models already allow us to automate processes which were impossible to automate just a few years ago. Here are some examples:

    • Detecting anomalies in roentgen and CT-scans
    • Normalizing unstructured information
    • Information distribution in organizations
    • Learning platforms
    • Stock photos
    • Modelling
    • Animation

    Note, these are obvious applications.

  • @pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    456 days ago

    Oh, it’s gonna be so much worse. NFTs mostly just ruined sad crypto bros who were dumb enough to buy a picture of an ape. Companies are investing heavily in generative AI projects without establishing a proper use case or even its basic efficacy. ChatGPTs newest iterations are getting worse; no one has a solution to hallucinations; the energy costs are astronomical; the entire process relies on plagiarism and copyright infringement, and even if you get by all of that, consumers hate it. AI ads are met derision or revulsion, and AI customer service is universally despised.

    This isn’t like NFTs. It’s more like Facebook and VR. Sure, VR has its uses, but investing heavily in unnecessary and unwanted VR tools cost Facebook billions. The difference is that when this bubble bursts, instead of just hitting Facebook, this is going to hit every single tech company.

  • @Sunsofold@lemmings.world
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    95 days ago

    In this thread: people doing the exact opposite of what they do seemingly everywhere else and ignoring the title to respond to the post.

    Figuring out what the next big thing will be is obviously hard or investing would be so easy as to be cheap.

    I feel like a lot of what has been exploding has been ideas someone had a long time ago that are just becoming easier and given more PR. 3D printing was invented in the '80s but had to wait for computation and cost reduction. The idea that would become neural network for AI is from the '50s, and was toyed with repeatedly over the years but ultimately the big breakthrough was just that computing became cheap enough to run massive server farms. AR stems back to the 60s and gets trotted out slightly better each generation or so, but it was just tech getting smaller that made it more viable. What other theoretical ideas from the last century could now be done for a much lower price?

  • atro_city
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    346 days ago

    You might be waiting a long time, friend. NFTs were truly useless (besides ripping people off). AI actually has its uses and isn’t totally worthless.

    • @Obi@sopuli.xyz
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      56 days ago

      Some companies are trying to do it right, looking at DaVinci Resolve’s new beta they’re trying hard to implement it in ways that leaves you in control but reduce the grind.

  • Count Regal Inkwell
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    I do feel that, unlike Crypto, AI (or, to drop the buzzwords, LLMs and other machine-learning based language processors and parsers) will end up having a place in the world.

    As it is NOW, the AI hype train is definitely an investment bubble and it will definitely explode in a glorious fashion eventually. Taking a lot of people down with it.

    But unlike Crypto, AI does – It like does things, you know? Even if I personally feel like it’s mostly only good for a toy, all my attempts to use it for anything society would deem “valuable” were frustrated, but at least I can RP with it when my friends aren’t available. It is a thing that exists and can be used.

    Crypto was funny because it was literally useless. Just an incredibly wasteful techno-fetishistic speculative vehicle with precisely zero shame about being that.

    As for what’s next, I think Quantum Computing might be it. That is, assuming the Tech Industry even survives the bubble’s burst in its current form. Because everyone in the industry is putting all their eggs including theoretical eggs that haven’t even been laid, and in fact there’s not even a chicken in this AI hype train. And even with AI becoming part of people’s lives, as I predict it indeed will, when the bubble does burst it might end up hitting the reset button on who is truly in charge of things.

  • magic_lobster_party
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    1386 days ago

    For better or worse, AI is here to stay. Unlike NFTs, it’s actually used by ordinary people - and there’s no sign of it stopping anytime soon.

    • @CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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      ChatGPT loses money on every query their premium subscribers submit. They lose money when people use copilot, which they resell to Microsoft. And it’s not like they’re going to make it up on volume - heavy users are significantly more costly.

      This isn’t unique to ChatGPT.

      Yes, it has its uses; no, it cannot continue in the way it has so far. Is it worth more than $200/month to you? Microsoft is tearing up datacenter deals. I don’t know what the future is, but this ain’t it.

      ETA I think that management gets the most benefit, by far, and that’s why there’s so much talk about it. I recently needed to lead a meeting and spent some time building the deck with a LLM; took me 20 min to do something otherwise would have taken over an hour. When that is your job alongside responding to emails, it’s easy to see the draw. Of course, many of these people are in Bullshit Jobs.

      • @brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        446 days ago

        OpenAI is massively inefficient, and Atlman is a straight up con artist.

        The future is more power efficient, smaller models hopefully running on your own device, especially if stuff like bitnet pans out.

        • @CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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          96 days ago

          Entirely agree with that. Except to add that so is Dario Amodei.

          I think it’s got potential, but the cost and the accuracy are two pieces that need to be addressed. DeepSeek is headed in the right direction, only because they didn’t have the insane dollars that Microsoft and Google throw at OpenAI and Anthropic respectively.

          Even with massive efficiency gains, though, the hardware market is going to do well if we’re all running local models!

          • @brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            86 days ago

            Alibaba’s QwQ 32B is already incredible, and runnable on 16GB GPUs! Honestly it’s a bigger deal than Deepseek R1, and many open models before that were too, they just didn’t get the finance media attention DS got. And they are releasing a new series this month.

            Microsoft just released a 2B bitnet model, today! And that’s their paltry underfunded research division, not the one training “usable” models: https://huggingface.co/microsoft/bitnet-b1.58-2B-4T

            Local, efficient ML is coming. That’s why Altman and everyone are lying through their teeth: scaling up infinitely is not the way forward. It never was.

      • ☂️-
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        14 days ago

        are you telling me i can spam these shitty services to lose them money?

      • SmokeyDope
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        Theres more than just chatgpt and American data center/llm companies. Theres openAI, google and meta (american), mistral (French), alibaba and deepseek (china). Many more smaller companies that either make their own models or further finetune specialized models from the big ones. Its global competition, all of them occasionally releasing open weights models of different sizes for you to run your own on home consumer computer hardware. Dont like big models from American megacorps that were trained on stolen copyright infringed information? Use ones trained completely on open public domain information.

        Your phone can run a 1-4b model, your laptop 4-8b, your desktop with a GPU 12-32b. No data is sent to servers when you self-host. This is also relevant for companies that data kept in house.

        Like it or not machine learning models are here to stay. Two big points. One, you can self host open weights models trained on completely public domain knowledge or your own private datasets already. Two, It actually does provide useful functions to home users beyond being a chatbot. People have used machine learning models to make music, generate images/video, integrate home automation like lighting control with tool calling, see images for details including document scanning, boilerplate basic code logic, check for semantic mistakes that regular spell check wont pick up on. In business ‘agenic tool calling’ to integrate models as secretaries is popular. Nft and crypto are truly worthless in practice for anything but grifting with pump n dump and baseless speculative asset gambling. AI can at least make an attempt at a task you give it and either generally succeed or fail at it.

        Models around 24-32b range in high quant are reasonably capable of basic information processing task and generally accurate domain knowledge. You can’t treat it like a fact source because theres always a small statistical chance of it being wrong but its OK starting point for researching like Wikipedia.

        My local colleges are researching multimodal llms recognizing the subtle patterns in billions of cancer cell photos to possibly help doctors better screen patients. I would love a vision model trained on public domain botany pictures that helps recognize poisonous or invasive plants.

        The problem is that theres too much energy being spent training them. It takes a lot of energy in compute power to cook a model and further refine it. Its important for researchers to find more efficent ways to make them. Deepseek did this, they found a way to cook their models with way less energy and compute which is part of why that was exciting. Hopefully this energy can also come more from renewable instead of burning fuel.

        • @CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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          36 days ago

          Theres openAI, google and meta (american), mistral (French), alibaba and deepseek (china). Many more smaller companies that either make their own models or further finetune specialized models from the big ones

          Which ones are not actively spending an amount of money that scales directly with the number of users?

          I’m talking about the general-purpose LLM AI bubble , wherein people are expected to return tremendous productivity improvements by using a LLM, thus justifying the obscene investment. Not ML as a whole. There’s a lot there, such as the work your colleagues are doing.

          But it’s being treated as the equivalent of electricity, and it is not.

          • SmokeyDope
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            Which ones are not actively spending an amount of money that scales directly with the number of users?

            Most of these companies offer direct web/api access to their own cloud supercomputer datacenter, and All cloud services have some scaling with operation cost. The more users connect and use computer, the better hardware, processing power, and data connection needed to process all the users. Probably the smaller fine tuners like Nous Research that take a pre-cooked and open-licensed model, tweak it with their own dataset, then sell the cloud access at a profit with minimal operating cost, will do best with the scaling. They are also way way cheaper than big model access cost probably for similar reasons. Mistral and deepseek do things to optimize their models for better compute power efficency so they can afford to be cheaper on access.

            OpenAI, claude, and google, are very expensive compared to competition and probably still operate at a loss considering compute cost to train the model + cost to maintain web/api hosting cloud datacenters. Its important to note that immediate profit is only one factor here. Many big well financed companies will happily eat the L on operating cost and electrical usage as long as they feel they can solidify their presence in the growing market early on to be a potential monopoly in the coming decades. Control, (social) power, lasting influence, data collection. These are some of the other valuable currencies corporations and governments recognize that they will exchange monetary currency for.

            but its treated as the equivalent of electricity and its not

            I assume you mean in a tech progression kind of way. A better comparison might be is that its being treated closer to the invention of transistors and computers. Before we could only do information processing with the cold hard certainty of logical bit calculations. We got by quite a while just cooking fancy logical programs to process inputs and outputs. Data communication, vector graphics and digital audio, cryptography, the internet, just about everything today is thanks to the humble transistor and logical gate, and the clever brains that assemble them into functioning tools.

            Machine learning models are based on neuron brain structures and biological activation trigger pattern encoding layers. We have found both a way to train trillions of transtistors simulate the basic information pattern organizing systems living beings use, and a point in time which its technialy possible to have the compute available needed to do so. The perceptron was discovered in the 1940s. It took almost a century for computers and ML to catch up to the point of putting theory to practice. We couldn’t create artificial computer brain structures and integrate them into consumer hardware 10 years ago, the only player then was google with their billion dollar datacenter and alphago/deepmind.

            Its exciting new toy that people think can either improve their daily life or make them money, so people get carried away and over promise with hype and cram it into everything especially the stuff it makes no sense being in. Thats human nature for you. Only the future will tell whether this new way of precessing information will live up to the expectations of techbros and academics.

      • @deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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        106 days ago

        I fucking hate AI, but an AI coding assistant that is basically a glorified StackOverflow search engine is actually worth more than $200/month to me professionally.

        I don’t use it to do my work, I use it to speed up the research part of my work.

      • @LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
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        56 days ago

        Right, but most of their expenditures are not in the queries themselves but in model training. I think capital for training will dry up in coming years but people will keep running queries on the existing models, with more and more emphasis on efficiency. I hate AI overall but it does have its uses.

        • @CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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          -16 days ago

          No, that’s the thing. There’s still significant expenditure to simply respond to a query. It’s not like Facebook where it costs $1 million to build it and $0.10/month for every additional user. It’s $1billion to build and $1 per query. There’s no recouping the cost at scale like previous tech innovation. The more use it gets, the more it costs to run, in a straight line, not asymptotically.

          • @LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
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            66 days ago

            No way is it $1 per query. Hell a lot of these models you can run on your own computer, with no cost apart from a few cents of electricity (plus datacenter upkeep)

      • I do think there will have to be some cutting back, but it provides capitalists with the ability to discipline labor and absolve themselves (I would never do such a thing, it was the AI what did it!) which might they might consider worth the expense.

      • @Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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        76 days ago

        That’s the business model these days. ChatGPT, and other AI companies are following the disrupt (or enshittification) business model.

        1. Acquire capital/investors to bankroll your project.
        2. Operate at a loss while undercutting your competition.
        3. Once you are the only company left standing, hike prices and cut services.
        4. Ridiculous profit.
        5. When your customers can no longer deal with the shit service and high prices, take the money, fold the company, and leave the investors holding the bag.

        Now you’ve got a shit-ton of your own capital, so start over at step 1, and just add an extra step where you transfer the risk/liability to new investors over time.

      • @kameecoding@lemmy.world
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        -26 days ago

        Companies will just in house some models and train it on their own data, making it both more efficient and more relevant to their domain.

    • @Empricorn@feddit.nl
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      25 days ago

      There’s nothing wrong with using AI in your personal or professional life. But let’s be honest here: people who find value in it are in the extreme minority. At least at the moment, and in its current form. So companies burning fossil fuels, losing money spinning up these endless LLMs, and then shoving them down our throats in every. single. product. is extremely annoying and makes me root for the technology as a whole to fail.

      • magic_lobster_party
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        15 days ago

        I don’t use it much myself, but I’m often surprised how many others use ChatGPT in their job. I don’t believe it’s an extreme minority.

    • @alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      136 days ago

      It is definitely here to stay, but the hype of AGI being just around the corner is definitely not believable. And a lot of the billions being invested in AI will never return a profit.

      AI is already a commodity. People will be paying $10/month at max for general AI. Whether Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Llama, ChatGPT, copilot or Deepseek. People will just have one cheap plan that covers anything an ordinary person would need. Most people might even limit themselves to free plans supported by advertisements.

      These companies aren’t going to be able to extract revenues in the $20-$100/month from the general population, which is what they need to recoup their investments.

      Specialized implementations for law firms, medical field, etc will be able to charge more per seat, but their user base will be small. And even they will face stiff competition.

      I do believe AI can mostly solve quite a few of the problems of an aging society, by making the smaller pool of workers significantly more productive. But it will not be able to fully replace humans any time soon.

      It’s kinda like email or the web. You can make money using these technologies, but by itself it’s not a big money maker.

      • @WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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        186 days ago

        Does it really boost productivity? In my experience, if a long email can be written by an AI, then you should just email the AI prompt directly to the email recipient and save everyone involved some time. AI is like reverse file compression. No new information is added, just noise.

        • @MBech@feddit.dk
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          16 days ago

          I’m not a coder by any means, but when updating the super fucking outdated excel files my old company used, I’d usually make a VBA script using an LLM. It wasn’t always perfect, but 99% of the time, it was waaaay faster than me doing it myself. Then again, the things that company insisted was done in Excel could easily have been done better with other software. But the reality is that my field is conservative as fuck, and if it worked for the boss in 1994, it has to work for me.

        • @alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          -26 days ago

          If that email needs to go to a client or stakeholder, then our culture won’t accept just the prompt.

          Where it really shines is translation, transcription and coding.

          Programmers can easily double their productivity and increase the quality of their code, tests and documentation while reducing bugs.

          Translation is basically perfect. Human translators aren’t needed. At most they can review, but it’s basically errorless, so they won’t really change the outcome.

          Transcribing meetings also works very well. No typos or grammar errors, only sometimes issues with acronyms and technical terms, but those are easy to spot and correct.

          • @Harlehatschi@lemmy.ml
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            86 days ago

            Programmers can double their productivity and increase quality of code?!? If AI can do that for you, you’re not a programmer, you’re writing some HTML.

            We tried AI a lot and I’ve never seen a single useful result. Every single time, even for pretty trivial things, we had to fix several bugs and the time we needed went up instead of down. Every. Single. Time.

            Best AI can do for programmers is context sensitive auto completion.

            Another thing where AI might be useful is static code analysis.

          • @Hexarei@programming.dev
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            166 days ago

            As a programmer, there are so very few situations where I’ve seen LLMs suggest reasonable code. There are some that are good at it in some very limited situations but for the most part they’re just as bad at writing code as they are at everything else.

            • Mavytan
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              15 days ago

              I think the main gain is in automation scripts for people with little coding experience. They don’t need perfect or efficient code, they just need something barely functioning which is something that LLMs can generate. It doesn’t always work, but most of the time it works well enough

          • @drathvedro@lemm.ee
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            76 days ago

            Not really. As a programmer who doesn’t deal with math like at all, just working on overly-complicated CRUD’s, and even for me the AI is still completely wrong and/or waste of time 9 times out of 10. And I can usually spot when my colleagues are trying to use LLM’s because they submit overly descriptive yet completely fucking pointless refactors in their PR’s.

        • @ameancow@lemmy.world
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          26 days ago

          If you’re using the thing to write your work emails, you’re probably so bad at your job that you won’t last anyway. Being able to write a clear, effective message is not a skill, it’s a basic function like walking. Asking a machine to do it for you just hurts yourself more than anything.

          That said, it can be very useful for coding, for analyzing large contracts and agreements and providing summaries of huge datasets, it can help in designing slide shows when you have to do weekly power-points and other small-scale tasks that make your day go faster.

          I find it hilarious how many people try to make the thing do ALL their work for them and end up looking like idiots as it blows up in their face.

          See, LLM’s will never be smarter than you personally, they are tools for amplifying your own cognition and abilities, but few people use them that way, most people think it’s already alive and can make meaning for them. It’s not, it’s a mirror. You wouldn’t put a hand-mirror on your work chair and leave it to finish out your day.

      • @CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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        66 days ago

        AI is a commodity but the big players are losing money for every query sent. Even at the $200/month subscription level.

        Tech valuations are based on scaling. ARPU grows with every user added. It costs the same to serve 10 users vs 100 users, etc. ChatGPT, Gemini, copilot, Claude all cost more the more they’re used. That’s the bubble.

    • Admiral Patrick
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      176 days ago

      Unlike NFTs, it’s actually used by ordinary people

      Yeah, but i don’t recall every tech company shoving NFTs into every product ever whether it made sense or if people wanted it or not. Not so with AI. Like, pretty much every second or third tech article these days is “[Company] shoves AI somewhere else no one asked for”.

      It’s being force-fed to people in a way blockchain and NFTs never were. All so it can gobble up training data.

  • @vivendi@programming.dev
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    616 days ago

    Another banger from lemmites

    Mate, you can use AI for porn

    If literally -nothing- else can convince you, just the fact that it’s an automated goon machine should tell you that we are not going to live this one down as easily as shit like NFTs

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Mate, you can use AI for porn

      A classic scarce resource on the internet. Why pick through a catalog of porn that you could watch 24/7 for decades on end, of every conceivable variation and intersection and fetish, when you can type in “Please show me naked boobies” into Grok and get back some poorly rendered half-hallucinated partially out of frame nipple?

      just the fact that it’s an automated goon machine should tell you that we are not going to live this one down

      The computer was already an automated goon machine. This is yet one more example of AI spending billions of dollars yet adding nothing of value.

    • @rational_lib@lemmy.world
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      35 days ago

      Has anyone actually jerked off to AI porn? No shaming but for me there’s this fundamental emptiness to it. Like it can’t impress me because it’s exactly like what you expected it to be.

    • @JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      NFTs were a form of tax avoidance.

      Art purchases in the US are tax deductible. So you buy an artwork and then sell it your own family trust and that is not taxabele income.

      The only downside is that artwork may be damaged, so you have to insure it. NFTs being entirely digital didn’t need to be insured.

      The NFT thing falied when they were removed by the IRS from being defined as artwork.

    • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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      45 days ago

      My biggest frustration is how confidently arrogant they are about it

      AI is literally the biggest problem technology has ever created and almost no one even realizes it yet