Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It’s sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.
A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it’s a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it’s not being used that way.
Instead it’s being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.
Edit: hugely belated, I misspoke here after checking with my friend. He’s using local models, but they aren’t LLMs. This is why I’m no expert. 😅
Really it’s just capitalism that incentivises that. The fact that stepping on your fellow man and destroying nature makes you more money is not a coincidence.
You got an economic system in your back pocket that doesn’t allow money to funnel upwards? Bring it out! It’s not capitalism you’re complaining about, it’s plutocracy we’re living under.
Adam Smith would be horrified at our monopolies. 1980s conservatives would be horrified! Yeah, the economy has always served the wealthy, but it wasn’t anything like today.
Another one that makes sense is having an AI monitor system stats and “learn” patterns in them, then alert a human when it “thinks” there’s an anomaly.
It’s data collection like you mentioned in your original post, and it uses the same sort of approach to ingesting that data as an LLM does for text.
As for a valid use of LLMs: Natural language searching (with cited sources) is a use case that it’s already doing. This is especially useful in highly technical fields where the end users have the expertise to vet responses but there’s way too much data for a human to parse.
In a perfect, utopian world, yes. AI can go a lot of good. In the world that we are living in? No.
But it’s still good to keep an eye on what people are using AI to do, and how their capability is evolving. Even if you hate AI. If anything, so you can be prepare for what’s to come.
I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:
Generating example solutions to maths and physics problems I encounter in my coursework, so I can learn how to solve similar problems in the future instead of getting stuck. The generated solutions, if they come up with the right answer, are almost always correct and if I wonder about something I simply ask.
Writing really quick solutions to random problems I have in python or bash scripts, like “convert this csv file to this random format my personal finance application uses for import”.
Helping me when coding, in a general way I think genuinely increases my productivity while I really understand what I push to main. I don’t send anything I could not have written on my own (yes, I see the limitations in my judgement here).
Asking things where multiple duckduckgo searches might be needed. E.g. “Whats the history of EU+US sanctions on Iran, when and why were they imposed/tightened and how did that correlate with Iranian GDP per capita?”
What does this cost me? I don’t pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:
What I study (not very personal to me)
Generally what kinds of problems I want to solve with code (I try to keep my requests pretty general; not very personal)
The code I write and work on (already open source so I don’t care)
Random searches (I’m still thinking about the impact of this tbh, I think I feel the things I ask to search for are general enough that I don’t care)
There’s also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I’ve read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don’t know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.
I think that LLMs amaze rich investors and boomers with their naturalistic-enough language and responses, and they invest in and prop up the tech because they think, in the nearish future, that it can replace a ton of human jobs, both menial and creative. Eliminating manual labor jobs is great if it’s paired with Universal Basic Income.
I think that the fervor around AI is more economic anxiety than anything. If people’s income and oppurtunities were mostly equal, no new tech would make people think they’re being disenfranchised from society.
Is “AI” even worth it?
Seriously, is there really a major use case for LLM besides data collection (which they can still do without LLM)?
Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It’s sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.
A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it’s a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it’s not being used that way.
Instead it’s being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.
Edit: hugely belated, I misspoke here after checking with my friend. He’s using local models, but they aren’t LLMs. This is why I’m no expert. 😅
Really it’s just capitalism that incentivises that. The fact that stepping on your fellow man and destroying nature makes you more money is not a coincidence.
You got an economic system in your back pocket that doesn’t allow money to funnel upwards? Bring it out! It’s not capitalism you’re complaining about, it’s plutocracy we’re living under.
Adam Smith would be horrified at our monopolies. 1980s conservatives would be horrified! Yeah, the economy has always served the wealthy, but it wasn’t anything like today.
Another one that makes sense is having an AI monitor system stats and “learn” patterns in them, then alert a human when it “thinks” there’s an anomaly.
In the best cases, those would be ML but not specifically an LLM, no?
It’s data collection like you mentioned in your original post, and it uses the same sort of approach to ingesting that data as an LLM does for text.
As for a valid use of LLMs: Natural language searching (with cited sources) is a use case that it’s already doing. This is especially useful in highly technical fields where the end users have the expertise to vet responses but there’s way too much data for a human to parse.
But one big LLM trained on everything isn’t that.
In a perfect, utopian world, yes. AI can go a lot of good. In the world that we are living in? No.
But it’s still good to keep an eye on what people are using AI to do, and how their capability is evolving. Even if you hate AI. If anything, so you can be prepare for what’s to come.
Not for the peasantry, no.
I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:
What does this cost me? I don’t pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:
There’s also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I’ve read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don’t know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.
If you are using DDG for searches and concerned about privacy related to using LLMs, have you tried duck.ai?
You can also download some LLMs and run them locally.
I think that LLMs amaze rich investors and boomers with their naturalistic-enough language and responses, and they invest in and prop up the tech because they think, in the nearish future, that it can replace a ton of human jobs, both menial and creative. Eliminating manual labor jobs is great if it’s paired with Universal Basic Income.
I think that the fervor around AI is more economic anxiety than anything. If people’s income and oppurtunities were mostly equal, no new tech would make people think they’re being disenfranchised from society.
I think it could be good for faster language translations between different languages
It’s a great way to poke at software looking for security holes en masse. Lots of vulnerabilities are ready to be exploited at scale with LLMs.
Perhaps, but see the tons of imagined issues raised on bug bounty sites by LLMs. Maybe it’s right sometimes, but it’s very often wrong!
You don’t have to be right 100% of the time when scanning for vulnerabilities. You only have to be right once. It’s a fundamentally different game.
That’s true. Offense is always easier than defense.