this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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We found a mathematical function which is good enough to be called universal estimator. Even better, our current computation technology is enough to implement these ideas algorithmically and compute in real-enough time. This will allow us to "do first, figure out later" rather than "hard work first, fruits later" approach.
It's just not magic, so yea we have to find where it makes sense to deploy it and where it doesn't.
Anecdote: I wasn't really going for accuracy (we were looking at hidden layers more than the output layer) but the small model I was working with was able to predict cell state (sick with the thing I'm looking for?) from simple RNA assay data with 80-95% accuracy even with all the weird and bizarre regularization functions we were throwing at it.
For some things, it makes sense. For others, we need more research. For the remaining, this is an apple we need oranges.
I think a lot of the hype with AI comes from the sincere shock that throwing more compute at a really simple algorithm resulted in a program that kicked the Turing test's ass. If we can't recognize the significance of that, then we must truly have lost our sense of wonder and curiosity.
But the hype is focusing a little too much on the LLM side of things. The real gains are going to come from models that specialize on other kinds of data, especially data that humans are bad at working with.
We kicked the Turing Test's ass? Ask an LLM for a joke and you'll see it fail dismally.
Yes. And Turing has started asking questions that require basic counting skills, or the ability to recognize a letter in the alphabet.