Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
New artcle from Brian Merchant: An āalways onā OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen
Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Devicetm, I think Merchantās correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Devicetm and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.
headlines of Devicetm wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brianās noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Devicetm as an open show of contempt for others, and between AIās public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valleyās reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Devicetm wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.
Part of me wonders if this is even supposed to be a profitable hardware product or if theyāre sufficiently hard-up for training data that āput always-on microphones in as many pockets as possibleā seems like a good strategy.
Itās not, both because itās kinda evil and because itās definitely stupid, but I can see it being used to solve the data problem more quickly than I can see anyone think this is actually a good or useful product to create.
When I get a minute, I intend to do a back of the napkin calc to figure out how many words 100 million of these things would hear on an average day.
100 million sounds like a target that was naively pooped out by some other requirement, like āHow much training data do we need to scale to GPT-5 before the money runs out, assuming the dumbest interpolation imaginable?ā
What does solving the data problem supposed to look like exactly? A somewhat higher score in their already incredibly suspect benchmarks?
The data part of the whole hyperscaling thing seems predicated on the belief that the map will magically become the territory if only you map hard enough.
I fully agree, but as data availability is one of the primary limits that hyperscaling is running up against I can see the true believers looking for additional sources, particularly sources that arenāt available to their competitors. Getting a new device in peopleās pockets with a microphone and an internet link would be one such advantage, and (assuming you believe the hyperscaling bullshit) would let OpenAI rebuild some kind of moat to keep themselves ahead of the competition.
I donāt know, though. Especially after the failure of at least 2 extant versions of the AI companion product I just canāt imagine anyone honestly believing thereās enough of a market for this to justify even the most ludicrously optimistic estimate of the cost of bringing it to market. Itās either a data thing or a straight-up con to try and retake the front page for another few news cycles. Even the AI bros canāt be dumb enough for it to be a legit effort.