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Artificial Intelligence
- Thread starter Buckminster
- Start date
Great writeup by none other than Bill Gates on AI:
I’ve never liked Gates and I am a contemporary, so that’s going back a lot of years. Right at the beginning of the article he says there have been two huge computer developments. GUIs and now AI. He missed two biggies. Microprocessors and the minor thing called the Internet. Gates was always a third rate technologist IMHO.
Some of his quotes: “But achievement in math is going down across the country, especially for Black, Latino, and low-income students. AI can help turn that trend around.”
He gives no reasoning how AI can help. In fact AI is much more likely to make the problem worse. When the AI can solve everything for you, why put in the effort to learn math?
He touts GPT as being a co-pilot to help white collar workers. In reality, it will quickly become a replacement.
Anyways, AI will certainly change society!
I find a software billionaire who spends all of his time improving the planet through philanthropy a source of inspired thought and perspective. It just isn't the only single source of thought and perspective I'm learning from either. It's kinda weird to dismiss, literally, free information/perspective from a good source.
It is not weird if you don’t agree with the analysis. I gave a couple of examples where Gates is probably wrong. I’ll freely admit being biased against Gates since I’ve seen him being wrong on many, many things since about 1980, so that’s like 43 years of being wrong. 640K memory limit, Basic as a good computer language, Excel macros, missing the importance of the Internet, Microsoft Explorer which was the bane of every web developer’s existence for 10+ years, all versions of Windows until 8.0 which gave us the blue screen of death, print drivers that still don’t work properly today, Zune which was a big strategic error (Gates thought you could extend the software on generic hardware through to music players and phones … you could not, or at least Microsoft could not).
Well, I suppose agree to disagree. What a person says vs their actions matter a bunch to me. He might be publicly wrong on a lot of technologies, but he also has similar company in others who are very important people too:
Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy decision in last 4 decades
You have to give President Biden credit for consistency. Unfortunately, he has been consistently wrong.
www.washingtontimes.com
...I'm just saying it's one (albeit very helpful) perspective and one that's useful to gain a comprehensive understanding to better improve decision making. Elon isn't always right. That'd be scary if he was and we leaned on everything he said?
I understand that Gates is controversial. I have watched him closely for decades and never found much of use beyond excellent marketing and excellent use of the legal system.Well, I suppose agree to disagree. What a person says vs their actions matter a bunch to me. He might be publicly wrong on a lot of technologies, but he also has similar company in others who are very important people too:
Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy decision in last 4 decades
You have to give President Biden credit for consistency. Unfortunately, he has been consistently wrong.
Perhaps it was Balmer’s influence or his own nature but his life arc became a story of the exercise of ruthless power and control in opposition and suppression of technological advancement.
I don’t follow in lockstep with Elon but he is very kind with his words re Gates IMO.
Those of us who are really old sometimes have direct confirmation of your point of view. When the summary version of what became MS-DOS became widely known via:
The Rise of DOS: How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract
The reason Microsoft became so big comes down to the best deal ever made in the history of computing, between the fledgling software company co-founded by Bill Gates and the behemoth hardware giant IBM.
I had, a decade before, worked with one of the IBM 360-195 that were essentially prototypes for the 370 series. When the PC was in development they had still a deeply ingrained mainframeitis and thought IMS-fast path was efficient. Bill Gates could talk with them in pseudo-developer terms and could also negotiate cheap license fees with the same skills. That made him a billionaire. He failed to understand the Internet, and much else but he could sell.
Anything he ever has said about technology has been superficial and derivative. Being a spectacular opportunist and salesman has nothing to do with new approaches.
In this thread we’re trying to understand what is coming, or maybe even what is already here. From my admittedly obsolete view I have kept monitoring developments. Hence I consider what has happened to OpenAI, FSD, and Neuralink. Then I think about the proliferation of bots, worldwide extremism disseminated in large part by bots…and I think Elon is well justified in his fears. Realistically I fear it is already too late.
OK, I’m a geezer. OTOH even long ago we were using primitive AI to do better than did humans and consequently have decimated middle management around the world. Now we’re eliminating much of the labor need for semi-skilled work. We’re displacing journalists too.
FSD gets most of the attention from us. Auto labeling, Gigapress, highly automated materials development…the factory OS, these things are as consequential already as mass deployment of computing, then distributed computing, then the internet. Somehow very few of us perceive how consequential all this already is, and it is just now nearing critical mass.
Do any of us really think Tesla is primarily a car OEM?
Artful Dodger
"Neko no me"
Not all his time: Gates still found enough spare time (and change) to short TSLA to the tune of $500M and has profited off the FUD. In fact, he thinks shorting TSLA doesn't hurt Elon:
on Twitter: "NEWS: Bill Gates on Elon Musk & Tesla in new interview: "Tesla's done a fantastic job; I give a lot more money to climate change than @elonmusk or anyone else; He's (Elon) done a great job, but somebody shorting the stock doesn't slow him down or hurt him in any way." Ya….ok https://t.co/sqOFlgbBgS" / TwitterIndeed, Gates is the source of some of that FUD where it comes to Tesla Semi, which Gates said likely won't work:
In a blog post, Gates argued that all-electric semi-trucks like the Tesla Semi would “probably never” work because batteries would be too heavy: The problem is that batteries are big and heavy. The more weight you're trying to move, the more batteries you need to power the vehicle.
Dec 2, 2022
Sacks used GPT-4 to create a blog post. Amazing use of the tool:
Check out this ShareGPT conversation
End result:
The Give-to-Get Model for AI Startups
Check out this ShareGPT conversation
End result:
The Give-to-Get Model for AI Startups
Puma2020
Member
Holy cow... that is impressive....
I do wish that AI would be trained with Azimov's 4 laws of robotics, although he wrote many stories on how that could go wrong but at least it is a start.
I wonder why the AI was limited to a knowledge cutoff date of 2021?
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