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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • Skimmed through the article and I found it surprisingly difficult to pinpoint what “AI” solution they actually covered, despite going as far as opening the supplementary data of the research they mentioned. Maybe I’m missing something obvious so please do share.

    AFAICT they are talking about using computer vision techniques to highlight potential problems in addition to bringing the non annotated image.

    This… is great! But I’d argue this is NOT what “AI” at the moment is hyped about. What I mean is that computer vision and statistics have been used, in medicine and elsewhere, with great success and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be applied. Rather I would argue the hype at he moment in AI is about LLM and generative AI. AFAICT (but again had a hard time parsing through this paper to get anything actually specific) none of that is using it.

    FWIW I did specific in my post tht my criticism was about “modern” AI, not AI as a field in general.


  • There are pretty great applications in medicine.

    Like what? I discussed just 2 days ago with a friend who works in public healthcare, who is bullish about AI and best he could come up with DeepMind AlphaFold which is yes interesting, even important, and yet in a way “good old fashion AI” as has been the case for the last half century or so, namely a team of dedicated researchers, actual humans, focusing on a hard problem, throwing state of the art algorithms at a problem and some compute resources… but AFAICT there is so significant medicine research that made a significant change through “modern” AI like LLMs.


  • Can’t believe I’m doing this… but here I go, actually defending cryptocurrency/blockchain :

    … so yes there are some functionalities to AI. In fact I don’t think anybody is saying 100% of it is BS and a scam, rather… just 99.99% of the marketing claims during the last decade ARE overhyped if not plain false. One could say the same for crypto/blockchain, namely that SQLite or a random DB or is enough for most people BUT there are SOME cases where it might actually be somehow useful, ideally not hijacked by “entrepreneurs” (namely VC tools) who only care about making money but not what the technology could actually bring.

    Now anyway both AI & crypto use an inconceivable amount of resources (energy, water, GPU and dedicated hardware, real estimate, R&D top talent, human resources for dataset annotation including very VERY gruesome ones, etc) so yes even if in 0.01% they are actually useful one still must ask, is it worth it? Is it OK to burn literally tons of CO2eq … to generate an image that one could have done quite easily another way? Summarize a text?

    IMHO both AI & crypto are not entirely useless in theory yet in practice have been :

    • hijacked by VCs and grifters or all kinds,
    • abused by pretty terrible people, including scammers and spammers,
    • absolutely underestimated in terms of resource consumption and thus ecological and societal impact

    So… sure, go generate some “stuff” if you want to but please be mindful of what it genuinely costs.