On top of that, these products are extremely expensive to run. ChatGPT burns millions of dollars a day in computing power, while charging a per-access-token price for companies to plug into its models. OpenAI expects $200 million in revenue in 2023, claims that they’ll be making a billion a year in revenue in 2024, but as their AI becomes more widely adopted into other products, so will the cost of providing that service, and I see nothing about how this company could possibly be profitable. On top of that, OpenAI will be handing over 75% of its profits until Microsoft has recouped its $10 billion investment. To survive and perform even its most basic tasks, OpenAI must constantly consume information and burn capital, and as it grows in complexity, so will its technological demands, ethical concerns and genuine threats to society. ... As said last week, tech companies are incentivized to grow at all costs, even if said costs involve them acting in reckless, unethical ways. A ChatGPT-powered search engine marketed by a massive tech company as a search engine is one that users are likely to believe the answers of, meaning that when said search engine gives patently incorrect and “unhinged” results, we are likely to see situations of misinformation that dwarf the damage caused by Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Microsoft rushed out Bing AI because they wanted their shareholders to see them as constantly growing, despite the fact that it is both regularly wrong and actively manipulative users. ... And the reason that these risks are so significant is that both Microsoft and Google were desperate to show that they will never, ever stop growing. They did not slowly and methodically roll out these products with constant reminders of their fallibility - they branded and marketed them as the future, as the new way in which we request and process information. Microsoft and Google’s customers are victims of rich people playing with toys, hoping to find ways to please rich people that invest the money of other rich people.
Ed Zitron: The Rotten AI
This is the sort of thing that bothers me here -- the economic incentives at work (and not out of nowhere: specifically courted by those making these things do not align -- remotely! -- with responsible creation of these products. The $ numbers at work are staggering, and if you're on the hook for that amount of money, I don't feel like you're going to be too prudent about the limits you set on these things if you can get away with them.
I refer you back also to BRIAN BLESSED PIGEON (undeterred).
AI (which we’ll use to describe the new wave of natural language systems despite the fact that it’s basically a branding exercise invoking benign superconsciousnesses from mid-20th Century SF to sell an interactive probability map) is going to disrupt our lives. That’s a given. In exactly what ways remains to be seen. At the moment the AI chat systems we’re talking about are the image of a persuasive liar: smooth-talking fabricators of plausible nonsense without the hindrance of conscience or a residual allegiance to truth. In fact it’s worse than it appears - they’re number generators emitting the expression of statistical likelihood dressed up as meaning. Unchecked, they are misogynistic, racist conspiracists gleefully plagiarising or collaging slabs of coherence, their entire being an intricate patchwork of human self-expression stitched into the shape of consciousness.
Nick Harkaway: Not The Future
Tom Scott: I tried using AI. It scared me.