I'm baffled by people who've already decided #GenerativeAI isn't worthwhile because <insert current limitation here>. It's like dismissing the Internet because who'd want to use a 300 baud modem that ties up their landline.
We're still in the #LLM early days. We don’t know how #GenAI will improve.
@smach the problem is that the way LLMs have been developed and the people who have embraced it have made the tech radioactive for most non-tech orgs. You can't scrape vast quantities of copyrighted material without permission and not expect criticism for that. Meanwhile it has attracted a group of enthusiasts for whom that theft (and the toxicity associated with "uncensored" models) is exactly the point; even though it isn't technically necessary they still demand it.
@smach I think a better analogy for GenAI than the early Internet is the early days of music file-sharing. Eventually streaming business models like Apple Music and Spotify emerged but not before the "Wild West" version killed record sales for working musicians. Or, a better analogy might even be netbooks, which were aggressively hyped but never quite fit any realistic use case. The question is what's the equivalent of the iPad, then?
@smach I grew up with a "dumb terminal" in my room! no joke; my dad ran networking cables through the heating ducts so that my sister and I could connect to his UNIX machine in the basement. Thanks to this egregious building code violation I also know what Lynx and Newsgroups are/were, and I now miss USENET... I mean, it still exists but doesn't seem to be used for much besides piracy.
@colby That sounds like fun!
I remember USENET 😀 and random people's BBS's. I set one up at the newspaper where I worked and it was so cool when readers would connect that way. Before email became drudgery and spam choked.
@colby Netbooks 🤣 I'm old enough to remember "dumb terminals." Never saw the allure of netbooks either, except if price is the only issue.
Streaming music affects one thing: music. Netbooks are one industry: personal computing. GenAI will affect many things, as did the Internet. That's the difference.
Universities, media companies, large numbers of Gen Z . . . all using GenAI. But we can agree to disagree.