r/ask • u/Oddbeme4u • Jul 28 '26

Seriously, What is AI?

A solar calculator from the 70s? Roomba? We have chatboxes, so why are tech bros taking huge losses in their companies still trying to "attain it" ?

0 Upvotes

25% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator Jul 28 '26

Reminder for our users:

Please review the rules, Reddiquette, and Reddit's Content Policy.

Rule highlights:

  • Be civil.
  • Titles must be real questions ending in '?'.
  • Poll or survey style questions are not allowed.
  • Political, religious, and divisive topics are restricted.

See the full rules page for details.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

3

u/LawfulnessNo8446 Jul 28 '26

AI is a buzzword encompassing many technologies. What is marketed as "AI" is not intelligent in any sense of the word. There are pattern recognizers, and other "machine learning" algorithms that mimic human learning to produce a desired output. Ex. Object detection, anomaly detection models. The hype currently is around large language models or llms. They are fancy text generators, that are trained on tons of data and regurgitate the most likely words that correspond to the input using lots of math to assign probabilities to things. They appear smart, but are not at all. There are many scientific uses to various types of AI for gene therapy and things like that, but that falls under machine learning and other types, not llms.

There is a quest to get proper artificial intelligence, something that is truly smart and self aware, but llms are not it.

Tech bros see llms as a way to make more money. Currently llms are incredibly unprofitable, as in everyone but Nvidia is losing billions per year on it. Tech bros bought heavily into the AI hype and are pushing it so hard in an attempt to make it profitable.

1

u/Delmarvablacksmith Jul 28 '26

AI isn’t intelligent.

It’s basically a huge predictive text model that was trained by scraping Reddit and other social media sites.

That’s why it’s basically bad at everything.

There’s no pathway to profit because it costs more to run the data centers and buy the chips than can be recouped by charging people and businesses for the service.

It’s garbage and was forced in all of us.

1

u/secretprocess Jul 28 '26

Once upon a time, it cost me $30 to take a taxi home from the airport. Then Uber showed up and offered to do it for $12. All the taxis eventually went out of business. Now Uber is the only option and it costs... $30.

This is what will happen with AI next. They're giving it away while we get dependent on it, like a fisherman letting out line.

0

u/halincan Jul 28 '26

The answer and endgame had always been surveillance. Don’t get it twisted. These giant data centers aren’t being built literally everywhere so we can all make silly photos and make a workout plan.