It’s no secret that I am not a fan of ‘AI’… Or rather what folks like Sam Altman are selling as AI. What I have realized is that I am actually not anti-AI, I am actually more focused on the real downsides of the hyped-up uses of AI and am against those, rather than the more interesting advances actually being made in the industry and the advances likely to come in the future.
We are nowhere near actual intelligence but if you listen to Altman you will hear that AI is here and we should give them all the money so that they can run intelligence as a service. The guy is dumb as rocks and absolutely a terrible human being. He is also so taken by his own ‘intelligence’ that the statements he make are absolutely tone deaf and horrible. In a recent interview he stated that “it’s “quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply” of DRAM sitting in personal computers.”
The cost of RAM has more than doubled because he bought all the supply a while back and hard-drive cost also has doubled because of him. I recently (about a week ago) had to buy a 2TB ssd because my primary drive was acting funny, it kept shutting down randomly and would be back to normal after I let it cool down for a few mins. I had bought the drive ~4 years ago for ~14k INR, the same drive today cost me ~29k INR. When I told my dad that the cost was more than double he was quite surprised because the cost should go down over time and it would have if not for AI datacenters. Companies are firing people because they think AI is going to replace all developers but then they are going back and hiring the same folks because what these folks claim and reality are not even on the same planet let alone the same page.
As a data engineering tool, and as an assistant for developers this tech is phenomenal but we are nowhere near what Altman and others are claiming it can do. In fact if their claims of AI being an existential threat to humans were true we should arrest the lot of them and shut down their companies and only allow highly regulated companies to work on it, just like we do for chemical weapons, nuclear and biological weapons etc. We regulate all other threats to humanity and the fact that we are not regulating AI is quite telling because what they claim and what the reality is quite different.
Altman’s quote on RAM was so ridiculous that pretty much the entire industry is cracking jokes about it. A developer named Iain Kay has created a script called “Ram Altman” that checks a computer’s RAM usage and then send an email to Altman informing him about how much of the computer’s memory is unused & available.
Hopefully now that Nvidia CEO is fired and we have found out that part of the RAM & GPU shortage problem was allegedly artificially created by Nvidia the prices might go down again in the near future. Apparently Jensen Huang is squarely in the frame for about $250Bn fraud.. Wow! Fingers crossed, that the prices will drop soon.
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.