Ancestors

Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-15 at 09:20

The UK's "AI Opportunities Action Plan" (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-opportunities-action-plan/ai-opportunities-action-plan) perpetuates the fallacy that we should embrace the "AI revolution" and its huge increase in demand for compute to make society better through e.g. better diagnostic tools in healthcare, smarter electricity grids, etc.

The growth in "AI" is entirely driven by generative AI based on Large Language Models. It has little or nothing to do with the Machine Learning approaches that already help with so many aspects of society. (1/2)

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Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-15 at 09:21

Compared to GPT-4 or Gemini, these are tiny models that do not require huge amounts of compute, memory or storage. Where GPT-4 is more than a trillion parameters (10^12), a typical CNN for medical applications (*) is of the order of tens of millions of parameters (10^7). So it needs a hundred thousand times fewer resources. And many of the ML techniques that do not use neural networks, like SVM or random forest, are even smaller than that. (2/2)

[#]FrugalComputing

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Written by Eskild Hustvedt on 2025-01-15 at 11:30

@wim_v12e That's quite interesting. A bit of the problem that we've got now is that LLM and AI has somehow become synonyms in the larger discourse, drowning some of the finer points in tech-bro-babble.

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Written by pera on 2025-01-15 at 12:26

@zerodogg @wim_v12e I guess it's easier for the tech industry to sell "intelligence" than "models" or "deep learning"?

• sent from my smartphone

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Written by Eskild Hustvedt on 2025-01-15 at 13:17

@trobador @wim_v12e That's certainly one side of it, but it does muddy the waters, since LLM and most of gen-AI is a garbage fire, while these models, used correctly, can actually help. With emphasis on "used correctly".

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Written by pera on 2025-01-15 at 14:51

@zerodogg @wim_v12e I agree, and I believe this conflation is intentional: by grouping LLM chatbots with everything related to machine learning these big tech spokespersons and lobbyists can say things like "AI is helping cure deadly diseases" and refer to the critics as "irrational luddites"...

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Toot

Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-15 at 19:52

@trobador @zerodogg

It's definitely intentional from the side of OpenAI and the likes.

But for the UK government to perpetuate the same notion is really disappointing.

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Descendants

Written by Eskild Hustvedt on 2025-01-15 at 20:20

@wim_v12e @trobador It really is, but they're in good company - there's a lot of "we need to use AI" around, where the using is more important than actually solving any real problem.

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