How did you get to conclusion I think progress is mostly about business?
My point is about promises that funded current wave of AI craziness do not seem to get fulfilled. At the precise moment it becomes obvious for everybody, funding will stop and bet on the next horse, whatever it will be.
It seems that autonomous driving got stuck on “driver must be ready to take control”. If that doesn’t change, Uber is just a glorified tax corporation. Tesla car revolution ain’t happening, if my car can’t drive me to a spot without assistance (allowing me to sleep or be drunk or whatever). They become just another car company with a head start on electric.
And the rest of the AI industry seems to follow the pattern for me - great results (cars can mostly drive themselves nowadays, that’s insane!), but always a notch less than expected. Because what was expected were humans replacements and what we got is human augmenters. It’s probably better for humanity, as productivity will rise, but humans won’t be cut from the loop. I just don’t think it is this particular result that Big Money had in mind when they poured money over it.
Stable Diffusion only cost $600k to train. It's hardly Big Money, and for those $600k you have a revolution in digital art, image processing, stock photo generation, FUN, etc. taking place right now that is insane, and it has only been around for a few weeks!
Btw neither OpenAI nor Stability have at any point suggested that this technology was intended to "cut humans from the loop". These are just new tools. What we do with them is up to us but they are certainly useful and inspiring.
You are expecting delivery of your dream. Where some companies get quite close, close enough for a lot of people and they are dismissed.
This vastly improves process of generating artworks. Like it or not there is still human. But given a job of delivering artwork somebody with those ai tools is going to appear like a superhuman - if time is important (usually in business it is).
Now, funnily you bring AI cars into this, afaik George Hotz is running a very successful product(comma ai) that kinda gets you there, almost. Yet people are ok with it, if they have to hold the wheel every time they need to shift direction. It still helps them 60-95% of the time.
If I can get a tool that is helpful 20% of time, if its accessible I would rather have it. Especially if I can determine this 20% easily. Big money I think would think similarly.
> what was expected were humans replacements and what we got is human augmenters
The advantages of AI even without full human replacement are: volume, consistency, testability, cost, scalability and upgrade story. You can process more data, processing is more consistent as enforced by the model, you can test the model extensively, costs less, can handle sudden scaling and is easier to control the upgrade process when you want to update the system.
But even if the AI ability to remove the human in the loop is low today - that's not necessarily a bad thing. We need some time to adapt and transition as a society. If the transition is too fast, much more social displacement will happen. If we can match the automation rate to the natural job attrition rate then we can have a much smoother transition.
My point is about promises that funded current wave of AI craziness do not seem to get fulfilled. At the precise moment it becomes obvious for everybody, funding will stop and bet on the next horse, whatever it will be.
It seems that autonomous driving got stuck on “driver must be ready to take control”. If that doesn’t change, Uber is just a glorified tax corporation. Tesla car revolution ain’t happening, if my car can’t drive me to a spot without assistance (allowing me to sleep or be drunk or whatever). They become just another car company with a head start on electric.
And the rest of the AI industry seems to follow the pattern for me - great results (cars can mostly drive themselves nowadays, that’s insane!), but always a notch less than expected. Because what was expected were humans replacements and what we got is human augmenters. It’s probably better for humanity, as productivity will rise, but humans won’t be cut from the loop. I just don’t think it is this particular result that Big Money had in mind when they poured money over it.