Seems as though as time goes by that AI is being exposed

[Klarkashton]

As a half assed magic trick.and nothing more.

Clever people have taken this to the current limits and it isn't worth shit.

[orthoclad]

1. Oh, it will get more powerful in time.

Mainly in China, where profit does not equal performance.

As long as it's a horse in the race for money, shortcuts will sabotage it. But it will still power evil ends like surveillance and oppression here in the good ol usa. Oppression does not require precision.

[RockRaven]

2. The biggest issue with "AI" is the overhyping, overspending people behind and around it.

It could maybe be useful for some things some of the time. And those maybes and somes are very very important modifiers.

But that isn't what it is being sold as, by liars and grifters and scammers and fraudsters. They are selling it as a step towards AGI, and as a thing which can replace humans entirely, and as a thing which will exponentially increase productivity, etc. Believing that bullshit is a good way to ruin companies, the economy, and people's lives. And there are a lot of idiotic believers, on Wall St, in DC, and in homes on your block and mine.

[orthoclad]

9. Don't forget, used as a military device

Autonomous killing machine.

120 schoolgirls...

[LudwigPastorius]

3. "it isn't worth shit"

According to a 2025 survey, 84% of professional software developers are using or planning to use AI tools in their workflow.

Most pros don't implicitly trust the results of AI tools, but they apparently find them worth using.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai#sentiment-and-usage-ai-select-ai-select

[mwmisses4289]

4. Some companies apparently are regretting that choice,

and are rehiring the people they thought ai was going to replace.

https://www.khou.com/video/news/companies-rehire-workers-after-ai-layoffs-as-automation-falls-short/285-e3d7b7e2-b168-47f6-9a16-dbaa4795a92c

https://www.kvue.com/video/money/economy/companies-rehiring-ai-layoffs/269-3050b34c-d1a0-4a19-9dc1-caeea8b37439

[JHB]

5. I'd say it's more a matter of separating actual useful applications from High-Fantasy-level hype

The hype trains are always more about "steer money into my pocket", because that's the goal.

Where specific versions can be genuinely useful tools is a separate matter entirely. But the billionaire techbros don't care about that part.

[Metaphorical]

6. Neurosymbolic AI

There's been a steady and quiet opposition to the current architectures where the LLM is being shifted increasingly to the role of pattern matching, rather than providing data, and the underlying architecture is actually reverting back to declarative grounding solutions: databases, knowledge graphs, context graphs, and so forth. This is even permeating the larger AI hyperscalars, who are increasingly looking at these foundations (what had been known as symbolic AI) now. These approaches are notable as well for requiring far less energy, as they are using anywhere from 3-5% of the number of tokens that "traditional" AI utilises. I've been involved in these efforts for awhile now (since about 2017 or so). Neither OpenAI or Xai like this approach because it puts the LLMs much more on the periphery, and it reduces the requirements for the massive data centres they are trying to get investors to build out for them, but at the engineering level, the shift to neurosymbolics is WELL underway.

[orthoclad]

10. Properly applied, I can see uses

for really complex problems like climate change, where we need to balance the carbon cost of manufacturing "green" devices against reducing the rate of change - for example.

Your post is over my head. But I think generating answers which are beneficial to the world as a whole can justify the theft of the sum of human endeavor that these LLMs are being trained on.

But no, it's being used to target missiles and amuse unskilled cartoonists.

[LAS14]

11. Care to concretize this a bit? Give us some examples we can understand? nt

[Jilly_in_VA]

7. Has anyone listened to Chris Hayes' podcast series on this subject?

The folks he's had on there would tend to agree with the OP.

[JCMach1]

8. Reality vs. hype

The reality is pretty damn impressive though.

But pause that thought. The advanced stuff I have been using lately is all open source.

And little to do with frontier model llm's

Corporations are going to loose their shirts like fiber companies did in the first internet wave.

A cautionary tale though. We on the left need to stop ceding ground on advancing AND regulating new technology because of what amounts to anti-tech bias.

We get it, you hate AI, but we as a society are atill going to have to deal with it. I definitely don't want to cede that ground fully to the right.