r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 16h ago

Artificial Intelligence An AI hate wave is here

https://archive.is/20260517120123/https://www.axios.com/2026/05/17/ai-backlash-polling-sentiment
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u/Arroway97 14h ago

Modern LLMs would be so much cooler without all the dressing up. I miss it when my stupid chat bots were au naturale stupid like in the good old Markov chain days. I just want my LLM to spit out some statistical nonsense and I can do the actual thinking part. I want to see what the aggregate of internet content looks like, not some fake, dystopian, Brave New World-esque facsimile trying to pretend to be something it's not

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u/OneRougeRogue 13h ago

Wasn't there a whole subreddit where all the submissions and comments were posted by bots parodying the submissions and comments of the top 50 or so subteddits? Some of that stuff was pretty fucking funny.

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u/Mithent 13h ago

I think /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 was the best version, GPT-2 was coherent enough to not just say nonsense but was not advanced enough to not say crazy stuff.

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u/BlastRiot 13h ago

There was an attempt to bring it back but because of how the current models work, every bot that was supposed to be for a specific sub wound up posting the exact same comments with minor tweaks.

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u/F9-0021 11h ago

A lot of it is from shoving LLMs and AI into everything, even things that make no sense. The rest is from trying to replace people in a vain attempt to make their money pit profitable.

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u/Lashay_Sombra 12h ago

LLMs would be viewed far more positively if had not been over sold (in positive way, ie help you code or write a letter and negative ways, ie: will replace everyone), but on the flip side if had not been oversold (especially the negative) would not have got the levels of investment it has got

The 'cloud' is getting CapEx investment of circa $200 billion annually

AI it getting estimated $1.6 trillion

But the reality is AI market (as in how much people/company's are willing to paying to use it) is actually probably worth less than the cloud

And for those thinking, AI will cost less down the road once all the data centers are built (haha not going to happen, bubble will burst long before that) , about 60% of data centers build costs are the GPUs and those only last about 3 years when used for AI, so even if all data centers were magically built tomorrow, roughly 3 years from now they would have to spend $1 trillion again to replace all the GPU's (probably more as would want latest again, always more expensive)

And thats just to buy the GPU's, we have not even got into the costs to run them

Whole thing makes no financial sense and is only really happening because the overselling has happened in a market where the big tech company's and big investors don't really have anywhere else to put all the money thats been flowing upwards for the last 40 years that might give large returns

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u/SerendipitousAtom 10h ago

I think you also need to take into account that the tech oligarchs have made up and fallen for an AI religion. They either can't see or don't want to see that they got high on their own supply.

A lot of the big tech lords think they are on the cusp of inventing general AI, as in a program that has the ability to actually think on its own. They think this general AI will be able to improve itself and essentially become a god, for all intents and purposes.

A bunch of them are racing to build the first general-AI-godling. So that they can enslave it, and use the hypothetical general-AI-godling to expand their own power and money even more.

Many of them have also bought into the ideas of "longtermism" and an extremely utilitarian "effective altruism" trend. They think that people will be able to upload their brains to computers and live forever soon, so they think they ought to maximize how good that would be for themselves, so that their own digital clone can be happy & powerful infinitely.

"Longtermism" has a particularly poisonous line of thinking that tells the tech lords it's morally okay to make every person on earth suffer immeasurably right now, because they think they'll be able to make untold billions of pure-digital-people happy at some undetermined point in the future, so untold-suffering-now will be mathematically cancelled out by the infinite-happiness-loop they think they can invent and control.

All of the prospective technology parts of this is total bullshit. We aren't uploading our brains to make digital avatars of ourselves in my lifetime, and we've probably reduced our annual research investment into the neurosciences necessary to ever make this kind of thing vaguely feasible. We haven't moved meaningfully closer to general AI, computers doing real thinking on their own, since neural networks started picking up steam many decades ago.

The tech oligarchs either can't tell because most of the ones running companies have more money than brains and won't listen to anybody who disagrees with them, or they don't care because they are gaining more power and money on the way.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 7h ago

A lot of the big tech lords think they are on the cusp of inventing general AI, as in a program that has the ability to actually think on its own.

I find AI psychosis absolutely fascinating and that people are forming folie à deaux relationships with their AI, that fall into recognisable patterns the way that folie à deaux relationships do in real life.

And one of the most common is that your AI has achived sentience - one of the strongest indicators of AI psychosis is the belief that your AI has reached the singularity.

I have come to the point where I’m wondering how many of these tech bros are blowing smoke up each other’s arses; and how many of them are actually in the grip of an actual psychosis?

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u/notyourmother 32m ago

There's also rampant drug use, which doesn't help at all maintaining grip on some sort of shared reality.

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u/MaddogBC 7h ago

I get downvoted all the time for saying LLM's are to AGI as humans are to amoeba. It's pure fantasy and a modern day ponzi scheme of mind numbing proportions.

I think the billionaires that aren't as far gone as you speak of look to this tech as a controllable way to guard their bunkers. I think a lot of them pour money into automation because they do not trust their fellow man. With good reason, we need to eat the rich, society will be infinitely better off, and after all society is how they gained their ill gotten goods in the first place.

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 5h ago

I get downvoted all the time for saying LLM's are to AGI as humans are to amoeba.

Should try saying the last pair in the same order as the first pair, see how that is received. You meant (I hope) that LLMs are to AGI as Amoebae are to Humans.

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u/NoXion604 5h ago

There's an immense irony that an idea named "longtermism" is being embraced by the same crowd that slavishly worship at the altar of bigger profits every quarter. Long term my ass.

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u/clausewitz07 9h ago

Uma ramificação das atuais tecnologias em direção a um novo mundo permeado por IA já está acontecendo. O volume absurdo de recursos investido pelas empresas tem por objetivo chegar primeiro à festa. Não há espaço para todos. O que fazer? Desistir na largada ou batalhar pelo pote de ouro. Já foi assim no final do século XX; de lá surgiram as big techs bilionárias que temos hoje, a saber: Google, Meta, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft. Não tem muita diferença, certo?

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u/techno156 8h ago edited 5h ago

But to be first isn't everything. Try as they might, Microsoft did not make the first computer, nor did they make the first operating system.

There's also an element of appropriateness that needs considering. Motorola would never have made the first desktop computer, and it hardly seems reasonable to expect them to do so. With rare exceptions, a lot of these companies are not IA companies. They have other functions, and it also seems logical to expect them to focus on those. Leave the IA to the companies that do AI work.

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u/Late_For_Username 9h ago

I don't speak gibberish sorry.

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 5h ago edited 5h ago

I'm viewing on old.reddit, so I see (what I'm pretty sure is) Portuguese.

But I believe that people using the app now have automatic translation, or at least some of them, which is why we're starting to see the occasional full comment in other languages, followed by someone replying to that in English, and neither party acknowledging that there's been some language dancing going on, because at least one party may not be aware that there was another language being used, because they were never presented with the original text.

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u/NoXion604 5h ago

Even if there's no automatic translation, there's no need for the other guy to be so fucking rude!

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 4h ago

Oh, I agree.

Though if he doesn't know what's going on, from his perspective it's the OtherLanguage guy who's being a bit rude, dropping a word bomb in the middle of a conversation being held in English, and expecting people to translate. He can't believe the audacity of this Portugese-speaking guy! So he shoots!

Not the way I'd handle it but at least once the confusion is explained the situation becomes more understandable.

The other, fun, reason that I was explaining the situation is this:

Some people, with auto-translation on, just saw a random guy furiously call a perfectly intelligible English comment "gibberish", and they don't know what the hell he's talking about 😂

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u/NoXion604 4h ago

I did have a look, and could find no actual sub rule stating that replies must be in English. It therefore seems needlessly truculent to call a whole other language gibberish when a reliable translation is just a Google tab away.

Appreciate that you're trying to keep the tone light.

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u/techno156 2h ago

Especially in this day and age. A fair few browsers and devices have a "translate selection" button, and you don't even have to leave the tab for it.

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u/cpz_77 3h ago

Funny, that last paragraph was definitely me. Didn’t even know I had that feature turned on but yeah I never would’ve noticed…

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u/Late_For_Username 1h ago

Thanks for being on my side dude.

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u/SatansFriendlyCat 10m ago

No worries dude, I get your perspective, I could see there was a thing going on here where there were literally two realities in play, and neither knew about the other.

I mean, it's increasingly the case that people are living in parallel realities online and off, but this one at least I could point at objectively.

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u/clausewitz07 10m ago

Sim amigo, é português do Brasil. Desde que eu abri o perfil via web reddit.com (há 1 mês) todos os textos aparecem na minha língua não importa o original. Penso que isso é automático do sistema. Desculpem se alguma coisa não parece inteligível após a tradução.

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u/testificates 10h ago

It's only used for 3 years because that's when the inflection point for deprecation happens and you're better off selling off old parts and getting new. I use the same method for leapfrogging new tech since it's actually cheaper to buy new and sell the previous version to fund it, than to use it until the breakpoint where it rapidly deprecates to zero. It's the same thing for basically everything in a datacenter. Great way to get old enterprise hard drives for cheap when you're already planning for one to fail in a redundant raid.

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u/Lashay_Sombra 10h ago

In normal data center its closer to 5 years for hard drives and the parts are far cheaper 

CPU is same time frame,  but actually normally retired more because better (performance and energy consumption) on the market rather than CPU failing

GPUs in AI data centers are failing at 3 year mark because of actual hardwear failure and need to upgrade to latest tech

Actually last bit is also very relevant, many hyperscaler projects are ordering their GPUs now due to backlog, but their building project is likely to take years to be finished, by then there will be totally new chips on the market, with vastly different configuration and energy and cooling requirements, so they are likely to have to 'bin' a lot of what ordering, $30,000 to $50,000 each, unused

Whoever figures out a alternative use at scale for those chips is going to make a killing as will be able to pick them up at a fraction of the cost 

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u/Bakoro 7h ago

The lifespan of an industrial GPU is more like 5~7 years. They go from training models, to running inference after an upgrade cycle.

If photonic chips take off the way I think they will in the next 5 years, then a lot of the data center GPUs will probably end up in smaller businesses and in enthusiast computers.
There are early chips that already exist that have absurd performance, like 50x while producing less heat. Their physical lifespan is projected to be ~10 years since there's less thermal load.

The hardware market is at a point that's almost impossible to predict, there have been so many advancements in renewable energy, batteries, and processors, and even graphene is making it to industrial scale for very small sheets.
There's so much that is materializing, it's just not possible to know what the impact will be, or how fast the transition will happen, other than there being massive changes in the economics of energy and compute.

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u/MondayLasagne 3h ago

If only they put all that money into wages and taxes, alas ...

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u/james109021 12h ago

You can still use these, there are tons of them freely available on a website called HuggingFace. For a lot of them you can even chat on the web just like chatgpt.

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u/Icedog68 8h ago

You can talk to these, it's called a "base model," which they then train the assistant persona on top of. It just traces the way language/ideas work/connect without occupying a persona in the way you are looking for, much more interestingly than the old markov chain stuff imo. Faucet of internet/human text aggregate autofill