this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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I think it’s becoming fair to label a lot of commercial AI “scams” at this point, considering the huge gulf between the hype and the end results.
Open source projects are different due to their lack of commercialisation.
Sure, but don't let that feed into the sentiment that AI = scams. It's way too broad of a term that covers a ton of different applications (that already work) to be used in that way.
And there are plenty of popular commercial AI products out there that work as well, so trying to say that "pretty much everything that's commercial AI is a scam" is also inaccurate.
We have:
Suno's music generation
NVidia's upscaling
Midjourney's Image Generation
OpenAI's ChatGPT
Etc.
So instead of trying to tear down everything and anything "AI", we should probably just point out that startups using a lot of buzzwords (like "AI") should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, until they can prove their product in a live environment.
Machine translation has been used by large organizations for years. Anyone saying AI is a scam doesn’t realize it’s been around, and useful, for quite a while
The issue is AI is just too broad of a term. It's also not a magic bullet and comes with its own problems so it's not even the best tool for the job many times.
It’s not too broad imo, there’s just a lot of different types. So saying “AI is a scam” is incorrect, because there are types of AI that are enterprise level, and are being used currently by all the largest companies in the world to save time and money - like Machine Translation
So when I hear someone say it’s a scam, it just tells me they aren’t very familiar with AI, and only have experience with it in very limited forms and settings
I mean, LLaMA is open-source and it's made by Facebook for profit, there's grey areas. Imo tho, any service that claims to be anything more than a fancy wrapper for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. API calls is possibly a scam. Especially if they're trying to sell you hardware, or the service costs more than like $10/month, LLM API calls are obscenely cheap. I use a local frontend as an AI assistant that works by making API calls through a service called openrouter (basically a unified service that makes API calls to all the major cloud LLM providers for you). I put like $5 in it 3 or 4 months ago and it still hasn't run out.