I have a conflicting relationship with A.I., I think they are neat as a concept (I based two thesis projects on LLMs when Muppets dominated the market[1]) but in practice I think they are a blight upon humanity. At some point we decided to extrapolate everything is this stupid A.I. race even tho transformers energy consumption scales rapidly as they announced the billion of parameters used in the new model to have a sex chatbot with an anime girl on X. It's not about refining it about expanding.

Every day at work I have to say to big boss manager that doing LLM solutions for something simple is a stupid and expensive idea and any simpler solution would even work better with tabular data but I still have that dumb objective of doing 1 GENAI project a year.

If you ask me what are the things that A.I. do better than any other similar or simpler system would be either being an encyclopedia for several sources of data (like a RAG) or generating empathy. The last one gets me the most. I never thought I would be the person in the movie that would hate the emoting robot cuz I think it's just a robot and not a real person. Every time I see people talking about the AI thinking, reasoning and showing emotions I grow a little bit bitter. They are all buzzwords for mathematical representations of things that work. Attention models, diffusion models, Chatbots they all have a degree of randomness of what they were trained on to give variety. I think I complained to a coworker for 2 week when doing a LangChain project about how they change the name of function to tools because tools are "used" by "agents" apparently (I have no source for this, this is only my reasoning). I found that one Vtuber AI that is really popular fascinating as a experiment on how easy are we trick to have empathy for something as long as it has certain characteristics even tho it's not human (Kinda like how dogs evolved to emote in a way that triggers emotion to us).

Now lets talk about avocados. When I was growing up avocados were just something we ate at home at dinner with some toast. A middle to low class delight, it was expensive but not THAT expensive.

Then they blew up and a couple years before the whole starbucks avocado toast thing, we had plantations here in my country that were sucking a whole city dry of water. Not that the avocado tree (that uses up to 230 liters of water per week per tree) is sucking the water pipes but the owners of the plantations were stealing water from river that would feed the reserves. They even tour most of Europe to say "We are not stealing water, those are lies". People with fancy last names could go to campaign in Europe while other don't have access to a basic resource.

The thing is, even if AI is doing the same to several cities (and the world) with their stupid datacenters and looking to open new ones destroying whatever environments they can, AI is useful to people that don't want to research, or not pay for a psychiatrist (don't do this, again they are not persons) or want to generate an image because learning a craft is apparently too much work; and avocado is tasty. As long as people don't see the problems with the consumption they're doing they are not gonna care unless you give them something better that replace it.

It makes me remember the book The Gods Themselves, written by serial sex pest Isaac Asimov, were humans found a new source of energy that was unlimited but was destroying the whole universe and they were debating if they actually should or could unhook people to this new commodity cuz they don't care about the end of the universe as long as I'm not alive to see it. Even South Park made this point when they try to get rid of the Manbearpig (a representation of global warming as a ridiculous beast cuz the creator were deniers when it was conceived) but decide to refuse and let it to the next generation cuz they didn't want to give up soy sauce and RDR2.

Do I have a solution for this? Not really. I'm mostly rambling about some frustration I have with this whole model that started to make me hate my job.

[1] muppetware