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Machine learning is easily the most amazing technology I've witnessed in 50 years. AI is advancing so fast, and I'm not 100% sure where the public pulse is on this one. Has it swung fully into raw hatred? There's good reason for that. But it's also here, and getting astonishingly good.

"GenAI" is a marketing concept that pickbacks on the great advances of so many years of ML, despite being functionally the opposite (using patterns to generate content rather than deriving patterns from data) to sell a fantasy of the machine "thinking".

They're technical rooted in some of the same fundamentals, but those who profit from selling "AI" have purposely conflated them to justify products that are still probability algorithms pretending to do thoughtful or creative work.

I worry that LLMs/image GAN have set back the actual AI field (mostly ML) as the image of ML is likely now tainted by the false promises of some sentient super-being computer that has never and will never exist - a myth propped up to sell GPUs.

I find it hard to call something burning unfathomable amounts of energy and requiring our courts to reconsider copyright a "natural evolution". It's more VCs who are desperate for another dotcom to keep making them money trying to sell a cool reverse ML statistical model as essential to tech.

If it were a natural evolution of tech, surely it would make economic sense? How is something OpenAI is still losing billions of dollars a year on a natural evolution? The gig economy wasn't a natural evolution, it was a loss leader to force changes to employment law.