AI in Puna

[MyManao]

Ok, a simple question: What effect does AI have on people in Puna? What effect does AI have on you?

AI has already shown itself to be prolifically used. Kane started a few threads using AI. First he had AI talk about us, and then later created AI art. Both were shiny bauble. Glittery, and attractive, for a moment. And then.. just more fake jewelry. We’re not making AI art here.. we aren’t posting AI stories here.. shiny bauble..

Then we had a politician’s reams of AI generated position papers flood our senses. Geothermal, Pohiki, turning our subs into townships, all AI generated, and absent any actual human understanding, or editing to actually be applicable for use.. And when the guy that 'created' all that showed up to 'engage in a thoughtful discussion' he ran for the hills as soon as Yak posted a few questions.

Ok, but maybe more seriously, how many people are invested in the stock market? How many live on dividends? How many 401(k)’s, how many retirement funds? How many rely on the stability of the stock market? I imagine some here have some tie to the market, yeah?

How many work with AI? Use it to write, to draw, to code, to generate content?

Are you hip to the fact that the owners of AI are farming it out for pennies? That for every dollar in tokens you pay they’re giving you 4 - 7 times more computational power in return? They’re dumping a gazillion dollars in lost leaders. And god knows, there’s a day, somewhere around some corner, where they will charge full value for the same service. Will you use it then?

Already AI owners have tried to up the ante on enterprise clients, and they’re leaving. Auto manufactures that had given design departments over to AI are rehiring designers. Software companies are rehiring coders. Sheesh, McDonalds is rehiring, even Google is rehiring. And yet the stock market is being held up, is growing in leaps and bounds, all over one commodity, the future of AI.

Elon is building the biggest ever, Bezos/AWS is going gangbusters.. and on the other side there’s Ed Ziton on Bloomberg saying run for the hills the thing is about to collapse.. and the NY Times is telling one hell of a whopper of how Larry Ellison is really the kingpin in a house of cards.. and another piece by Julie Averill, a former chief information officer of Lululemon, saying the same thing.. it ain't worth it, it can’t be done, and there’s just no reason to invest in or expect anything back from it..

And the stock market keeps going up and up and up.. and everyone says if it wasn’t for the investments in AI.. it would already be tanking.

So, every working person with a 401(k), every pension, every retiree with enough to live off the dividends, or day trader hustling it.. is riding high on an illusion.. or so it seems. If you listen to the Bloomberg feature of Ed Ziton linked above there is just no way this is going to be sustained. By his measure the only folks who are going to make anything out of all this is the folks that have already been paid up front.. building contractors hammering together data centers.. but those data centers will never be stuffed full of data.. the racks will never be installed..

So.. as per Edge’s inflation in Puna.. how much has AI taken a hold here? How dependent on AI are you?

[randomq]

I code with it, and the SOTA models are awesome. Literally turning your ideas into apps. Even the open-weights ones (ones you can download and run yourself given a sufficient computer) are better than GPT-4 ever was. I think there may be a lag in large companies competently using AI and actually seeing ROI, and that probably means there'll be a bigger crash or correction than we've seen so far just in semi-conductors. But long-horizon, AI, semis, and tech are the future. We're gonna have AI taking jobs and AI powered robots walking and driving around, it might just take longer here, like everything does.

Right now smaller businesses are getting more ROI, not just because it's a loss leader, but because they are using it for very practical stuff (a website or ad for their business, editing their emails, helping them design an excel spreadsheet or smartphone app). Big Island has lots of smaller businesses, so maybe it's a net win for us, until the price goes up.

I would say don't hate it; take advantage of it. It can do a lot and teach a lot. We should probably be using it to tutor kids in our schools, or reality check our county council and keep them from blowing money on studies and homeless grants.

[Durian Fiend]

Since I'm mostly retired there's no obvious effect for me, except perhaps the stock market.   How are you so sure that Hunt uses AI to generate papers?   It does not seem plausible to me that he wouldn't anticipate questions in this forum and be capable of answering them.   If he asked AI whether geothermal or solar makes more sense for grid power on the Big Island, the answer would have been contrary to his preference.

[Obie]

" If he asked AI whether geothermal or solar makes more sense for grid power on the Big Island, the answer would have been contrary to his preference."

The anti geothermal people in Puna are distorting the facts with their constant posting about ill effects.

Doesn't that influence AI because it just consolidates data and make a logical (to it) response ?

[ironyak]

Durian Fiend - How are you so sure that Hunt uses AI to generate papers?

Tam Hunt's Medium posts have this at the end - "[Claude helped to write this]" and if you spend time reading them you'll find a lot of overstatements and blending of facts that is common to LLMs as they average out the sentences in their training data. It's why it was trivial for everyone to point out errors in his statements on everything from Hawaii's energy sources to Ilagan's donors. If you use "AI", at least take the time to actually fact check the output, unless you want to look like a mindless drone repeating nonsense.

And that's probably the most common impact I've seen here in Puna - people repeating AI slop info because it says something they want to believe, without ever checking for accuracy or sources. The other is the rapid undermining of education as kids get tempted into cut and pasting AI slop and not engaging in the actual effort of the learning process.

Lots of local teachers returning to in-class work and handwritten "blue book" tests so that they can figure out who is actually thinking for themselves and who is always just asking Claude for "help".

[knieft]

I use Grok as a search engine substitute. From questions about the best jack for a zero turn mower, to will a particular package (with link) fit in a 2020 Prius, to asking for sauna heater chimney components that ship to Hawaii, etc. I find the tactic of adding, “ask three clarifying questions about my query before responding” to be useful and time saving.

Haven’t used the image generator, no interest.

I tested a few competitors with various esoteric questions like, “”Why doesn’t Keith Jarrett’s soprano sax playing get more praise and attention?” and “Show me how to checkmate with a bishop and knight”, to does Puppers Beer actually exist? Etc. Etc. Grok was always the most consistent winner. (Though Grokopedia has some glaring inadequacies ie, no mention at all of Keith Jarrett’s European quartet in the Keith Jarrett listing, which Grok admits is bad, but it hasn’t gotten updated.)

As to the effect AI has had on me. Customer support is over in many cases. People complain about it everywhere I guess. I enjoy Wings of Pegasus, and such exposing AI music frauds. Until AI WW3 drones eliminate human existence, I guess I am good.

Cheers,
Kirt

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

AI weather forecast.
Zoom in on Hawaii, click play on the slider at bottom of the page.
Right now it shows the low headed in our direction mostly going south of the islands, and not developing into a hurricane?  If I’m reading the graphics correctly?  

How is this forecast different from other models?  I don’t know.
The real question is, how accurate is it?

https://deepmind.google.com/science/weatherlab

[ironyak]

MyManao - Elon is building the biggest ever, Bezos/AWS is going gangbusters.. and on the other side there’s Ed Ziton on Bloomberg saying run for the hills the thing is about to collapse.. and the NY Times is telling one hell of a whopper of how Larry Ellison is really the kingpin in a house of cards.. and another piece by Julie Averill, a former chief information officer of Lululemon, saying the same thing.. it ain't worth it, it can’t be done, and there’s just no reason to invest in or expect anything back from it..

That NYT Magazine article is a very thorough rundown of the last couple decades of tech mogul madness from the end of the dot com bubble, to the release of ChatGPT, to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund being tapped by the Ellisons in their ongoing attempt to buy Warner Brothers. Some of the Hawaii-specific info is eye opening as to what we're dealing with:

"Tech billionaires love Hawaii. Jeff Bezos has a $78 million estate on Maui; Marc Benioff owns hundreds of acres and an oceanfront estate on the Big Island; Mark Zuckerberg is building a fortified compound on Kauai. But only Ellison owns his own island. Lanai is 140 square miles, and pretty much all of it — the 47 miles of shoreline, the gas station, the movie theater, the Four Seasons resorts and about 150 newly built rental houses for employees, decorated in Japanese style — belongs to him. Local residents, and there are about 3,000 of them, refer to Ellison as “ownership,” and the island’s unusual economic structure does give it a strange, plantation-like feel.

Ellison retreated to Lanai during the pandemic and basically stayed put for the next few years, seemingly gliding into a more mellow phase of his career. He enjoyed hosting his many rich and powerful friends on his island paradise: Bezos, Benioff, Benjamin Netanyahu and Tony Blair all flew in for his birthday party in 2021. (Netanyahu’s security team insisted that he stay in a six-bedroom hilltop villa, requiring one of Ellison’s employees to move.) Ellison is building a house on the island for his good friend Elon Musk, a regular visitor.

Ellison was living on Lanai with Keren Zhu, a Chinese national who came to the United States as a teenager and who goes by Jolin. Very little is known about her, including whether she and Ellison are married. But people who lived on Lanai and worked for Ellison told us that he and Jolin had their first child when she was about 23 and he was about 70 — before Ellison was divorced from his fifth wife, Nikita Kahn, in 2020 — and that they have since had at least three more. Ellison appears to be attentive to Jolin’s desires. When she complained about missing authentic Chinese food, he had one of the island’s local spots, the Lanai City Bar and Grill, which he also owns, temporarily converted into a Sichuan restaurant."

As for Ed Zitron, he's been on the "AI is a bubble" beat for a few years now, noting its similarities to 2008 back in at least 2024. He may be like Michael Burry, of The Big Short fame, who was right in his analysis but years ahead of the curve in everyone else catching on.

For those of us who participated in the dot com and subprime mortage bubbles to varying degrees, the AI hype cycle is pretty obvious. Much like many dotcoms with once-large market caps, AI loses money on every customer, but makes up for it in volume. If the estimate is right that "A.I. bubble is 17 times as large as the dot-com bubble and four times as large as the 2008 housing bubble" then I guess we in Puna can look forward to furlough Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays this time!

If you want to hear Ed Zitron really rant about his AI financial analysis, with all the choice language they don't allow on Bloomburg, check out his podcast Better Offline.

[HiloJulie]

Ironic timing.

Today's Big Island News:

Warning signs of artificial intelligence ‘doctor’ scams revealed by health experts : Big Island Now

Of all things good, bad or otherwise of AI, using it in this context has to be one of the most absurd.

[randomq]

people repeating =REDACTED= info because it says something they want to believe, without ever checking for accuracy or sources.

Same as it ever was.

Lots of local teachers returning to in-class work and handwritten "blue book" tests so that they can figure out who is actually thinking for themselves and who is always just asking =REDACTED= for "help".

Same as it ever was.

You can use a hammer to build a house, or break into your neighbor's house.