On Taxi, when the Sunshine Cab Co. is temporarily shut down, the drivers reunite a few months later to talk about what they've been doing in the interim. Louie has essentially been stoking a boiler room, selling stock over the phone. He quickly loses the job, because regardless of how much money he pulls in, he's still Louie De Palma. But one of his pitches keeps coming back to me.
Tom, listen to the words that are going to send you to an early retirement: Genetic research. You know, cloning and stuff like that. Listen, today they're doing it with rats. Tomorrow, they'll be cranking out Cheryl Tiegs by the dozens.
Ah, I know what you're going to say. I know, you got a philosophical problem because there'sa possibility that something maybe could go wrong. I mean, some mutant virus could wipe out half the world. If you're in the half that's still around do you want to be rich or not?
2 comments:
Louie's reputed to have been one of the nastiest characters ever to appear in a network tv show. That's why everybody loved him - hard to choose just one but I'm voting for the time Jim and Louie discovered cocaine in the cookies Latka was selling:
https://youtu.be/Yt_p15C_lBM?si=7vKoFqNpkewxaXop
I agree it's hard to consider either AI boosterism or AI doomerism in a positive light. LLMs are not Artificial Intelligence; promoted by brain dead billionaires, they're what happens when you get a major techno bubble in the age of social media. I've been lucky in that my life has allowed me to ignore it completely except when some slop shows up in my twitter feed.
There are some useful elements in LLMs but anything marketed as AI or, God forbid, Gen AI are nothing but products wrapped in cheap ChatGPT packages.
The character of Louie De Palma spoke to highly offensive people everywhere. That scene with him and Jim is a sheer classic. Interesting to note that Danny De Vito and Christopher Lloyd had both been patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Unless you're Amish--and one who hews strictly to the old ways at that--some AI Slop will fall into your life. Yeah, it's a bubble, and it's a very aggressive bubble due to the nature of social media. It's almost impossible to prove anyone wrong about anything, even if they obviously are, because nothing is connected to anything. But some longtime investors appear to be moving on to other ventures.
There probably is some use in LLMs, but they've been marketed as some kind of Everything Machine. I suspect China is a bit more focused in developing it.
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