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My guy is competing with Christopher Nolan for longest film

Reminds me of "If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research"

In an age where hordes of channels are exporting their entire production pipeline to AI in order to deliver low brow, low quality, frankly insulting content to monetize people's desire for long form video essays, you stand out as an exceptional example of how this format should be used. I am in awe of the quality of every single aspect of your work, and I cannot imagine how hard you work to get this out in the time frame that you do. May your curiosity and strive for excellence long continue

"The question is not what AI can do, but who it can do it for."

Honestly, the best independent documentary channel on youtube

The problem isn’t AI in isolation. The problem is AI + current economic reality. The corporate world lost its mind during the pandemic when the unemployment rate reached 30% because they couldn’t profit from it at that time. AI has made it possible for corporations to profit from unemployment. So if the unemployment rate rises to 60%, corporations simply won’t care. AI protects CEOs from the consequences of their own actions.

AI + dark patterns = Hell on the internet.

Bezos not paying out those tiny amounts of cash (that often mean life to many, still - and mean NOTHING to him) is one of the vilest stories we have 'on our books'. [puke emoji]

Holy shit. 3 fuckin hours? My boy is puttin in that work.

Amazon naming its ghost work platform ‘Mechanical Turk’ is diabolical 🤣

Honestly as far as research publications are concerned, they deserve zero money for anything aside from hosting, and the salaries of their editors, it's not like scientists are paid much or anything for peer review either. Scientists don't get paid by journals to research, they do so with public or private grants, there's no rationale to justify them holding copyright when most scientists would prefer as many people read their paper for free. If a service like scihub is required for even most scientists and students to do research on the subject, and it's an open secret that everyone uses it especially in developing countries where many institutions with limited funding can't afford jacked up pricing of publishers, then the system is broken and needs restructuring. So unlike other copyright holders, a publisher like Elsevier has very little moral claim to any compensation from AI using their paywalled content. I'm also highly critical of the concept of copyright and IP laws in general, they're all instruments of monopoly with ever expanding scope given by judicial diktats, and have to be reined in to a large degree if not radically rethought. This doesn't mean I'm against AI companies profitting off of other's work giving fair compensation, but that shouldn't be an excuse to further strengthen IP laws to the detriment of all, and should instead come from some new legal mechanism.

As someone who studies AI and is pretty invested in political discourse, this is by far the best analysis of AI as a societal phenomenon I’ve seen on KZfaq. I particularly like that you’re genuinely charitable to the AI, its potential and its prior successes, without sacrificing your critique.

Unfucking believable achievement my dude. Regardless of the monetary outcome: this video will age like wine. You ought to be deeply proud.

The entire stolen labor section giving me “pay no attention to the underpaid exploited labor behind the curtain”

This was like an entire college module on LLMs compressed into 3hours, so much info and well rounded

Takes a lot of courage to make an Oppenheimer length video about AI. Masterful.

Only half way, but wow, this is absolute premium content and production. Thank you! Sharing widely.

I highly disagree with that sociologist (at 2:23:51 or so)… to me, knowing and understanding why lightning strikes, how hugs communicate, etc IS wondrous and I love knowing, it doesn’t take any of the awe away from me whatsoever. The natural world is incredible and it doesn’t lose its majesty just because you understand it. Excellent video, mates. AI already made me uneasy and I wasn’t sure exactly why (besides the obvious theft issues) but this video does a great job explaining all kinds of things I both did and did not ever expect about the way AI works. I am both terrified for and excited by the future… AI could be used for greatness, but until it’s legislated I view it as unsafe and chaotic, as well as obviously thieving.

Awesome work! Very well researched and done. This documentary deserves to be seen by many. You could easily compete with pieces that have millions of views. The KZfaq algorithm has suggested the docu to me and I hope it will direct many more to this address. One thought - maybe dividing the 3 hours into 3-4 parts would attract more people to watch. All the best.

This topic could easily take three hours to even be a general introduction to the topic of AI

To me I feel like we should be more weary towards the people who are going to abuse the technology, than technology itself.

Bellos and Montagu convincingly argues in their book "Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs" that copyright law was not created to protect copyright holders, but rather to explicitly limit their control over works to a short number of years and expand the public domain. It had nothing originally to do with rewards and incentives, and everything to do with stripping monopolies from, e.g., publishers The printing press was a major driver for this, because publishers were claiming perpetual copyright over works they printed.

The worst part about all of this is that when AI is used to implement some global big brother type stuff. You will literally have the entire world against you (from voicing anything online & irl). And you can't do anything about it.

Kurt Vonnegut repeatedly asked: “What are people for?” No definitive answer but his first novel Player Piano explores that question in the context of workplace automation.

"AI is more important than even electricity!" *Flips switch*

Great stuff, like many have said. Friendly reminder that there is a playback speed option on YT, if you find the pace of the narrator a bit too slow.

Whatever AI means, you and I will still be working more hours than is good for us.

Wow. My comment on the “How the Internet Was Stolen” video was “Watching this and seeing what's happening with Al right now is so eerie. All according to the playbook, rinse and repeat...” Seems you felt the same exact way, haha.

The thumbnail is giving me deja vu

That's an insane effort. 3 hours of this quality!!? That's a definite sub. Haven't finished watching yet but so far extremely well presented.

BEST DOC OF ALLLLLLLLL TIME!!!!!!

another Then and Now video? awesome way to start a day

Amazing content as always. As a computer scientist (non AI primarily) this all rings true

294,000 titles at the generous average cost of $100 per title is $29,400,000. Basically 30 million dollars. It is possible that openAI bought a copy of each book and proceeded to let their AI “read” the books. They could argue that their AI has read all the books and is good at remembering the text.

When our school received our first computer it was at Tandy TI 1000 & somehow we ended up with a commodore 64 as well neither were programmed and that was what we were doing is seniors in high school trying to get it working. Once it was working we use the term synthetic intelligence since it was a plastic box and did a lot of things that were taking a exponential amount of time to do on paper. Started as a CIS major at Arizona State in 1983 but after my junior year got frustrated every time he would take one semester of classes the next semester follow-up class was not available because the language was already obsolete. Got tired of the lack of consistency and objectives in programming at the time. It is great to see it finally starting to come along. Will still be a ways away, has grown exponentially to finally be able to do what we would hope it would do all way back in the 80s

whoa. there goes my sleep tonight.

Thank you for this great video and for all the hard work you put into these essays!

My contention is that this documentary requires multiple views anyways so speed it up if the duration seems daunting. Great content sir! Thank you for the hard work.^^

I just watched your 3-hour video "How AI was Stolen", and I'm thoroughly impressed. As someone with extensive experience in the tech industry and decades of public speaking, I can confidently say this is an excellent and comprehensive piece. The content is well-researched and thoughtfully presented. What truly stands out is your ability to maintain audience engagement throughout such a lengthy video. Your masterful use of pitch, pace, and power, combined with effective body language and strategic questioning, keeps viewers invested from start to finish. I particularly appreciated how you distributed interesting points throughout the video, preventing viewer fatigue. The discussion on "what's left for humans if machines can do everything better" was especially thought-provoking. Your storytelling skills are top-notch, making complex AI concepts accessible and engaging, but maybe even more importantly, keeping us around till the end while you tell the story. I'm eager to explore more of you and your partners’ work. Thank you for this outstanding contribution to AI discourse. Great job!

Great mix of truths / philosophy. I just listened to 3 hours in normal speed? Must be good!

Best comb-over in the 21st century

This video is an absolute work of art... a fantastic look at the development of AI and an excellent analysis of the current state of affairs, all packaged into a brilliantly told and presented story that undoubtedly reflects countless hours of research, writing, and editing. This is a huge achievement! Great work!!

Excellent video! Amazing work, easy to understand but still deep enough to cover all aspects of the topic.

Hello Then & Now Team... I know you guys may never see this comment, but I just wanted tontake a brief moment to expel my thoughts and ocerwhelming feelings upon watching this documentary...which I firmly believe is the single most important one of its kind available on the Internet right now... Thank you from the near dear bottom of my heart for such a profoundly insightful, intriguing and thought-provoking content. I had aspirations of wanting to go into the AI field upon my current transformative phase of self-development/improvement, and current unemployed status. However, this video has surely made me revise my prior intentions, and made me look deeper into our current AI conundrum and prompts (pun intended!) me to re-evaluate my strategic plans for the long term, while helping me refocus on taking more measured next steps into my future career plans AND contemplating the future outlook of the world with AI prevalence the contemporary benchmark and one of the most important pressing issues of our time. This video has made me pledge to work on AI ethics, governance, critically reviewing the re-usage and reliability of LLM's and other AI technologies. I look forward to further videos from you guys in the meantime, and supporting your guys' work further. Please keep these kinds of top-tier quality videos coming guys, and keep actively disproving the Dead Internet Theory with life-changing online content like this.🙏🏾🙏🏾

Better make myself some popcorn 🍿

Amaaaazing job. Summing this up so thoroughly and clearly in 3 hours so so impressive. One of the all time KZfaq gems

just discovered your channel, but this is an outstanding film / documentary, really thorough coverage and brilliantly articulated.

At the very least, these companies engaged in piracy of millions of items. Many people have been prosecuted and fined to the maximum extent allowable by the law and these companies being allowed to get away with it is one of the clearest examples of a double standard and selective prosecution. These companies should be fined BILLIONS of dollars if the law was applied evenly.

The level of quality you guys put out every time is incredible. A lot of food for thought. Thanks!

I found this presentation absolutely informative (and entertaining). Thank you for taking the time to create it.

Congratulations on your outstanding quality documentary! I'm going to have to join this channel.

I've been waiting for you to talk about AI and I always knew you would take your time and make it a great one! I've been around a long time and there are not many KZfaqrs I really respect, but you are among my heroes.

The first decent Chanel IV found in a long while

It goes like this: Watch a Then & Now video > Fall asleep watching other videos on autoplay > Wake up at 5:00 and it's a Then & Now video. KZfaq, I would like this to continue please

Thank you for creating this. I listened to half of this on audio, and still feel I got the full experience. What a versatile piece of work!

So excited for a documentary from you. Click and watching straight away.

I will give it a listen. I hope your three hour long video is more worth it (as it usually is) compared to Scorsese's last two movies. :D

Wow, good work. I watched it all. So much good stuff here, especially about sketchy labor practices and misappropriation of training data.

We want the Extended Cut

"Could two Boeing whistleblowers have suddenly died... by accident?"

This video is amazing. I'm still in the first hour and it's gold!. Keep it up my man!

I like that you used 70s footage of Greg Weaver skateboarding in a pool at the moment you mention "knowledge"

Excellent.some of the best presented... researched.. writing...editing...top notch

Tax the tide. 50% profit tax on AI to provide worldwide UBI.

I used to work in AI. You absolutely nailed it on this video. The depth of your understanding of the topic and problematic near future is spot on.

Excellent work! I think we may soon question the assumptions around intellectual property itself and whether its protections are still advancing civilization's interests.

Thank you. I got a lot from this - you’ve spanned past to future - and with this context - given pause for thought on the biggest technology driven topics of our time.

Another excellent video essay, I was one of your early followers and patrons and I've been following you when you were "just a little channel"

Only 42-minutes in and already have to comment about how spectacular of a job you’ve done with this! Brilliant work!❤

Im only halfway through this work of art and its filled with so much information and such rich CONTEXT that im in awe. For real this is changing how ill think about tomorrow.

I don’t usually like videos but I had to like this one. The effort put into this is impeccable

Good video. Now I have to watch it.

being excited at a long video, but also wondering when/how you'll make time to watch it all

Thank you for putting all this together so concisely and and keeping the message so open at the same time. Excellent work and narration!

I haven't finish the video, but I can confirm that Claude is a huge pain that is aggressively scrape sites, which are the equivalent of DDoS attack or Web app attacks. There is a way to block the crawler, but they changed the name of their agent recently, so webmasters have to intervene again to avoid these attacks, because this is what they are.

We're likely to enter into a new age of AI.

I’m so excited to listen to this at work later!! ❤❤

This is some really fantastic reporting and I'm so happy to have stumbled across this channel! If I had one thing to comment on though, I do wish this video had touched more on the (non-human) resources and inputs that are necessary to make these very early and somewhat unsophisticated models work. This is going off the idea that we continue to build on the foundation created by large language models like chat GPT, but if these models are to become more complex and the models get larger (think GPT-3 to GPT-4) the amount of resources needed to run the systems also increases significantly. GPT-4 already uses massive quantities of water and power in order to function, significantly more than GPT-3 - which already used an uncomfortable amount of water imo. Personally, my thought process is more centered around whether or not these models will reach a level of self sufficiency before the very complex, expensive, and difficult to maintain infrastructure that allows them to exist decays to a point of non-function. Maybe they will get to a point where they can develop their own ways of gathering water, power, etc without a need for human systems/institutions and will just suck the planet dry trying to maintain themselves. But maybe modern society will just collapse in on itself before this can happen. The deeply complicated and fragile modern human processes that have created an environment where a AI system can even be developed and run in the first place will cease to exist. Obviously this is a real doomer way to think about it, but I don't think we take into account enough how resource use can affect the viability of these massive super-computer systems. To many of us software and even hardware can feel very disconnected from real physical resources in a way that something like a chair doesn't. But they do take many physical materials to function, even the internet is really just a bunch of fiber-optic cables along the sea floor transferring data. What's to say the continuation of these social systems is guaranteed?

Outstanding video, thank you. AlphaGo especially has stuck with me philosophically since I watched the 2016 documentary. Amazing how quickly ai has developed.

wow. This is a time for a wow, very wowed

First off, big tech companies that used copywrite materials for training their model should actually pay some royalties to the authors whose works they used.

Thanks for the documentary! Very interesting and well produced, this is a topic that I have been studying and it has undoubtedly helped me a lot.

First vid. I'm an AI researcher myself with an MS in Computer Science. This was incredibly well done.

They stole all that data. Once they finished training those models, all the data was gone. They are still looking for the missing data to return it to the owners.

OpenAI didn't start because Elon Musk was afraid of AI. He made a tiny investment in them later on and then pulled out because he wanted full control, then made his own underperforming LLM several years later.

Unquestionably one of the most exhaustive documentaries on on AI, it’s evolutions through R&D over the years and the deep ethical concerns of how it’s become what is today and what that means for us now and into our future. Job well done!

Hello, is this the hands free speech streaming? Super cool! Is it available via extras or extensions?

This episode repeatedly reminds me of a faux documentary called "Ghosts with Sh!t Jobs." It's about Westerners with low paying high tech jobs doing things like looking after simulated human babies, or being paid to promote products in social situations.

'intelligence isn't an abstract, transcendental thing. then connection between things is what matters; those connections allow predictions of a future move' this is an absolutely wild concept and definition for intelligence, one that isn't proven and easily contested in this video-there was little discussion on a core problem, and that is: patterns can mean jack-shit. most patterns AI alerts to have no significant meaning and just happen to correlate (red shirted patients were more likely to have kidney disease! because it just so happened that way) or the significance is noise and basically worthless (photos of people wearing black under black parasols near black hearses and gravestones seem to have a high rate of showing signs of depression, who knows why??). the data is not filtered because there is no meaning capability. in fact, i am shocked your takeaway from _what tech calls thinking_ was what it was, and not the ample displays that silicon valley types are really not equipped to handle anything but raw data sets as inputs and outputs. they don't 'get how it works' but it works similarly to conspiracy theory patterns: noise noise noise correlation. we are good at making patterns, but it's nuts to say that spotting patterns is or should be what we think of as sentient intelligence. and i don't think they'll leap this hurdle. i think AI will degenerate by eating its own garbage for a couple generations until it collapses. they are running out of data to feed, and are already talking about AI generated content next (with a long line of AI correction checkers to check the AI isn't outputting garbage, and checkers for the checkers, etc. 404media did a report on this 2 weeks ago). maybe one day. but we will need a lot more than energy-extensive, climate-nightmare pattern matching games, and these fellas are going to need to stop insisting engineer brain can solve this difficulty because if you feed logic -> get desired result = intelligence. it's simplistic to a cynical degree. there is a genuine idea that we are simplistic creatures easily replicable-my cat has more comprehension of what is going on and why he does his kitty things than AI models do with data sifting. 'connections' is a part of intelligence but it sure as fuck isn't the only part; if it was we would be looking at flat earth theory and convoluted 'all world ills explained' conspiracies as god-tier intelligence at work. instead, we know this predictive patterns can be pure noise, or significant, or deceptively coincidental while appearing like a valid connection. AI can't, and trust in AI answers is very low among people; it will take _a lot_ to fix this. i think we are at the peak of this iteration of AI (with the associated terms and so on). i think it's going to ouroboros itself until it's a rusty heap. better luck next time on silicon valley's _long adventures in figuring out philosophy without reading liberal arts books,_ same bat time, same bat channel.

As a former computer scientist and current philosopher, thank you so much for this video! I'm impressed by how well researched and thoughtful this is.

The exploration of AI's philosophical and ethical dimensions in your article is incredibly thought-provoking. It's crucial for us to continuously evaluate how advancements in AI align with our human values and the impact they have on intellectual property and creativity. 🤖

Very well done. Had Choamsky and Lenat etc paid more attention to Turing’s last paper on morphogenetic systems instead of obsessing over symbolic systems they would not be also rans. Hugely satisfying.

This was an outstanding video, except for the part where you said “Gary Marcus, who might be the leading expert in AI.” Gary Marcus is a joke among people who actually know AI. This statement was the equivalent of saying Bill Nye might be the world’s leading science expert.

Epic video! So much knowledge packed in a YT video, available to people for free. This is also a marvel of modern world.

Thank you for clarifying mate. There's lots to unpack from one sitting.

This is the best material on the subject of AI I have seen on KZfaq for the past few years. The way in which you explain some concepts is brilliant. Hats off to you sir. You've really outdone yourself with this one.

This channel is a refreshing break from the sea of cheap, insipid mediocrity that KZfaq has become. Good stuff!

Incredible journalistic work that everyone should watch. Thank you for creating this ❤

1:04:20 YES you HAD to plug Jamiroquai. So fitting