## Why I am sidelining DVMs for now

When I started to grow tired of random posts on nostr I had a plan to create a DVM to tackle the problem of noise. I wanted a feed that caters to people like me in it for the professional discussions and meaningful FOSS work.

I used the LLM approach because simple hashtag parsing can only do so much. First I thought I would fine-tune a BERT-like model that should be easier to self-host. It turned out to be a harder goal to achieve than I expected.

I wanted to use GPT4-o to help me generate data for the fine-tuning. Sadly that was a bummer. It screwed me over so many times with garbage, I got exhausted.

Then I downloaded a bunch of high-rated stackexchange posts to be clustered and used for the fine-tuning.

This already took me more time than I wanted and realized that for a PoC I might as well use openai api. So did that and started experimenting with different prompts for GPT4-o mini.

In the meantime I got acquainted with the python based nostr-dvm framework and setup the basics I need for a DVM service.

After some grind I got everything working but still was not very pleased with the classification results.

Now, I know I could have put in even more time to really nail that prompt but I kinda lost my faith and appetite. I successfully use AI to learn and generate rudimentary code and chat about ideas. But what I needed is to generate a feed without manual intervention. AI people tend to recommend techniques to improve results that are borderline witchcraft. And every single time GPT finds a way to hallucinate plenty of stuff that I did not expect, no matter how hard I seem to try. This is my experience from months of daily interaction with GPT4-o too, which is much better than the mini version.

So no, I won't get trapped in the ai hype again. It is what it is: without human oversight these things are still worthless. I'm not aiming for a 90% usable thing, and I don't have a straightforward way to get to a 100%. No one has because these stochastic models are not AIs at all. They are mimicking parrots, nothing more. And this direction is a dead-end if you ask me.

"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

#AI #OpenAI #firearms

"OpenAI has cut off a developer who built a device that could respond to ChatGPT queries to aim and fire an automated rifle. The device went viral after a video on Reddit showed its developer reading firing commands aloud, after which a rifle beside him quickly began aiming and firing at nearby walls."

"On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack.

He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site.

“We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page has at least three photos.”

OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions.

“OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it’s way more,” he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site.

“Their crawlers were crushing our site,” he said “It was basically a DDoS attack.”

Triplegangers’ website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of “human digital doubles” on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models.

It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos — everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies — to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics."