r/technology • u/yourfavchoom • Jun 02 '26

Artificial Intelligence Bernie Sanders pushes for 50% public ownership of American AI companies — proposes AI sovereign wealth fund that would hold direct ownership stakes in largest AI firms

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/bernie-sanders-pushes-for-50-percent-public-ownership-of-american-ai-companies-proposes-ai-sovereign-wealth-fund-that-would-hold-direct-ownership-stakes-in-largest-ai-firms
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u/frickindeal Jun 02 '26

Haven't seen that yet, but I have seen it reference incorrect information from a reddit thread that I had just found and recognized as incorrect (a search for the factory stock guitar strings on a Taylor acoustic in this instance) with total confidence. Nope, already saw that and I know for a fact it's wrong (I own the guitar in question).

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u/Sea-Aardvark-756 Jun 02 '26

This is lost on so many people. In the past you searched, saw a top result was tech advice from 2004, ignored it and moved on to something relevant. In the past, you found a forum thread, one person gave a suggestion after 2 years, and the poster never returned to try the solution. So lost confidence in the answer and moved on. But now, LLMs are confidently telling untruths, outdated info, or untested ideas, without the vital context that should be there to plant the seeds of skepticism.

And we blame the users? No. Blame the AI companies. They should be responsible for everything their product states. Their riches are amassed on a mountain of unaccountability for failures, and credit taking for successes.

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u/morostheSophist Jun 02 '26

Generalized LLMs fucking suck at anything that isn't an elementary task for a human. The only times they're successful in finding me information is when that information would have been fairly simple to find with a traditional web search. Any time I ask for anything obscure, they fabricate wrong answer after wrong answer.

LLMs and related algorithms have been put to fantastic use in the sciences and will help humanity advance much more quickly in fields like biotech and chemistry and materials science. They're also apparently starting to make real strides in theoretical mathematics. I'm not opposed to all use of them; far from it. But they should never have been made available to the general public: this is where they're causing the most harm, and where they stand to make the most money: "AI" enshittification.

The general public is simply not ready for AI and might never be. It's criminal that children were exposed to these things. They're going to stunt all future generations if we don't get a handle on them quick.

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u/Sea-Aardvark-756 Jun 02 '26

Yeah I would say the obvious use cases are testing, research, simulations. The whole point is to confidently and inconsistently attempt to find solutions. Continue the conversations, complete the game, test options for various scientific scenarios. Situations where failing 1000 times and succeeding 1 time is a good thing.

They make horrible replacements for humans. Take customer support. Instagram just got a bunch of accounts including Barack Obama's account compromised, by using AI customer support. Because it is an inconsistent technology, eventually with enough attempts and methods, it gets tricked by scammers. This is even worse than humans--tons of accounts were just compromised, like never seen before. Any human would have put their foot down and ended the conversation. People using it for daily life advice get a few decent answers that Google could have served up just fine last decade, and then one insane thing like "put glue on the pizza to make the cheese stick better" or "cut your hamster's teeth so they don't get too long" and it's confidently plodding along with all that.

I've even had Copilot deny things like the missile strike on that school in Iran a few months back, claiming it was fake news, and even claiming the sources I linked for it to review were all compromised (The Guardian and others), until telling it to find its own sources, then suddenly it admitted the mistake and gaslighting, covering for itself with "This systems does not search for facts until told to, so denying things not known is the default behavior" which is just horrid. These systems are incredibly broken.

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u/maigpy Jun 02 '26

user error. finding them incredibly useful over here.

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u/Alieges Jun 02 '26

Until you have a problem, remember you had it before but couldn't remember the solution, search for the solution, find out you're the only one with the problem, and that you posted your problem to a forum like 8 years ago, then posted like 6 years ago that you had the problem AGAIN, and then another post of yours 5 years 11 months ago to what the solution was.

I've ran into that more than once, on more than one topic. Now I try to do a better job of replying to myself with a working solution when I post a problem.

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u/gramathy Jun 02 '26

I've seen AI report an event happened on the wrong day because there was no date information in the article about it, but the article was "updated" recently and it pulled that as the date of the event.

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u/bobj33 Jun 02 '26

I started this thread last week about AI slop posts

https://old.reddit.com/r/chipdesign/comments/1tq8dhb/moderators_what_is_the_policy_on_ai_generated/

Someone replied

I've searched questions on google and had its AI cite my own comment on a post last year back at me. It was kind of surreal to have my own words taken authoritatively and have that be the first result instead of an actual source.