genai

The other day I had another conversation in which someone said that #GenerativeAI made them more productive, and after I asked a few questions they admitted maybe 80% of the output is OK and they have to check and double check everything. Then when I asked the obvious followup, "wouldn't it be easier just to do it yourself from the beginning instead of having to put in all these safeguards and worry about whether you missed errors?" they had no real answer.

I feel like people have been sold the idea that #GenerativeAI must provide productivity gains, and many don't bother to examine whether it really does.

#AI #GenAI #hype

Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they won’t use an AI assistant to help write their application.

“We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree.”

From https://www.404media.co/anthropic-claude-job-application-ai-assistants/

Mediating everything else in the world through an AI system is just fine, though, and non-AI-assisted communication skills are otherwise unimportant to them.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic

LinkedIn accused of using private messages to train AI
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxevpzy3yko

#AI #GenAI #LinkedIn #Microsoft

Abstract: This paper will look at the various predictions that have been made about AI and propose decomposition schemas for analyzing them. It will propose a variety of theoretical tools for analyzing, judging, and improving these predictions. Focusing specifically on timeline predictions (dates given by which we should expect the creation of AI), it will show that there are strong theoretical grounds to expect predictions to be quite poor in this area. Using a database of 95 AI timeline predictions, it will show that these expectations are borne out in practice: expert predictions contradict each other considerably, and are indistinguishable from non-expert predictions and past failed predictions. Predictions that AI lie 15 to 25 years in the future are the most common, from experts and non-experts alike.

Emphasis added. From https://intelligence.org/files/PredictingAI.pdf
Armstrong, Stuart, and Kaj Sotala. 2012. “How We’re Predicting AI—or Failing To.” In Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams, edited by Jan Romportl, Pavel Ircing, Eva Zackova, Michal Polak, and Radek Schuster, 52–75. Pilsen: University of West Bohemia.

Note that this is from 2012.

One wonders what exactly an expert is when it comes to AI, if their track records are so consistently poor and unresponsive to their own failures.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AGI

DeepSeek launched a free, open-source large-language model in late December, claiming it was developed in just two months at a cost of under $6 million — a much smaller expense than the one called for by Western counterparts.

These developments have stoked concerns about the amount of money big tech companies have been investing in AI models and data centers, and raised alarm that the U.S. is not leading the sector as much as previously believed.

The "Western counterparts" are claiming training a model might take years and billions of dollars. This has always been a hyped-up grift, with snake oil salesmen and con artists being showered with money and power. It's really quite amazing how profoundly unintelligent "the market" is in practice.

The sad reality is that the US could lead in this field (1), if we'd stop routinely putting narcissists and con artists in charge and showering them with praise even when they fail.

From https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/nvidia-falls-10percent-in-premarket-trading-as-chinas-deepseek-triggers-global-tech-sell-off.html

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #SnakeOil #hype #grift #MarketCapitalism

(1) Putting aside whether we should, which is an important question.

"You need suckers who think AI is effectively magic:

… people with lower AI literacy perceive AI to be more magical, and thus experience greater feelings of awe when thinking about AI completing tasks, which explain their greater receptivity towards using AI-based products and services. 

AI marketing is 100% about whether the sucker is sufficiently wowed by an impressive demo."

From https://econtwitter.net/users/amycastor/statuses/113902204443133686

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #SnakeOil

[NEW PAPER ALERT!] Our grantees
@A__W______O
new paper puts forward a vision for balancing the benefits and risks of #opensource #GenAI (funded by
@DigInfFund
). Drafted by NickBotton
& Mathias Vermeulen
- a short thread on #boundariesofopenness #digitalinfrastructure

If you turn the sink off when you're done using it to conserve water, or turn the lights off when you leave the room to conserve electricity, why do you use ChatGPT or other AI tools? Using those sorts of tools a few times a month negates whatever you've conserved by being prudent in other parts of your life.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #waste #environment

Resistance to the coup is the defense of the human against the digital and the democratic against the oligarchic.

From https://snyder.substack.com/p/of-course-its-a-coup

Defense of the human against the digital has been my mission for some time. Resisting the narratives about how #LLMs "reason", "pass the Turing test", "diagnose illnesses", are "better than humans" in various ways are part of it. Resisting the false narrative that we're on the verge of discovering #AGI is part of it. Allowing these false stories to persist and spread means succumbing to very dark anti-human forces. We're seeing some of the consequences now, and we're seeing how far this might go.

#USPol #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AGI

Some argue that ai technology is more significant than electricity or the internet, and so it will spread fast. But there is little sign of this. Only 5-6% of American businesses said they used ai to produce goods and services in 2024, according to the country’s Census Bureau.

From https://www.economist.com/catch-up-rampage-in-new-orleans-tesla-cybertruck-explosion/2024/12/31/the-ai-productivity-puzzle , titled The AI productivity puzzle

What's the puzzle? It has its uses but generally this technology is not particularly useful for most people. Countless billions of dollars have been spent hyping it up to pretend that isn't the case. But reality matters.

Nowadays I think of generative AI as a power grab. It's not a useful tool for a lot of people, but it's exceptionally useful to people who want to grab and hold power, or restructure power in their favor.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

New Open at Intel Podcast! I spoke with Andrew Brown of Exam Pro about his free generative AI bootcamp for developers, #Deepseek, keeping up with AI development and its rapidly moving pace, and a lot more. Check it out!

Episode: https://openatintel.podbean.com/e/mastering-generative-ai/

Clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/ofsiK5cF1u0?feature=share

#OpenSource #AI #GenAI

Over 2,000 years ago Ovid wrote about a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he carved, imputing the ability to love to an arrangement of rock. Today we impute the ability to think to an arrangement of silicon. Stories of breathing life into non-life have been with us for a very long time, yet somehow we're stuck in the same place.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AGI #Pygmalion #Golem #Pinocchio #Talos #Frankenstein