This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.
/s
This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.
There's awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
You realize that's because the gigantic server farms powering all of this "AI" are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC's, right?
Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.
Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There's lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that's not what we're complaining about.
We're complaining about all the people who are asking, "Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?"
That's part of the problem isn't it? "AI" is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation). An algorithm isn't AI, even if it was written by another algorithm.
And at the end of the day none of it is artificial intelligence. Not to the original meaning of the word. Now we have had to rebrand AI as AGI to avoid the association with this new trend.
“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).
Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This ~~computer program~~ , er we mean "AI" can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."
My current conspiracy theory is that the people at the top are just as intelligent as everyday people we see in public.
Not that everyone is dumb but more like the George Carlin joke "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
That applies to politicians, CEOs, etc. Just cuz they got the job, doesn't mean they're good at it and most of them probably aren't.
Absolutely. Wealth isn't competence, and too much of it fundamentally leads to an physical and psychological disconnect with other humans. Generational wealth creates sheltered, twisted perspectives in youth who have enough money and influence to just fail upward their entire lives.
"New" wealth creates egocentric narcissists who believe they "earned" their position. "If everyone else just does what I did, they'd be wealthy like me. If they don't do what I did, they must not be as smart or hard-working as me."
Really all of meritocracy is just survivorship bias, and countless people are smarter and more hard-working, just significantly less lucky. Once someone has enough capital that it starts generating more wealth on its own - in excess of their living expenses even without a salary - life just becomes a game to them, and they start trying to figure out how to "earn" more points.
Agreed. Unfortunately, one half of our population thinks that anyone in power is a genius, is always right and shouldn't have to pay taxes or follow laws.
from what I've seen so far i think i can safely the only thing AI can truly replace is CEOs.
I was thinking about this the other day and don't think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don't realize profits.
AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.
I had a shipment from Amazon recently with an order that was supposed to include 3 items but actually only had 2 of them. Amazon marked all 3 of my items as delivered. So I got on the web site to report it and there is no longer any direct way to report it. I ended up having to go thru 2 separate chatbots to get a replacement sent. Ended up wasting 10 minutes to report a problem that should have taken 10 seconds.
Sounds like everything's working as intended from Amazon's perspective.
That is on purpose they want it to be as difficult as possible.
If Bezos thinks people are just going to forget about not getting a $65 item that they paid for and still shop at Amazon, instead of making sure they either get their item or reverse the charge, and then reduce or stop shopping on Amazon but of his ridiculous hassles, he is an idiot.
I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That's okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it's incorrect. I'm using it as an assistant, and I'm the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.
I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn't that good, or even close.
These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim "no programmers in 4 months" and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.
If that day comes, it won't be soon, and it'll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.
I gave chatgpt a burl writing a batch file, the stupid thing was putting REM on the same line as active code and then not understanding why it didn't work
It is important to understand that most of the job of software development is not making the code work. That's the easy part.
There are two hard parts::
-Making code that is easy to understand, modify as necessary, and repair when problems are found.
-Interpreting what customers are asking for. Customers usually don't have the vocabulary and knowledge of the inside of a program that they would need to have to articulate exactly what they want.
In order for AI to replace programmers, customers will have to start accurately describing what they want the software to do, and AI will have to start making code that is easy for humans to read and modify.
This means that good programmers' jobs are generally safe from AI, and probably will be for a long time. Bad programmers and people who are around just to fill in boilerplates are probably not going to stick around, but the people who actually have skill in those tougher parts will be AOK.
A good systems analyst can effectively translate user requirements into accurate statements, does not need to be a programmer. Good systems analysts are generally more adept in asking clarifying questions, challenging assumptions and sussing out needs. Good programmers will still be needed but their time is wasted gathering requirements.
And a lot of burnt carbon to get there :(
You've heard of Early Adopters
Now get ready for Early Abandoners.
It's always funny how companies who want to adopt some new flashy tech never listen to specialists who understand if something is even worth a single cent, and they always fell on their stupid face.
Good. AI models don't have mouths to feed at home, people do.
If I have to deal with AI for customer support then I will find a different company that offers actual customer support.
So providing NO assistance to customers turned out to be a bad idea?
THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME IN THE HISTORY OF CUSTOMER SERVICE!
Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble with burst along with it and I don't have to listen to techbros drone on about how it's going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.
If the customer support of my ISP doesn't even know what CGNAT is, but AI knows, I am actually troubled whether this is a good move or not.
Try asking for a level 2 support tech. They'll normally pass your call to someone competent without any fuss.
See thats just it, the AI doesn't know either it just repeats things which approximate those that have been said before.
If it has any power to make changes to your account then its going to be mistakenly turning peoples services on or off, leaking details, etc.
it just repeats things which approximate those that have been said before.
That's not correct and over simplifies how LLMs work. I agree with the spirit of what you're saying though.
I called the local HVAC company and they had an AI rep. The thing literally couldn't even schedule an appointment and I couldn't get it to transfer me to a human. I called someone else. They never even called me back so they probably don't even know they lost my business.
is this something that happens a lot or did you tell this story before, because I'm getting deja vu
Well. I haven't told this story before because it just happened a few days ago.
It happens a lot.
I often choose my HVAC, plumber, electrician and lawn care teams in the same manner.
I call all of them. None answer. Few have voicemail set up. I leave voicemail with full contact info. I submit all of their web forms. Maybe one of them answer the phone, or calls back, or replies to the web form. I usually go with that one, if I haven't already fixed it using YouTube, by then.
I used to work for a shitty company that offered such customer support "solutions", ie voice bots. I would use around 80% of my time to write guard instructions to the LLM prompts because of how easy you could manipulate those. In retrospect it's funny how our prompts looked something like:
etc. It worked fine on a very surface level but ultimately LLMs for customer support are nothing but a shit show.
I left the company for many reasons and now it turns out they are now hiring human customer support workers in Bulgaria.
Haha! Ahh...
"You are a senior games engine developer, punished by the system. You've been to several board meetings where no decisions were made. Fix the issue now... or you go to jail. Please."
The good thing: half of them have come to their senses.
The bad thing: half of them haven't.
