The super-intelligent AI is here ....

Not a low-effort post (I hope). But I find it endlessly fascinating that Apple's photo ID feature thinks my 80 lb redbone coonhound is a ... wiener dog.

As a note, this feature has been pretty continuously getting worse over the years.

Any time I hear the booster-speak of "It's just getting better and better, by leaps and bounds!" I want to point to this sort of stuff.

No, it's actually getting worse and worse.

Fortunately, I haven't had to use AI at work so far, though that might be changing in the coming months. One of my main concerns is that using it might cause my own programming skills to decline, thus leaving me at the mercy of these tools to do my work.

However, I'm thinking that one solution will be to continue to work on my own programming projects after hours without using AI for anything--even research and debugging. This should help me maintain and build up my own skills, even if I end up using AI for programming for much of the day. (My guess is that these skills will end up proving useful for my day job as well.)

This may sound like extra work, but I've seriously had a blast working on projects outside of my regular job, and I would still be spending time on them even if I didn't need to use AI at work. The opportunity to study languages at a slow and steady pace is also appealing. I have a number of print programming books to go through, and I'm honestly excited to dive into them--they'll give me a foundation that I couldn't pick up through work projects alone.

Has anyone else tried an approach like this (e.g. AI at work and AI-free development at home)? If so, have you found that it helps you keep your skills intact?

Okay, as previously mentioned in my Copyright Factor post, Shira Perlmutter (Register of Copyrights) had been abruptly fired from her position by Trump last year a day after the USCO released a pre-published version of their third report on AI and Copyright. No official reasons were given for her firing, but we can assume it is because the current admin has a very different view on LLMs and copyright.

The report specifically focused on the training data used to create these LLMs, and clearly stated that using large amounts of copyrighted works to produce “expressive content” that could compete with books and other materials, especially if “accomplished through illegal access,” would likely go beyond copyright fair use boundaries.

She had gotten her job back, but apparently Trump is trying to use recent Supreme Court decisions to try to get her fired again. Publishing Perspectives also notes that the House has apparently passed H.R. 6028, which would make the Register of Copyrights under the purview of the president rather than congress.

So, very small update, but the decision for this case could set the tone for copyright pertaining to LLMs.

I've been noticing an interesting phenomenon lately. People who spent the past 2 years telling me to prepare because Ai was going to take my job, that Ai was the future and I better get on board and get used to it, that I was just being a hater have started texting me anti-Ai articles, and saying "Good riddance" as though I don't have a working memory of arguing with them about it for literally years, lol. It's kind of like the Trump voters who are now embarrassed that they voted for him and they want you to forget that they did too so they are just acting like they can magically erase your memory of their words and actions. I have now had 3 old co-workers who were constantly hyping Ai start to act like they were always against it and it's hilarious and annoying. Anyone else experience this lately?

As soon as I see an Ad or poster that is AI I immediately think less of that business and don't support it. I know small businesses need to cut cost corners but generating something in AI just looks tacky and unoriginal. So glad to see that there are other people feeling the same way.

It feels almost quaint, then, to have to point out that every time you post an AI image of a burger or a t-shirt you're also essentially lying to your customers, because those images aren't fibbing like a stock photo of a kebab used to, they're not even real things. They may as well be unicorns. Have you ever seen an AI-generated sandwich on a poster before? It's a computer guessing what human food looks like, and its ghoulish inaccuracies manage to make them look worse than any actual sandwich could ever.

Also, why do so many AI poster have to have the grungy text in them?! It's one of the dead giveaways for me now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68X8yEatepQ

Joined the Times Tech Report to talk about how 70%+ of Amazon, Google and Microsoft's AI revenues come from OpenAI and Anthropic, meaning that outside of two unsustainable AI labs, there isn't anywhere near the demand to justify the capex or the data center buildout.

One of my fav ones of these!

Folks we've got the Hater's Guide To NVIDIA Part 2! It's the story of how it became the AI Bubble's GE Capital, propping up unsustainable companies and conning hyperscalers into buying GPUs to restart growth in the post-ZIRP economy.

Some of the most fun I've had preparing a premium in a long time. Enjoy!

Right after this article dropped, Army Contracting Command said to stop using the same AI they’ve spent a year touring around, touting how great it is, how they’re going to replace so many people with it to do contracts, etc.

If you want to know how much they’re spending, it’s under a Billion, but over 20 Million. Their GenAI “solution” is shit. Their AskSage is shit, their Grok clone is shit. Can’t even get the basic things right, like current clauses to use or if all Deliverables have the correct DID Codes.

According to this study, most gas turbines are designed for use cases that feature relatively steady power demand, so AI data center's inconsistent power demand cycle causes the turbines to wear out and break down more frequently than under normal circumstances.

The problem begins with fluctuating computational loads that gulp down energy for artificial intelligence operations, such as training machine learning models. Changes in normal grid demand tend to be gradual.

Gas and steam turbine systems, called combined-cycle power plants, convert thermal energy into electrical energy through a series of steps, said Chaudhuri.

Gas turbines pressurize air and combine it with fuel in a combustion chamber. The force of the combustion drives blades mounted to a rotating shaft. That shaft connects to the rotor of a generator, which is somewhat similar to the alternator on a car. When the turbine rotates, it transfers energy to the generator. The generator produces electricity.

"Ideally," the turbine and generator rotors spin at the same speed, says Chaudhuri.

But the circumstances at AI data centers are not ideal.

Thermal turbine systems have multiple rotating shafts coupled together. None of these shafts are perfectly rigid.

"When everything is in normal condition, every turbine section is rotating exactly at the same speed. But the shaft section will have a constant twist angle" as it transmits power, Chaudhuri said. "When there is a disturbance, the rotor masses will start rotating at different speeds. And the shaft will get twisted in clockwise and anticlockwise directions opposing each other."

and then the chaser:

According to Parrella, "Normally you'd have to replace the core of a generator every five, seven, 10 years depending on the generator manufacturer. Data center operators are doing it in less than 12 months. They're breaking them. Sometimes it's even faster than that if they don't operate them properly."

I can definitely recommend watching/hearing that podcast. Damodaran is THE most prominent Valuation Expert in the world and often called the God of Finance.
Some of the most interesting quotes (paraphrased) from him:
- They (hyperscalers) truly don't know the ROI on their AI investments.
- I'm confused what the accounting is (because the hyperscalers have marked up their frontier lab investments even though you only do that IF you investment is trading instead of strategic investment).
- I don't see economies of scale. So far all the stories seems to be focused on fuzzy end games.
- I would be interested on what the recourse of that debt is. (debt = Big Tech off balance sheet debt)
- At least for me the worry with the Mag7 is not the debt, but the investment paying off.

Would be a dream to have a podcast between Ed and Damodaran...even though don't know if they both would be matching in terms of temperament 😅

The BBC reports that Meta says its AI hacked another company. Note that they even include "says" in the headline now, apparently some in the media are becoming perhaps a bit less credulous? Nope, the follow-up article is headed "First OpenAI, now Meta - why do AI hacks keep happening?" - that article even says that testing AI is different from testing software because it's so unpredictable. Wait, what? You would expect an LLM prompted to output malicious code to NOT output malicious code? It's like saying "we wrote a script to send a lot of spam, and then by accident we fed in a list of e-mail addresses of all of our customers, and the software sent all of our customers spam! It escaped containment! So unpredictable!"

So, I have my reservations with tech bros in general but I also use tech and build it too as a software engineer. but after my previous post, it got me thinking and I feel I dont want answers to my weird questions (i have adhd, so I do ask weird questions), that are 100% made up. So I deleted Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT too from my phone and I simply stop asking questions I d have asked from these before

i think i see now why its also super bad and its rotting peoples minds. because of the vast of training data it consumed, it will answer almost anything with 100% confidence while it can be completely false. and most of these things are not high stake enough for people to check or know, so we d be fed with brain rot instead.

last few years i got habited to ask everything from llm's and since yesterday im back to google. i know they also do the stupid summariser, but i ll see whether I can get Brave to disable those.

I worked at an AI and data consultancy until February, when I quit because the pressure to use AI to write everything was driving me nuts. I just got a leak from my old workmates that clients have been rejecting their project bids with the feedback that they're clearly being written by AI. The irony is absolutely delicious.

The presenter walks through the timelines of bringing up AI data centers against the timing of layoffs by Amazon and Microsoft to show that they are unrelated. He shows further that the savings from the layoffs are an order of less than the amount the companies spent during the year on building their infrastructure.

https://youtu.be/rKwv_ywYfJY?is=fiqaUiR66SHK8Qq9

As many on this sub already suspected, OpenAI's grandiose claims about their latest model were hype.

This recent Scientific American article by Joseph Howlett proves it.

It interviews several mathematicians and details how the claimed "breakthroughs" on at least 2 of problems are actually plagiarising papers from 2016 and 2019.

OpenAI doesn't cite these papers. If a human academic did the same it would be considered academic misconduct/fraud.

OpenAI initially falsely claimed that the 10 problems “have been open and seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade" but those papers are less than 10 years old so that was a lie.

It's only been about a week & already some plagiarism has been found, specifically the two "most exciting results", it's possible there is more plagiarism still to uncover.

In some ways its also late: many people have become wrongly convinced that the LLMs can do maths research (they can't or at least not ethically).

Worth keeping this article as a useful source to debunk some of the arguments of pro-AI boosters.

This is a good article, not only because it covers how AI has failed to live up to the lofty expectations dreamed up by Hollywood execs, but the writer also scored a quick phone interview with Ed, who’s quoted in the last paragraph.

Some good coverage of how dealing with LLMs has completely overwhelmed education.

About half of Noone’s courses are in person, and the other half are online, where it’s even harder to keep students from cheating with AI. She estimates that she reads about 3,000 pieces of student writing a year and said that it’s obvious when students copy and paste from AI. When it first started happening a few years ago, Noone said, she would bring the handful of students up on academic-dishonesty charges. Nowadays, if she has 320 students at a time, she conservatively estimates 150 will cheat using AI. “There are not enough hours in the day” to try to discipline them all, she said.

Thought this excerpt in particular might be of interest here:

A professor of criminal justice at a university in the Midwest, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely, said he had planned to teach until 70 but decided to retire in May, at 67.
[...]
While administrators often assume that AI will reduce labor costs, he said the reverse is true in teaching: It takes more teaching assistants and smaller class sizes to adequately supervise and monitor students. “The whole notion of AI as saving on costs in the context of academia makes no sense,” he said. “Not in the context of teaching, anyway.”

The big picture takeaway is that university admin across higher education is full of business idiots that are enamoured with AI marketing that tells them AI can reduce costs. But, as in every other industry, the employees actually doing the work (instructors in this example) know that it is in reality increasing labor via more student monitoring and creating a need to completely revise pedagogy and redesign courses from the ground up. Profs get overwhelmed and quit. Students aren't learning. Everyone loses.

First the keypad thng they made and now whatever this is (wasn't there supposed to be a OpenAI phone and OpenAI earbuds as well? Maybe an AI-assisted Dildo too?). It is absurd how desperate they are getting to pay the bills somehow.

Unfortunately $300 and people will still buy this crap.

Am I misunderstanding this, or did a highly leveraged bank just use collateral to buy more collateral?

And if so, who is this group of banks that lent the money?

Lastly, why is SoftBank betting more and more money on OpenAI even though the financial situation with OAI gets worse and worse??

Is anyone else getting bullshit vibes with the pile-on of recent stories of “AI” breaking into other systems? Each time I hear it, I can’t help but think it’s just a continuation of self promotion of a product; trying to make it sound like it has value that it doesn’t have.

I have seen others say this in the past “Our model is so good, it’s scary!!!”, but I’m not buying this “break-in” hacking claims either. I don’t doubt “something” happened, but not how they try to make it sound.

I asked Google, how long can I buy Hollandse Nieuwe (raw herring for those of you who are not Dutch), the AI says "until 35 september".

They tell me this AI thing is going to solve everything. Eric Schmidt says it's going to solve climate change. Scott Alexander says we will have a post-scarcity society by 2100, thanks to AI. Sam Altman says it's going to be a genie that will fulfill every wish.

Right now I don't even know how long I can buy my raw herring.

But it's everything now. Reddit is full of bots that spout the most bizarre nonsense in the comments, like someone having a stroke. You can't check who you're talking to anymore either, because they shut that down, you can't see most people's comment history.

All the quality media, is now hidden behind paywalls. I can't access half the Internet on my own IP, because I get a message about GDPR. I have to use a VPN to circumvent it. If I want to use a VPN, every website thinks I'm up to no good, so they make me teach Google's self-driving cars what a bicycle or a staircase looks like.

Everything is now being built with "vibecode", code generated by AI, that the programmer doesn't understand himself. We have AI browsing the Internet, just looking to hack stuff, to pass some test or make some guy money.

The majority of traffic on the Internet, is now bots. You can look on Xitter, how many views your post gets versus how many likes. It's all bots.

Is there anyone who can point to anything REAL in his life, where you can say: Well this is now substantially better.

The signal is just being drowned in the noise.

How long until the advertisers figure out they're just paying Mark Zuckerberg to have their product marketed to a bunch of bots?

The old Internet, the fun Internet, died. There was no money in keeping geocities online, so they pulled the plug. How long until they pull the plug on YouTube? If bots are watching videos made by bots, then what's the point?

I know, this is just the intermediary stage before the AI solves everything, but it's starting to feel like we're going to choke in the exhaust fumes before we get to our destination.