Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper
Goldman Sachs researchers also say that
It’s not a research paper; it’s a report. They’re not researchers; they’re analysts at a bank. This may seem like a nit-pick, but journalists need to (re-)learn to carefully distinguish between the thing that scientists do and corporate R&D, even though we sometimes use the word “research” for both. The AI hype in particular has been absolutely terrible for this. Companies have learned that putting out AI “research” that’s just them poking at their own product but dressed up in a science-lookin’ paper leads to an avalanche of free press from lazy credulous morons gorging themselves on the hype. I’ve written about this problem a lot. For example, in this post, which is about how Google wrote a so-called paper about how their LLM does compared to doctors, only for the press to uncritically repeat (and embellish on) the results all over the internet. Had anyone in the press actually fucking bothered to read the paper critically, they would’ve noticed that it’s actually junk science.
A big part of the problem – and this is not a new issue, goes back decades – is that a lot of terms in AI-land don’t correspond to concrete capabilities, so it’s easy to claim that you do X when X is generally-perceived to be a much-more-sophisticated thing than what you’re actually doing, even if your thing technically qualifies as X by some definition.
None of this in any way conflicts with my position that AI has tremendous potential. But if people are investing money without having a solid understanding of what they’re investing in, there are going to be people out there misrepresenting their product.
Just like how it’s no coincidence that they change the definition of AI to AGI.
Same with all cryptocurrencies having a “white paper”, as if it was anything other than marketing crap formatted like a scientific paper.
It started as actual unpublished technical descriptions of underlying technology.
Go-dAmn Sachs is wrong often, but in this I think they’re on point. Learned from the Crypto insanity.
It’s costing them money, and they’re not sure they’re going to get it back.
saying the quiet part out loud… big tech won’t like that.
I’ve found like, 4 tasks that are really helped with by AI, and I don’t have the faintest idea how you could monetize any of them beyond “Subscribe to chatgpt”
At my previous job their was a role where you just called insurance companies and asked them incredibly basic questions about what they planned to do for a patient with diagnosis X and plan Y. This information should be searchable in a document with a single correct answer, but insurance companies are too scummy for that to be reliable.
In 2021 we started using a robot that sounded like a human to call instead. It could handle the ~80%+ of calls that don’t use any critical thinking. At a guess, that’s maybe 5-10% of our division’s workforce that wasn’t needed anymore.
With the amount of jobs like this that are 100% bullshit, I’m sure there are plenty of other cases where businesses can save money by buying an automated bullshit generator, instead of hiring a breathing bullshit generator.
The problem is that 20% failure rate has no validation and you are 100% liable for the failures of an AI you’re using as a customer support agent, which can end up costing you a ton and killing your reputation. The unfixable problem is that an AI solution takes a ton of effort to validate, way more than just double checking a human answer.
I feel like customer support is one place where AI may actually be used going forward because companies don’t really care if their customers get support. The only wrinkle is that if companies get held to promises the AI makes (there’s that Canada Air incident from last year where the AI offered a refund and the company tried to walk it back).
It’s not a 20% failure rate when the chatbot routes calls to a human agent whenever it’s more than x% unsure about what to say.
AI solutions still get the 80% “bottom of the barrel” menial tasks perfectly well.
With streaming services they’re proving it’s not viable to run a resource hog of a service with a measly monthly subscription.
With social media they’re proving it’s not viable to run a resource hog of a service for free, even with advertisement.
So naturally the best plan to monetize AI is to run a resource hog of a service with a measly monthly subscription and a free version without advertisements. /s
In other news: water is wet and bears shit in the woods
Sometimes that bear shits in my yard. And then the little asshole trashes my garden. I might buy a tag and shoot the son of a bitch this fall if he keeps it up…
Man I love it when billionaire assholes finally figure out what the rest of the world has been saying since the beginning.
I mean, the rest of the world has been hyping AI since the start, no? Most companies are not run by billionaires.
