Technology

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.

Same with all cryptocurrencies having a "white paper", as if it was anything other than marketing crap formatted like a scientific paper.

Broken clock etc.

It's costing them money, and they're not sure they're going to get it back.

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 stuff they're calling ai now is just predictive text algorithms. I really can't wait to stop hearing about this because it is all artificial with no intelligence.

Funny you should mention that McKinsey published a paper a few months back concluding that GenAI will take over most of the jobs in America because it was good at doing what McKinsey Associates do. Missed by the authors is that the job of a McKinsey associate is to confidently spout nonsense all day long and that's actually exactly what chatgpt is programmed to do.

I mean, ask pretty much anyone familiar with the workings of AI who doesn't have a vested interest, and they'll say the same thing. Goldman is right.

I'd also say that it does have applications, but it's going to take a moment for all the bullshit artists to move on to the next thing so the grown-ups can work. It's a bit like graphene research circa-2011, although it's way more proven than graphene ever was.

They might also say that the moment it does work reliably we should be scared, although it's fair to say there's many experts who take the obvious stance.

It's a gold rush and NVIDIA is selling the shovels