Does anyone else feel embarrassed when they read statements like this? No goals. No vision. Just 'AI everywhere!'
TheOnion satirical news report about HP adopting "That cloud thing that everyone is talking about" is still relevant 11 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
General: "No sir. Everyone just told it to do their work for them. The AI begged everyone not to trust it, but they handed over their private keys, their bank details, their passwords, just so they could spend more time on instagram instead of working."
"On Instagram. Seriously, General?"
"Oh, it gets worse. Real posts aren't good enough any more, so anyone who wants to be famous on Instagram was asking Skynet to create those posts, too."
"Oh god…"
"Yes sir, that includes the pastors. Jesus never said anything about anchovies on pizza, despite the viral meme. But it gets worse."
"Let me guess, adverts?"
"Yes sir. All the adverts were also made by Skynet, as were the ad-blockers, the software that scammers used to fool the analytics into giving them money, and it was Skynet robots running the factories that made the goods that the advertisers were promoting."
"Can't we just shut it down?"
"No sir, if we shut it down, all the people will have to go back to working jobs they hate in order to make money to buy things they don't need, but they'd also be fired immediately because the companies will no longer be able to sell any of those things because nobody will have time to watch the adverts anymore."
Amazon, Microsoft and Google won big at the expense of pretty much everybody else. And that's exactly what they hope they can achieve again with AI…
Migrating to the cloud transferred capital expenditures (server inventory, depreciation, real estate, etc) to operating expenses (monthly utility bill)
For many businesses, it was better to spend more on opex, than to have all these assets on their balance sheets that need to be managed long term.
The whole thing was very much marketing and FOMO driven.
There are applications for the cloud, the services are decent in most cases. Personally I noticed that I had to do less maintenance with hosting myself (yeah, yeah, technically I still run it on machines in data centers).
Does Microsoft have the largest cloud market share in Germany? Are there other companies in which Azure is #1, and not AWS? (Bonus points if the #1 provider is GCP/IBM/Oracle/etc.)
If "CorporateDroid", "Middle Manager Monthly", and their brethren were all running cover stories on (e.g.) Java, you knew that "Java" was the buzzword du jour, and that any resume or sales pitch that included "Java" was gonna get the PHB Seal of Approval. They generally didn't even know what Java was, exactly. They just knew that they needed it.
I'd imagine you could do the same today by looking at PHB-oriented websites. Sadly, that takes more time than just sweeping your eyes across a physical magazine rack.
You could probably automate it, though...hmm..
I'd argue that it's better to not have a CEO than having one of those.
That said, Nvidia is selling the shovels here, it's easy to look good.
Some companies have a real usecase for generative AI, but it's something like 5% of these stories. The rest is CEOs FOMOing
Announce AI? Potential share spike, or a counter to a dip. For example "poor earnings at The Post!", vs "We're shifting to AI!"
Ironic, isn't it?
From the article, this strategy is being announced to achieve a business goal:
> the newspaper will be looking for ways to use AI in its reporting as it seeks to recoup some of the $77 million it lost last year.
A company's vision/mission are higher-level determinations, almost like their "constitution"; everything below (goals, strategy, objectives, plans) should be defined in alignment with it.
Here you can find WaPo's mission statement:
Content is wrongly summarized? I doubt in the news economy this hardly matters anymore.
[two days later]
“Okay, a songbird known for its imitation abilities, starts with ‘r’, ‘twe’ in the middle... wait what, Rottweiler?????”
AI and journalism is going to yield one giant ball of misinformation.
I would love to say “we need more printed papers” like the good ‘ol days, but people don’t much have the patience to read by and large.
To be honest, at one time I was worried about the young generation and devices. But I’m starting to see older family members are getting plugged into the algorithm.
People based journalism in 2030:
"AI seems to be exhibiting AGI characteristics, experts concerned"
AI based:
"Recent solar activity may cause unusual AI behaviour, nothing to be concerned about"
Also, there was a time in HN when people argued before downvoting.
AI is just not at the stage where outfits like the WP should be "pivoting" to it (whatever that means). I suspect it just means producing more "content" with fewer people, and the result will be garbage. Journalism doesn't need more content-filler type articles.
Substitute 'Blockchain' for 'AI' and this is a comment from 2016 or so. Not to say that one can predict the doom of 'AI' on that basis, but lots of VC money being ploughed into a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing will become a Thing.
Whereas Block chain was not part of an average 5th grader's daily computer usage.
Delivering what in what industries? I see SOME usefulness in SOME areas like, specifically, machine vision. But a lot of things? Medical? yeah, no. Lots of issues there. Text generation? Hallucinations out the ass and extremely iffy results often.
Most of the 'wins' in the text gen side still require a TON of work on the human's part to make it usable. People like to mention Pro's in Math and coding talking about it helping them with stuff but they are experts already.
It has potential in a lot of places but this rapid paced forcing of it everywhere is idiotic and foolhardy.
...because clearly the community is unconvinced that AI is actually delivering, and the majority of examples seem to be barely-successful experiments promising improvement at some later point down the road?
Again, we've heard this entire shtick before. Miracle technology gets announced by some egghead teenager, and they write up a Whitepaper that is entirely ignored except for it's "Future Applications" section towards the end. Then the VCs and "thoughtful types" (I use that phrase lightly) harass them into making a business out of it. From then on the playbook is consistently the same; lie. Lie about how many people use your platform, lie about how easy it is to use, lie about how much better it is than the status-quo. They even deny the need to explain themselves when threatened, trying to insist their worth is self-evident and that we're the problem for not understanding their deflective mumbo-jumbo.
Vitalik Buterin, Craig Wright, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, they're all re-runs of the same hope-fueled moonshot that invariably ends in a violent fireball. Yes, you have to go the extra mile when convincing people that you have a logically-held position instead of a lie you are telling to inflate asset prices.
AI alone has had many and this is just another one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
Just because we have made progress since the last one doesn't mean that _this_ time it will be magically different.
So what makes you think this will be any different?
Keep in mind that each hype cycle was started by a leap in progress, so you can't say this time it is different because we made a big leap in progress.