This is happening at my company. They gave us 6 months to build an AI-tool to replace a non-AI tool that has been very well built and tested for 6 years, and works perfectly well. The AI tool has some very amazing features, but it could never replace the good old tool.
The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.
The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.
AI in a nutshell.
A shame, because the underlying technology - with time and patience and less of an eye towards short term profits - could be very useful in sifting large amounts of disorganized information. But what we got was so far removed from what anyone asked for.
I can see AI as a tool in some contexts, doing some specific tasks better than an unassisted person.
But as a replacement for people, AI is a dud. I would rather be alone than have a gf AI. And yes I am taking trauma and personal+cultural baggage into account. LLM is also a product of our culture for the most part, so will have our baggage anyway. But at least in principle it could be trained to not have certain kinds of baggage, and still, I would rather deal with a person save for the simplest and lowest stake interactions.
If we want better people, we need to enfranchise them and remove most paywalls from the world. Right now the world instead of being inviting is bristling with physical, cultural, and virtual fences, saying to us, “you don’t belong and aren’t welcome in 99.99% of the space, and the other 0.01% will cost you.” Housing for now is only a privelege. In a world like that it’s a miracle the people are as decent as they are. If we want better people we have to delibarately, on purpose, choose broadbased human flourishing as a policy objective, and be ruthless to any enemies of said objective. No amnesty for the billionaires and wannabe billionaires. Instead they are trying to shove down our throats AI/LLMs and virtual worlds as replacements for an actually decent and inviting world.
Capitalism strikes again! All the good generative AI could and does sometimes do but some capitalist made an email sound less like a soulless, corporate turd and it was to the moon with whatever state the tech was at! Rich people have no creativity, imagination, or understanding of the tech. They’re always looking for ways to remove labor costs and make those phat stacks! We could have used generative AI to handle a lot of the shitty, mundane stuff at a faster rate, but no they chose to replace the artists’ creations so they didn’t have to pay for the cost of labor.
Management was planning implementing Google Vertex (AI search platform), but since we already have all our data in ElasticSearch and it supports vectors, I said why not try to implement it myself. With integrated GPU and a very small model, I could create a working POC and it is gonna be - not overexaggerating - 50 times cheaper.
This is happening at my company. They gave us 6 months to build an AI-tool to replace a non-AI tool that has been very well built and tested for 6 years, and works perfectly well. The AI tool has some very amazing features, but it could never replace the good old tool.
The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.
AI in a nutshell.
A shame, because the underlying technology - with time and patience and less of an eye towards short term profits - could be very useful in sifting large amounts of disorganized information. But what we got was so far removed from what anyone asked for.
As someone whose had to analyze probably a billion lines of log files in my career, having an AI to do at least some sifting would be pretty great.
Or one that watches a Grafana dashboard and figures out some obscure, long term pattern I can’t see that’s causing an annoying problem.
A narrow purpose AI trained to recognize tumor growths early is the kind of AI that makes sense to me.
As an enhancement to an existing suite of diagnostic tools, certainly.
Not as a stand in for an oncology department, though.
As an assist to an actual oncologist, only.
I can see AI as a tool in some contexts, doing some specific tasks better than an unassisted person.
But as a replacement for people, AI is a dud. I would rather be alone than have a gf AI. And yes I am taking trauma and personal+cultural baggage into account. LLM is also a product of our culture for the most part, so will have our baggage anyway. But at least in principle it could be trained to not have certain kinds of baggage, and still, I would rather deal with a person save for the simplest and lowest stake interactions.
If we want better people, we need to enfranchise them and remove most paywalls from the world. Right now the world instead of being inviting is bristling with physical, cultural, and virtual fences, saying to us, “you don’t belong and aren’t welcome in 99.99% of the space, and the other 0.01% will cost you.” Housing for now is only a privelege. In a world like that it’s a miracle the people are as decent as they are. If we want better people we have to delibarately, on purpose, choose broadbased human flourishing as a policy objective, and be ruthless to any enemies of said objective. No amnesty for the billionaires and wannabe billionaires. Instead they are trying to shove down our throats AI/LLMs and virtual worlds as replacements for an actually decent and inviting world.
Capitalism strikes again! All the good generative AI could and does sometimes do but some capitalist made an email sound less like a soulless, corporate turd and it was to the moon with whatever state the tech was at! Rich people have no creativity, imagination, or understanding of the tech. They’re always looking for ways to remove labor costs and make those phat stacks! We could have used generative AI to handle a lot of the shitty, mundane stuff at a faster rate, but no they chose to replace the artists’ creations so they didn’t have to pay for the cost of labor.
Management was planning implementing Google Vertex (AI search platform), but since we already have all our data in ElasticSearch and it supports vectors, I said why not try to implement it myself. With integrated GPU and a very small model, I could create a working POC and it is gonna be - not overexaggerating - 50 times cheaper.
Don’t tell management. Start a new company then sell them what you made.