Jeffrey Funk
Why OpenAI Will Collapse: LLMs Are Not Economical
If a model is not refreshed every few months, it quickly turns from a helpful assistant into a debt generation machine with outdated knowledge
AI Is a Long Way From Replacing Software Coders
Despite C-suite claims, they are not likely to take our jobs any time soon because they do not understand what words mean and how words relate to the physical world
AI in Education: Is the System Being Gamed — or the Student?
AI makes it easier to game the system, but many users are also being gamed
Is Microsoft’s New AI System Better Than Doctors? Probably Not.
A critic notes that Microsoft’s AI system didn’t solve the problems, but merely repeated the solutions that it was trained on
The Job Market is Telling Us Something About AI and Jobs…
But it’s not telling us the same things as the AI hypesters are telling us
AI Productivity Hype: The New “Cargo Cult Science”?
Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term to describe imaginary scenarios for success based on simple misunderstanding of realities
AI’s Contradictory Impact on Productivity: Squeezing a Balloon
AI appears to give support workers a big revolution in productivity. But it is somewhat like a child squeezing a balloon; the air pushes out someplace else
University Science War: Ideas vs “Dollars per Net Square Footage”
Katalin Karikó, obscure and mistreated at the University of Pennsylvania, won the Nobel Prize. Shouldn’t we have some questions?
Today’s Startups Are Doing Much Worse Than Those of the Past
The percentage of startups profitable at IPO time has steadily declined since the 1980s and most valuable ones take longer to become profitable
Why LLMs Are Not Boosting Productivity
If LLMs were as reliably useful as economist Tyler Cowen alleges, businesses would be using them to generate profits faster than LLMs generate text. They aren’t.
Does Everyone Think We Should Exaggerate Scientific Advances?
Many “breakthroughs” reported breathlessly in media are nowhere close to resulting in usable products or services
Unequal Profits: Why AI Needs Successful Applications
Readers may be surprised to learn that these widely touted AI advances are not making their developers much money
Do High AI Startup Valuations Mean Great Success, or Desperation?
The answer is important but is not as clear as we might think. First, let's look at the backgroundConsider a recent news report: “Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a deal that would value it at $60 billion, more than triple its valuation from a year ago” says the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic’s last venture capital (VC) funding round, less than two months ago, raised $2 billion, bringing its total funding to $9.6 billion. OpenAI had raised $6.6 billion, last October just a year after it raised $10 billion from Microsoft the previous year and just months after it also raised funds on the debt and secondary markets. So that $6.6 billion round was the largest VC funding round ever, a little larger than the $6 billion that Elon Musk’s generative AI startup, xAI, raised in 2023. Read More ›
The Promise of Artificial General Intelligence is Evaporating
Revenue from corporate adoption of AI continues to disappoint and, so far, pales in comparison to the revenue that sustained the dot-com bubble — until it didn’t
AI Adoption is Slowing Amidst the “Biggest Gamble in Business History”
Workers and companies aren't buying the AI hype
AI Pessimists vs True Believers: A Deepening Divide
There is a growing divide about AI even among AI experts but many of them like polarizing content, just as the consumers of political information do
No, the AI Bubble is Nothing Like the Dotcom Bubble
Don't listen to the tech bros on this oneMichael Dell, founder of Dell Computers, said recently on LinkedIn: “The skepticism around AI’s ROI today feels a lot like the doubts people had about the internet in its early days. Back then, no one could fully grasp how much the web would transform our lives, and now AI is on the same path. Yes, it might be tough to measure immediate returns, but if history teaches us anything, it’s that game-changing technologies take time to show their true impact. By embracing AI, we’re not just adopting a tool — we’re investing in a future where human potential gets a major boost, and new opportunities are unlocked. Just like the internet became the foundation of our digital world, AI has Read More ›
A Sloppy “AI Scientist” Could Make the Science Crisis Much Worse
A research team claims to have developed the AI Scientist that “generates novel research ideas, writes code, executes experiments ...” Really?