True believers don’t focus on short-term trends because they aren’t very positive. But short-term trends should be consistent with a long-term forecast.
Read More ›
Michael 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 ›
It continues to astonish us how easily people can be persuaded that LLMs (chatbots) can do our thinking for us
Read More ›
Are the benefits from generative AI really hundreds of times higher than those from Microsoft Office?
Read More ›
Sanity might be about ready to return to the market. Just maybe, we have reached peak hype.
Read More ›
Elon Musk tweeted the following: “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.” Yann LeCun, chief scientist at tech giant Meta, could not resist responding. Musk claims to “want a maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.” It escalated quickly, with Musk questioning what science LeCun had done in the past five years, and LeCun replying: “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?” LeCun then said: “If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not science”. So the most successful engineer over the last ten years criticizes academic Read More ›
One reason there wasn’t an emphasis on reducing hallucinations is because the problem is hard. Some argue that hallucinations are “baked into” AI chatbots.
Read More ›
No matter how many words they train on and no matter how many human trainers correct their mistakes, they will continue to lack the critical thinking skills.
Read More ›
Too many people are extrapolating from the systems that are purportedly automated, even though they aren’t yet working properly.
Read More ›
Ask someone how big AI will be, and the answer is likely huge. But how big is huge? Why does this matter? Because big forecasts encourage big investments, trials, and purchases. After big consulting companies predicted eight years ago that AI would have economic gains of about $15 trillion by 2030, many countries and companies felt the need to pay for their own reports from those same consultants. Of course, those consultants said that those countries could experience rapid productivity gains and those companies could experience rising profits if they implemented AI in the right way, which was of course under the guidance of the consulting companies! Eight years later and few of their predictions have come true. But their Read More ›
The hallucinations are symptomatic of generative AI models’ core problem: they can’t identify output problems because they know nothing about the real world.
Read More ›
Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize didn’t prove that universities don’t fund good ideas. It merely reminded us that they rarely do.
Read More ›
I don’t believe that economists intended to create a monster when they coined the term “general purpose technology”, but they have.
Read More ›
Many do not think of these small ideas, most of them highly technical, that enabled the improvements in chips, crop yields and new drugs.
Read More ›
LLMs often remind us of clueless students who answer essay questions by writing everything they think is relevant, hoping the right answer is in there somewhere
Read More ›
Evidence that existing ideas aren’t so good can be seen in the big startup losses, slow diffusion of technology, and slow rate of productivity improvement.
Read More ›
If we look at the papers presented at the conference, we can’t find evidence that AI is or will improve productivity.
Read More ›
The biggest lesson from giving university exams to ChatGPT is that students should be tested in other ways.
Read More ›
AI will be much harder to implement than previous information technologies.
Read More ›
Science has enriched our lives enormously. Publicity stunts like this superconductor fiasco will not help.
Read More ›