onfocus

Silicon Valley billionaires claim they are building a godlike “superintelligence” that will save—or destroy—humanity. But is this apocalyptic storyline a massive marketing scheme to seize natural resources and consolidate power?

Yes. This is a great interview with Timnit Gebru that helps deflate the AI doomerism that doubles as IPO hype. Just hearing a bit of the history of the way the current AI hype came to be helps cut through the illusion.

As part of last night’s shocking blue tsunami, voters selected candidates with tough policies on data centers at all levels of government, in a clear rebuke to the industry’s buildout in states across the country. Almost a quarter of all voters told NBC News that data centers were “crucial” to their vote, while nearly two-thirds said it was either a major or minor factor.

This happens when you don't even try to work with communities and try to force them to do things against their interests.

It is the plagiarism machine being used for plagiarism, but also it is random people using AI to take control back over devices whose proprietary software was used to arbitrarily lock away basic functionality, to add advertisements, surveillance, and bloat to devices that probably shouldn’t have them, or whose functionality was bricked altogether. 

It makes me wonder how long this is going to be allowed. I would think that plagiarizing software was not in the plan and I would expect some decompiling controls to be added to the centralized models soon.

Update 11/10: Yup. Piracy for me not for thee.

Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions. 

These companies have gone rogue and don’t feel a responsibility to follow laws. I wish we had a government willing to enforce the laws we already have.

Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or “randomly” selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space – boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants – to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects.

There's a secret underground of AI skeptics and they can't speak up without losing their jobs because the culture is all-in.

Literally a couple months ago Marc Andreessen was on Joe Rogan talking about how these dumb young progressive kids support “socialism” even though “it never works.” Meanwhile, Andreessen was just appointed by Trump to some government policy board. As Trump literally nationalizes parts of the AI industry that Andreessen insisted the prior administration was going to destroy through its woke anti-capitalist policies.

I know it's tired to point out Republican hypocrisy because that's their happy place, but come on. The supposed party of small government is only concerned about the size when the benefits of government are going to people who aren't already wealthy.

These are words that cast systems as doing the same work as people in various roles, and serve to hide all of the ways in which such automation falls short of what is needed all the while devaluing the actual work that people do and relationships that we form. Calling systems tutor or co-creator are overclaims that describe what a developer might wish they could develop—for those who want to replace people in these roles.

For this category, our recommendation is to use language that describes algorithms as tools (or products) that people use, rather than as human-like entities, and more clearly indicates system functionality while also not telegraphing a plan to replace people.

Nice discussion of ways to talk about tools that more accurately describes how they work.

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.”

I assume the people who pushed for layoffs have been promoted and given bonuses. We never hear that side of the story.

This sort of journalism doesn't really care about real consumers, labor, technology, or even whether the technology even works. Its focus is propping up extraction class narratives surrounding unchecked wealth accumulation. It's lazy fanfiction for MBAs who want to pretend to be informed without the pesky weight of ethical or even logistical realities.

But the scam is so lucrative!

The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."

CEO brain in a nutshell.

Computers don’t have opinions.

No, Siri isn’t lying here. Apple is lying. Just like all other unethical corporations in the Big AI space, Apple has created a sycophantic chatbot which glazes users, providing an utterly false impression that there’s any value whatsoever to the assessment the chatbot has made. There is none. It is a valueless exchange.

I thought Apple was making good decisions to keep AI features out of its core ecosystem but they’re hopping on the slop train to garbage town.

Tridgell has the right to run the rsync project his way, and nobody can tell him not to. But also, other people do have the right to say: this broke our stuff, it’ll keep breaking our stuff ’cos it’s vibe slop now, and so we’re moving, and everything about all this sucks.

Not rsync! Some things you just expect to work. Someone check on the curl guy!