AI Snake Oil Hisses at AI

August 23, 2024

This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.

Enthusiasm for certain types of novel software or gadgets rises and falls. The Microsoft marketing play with OpenAI marked the beginning of the smart software hype derby. Google got the message and flipped into Red Alert mode. Now about 20 months after Microsoft’s announcement about its AI tie up with Sam AI-Man, we have Google’s new combo: AI in a mobile phone. Bam! Job done. Slam dunk.

Thanks, MSFT Copilot. On top of the IPv6 issue? Oh, too bad.

I wonder if the Googlers were thinking along the same logical lines at the authors of “AI Companies Are Pivoting from Creating Gods to Building Products. Good.”

The snake oil? Dripping. Here’s a passage from the article I noted:

AI companies are collectively planning to spend a trillion dollars on hardware and data centers, but there’s been relatively little to show for it so far.

A trillion? That’s a decent number. Sam AI-Man wants more, but the scale is helpful, particularly when most numbers are mere billions in the zoom zoom world of smart software.

The most important item in the write up, in my opinion, is the list of five “challenges.” The article focuses on consumer AI. A couple of these apply to the enterprise sector as well. Let’s look at the five “challenges.” These are and, keep in mind, I a paraphrasing as dinobabies often do:

Cost. In terms of consumers, one must consider making Hamster Kombat smart. (This is a Telegram dApp.) My team informed me that this little gem has 35 million users, and it is still growing. Imagine the computational cost to infuse each and every Hamster Kombat “game” player with AI goodness. But it’s a game and a distributed one at that, one might say. Someone has to pay for these cycles. And Hamster Kombat is not on the radar of most consumers’ radar. Telegram has about 950 million users, so 35 million users comes from that pool. What are the costs of AI infused games outside of a walled garden. And the hardware? And the optimization engineering? And the fooling around with ad deals? Costs are not a hurdle. Costs might be a Grand Canyon-scale leap into a financial mud bank.
Reliability. Immature systems and methods, training content issues (real and synthetic), and the fancy math which uses a lot of probability procedures guarantees some interesting outputs.
Privacy. The consumer or user facing services are immature. Developers want to get something to most work in a good enough manner. Then security may be discussed. But on to the next feature. As a result, I am not sure if anyone has a decent grasp of the security issues which smart software might pose. Look at Microsoft. It’s been around almost half a century, and I learn about new security problems every day. Is smart software different?
Safety and security. This is a concomitant to privacy. Good luck knowing what the systems do or do not do.
User interface. I am a dinobaby. The interfaces are pale, low contrast, and change depending on what a user clicks. I like stability. Smart software simply does not comprehend that word.

Good points. My view is that the obstacle to surmount is money. I am not sure that the big outfits anticipated the costs of their sally into the hallucinating world of AI. And what are those costs, pray tell. Here’s are selected items the financial managers at the Big Dogs are pondering along with the wording of their updated LinkedIn profile:

Litigation. Remarks by some icons of the high technology sector have done little to assuage the feelings of those whose content was used without permission or compensation. Some, some people. A few Big Dogs are paying cash to scrape.
Power. Yep, electricity, as EV owners know, is not really free.
Water, Yep, modern machines produce heat if what I learned in physics was actual factual.
People (until they can be replaced by a machine that does not require health care or engage in signing petitions).
Data and indexing. Yep, still around and expensive.
License fees. They are comin’ round the mountain of legal filings.
Meals, travel and lodging. Leadership will be testifying, probably a lot.
PR advisors and crisis consultants. See the first bullet, Litigation.

However, slowly but surely some commercial sectors are using smart software. There is an AI law firm. There are dermatologists letting AI determine what to cut, freeze, or ignore. And there are college professors using AI to help them do “original” work and create peer-review fodder.

There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, right?

Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2024

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Cost, Financial, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.