China Smart, US Dumb: Twisting the LLM Daozi
May 12, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zellenials.
That hard-hitting technology information service Venture Beat published an interesting article. Its title is “Alibaba ZeroSearch Lets AI Learn to Google Itself — Slashing Training Costs by 88 Percent.” The main point of the write up, in my opinion, is that Chinese engineers have done something really “smart.” The knife at the throat of US smart software companies is cost. The money fires will flame out unless more dollars are dumped into the innovation furnaces of smart software.
The Venture Beat story makes the point that “could dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of training AI systems to search for information, eliminating the need for expensive commercial search engine APIs altogether.”
Oh, oh.
This is smart. Buring cash in pursuit of a fractional improvement is dumb, well, actually, stupid, if the write up’s inforamtion is accurate.
The Venture Beat story says:
The technique, called “ZeroSearch,” allows large language models (LLMs) to develop advanced search capabilities through a simulation approach rather than interacting with real search engines during the training process. This innovation could save companies significant API expenses while offering better control over how AI systems learn to retrieve information.
Is this a Snorkel variant hot from Stanford AI lab?
The write up does not delve into the synthetic data short cut to smart software. After some mumbo jumbo, the write up points out the meat of the “innovation”:
The cost savings are substantial. According to the researchers’ analysis, training with approximately 64,000 search queries using Google Search via SerpAPI would cost about $586.70, while using a 14B-parameter simulation LLM on four A100 GPUs costs only $70.80 — an 88% reduction.
Imagine. A dollar in cost becomes $0.12. If accurate, what should a savvy investor do? Pump money into an outfit like OpenAI or the Xai- type entity, or think harder about the China-smart solution?
Venture Beat explains the implication of the alleged cost savings:
The impact could be substantial for the AI industry.
No kidding?
The Venture Beat analysts add this observation:
The irony is clear: in teaching AI to search without search engines, Alibaba may have created a technology that makes traditional search engines less necessary for AI development. As these systems become more self-sufficient, the technology landscape could look very different in just a few years.
Yep, irony. Free transformer technology. Free Snorkle technology. Free kinetic into the core of the LLM money furnace.
If true, the implications are easy to outline. If bogus, the China Smart, US Dumb trope still captured ink and will be embedded in some smart software’s increasingly frequent hallucinatory outputs. At which point, the China Smart, US Dumb information gains traction and becomes “fact” to some.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2025
Google, Its AI Search, and Web Site Traffic
May 12, 2025
No AI. Just a dinobaby sharing an observation about younger managers and their innocence.
I read “Google’s AI Search Switch Leaves Indie Websites Unmoored.” I think this is a Gen Y way of saying, “No traffic for you, bozos.” Of course, as a dinobaby, I am probably wrong.
Let’s look at the write up. It says:
many publishers said they either need to shut down or revamp their distribution strategy. Experts this effort could ultimately reduce the quality of information Google can access for its search results and AI answers.
Okay, but this is just one way to look at Google’s delicious decision.
May I share some of my personal thoughts about what this traffic downshift means for those blue-chip consultant Googlers in charge:
First, in the good old days before the decline began in 2006, Google indexed bluebirds (sites that had to be checked for new content or “deltas” on an accelerated heart beat. Examples were whitehouse.gov (no, not the whitehouse.com porn site). Then there were sparrows. These plentiful Web sites could be checked on a relaxed schedule. I mean how often do you visit the US government’s National Railway Retirement Web site if it still is maintained and online? Yep, the correct answer is, “Never.” There there were canaries. These were sites which might signal a surge in popularity. They were checked on a heart beat that ensured the Google wouldn’t miss a trend and fail to sell advertising to those lucky ad buyers.
So, bluebirds, canaries, and sparrows.
This shift means that Google can reduce costs by focusing on bluebirds and canaries. The sparrows — the site operated by someone’s grandmother to sell home made quilts — won’t get traffic unless the site operator buys advertising. It’s pay to play. If a site is not in the Google index, it just may not exist. Sure there are alternative Web search systems, but none, as far as I know, are close to the scope of the “old” Google in 2006.
Second, by dropping sparrows or pinging them once in a blue moon will reduce the costs of crawling, indexing, and doing the behind-the-scenes work that consumes Google cash at an astonishing rate. Therefore, the myth of indexing the “Web” is going to persist, but the content of the index is not going to be “fresh.” This is the concept that some sites like whitehouse.gov have important information that must be in search results. Non-priority sites just disappear or fade. Eventually the users won’t know something is missing, which is assisted by the decline in education for some Google users. The top one percent knows bad or missing information. The other 99 percent? Well, good luck.
Third, the change means that publishers will have some options. [a] They can block Google’s spider and chase the options. How’s Yandex.ru sound? [b] They can buy advertising and move forward. I suggest these publishers ask a Google advertising representative what the minimum spend is to get traffic. [c] Publishers can join together and try to come up with a joint effort to resist the increasingly aggressive business actions of Google. Do you have a Google button on your remote? Well, you will. [d] Be innovative. Yeah, no comment.
Net net: This item about the impact of AI Overviews is important. Just consider what Google gains and the pickle publishers and other Web sites now find themselves enjoying.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2025
Microsoft AI: Little Numbers and Mucho Marketing
May 10, 2025
No AI. Just a dinobaby who gets revved up with buzzwords and baloney.
I am confused. The big AI outfits have spent and are spending big bucks on [a] marketing, [b] data centers, [c] marketing, [d] chips, [e] reorganizations, and [f] marketing. I think I have the main cost centers, but I may have missed one. Yeah, I did. Marketing.
Has the AI super machine run into some problems? Thanks, MidJourney, you were online today unlike OpenAI.
What is AI doing? It is definitely selling consulting services. Some wizards are using it to summarize documents because that takes a human time to do. You know: Reading, taking notes, then capturing the juicy bits. Let AI do that. And customer support? Yes, much cheaper some say than paying humans to talk to a mere customer.
Imagine my surprise when I read “Microsoft’s Big AI Hire Can’t Match OpenAI.” Microsoft’s AI leader among AI leaders, according to the write up, “hasn’t delivered the turnaround he was hired to bring.” Microsoft caught the Google by surprise a couple of years ago, caused a Googley Code Red or Yellow or whatever, and helped launch the “AI is the next big thing innovators have been waiting for.”
The write up asserts:
At Microsoft’s annual executive huddle last month, the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT’s growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI’s iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft’s best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling.
Keep in mind that Google suggested it had 1.5 billion users of its Gemini service, and (I think) Google implied that its AI is the quantumly supreme smart software. I may have that wrong and Google’s approach just wins chess, creates new drugs, and suggests that one can glue cheese on pizza. I may have these achievements confused, but I am an 80 year old dinobaby and easily confused these days.
The write up also contains some information I found a bit troubling; to wit:
And at this point, Microsoft is just not in the running to build a model that can compete with the best from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and even xAI. The projects that people have mentioned to me feel incremental, as opposed to leapfrogging the competition.
One can argue that Microsoft does not have to be in the big leagues. The company usually takes three or more releases to get a feature working. (How about those printers that don’t work?) The number of Softie software users is big. Put the new functionality in a release and — bingo! — market leadership. That SharePoint is a wonderful content management system. Just ask some of the security team in the Israeli military struggling with a “squadron” fumble.
Several observations:
- Microsoft’s dialing back some data center action may be a response to the under performance of its AI is the future push. If not, then maybe Microsoft has just pulled a Bob or a Clippy?
- I am not sure that the payoffs for other AI leaders’ investments are going to grab the brass ring or produce a winning lottery ticket. So many people desperately want AI to deliver dump trucks of gold dust to their cubicles that the neediness is palpable. AI is — it must be — the next big thing.
- Users are finding that for some use cases, AI is definitely a winner. College students use it to make more free time for hanging out and using TikTok-type services. Law firms find that AI is good enough to track down obscure cases that can be used in court as long as a human who knows the legal landscape checks the references before handing them over to a judge who can use an ATM machine and a mobile phone for voice calls. For many applications, the hallucination issue looms large.
- China’s free smart software models work reasonably well and have ignited such diverse applications as automated pig butchering and proving that cheaper CPUs and GPUs work in a “good enough” way just for less money.
I don’t want to pick on Microsoft, but I want to ask a question, “Is this the first of the big technology companies hungry and thirsty for the next big thing starting to find out that AI may not deliver?”
Stephen E Arnold, May 13, 2025
Apple and Google Relationship: Starting to Fray?
May 8, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zellenials.
I spotted a reference to an Apple manager going out on a limb of the old, Granny Smith tree. At the end of the limb, the Apple guru allegedly suggested that the Google search ain’t what it used to be. Whether true or not, Apple pays the Google lots of money to be the really but formerly wonderful Web search system for the iPhone and Safari “experience.”
That assertion of decline touched a nerve at the Google. I noted this statement in the Google blog. I am not sure which one because Google has many pages of smarmy talk. I am a dinobaby and easily confused. Here’s that what Google document with the SEO friendly title “Here’s Our Statement on This Morning’s Press Reports about Search Traffic” says:
We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens. We’re excited to continue this innovation and look forward to sharing more at Google I/O.
Several observations:
- I love the royal “we”. I think that the Googlers who are nervous about search include the cast of the Sundar & Prabhakar Comedy Act. Search means ads. Ads mean money. Money means Wall Street. Therefore, a decline in search makes the Wall Street types jumpy, twitchy, and grumpy. Do not suggest traffic declines when controlling the costs of the search plumbing are becoming quite interesting for the Googley bean counters.
- Apple device users are searching Google a lot. I believe it. Monopolies like to have captives who don’t know that there are now alternatives to the somewhat uninspiring version of Jon Kleinberg’s CLEVER inventions spiced with some Fancy Dan weighting. These “weights” are really useful for boosting I believe.
- The leap to user satisfaction with Google search is unsupported by audited data. Those happy faces don’t convey why millions of people are using ChatGPT or why people complain that Google search results are mostly advertising. Oh, well, when one is a monopoly controlling what’s presented to users within the content of big spending advertisers, reality is what the company chooses to present.
- The Google is excited about its convention. Will it be similar to the old network marketing conventions or more like the cheerleading at Telegram’s Gateway Conference? It doesn’t matter. Google is excited.
Net net: The alleged Apple remark goosed the Google to make “our statement.” Outstanding defensive tone and posture. Will the pair seek counseling?
Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2025
Apple and Meta: Virtual Automatic Teller Machines for the EU
April 29, 2025
No AI, just a dinobaby watching the world respond to the tech bros.
I spotted this story in USA Today. You remember that newspaper, of course. The story “Apple Fined $570 Million and Meta $228 Million for Breaching European Union Law” reports:
Apple was fined 500 million euros ($570 million) on Wednesday and Meta 200 million euros, as European Union antitrust regulators handed out the first sanctions under landmark legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech.
I have observed that to many regulators the brands Apple and Meta (Facebook) are converted to the sound of ka-ching. For those who don’t recognize the onomatopoeia for an old-fashioned cash register ringing up a sale. The modern metaphor might be an automatic teller machine emitting beeps and honks. That works. Punch the Apple and Meta logos and bonk, beep, out comes millions of euros. Bonk, beep.
The law which allows the behavior of what some Europeans view as “tech bros” to be converted first to a legal process and then to cash is the Digital Markets Act. The idea is that certain technology centric outfits based in the US operate without much regard for the rules, regulations, and laws of actual nation-states and their governing entities. I mean who pays attention to what the European Union says? Certainly not a geek à la sauce californienne.
The companies are likely to interpret these fines as some sort of deus ex machina, delivered by a third-rate vengeful god in a TikTok-type of video. Perhaps? But the legal process identified some actions by the fined American companies as illegal. Examples range from preventing an Apple store user from certain behaviors to Meta’s reluctance to conform to some privacy requirements. I am certainly not a lawyer, nor am I involved with either of the American companies. However, I can make several observations from my dinobaby point of view, of course:
- The ka-ching / bonk beep incentive is strong. Money talks in the US and elsewhere. It is not surprising that the fines are becoming larger with each go-round. How does one stop the cost creep? One thought is to change the behavior of the companies. Sorry, EU, that is not going to happen.
- The interpretation of the penalty as a reaction against America is definitely a factor. For those who have not lived and worked in other countries, the anti-American sentiment is not understood. I learned when people painted slurs on the walls of our home in Campinas, Brazil. I was about 13, and the anger extended beyond black paint on our pristine white, eight-foot high walls with glass embedded at the top of them. Inviting, right?
- The perception that a company is more powerful than a mere government entity has been growing as the concentration of eyeballs, money, and talented people has increased at certain firms. Once the regulators have worked through the others in this category, attention will turn to the second tier of companies. I won’t identify any entities but the increased scrutiny of Cloudflare by French authorities is a glimpse of what might be coming down the information highway.
Net net: Ka-ching, ka-ching, and ka-ching. Beep, bong, beep, bong.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2025
Banks and Security? Absolutely
April 28, 2025
The second-largest US bank has admitted it failed to recover documents lost to a recent data breach. The Daily Hodl reports, “Bank of America Discloses Data Breach After Customers’ Documents Disappear, Says Names, Addresses, Account Information and Social Security Numbers Affected.” Writer Mark Emem tells us:
“Bank of America says efforts to locate sensitive documents containing personal information on an undisclosed number of customers have failed. The North Carolina-based bank says it is unable to recover the documents, which were lost in transit and ‘resulted in the disclosure’ of personal information. [The bank’s notice states,] ‘According to our records, the information involved in this incident was related to your savings bonds and included your first and last name, address, phone number, Social Security number, and account number…We understand how upsetting this can be and sincerely apologize for this incident and any concerns or inconvenience it may cause. We are notifying you so we can work together to protect your personal and account information.’”
Banks are forthcoming and bad actors know there is money in them. It is no surprise Bank of America faces a challenge. The succinct write-up notes the bank’s pledge to notify affected customers of any suspicious activity on their accounts. It is also offering them a two-year membership to an identity theft protection service. We suggest any Bank of America customers go ahead and change their passwords as a precaution. Now. We will wait.
Cynthia Murrell, April 28, 2025
Geocoding Price Data
April 28, 2025
No AI, just a dinobaby watching the world respond to the tech bros.
Some data must be processed to add geocodes to the items. Typically the geocode is a latitude and longitude coordinate. Some specialized services add addition codes to facilitate height and depth measurements. However, a geocode is not just what are generally called “lat and long coordinates.” Here’s a selected list of some of the items which may be included in a for-fee service:
- An address
- A place identifier
- Boundaries like a neighborhood, county, etc.
- Time zone
- Points-of-interest data.
For organizations interested in adding geocodes to their information or data, pricing of commercial services becomes an important factor.
I want to suggest that you navigate to “Geocoding APIs Compared: Pricing, Free Tiers & Terms of Use.” This article was assembled in 2023. The fees presented are out of date. However, as you work through the article, you will gather useful information about vendors such as Google, MSFT Azure, and TomTom, among others.
One of the question-answering large language models can be tapped to provide pricing information that is more recent.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2025
Microsoft and Its Modern Management Method: Waffling
April 23, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby himself.
The Harvard Business School (which I assume will remain open for “business”) has not addressed its case writers to focus on Microsoft’s modern management method. To me, changing direction is not a pivot; it is a variant of waffling. “Waffling” means saying one thing like “We love OpenAI.” Then hiring people who don’t love OpenAI and cutting deals with other AI outfits. The whipped cream on the waffle is killing off investments in data centers.
If you are not following this, think of the old song “The first time is the last time,” and you might get a sense of the confusion that results from changes in strategic and tactical direction. You may find this GenX, Y and Z approach just fine. I think it is a hoot.
PC Gamer, definitely not the Harvard Business Review, tackles one example of Microsoft’s waffling in “Microsoft Pulls Out of Two Big Data Centre Deals Because It Reportedly Doesn’t Want to Support More OpenAI Training Workloads.”
The write up says:
Microsoft has pulled out of deals to lease its data centres for additional training of OpenAI’s language model ChatGPT. This news seems surprising given the perceived popularity of the model, but the field of AI technology is a contentious one, for a lot of good reasons. The combination of high running cost, relatively low returns, and increasing competition—plus working on it’s own sickening AI-made Quake 2 demo—have proven enough reason for Microsoft to bow out of two gigawatt worth of projects across the US and Europe.
I love the scholarly “sickening.” Listen up, HBR editors. That’s a management term for 2025.
The article adds:
Microsoft, as well as its investors, have witnessed this relatively slow payoff alongside the rise of competitor models such as China’s Deepseek.
Yep, “payoff.” The Harvard Business School’s professors are probably not familiar with the concept of a payoff.
The news report points out that Microsoft is definitely, 100 percent going to spend $80 billion on infrastructure in 2025. With eight months left in the year, the Softies have to get in gear. The Google is spending as well. The other big time high tech AI juggernauts are also spending.
Will these investments payoff? Sure. Accountants and chief financial officers learn how to perform number magic. Guess where? Schools like the HBS. Don’t waffle. Go to class. Learn and then implement big time waffling.
Stephen E Arnold, April 23, 2025
AI and Movies: Better and Cheaper!
April 21, 2025
Believe it or not, no smart software. Just a dumb and skeptical dinobaby.
I am not a movie oriented dinobaby. I do see occasional stories about the motion picture industry. My knowledge is shallow, but several things seem to be stuck in my mind:
- Today’s movies are not too good
- Today’s big budget films are recycles of sequels, pre-quels, and less than equals
- Today’s blockbusters are expensive.
I did a project for a little-time B movie fellow. I have even been to an LA party held in a mansion in La Jolla. I sat in the corner in my brown suit and waited until I could make my escape.
End of Hollywood knowledge.
I read “Ted Sarandos Responds To James Cameron’s Vision Of AI Making Movies Cheaper: “There’s An Even Bigger Opportunity To Make Movies 10% Better.” No, I really did red the article. I cam away confused. Most of my pre-retirement work involved projects whose goal was to make a lot of money. The idea was be clever, do a minimum of “real” work, and then fix up the problems when people complained. The magic formula for some Silicon Valley and high-technology outfits located outside of the Plastic Fantastic World.
This article pits better versus cheaper. I learned:
Citing recent comments by James Cameron, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he hopes AI can make films “10% better,” not just “50% cheaper.”
Well, there you go. Better and cheaper. Is that the winning formula for creative work? The write up quotes Ted Sarandos (a movie expert, I assume) as saying:
Today, you can use these AI-powered tools to enable smaller-budget projects to have access to big VFX on screen.
From my point of view “better” means more VFX which is, I assume, movie talk for visual effects. These are the everyday things I see at my local grocery store. There are super heroes stopping crimes in progress. There are giant alien creatures shooting energy beams at military personnel. There are machines that have a great voice that some AI experts found particularly enchanting.
The cheaper means that the individuals who sit in front of computer screens fooling around with Blackmagic’s Fusion and the super-wonderful Adobe software will be able to let smart software do some of the work. If 100 people work on a big budget film’s VFX and smart software can do the work cheaper, the question arises, “Do we need these 100 people?” Based on my training, the answer is, “Nope. Let them find their future elsewhere.”
The article sidesteps two important questions: Question 1. What does better mean? Question 2. What does cheaper mean?
Better is subjective. Cheaper is a victim of scope creep. Big jobs don’t get cheaper. Big jobs get more expensive.
What smart software will do the motion picture industry is hasten its “re-invention.”
The new video stars are those who attract eyeballs on TikTok- and YouTube-type platforms. The traditional motion picture industry which created yesterday’s stars or “influencers” is long gone. AI is going to do three things:
- Replace skilled technicians with software
- Allow today’s “influencers” to become the next Clark Gabel and Marilyn Monroe (How did she die?)
- Reduce the barrier for innovations that do not come from recycling Superman-type pre-quels, sequels, and less than equals.
To sum up, both of these movie experts are right and wrong. I suppose both can be reskilled. Does Mr. Beast offer a for fee class on video innovation which includes cheaper production and better outputs?
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2025
When
AI: Job Harvesting
April 9, 2025
It is a question that keeps many of us up at night. Commonplace ponders, "Will AI Automate Away Your Job?" The answer: Probably, sooner or later. The when depends on the job. Some workers may be lucky enough to reach retirement age before that happens. Writer Jason Hausenloy explains:
"The key idea where the American worker is concerned is that your job is as automatable as the smallest, fully self-contained task is. For example, call center jobs might be (and are!) very vulnerable to automation, as they consist of a day of 10- to 20-minute or so tasks stacked back-to-back. Ditto for many forms of many types of freelancer services, or paralegals drafting contracts, or journalists rewriting articles. Compare this to a CEO who, even in a day broken up into similar 30-minute activities—a meeting, a decision, a public appearance—each required years of experiential context that a machine can’t yet simply replicate. … This pattern repeats across industries: the shorter the time horizon of your core tasks, the greater your automation risk."
See the post for a more detailed example that compares the jobs of a technical support specialist and an IT systems architect.
Naturally, other factors complicate the matter. For example, Hausenloy notes, blue-collar jobs may be safer longer because physical robots are more complex to program than information software. Also, the more data there is on how to do a job, the better equipped algorithms are to mimic it. That is one reason many companies implement tracking software. Yes, it allows them to micromanage workers. And also it gathers data needed to teach an LLM how to do the job. With every keystroke and mouse click, many workers are actively training their replacements.
Ironically, it seems those responsible for unleashing AI on the world may be some of the most replaceable. Schadenfreude, anyone? The article notes:
"The most vulnerable jobs, then, are not those traditionally thought of as threatened by automation—like manufacturing workers or service staff—but the ‘knowledge workers’ once thought to be automation-proof. And most vulnerable of all? The same Silicon Valley engineers and programmers who are building these AI systems. Software engineers whose jobs are based on writing code as discrete, well-documented tasks (often following standardized updates to a central directory) are essentially creating the perfect training data for AI systems to replace them."
In a section titled "Rethinking Work," Hausenloy waxes philosophical on a world in which all of humanity has been fired. Is a universal basic income a viable option? What, besides income, do humans get out of their careers? In what new ways will we address those needs? See the write-up for those thought exercises. Meanwhile, if you do want to remain employed as long as possible, try to make your job depend less on simple, repetitive tasks and more on human connection, experience, and judgement. With luck, you may just reach retirement before AI renders you obsolete.
Cynthia Murrell, April 9, 2025
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