The Chinese AI PR Keeps Flowing
March 27, 2025
Is China moving ahead in the AI race? Some seem to think so. Interesting Engineering reports, "‘World’s First’ Fully Autonomous AI Agent Unveiled in China, Handles Real-World Tasks." Writer Christopher McFadden tells us:
"A group of Chinese software engineers have developed what they have called the ‘world’s first’ fully autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent. Called ‘Manus,’ the AI agent can independently perform complex tasks without human guidance. Unlike AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Grok, which need human input to perform things, Manus can proactively make decisions and complete tasks independently. To this end, the AI agent doesn’t necessarily need to wait for instructions to do something. For example, if a human asks, ‘ Find me an apartment,’ Manus can conduct research, evaluate multiple factors (crime rates, weather, market trends), and provide tailored recommendations."
Apparently, Manus works like a contractor directing their subcontractors. We learn:
"Rather than using just one AI model, Manus operates like an executive managing multiple specialized sub-agents. This allows it to tackle complex, multi-step workflows seamlessly. Moreover, the AI agent can work asynchronously, meaning it completes tasks in the background and notifies users only when results are ready, without constant human supervision. This is a significant development; most AIs have relied heavily on humans to initiate tasks. Manus represents a shift toward fully independent AI, raising exciting possibilities and serious concerns about job displacement and responsibility."
A fully independent AI? Perhaps. If so, the escalated threat to human jobs may be real. Manus has some questioning whether the US is truly the unrivaled leader in the AI space. We shall see if the expectations pan out or are, once again, overblown.
Cynthia Murrell, March 27, 2025
Insecure Managers Watch: Whistle While You Shirk
March 27, 2025
It’s never been easier to spy…er…watch employees while they work. Systems track employees and their work. Employees are monitored with software that’s akin to spyware except it wears a white hat (sort of) instead of a black one. Computer World says that employers are spying…er…monitoring their employees more than ever: “Electronic Employee Monitoring Reaches An All-Time High.”
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reported that 80% of companies are tracking remote and hybrid workers. Everything from keystrokes to tone in communications is being recorded. This is often happening without the knowledge of the employees. Meanwhile Gartner believes that spying…er…watching employees is up 30% from 2024, making it 71%.
One reason employees are being monitored more is that return-to-office mandates aren’t working. Employers aren’t enforcing them because employees value flexibility to work where they’re most productive. There’s also a changing workplace trend that employees value supportive management. If the support isn’t there, they’re not afraid to share their discontent online.
Employees are worried about the spying…er…monitoring:
“The constant oversight is stressing workers. In a survey of 1,500 US-based employers and 1,500 workers by ExpressVPN, 24% said they take fewer breaks to avoid looking idle, while 32% feel pressured to work faster. In response, 16% fake productivity with unnecessary apps, 15% schedule emails, and 12% use tools to evade detection. Nearly half (49%) would consider leaving if surveillance increased, with 24% willing to accept a pay cut to avoid it. ‘Surveillance may seem like a solution for improving efficiency, but it’s clearly eroding trust and morale in the workplace,’ said Lauren Hendry Parsons, ExpressVPN’s Digital Privacy Advocate. ‘As companies adopt increasingly invasive tools, they risk losing the loyalty and well-being of their workforce.’”
When employees are watched it lowers their productivity. Many of them also want a disclosure about being monitored and how their information is being used.
Maybe the modern workplace works better as a prison?
Whitney Grace, March 27, 2025
Digital Marketing: Is It Worse Than Social Media? Yep, in Some Ways
March 26, 2025
Yep, another dinobaby original.
With the US taking an interesting trajectory, I have seen an uptick in articles that tackle the question, “Why are many of society’s functions leaking synthetic oil?”
“How Digital Marketing Broke Society” takes a different analytic path. The culprit is not social media. (Please, visualize the tattoos on 11 year olds in TikTok- and Facebook-type content.) The bad actor is “digital marketing.” I must admit that I interpreted “digital marketing” with Google, but, please, don’t take my mental shortcut. You are more informed and neutral than I.
A young Silicon Valley type professional surfing to a digital advertising company on a flood of zeros and ones. He is making six figures and in his mom’s mind, her son is doing good things. He is such a good young man. She then turns her attention to his agentic note: “Love ya, mom.”
Let’s look at what Joan Westenberg (a person about whom I have zero knowledge) asserts.
I noted this passage:
We are, increasingly, a cross-generational society of extremely online, screen-tapping, doom scrolling depressives. And it’s having an impact. More than ever, we are divided by misinformation and disinformation, driven by and vulnerable to ignorance, hate-mongering, and bullshit, reactive more than proactive, caught in what is either a global backslide or a cycle of decay. We’re lonely, scared, and more likely than ever to take it out on total strangers. We read less. We watch more, and what we watch is short-form, viral videos designed to tap into the dopamine-fueled, base parts of our brains.
I think her point comes across, and it resonates with me. Every time I go to the gym I see people in need of serious calorie burning sitting on a machine or a bench fiddling with their mobile phones. I hit the gym at 6 am, and I am astounded that so many people have urgent messages to which they must respond. Hey, do some exercises. But these folks are gym potatoes engaged in doom scrolling I have concluded.
Ms. Westenberg adds:
An entirely new system of influence came into being, operating largely beneath conscious awareness. Dark patterns increased, making it harder for users to protect their privacy or limit their exposure. Intermittent variable rewards—the psychological mechanism that powers slot machines—became standard practice. The industry successfully reframed this surveillance and manipulation as “personalization” and “enhanced user experience”—linguistic legerdemain that positioned exploitation as a service.
I think this is accurate. (Remember, please, that I am interpreting this as Googley behavior. The company can pay for streaming video mostly for free because it seems to have the knack for using advertising to get more advertising and offering tools to facilitate most of the steps in the money extraction process. You, gentle reader, must be more open minded than I am.)
Another point in Ms. Westenberg’s essay caught my attention; to wit:
Meta’s internal research found that divisive content generates significantly higher engagement, translating directly to advertising revenue. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm precisely drives users toward increasingly extreme content because it maximizes watch time and ad impressions. Marketing technology companies have built their entire business models around the commodification of attention – regardless of its social consequences. Digital marketing is capitalism at its most predatory—a system where deliberately amplifying society’s worst impulses becomes a rational business strategy. The industry has created a machine that converts social discord into shareholder value. In an attention economy, hatred isn’t just profitable; it’s the optimal product. The economic model and the foundational worldview of digital marketing operate on the premise that human consciousness exists primarily as a resource to be mined, refined, and sold. It’s a form of cognitive colonization—claiming and exploiting mental territory that once belonged to human beings. You can read it in the language of the industry: users are “captured,” attention is “harvested,” and engagement is “extracted.”
Yes, data mining works. Predictive analytics work for precisely the insight behind Eugene Wigner’s 1960 essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Digital marketing just applies this idea, and, in my opinion, it is indeed highly effective in 21st century human-centric predictive work.
I want to quote the passage that makes me quite happy with Ms. Westenberg’s essay, and if I may do a bit of predictive assertion, makes me feel warm and fuzzy about her mental orientation; specifically, she writes and I quote:
I spent fifteen years in digital marketing. Building campaigns, funnels, and content. But over the last month, I shut down my marketing business. The decision was both ethical and existential. I can’t continue participating in an industry that has evolved from persuasion – harmful enough – to psychological exploitation and the deliberate destruction of our social order. Every optimization, targeting refinement, and engagement metric has brought us closer to a world where human autonomy is systematically undermined for commercial gain. The techniques I learned and taught others—the psychological triggers, the attention-capturing mechanisms, the behavioral prediction models—have escaped their commercial confines to taint our information ecosystem and devour the foundations of political discourse. Digital marketing is a fundamental threat to human flourishing, cognitive autonomy, and democratic governance. The industry has normalized a state of perpetual surveillance and manipulation that would have been unthinkable just decades ago. Its methodologies have created a world where attention is constantly hijacked, emotions are continuously manipulated, and reality itself is customized in pursuit of extraction value.
I am not sure that the flow of digital or weaponized information will stop. I suppose at some point a power outage or some other exogenous event will knock online out, but for the foreseeable future, we have to surf on the torrents flooding the information highway.
Net net: I suppose I should recast my thinking and consider the perpetrators at those who are simply following the Google Legacy.
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2025
The Future of Programming in an AI Spruik World
March 26, 2025
Software engineers are, reasonably, concerned about losing their jobs to AI. Australian blogger Clinton Boys asks, "How Will LLMs Take Our Jobs?" After reading several posts by programmers using LLMs for side projects, he believes such accounts suggest where we are headed. He writes:
"The consensus seems to be that rather than a side project being some sort of idea you have, then spend a couple of hours on, maybe learn a few things, but quickly get distracted by life or a new side project, you can now just chuck your idea into the model and after a couple of hours of iterating you have a working project. To me, this all seems to point to the fact that we are currently in the middle of a significant paradigm shift, akin to the transition from writing assembly to compiled programming languages. A potential future is unfolding before our eyes in which programmers don’t write in programming languages anymore, but write in natural language, and generative AI handles the grunt work of actually writing the code, the same way a compiler translates your C code into machine instructions."
Perhaps. But then, he ponders, will the job even fit the title of "engineer"? Will the challenges and creative potential many love about this career vanish? And what would they do then? Boys suggests several routes one might take, with the caveat that a realistic path forward would probably blend several of these. He recognizes one could simply give up and choose a different career entirely. An understandable choice, if one can afford to start over. If not, one might join the AI cavalcade by learning how to create LLMs and/or derive value from them. It may also be wise to climb the corporate ladder—managers should be safer longer, Boys expects. Then again one might play ostrich:
"You could also cross your fingers and hope it pans out differently — particularly if, like me you find the vision of the future spruiked by the most bullish LLM proponents a little ghoulish and offensive to our collective humanity."
Always an option, we suppose. I had to look up the Australian term "spruik." According to Wordsmith.org, it means "to make an elaborate speech, especially to attract customers." Fitting. Finally, Boys says, one could bet on software connoisseurs of the future. Much as some now pay more for hand-made pastries or small-batch IPAs, some clients may be willing to shell out for software crafted the old-fashioned way. One can hope.
Cynthia Murrell, March 26, 2025
FOGINT: Dubai Makes a Crypto Move
March 26, 2025
Cryptocurrencies are on deck to replace fiat currencies. The Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) recently recognized a cryptocurrencies says Gadgets 360: “USDC, EURC Stablecoins Secure ‘Token Recognition’ In Dubai.” The two new tokens recognized in Dubai are the stablecoins USDC and EURC from Circle.
The DFSA approved the use of these stablecoins within the Dubai International Financial Centre’s (DIFC) economic activities. EURC and USDC are the first crypto stablecoins to receive official recognition from the DFSA. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies backed by traditional assets such as gold and regular hard currencies.
The DFSA issued a crypto token framework in 2022 so businesses working with cryptocurrencies would have safe guidelines. Only DFSA-recognized cryptocurrencies are allowed to be used within the DIFC. This is to ensure companies are protected from scams.
This is an important move for stablecoins:
Dante Disparte, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy and Operations at Circle called the development a ‘milestone’ moment for the stablecoin sector. ‘This milestone aligns with our mission to make digital dollars and euros more accessible, interoperable, and useful for businesses, developers, and financial institutions worldwide,’ Dante said. ‘As the first stablecoins to receive this designation, USDC and EURC continue to set the global standard for transparency, compliance, and utility.’”
Circle is the second largest provider of stablecoins in the world after Tether. The company reported the USDC profit reached $18 trillion since launching in 2018. Dubai, Telegram, and crypto: Interesting ingredients.
Whitney Grace, March 18, 2025
YouTube: Another Big Cost Black Hole?
March 25, 2025
Another dinobaby blog post. Eight decades and still thrilled when I point out foibles.
I read “Google Is in Trouble… But This Could Change Everything – and No, It’s Not AI.” The write up makes the case that YouTube is Google’s big financial opportunity. I agree with most of the points in the write up. The article says:
Google doesn’t clearly explain how much of the $40.3 billion comes from the YouTube platform, but based on their description and choice of phrasing like “primarily include,” it’s safe to assume YouTube generates significantly more revenue than just the $36.1 billion reported. This would mean YouTube, not Google Cloud, is actually Google’s second-biggest business.
Yep, financial fancy dancing is part of the game. Google is using its financial reports as marketing to existing stakeholders and investors who want a part of the still-hot, still-dominant Googzilla. The idea is that the Google is stomping on the competition in the hottest sectors: The cloud, smart software, advertising, and quantum computing.
A big time company’s chief financial officer enters his office after lunch and sees a flood of red ink engulfing his work space. Thanks, OpenAI, good enough.
Let’s flip the argument from Google has its next big revenue oil gusher to the cost of that oil field infrastructure.
An article appeared in mid-February 2025. I was surprised that the information in that write up did not generate more buzz in the world of Google watchers. “YouTube by the Numbers: Uncovering YouTube’s Ghost Town of Billions of Unwatched, Ignored Videos” contains some allegedly accurate information. Let’s assume that these data, like most information about online, is close enough for horseshoes or purely notional. I am not going to summarize the methodology. Academics come up with interesting ways to obtain information about closely guarded big company products and services.
The write up says:
the research estimates a staggering 14.8 billion total videos on YouTube as of mid-2024. Unsurprisingly, most of these videos are barely noticed. The median YouTube upload has just 41 views, with 4% garnering no views at all. Over 74% have no comments and 89% have no likes.
Here are a couple of other factoids about YouTube as reported in the Techspot article:
The production values are also remarkably modest. Only 14% of videos feature a professional set or background. Just 38% show signs of editing. More than half have shaky camerawork, and audio quality varies widely in 85% of videos. In fact, 40% are simply music tracks with no voice-over.
And another point I found interesting:
Moreover, the typical YouTube video is just 64 seconds long, and over a third are shorter than 33 seconds.
The most revealing statement in the research data appears in this passage:
… a senior researcher [said] that this narrative overlooks a crucial reality: YouTube is not just an entertainment hub – it has become a form of digital infrastructure. Case in point: just 0.21% of the sampled videos included any kind of sponsorship or advertising. Only 4% had common calls to action such as liking, commenting, and subscribing. The vast majority weren’t polished content plays but rather personal expressions – perhaps not so different from the old camcorder days.
Assuming the data are reasonably good Google has built plumbing whose cost will rival that of the firm’s investments in search and its cloud.
From my point of view, cost control is going to become as important as moving as quickly as possible to the old-school broadcast television approach to content. Hit shows on YouTube will do what is necessary to attract an audience. The audience will be what advertisers want.
Just as Google search has degraded to a popular “experience,” not a resource for individuals who want to review and extract high value information, YouTube will head the same direction. The question is, “Will YouTube’s pursuit of advertisers mean that the infrastructure required to permit free video uploads and storage be sustainable?
Imagine being responsible for capital investments at the Google. The Cloud infrastructure must be upgraded and enhanced. The AI infrastructure must be upgraded and enhanced. The quantum computing and other technology-centric infrastructures must be upgraded an enhanced. The adtech infrastructure must be upgraded and enhanced. I am leaving out some of the Google’s other infrastructure intensive activities.
The main idea is that the financial person is going to have a large job paying for hardware, software, maintenance, and telecommunications. This is a different cost from technical debt. These are on-going and constantly growing costs. Toss in unexpected outages, and what does the bean counter do. One option is to quit and another is to do the Zen thing to avoid have a stroke when reviewing the cost projections.
My take is that a hit in search revenue is likely to add to the firm’s financial challenges. The path to becoming the modern version of William Paley’s radio empire may be in Google’s future. The idea that everything is in the cloud is being revisited by companies due to cost and security concerns. Does Google host some sketchy services on its Cloud?
YouTube may be the hidden revenue gem at Google. I think it might become the infrastructure cost leader among Google’s stellar product line up. Big companies like Google don’t just disappear. Instead the black holes of cost suck them closer to a big event: Costs rise more quickly than revenue.
At this time, Google has three cost black holes. One hopes none is the one that makes Googzilla join the ranks of the street people of online dwell.
Net net: Google will have to give people what they will watch. The lowest common denominator will emerge. The costs flood the CFO’s office. Just ask Gemini what to do.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2025
Cyber Attacks in Under a Minute
March 25, 2025
Cybercrime has evolved. VentureBeat reports, "51 Seconds to Breach: How CISOs Are Countering AI-Driven, Lightning-Fast Deepfake, Vishing and Social Engineering Attacks." Yes, according to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike‘s Adam Meyers, the fastest breakout time he has seen is 51 seconds. No wonder bad actors have an advantage—it can take cyber defense weeks to months to determine a system has been compromised. In the interim, hackers can roam undetected.
Cybercrime methods have also changed. Where malware was once the biggest problem, hackers now favor AI-assisted phishing and vishing (voice-based phishing) campaigns. We learn:
"Vishing is out of control due in large part to attackers fine-turning their tradecraft with AI. CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report found that vishing exploded by 442% in 2024. It’s the top initial access method attackers use to manipulate victims into revealing sensitive information, resetting credentials and granting remote access over the phone. ‘We saw a 442% increase in voice-based phishing in 2024. This is social engineering, and this is indicative of the fact that adversaries are finding new ways to gain access because…we’re kind of in this new world where adversaries have to work a little bit harder or differently to avoid modern endpoint security tools,’ Meyers said. Phishing, too, continues to be a threat. Meyers said, ‘We’ve seen that with phishing emails, they have a higher click-through rate when it’s AI-generated content, a 54% click-through rate, versus 12% when a human is behind it.’"
The write-up suggests three strategies to fight today’s breaches. Stop attackers at the authentication layer by shortening token lifetimes and implementing real-time revocation. Also, set things up so no one person can bypass security measures. No, not even the owner. Maybe especially not them. Next, we are advised, fight AI with AI: Machine-learning tools now exist to detect intrusions and immediately shut them down. Finally, stop lateral movement from the breach point with security that is unified across the system. See the write-up for more details on each of these.
Cynthia Murrell, March 25, 2025
Old School Search: Scrunch Can Help You
March 25, 2025
Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and other search engines have incorporated AI into their search algorithms. AI, however, remains regulated to generative text and chatbots. It’s also doing very little to assist companies with their Web presences Tech Crunch shares how one startup wants to change that: “Scrunch AI Is Helping Companies Stand Out In AI Search.”
Scrunch AI developed a platform that assists companies with auditing and optimizing how their appear on AI search platforms. The platform shows how a company’s online information interacts with AI Web crawlers. Scrunch also funds inaccuracies and gaps in information.
The CEO and co-founder of Crunch AI Chris Andrew said he got the idea for the platform when he realized that he expected ChatGPT to do the browsing for him. He shared the idea with CMOs who noticed that their companies received high-quality traffic from AI search engines. The rub, however, was that the companies received different results from different platforms.
While there are companies that concentrate o this task, he says Scrunch goes further than then:
“Andrew thinks his startup stands out thanks to its focus on the customer journey as opposed to just how a brand shows up in initial search results. He feels the company is also taking it a step further by not just focusing on search results by a human through an AI search engine, but rather on searches performed by AI agents. ‘I think people were like, ‘How do we use AI to make our website better?’ And my mindset was like, ‘Your website’s going to need to be for an agent or crawler in the future,’” Andrew said. ‘That theory has kind of really played out with our customer base at the enterprise level saying our brand is no longer what we say it is. It’s what ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri, Google AI Overviews say it is.’”
Consistency and accuracy is important in this digital age. Andrew has a great idea but will Scrunch optimize search engine AI or will it generate AI slop?
Whitney Grace, March 25, 2025
AI: Demand Goes Up But Then What?
March 24, 2025
Yep, another dinobaby original.
Why use smart software? For money, for academic and LinkedIn fame, for better grades in high school? The estimable publication The Cool Down revealed the truth in its article “Expert Talks Massive Impacts AI Will Have on Us All: I Can Only See the Demand Increasing.”
The expert is Dr. Chris Mattmann, the author of a book about AI and machine learning. He is also the chief data officer at UCLA.
The write up reports:
AI is really just search on steroids, and while training AI models is expensive and energy-consuming, it’s not much different than when Google introduced search for information retrieval and data gathering in 2009.
After reading the statement, I asked myself if smart software implemented in the Telegram smart contracts is about search or it it related to obfuscating financial transaction. Guess not. Too bad I did not understand that AI was just search.
The write up says:
“AI expects the world to look like tables with rows and columns … [but] the world doesn’t look that way. It’s messy, it’s multimodal, it’s video, image, sound, text,” he said, and making sense of all that information and “training AI models” takes the most energy.
I think that energy costs money. How companies make the jump between spending and generating sustainable revenue? Search runs on advertising dollars. Will AI do the same thing?
The Cool Down attempts to clarify certain types of AI use cases; for example, games and videos:
While The Cool Down will continue to report on inefficient uses of AI, it’s also fair to demystify AI as more like “a computer program” and to consider its energy use in a different light if and when it is a tool to replace other work or entertainment. Creating an AI image may often seem like it’s not a justified use of energy, but Mattmann is essentially saying: “Is it much more or less justified than playing video games or watching movies?”
AI has some benefits. Again the expert:
His three kids under age 15 use AI devices like the Amazon Echo to learn things, and Mattmann uses a Timekettle earbud device to immediately translate up to 40 languages in real-time, which he calls “an AI device at the edge.” “I’m excited about traveling. I’m excited about what it will do for our national security, what it will mean for language.” It will be transformative for “those tasks that [require] robotic process automation, intelligent assistance, or whatever can give us back time, which is our only precious commodity here on this planet,” he said.
Will The Cool Down become my go-to source for the real scoop about smart software? We’ll see.
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2025
Journalism Is Now Spelled Journ-AI-sm
March 24, 2025
Another dinobaby blog post. Eight decades and still thrilled when I point out foibles.
When I worked at a “real” newspaper, I enjoyed listening to “real” journalists express their opinions on everything. Some were experts in sports and knew little details about Louisville basketball. Others were “into” technology and tracked the world of gadgets — no matter how useless — and regaled people at lunch with descriptions of products that would change everything. Everything? Yeah. I heard about the rigors of journalism school. The need to work on either the college radio station or the college newspaper. These individuals fancied themselves Renaissance men and women. That’s okay, but do bean counters need humans to “cover” the news?
The answer is, “Probably not.”
“Italian Newspaper Says It Has Published World’s First AI-Generated Edition” suggests that “real” humans covering the news may face a snow leopard or Maui ‘Alauahio moment. The article reports:
An Italian newspaper has said it is the first in the world to publish an edition entirely produced by artificial intelligence. The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has “on our way of working and our days”, the newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, said.
The smart software is not just spitting out “real” news. The system does “headlines, quotes, and even the irony.” Wow. Irony from smart software.
According to the “real” journalistic who read the stories in the paper:
The articles were structured, straightforward and clear, with no obvious grammatical errors. However, none of the articles published in the news pages directly quote any human beings.
That puts Il Foglio ahead of the Smartnews’ articles. Wow, are some of those ungrammatical and poorly structured? In my opinion, I would toss in the descriptor “incoherent.”
What do I make of Il Folio’s trial? That’s an easy question:
- If the smart software is good enough and allows humans to be given an opportunity to find their future elsewhere, smart software is going to be used. A few humans might be rehired if revenues tank, but the writing is on the wall of the journalism school
- Bean counters know one thing: Counting beans. If the smart software generates financial benefits, the green eye shade crowd will happily approve licensing smart software.
- Readers may not notice or not care. Headline. First graf. Good to go.
Will the future pundits, analysts, marketing specialists, PR professionals, and LLM trainers find the journalistic joy? Being unhappy at work and paying bills is one thing; being happy doing news knowing that smart software is coming for the journalism jobs is another.
I would not return to college to learn how to be a “real” journalist. I would stay home, eat snacks, and watch game show re-runs. Good enough life plan, right?
Why worry? Il Foglio is just doing a small test.
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2025
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