The company I work for (we make scientific instruments mostly) has been pushing hard to get us to use AI literally anywhere we can. Every time you talk to IT about a project they come back with 10 proposals for how to add AI to it. It’s a nightmare.

I got an email from a supplier today that acknowledged that “76% of CFOs believe AI will be a game-changer, [but] 86% say it still hasn’t delivered mean value. Ths issue isn’t the technology-it’s the foundation it’s built on.”

Like, come on, no it isn’t. The technology is not ready for the kind of applications it’s being used for. It makes a half decent search engine alternative, if you’re OK with taking care not to trust every word it says it can be quite good at identifying things from descriptions and finding obscure stuf… But otherwise until the hallucination problem is solved it’s just not ready for large scale use.

The Kansas GOP said it was “disgusted” by the comments and that they do not reflect the views of Kansas Republicans, who, it emphasized, “elected a black chair a few months ago.”

Lmao, seriously they’re going with “we have black friends, actually”

I was initially impressed by the ‘reasoning’ features of LLMs, but most recently ChatGPT gave me a response to a question in which it stated five or six possible answers sparated by “oh, but that can’t be right, so it must be…”, and none of them was right lmao. Thought for like 30 seconds to give me a selection of wrong answers!

The Turing test is flawed, because while it is supposed to test for intelligence it really just tests for a convincing fake. Depending on how you set it up I wouldn’t be surprised if a modern LLM could pass it, at least some of the time. That doesn’t mean they are intelligent, they aren’t, but I don’t think the Turing test is good justification.

For me the only justification you need is that they predict one word (or even letter!) at a time. ChatGPT doesn’t plan a whole sentence out in advance, it works token by token… The input to each prediction is just everything so far, up to the last word. When it starts writing “As…” it has no concept of the fact that it’s going to write “…an AI A language model” until it gets through those words.

Frankly, given that fact it’s amazing that LLMs can be as powerful as they are. They don’t check anything, think about their answer, or even consider how to phrase a sentence. Everything they do comes from predicting the next token… An incredible piece of technology, despite it’s obvious flaws.

But that misuse of the word is harming the overall cause. It’s not like the need for feminism has evaporated, although it has surely evolved, and if young men think it’s harmful… Even if what they think is harmful is not an accurate representation of what feminism is, they aren’t going to be supporters of what it actually is if it has the name attached.

Maybe it is time for a new movement with a new name.