As someone who conferenced some basic ML research in early 2000s and then left academia for a boring/stable software engineering gig in a non IT org to escape the hype bubble only to end up having to talk to people about ML/AI frequently this article speaks to me.
That too. But he's also really angry that the world passed him by. That his understanding of AI turned out to be less than others'. That his skills couldn't make it happen and while he was on the side of the road watching everyone else try and commenting on their failures, someone actually kind of succeeded. Not completely, of course. But enough that it eclipses all of his career and makes him seem like just another naysayer that's been proven wrong. Like someone who can't make things happen so he resorts to laughing at those who even try. Like an old man yelling at clouds.
So yeah, now the narrative has to change and he has to yell at the bad capitalists who are bringing about the destruction of our way of life. Otherwise he looks like a hasbeen yelling about the people who could do more than him. So he does this yelling at capitalists from the comfort of his home, typing on the technological achievements of the last hundred years, without needing to worry about making and washing his own clothes, walking to the village 50 miles west, his wife dying in childbirth or him catching a stomach bug and shitting himself to death, all because we had a fucking industrial revolution that took care of those aspects and so many more, and those capitalist pigs saw there's money to be made in technology improvements so they invested in it. Did this benefit the few more than the many? Yes. Did many people find themselves out of a job, needing to adapt to strange conditions they were never trained for? Yes. Did it also bring about incredible quality of life improvements, especially to this old useless fuck who wouldn't even have a job without the last few decades of tech advancement, if he could even stay alive through the last pandemic? Also yes. So sitting on the sidelines crying about capitalism while at the same time enjoying its benefits is nothing more than a hypocritical plea for attention, all stemming from the fact that he can't seem to be able to stand having been wrong. Which, holy shit - get that narcissistic crap outta my sight.
C'mon, I think you have better reading comprehension than that. He's a professional data scientist specializing in machine learning. He went to grad school, then to big industry, then to startups, and is currently running a consultancy. He is very clearly not "on the side of the road." He's merely telling executives to fuck off with their AI grift.
Exactly this. I only have pretty vague experience with machine learning, since it was one of the other specializations for my Masters than the one I choose, which however means we still shared some basic courses on the topic, and I definitely share his point of view. I've been saying basically the same things when talking about AI, albeit not as expressively, but even with basic insight into ML, the whole craze that is happening around it is such bullshit. But, I'm by no means an expert in the field, so I may be wrong, but it's nice to finally read an article from an "expert" in the field I can agree with. Because so far, the whole "experts talking AI" felt exactly like the COVID situation, with "doctors" talking against vaccines. Their doomsaying opinion simply contradicts even the little knowledge I have in the ML field.
Dear sweet christ, I've been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they're special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to 'implement blockchain technology' on postgres.
Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.
Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.
I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.
I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.
I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.
Problem is the morons from other industries have all decided that working in tech is now cool and le future, so they get hired at tech companies and bring all their stupid non-merit-based shenanigans with them.
Good tech people don’t want to become bullshitters, so they avoid management positions, and therefore get these idiots as their bosses.
The solution is to only work at small companies with flat hierarchy.
Aside from the technology stack being the embodiment of vendor lock-in and misery, the scamming is really what makes me not want to work on Generative AI tasks, or whatever the next hype thing is going to be.
The worst part is that many people want to be scammed. We have customers come to us, asking for a solution to a problem they've had for long time, and asking it to be solved with GenAI.
Then we tell them that there's really no use-case for GenAI there, that it could be better solved for half the money using traditional methods.
At which point, they ask us to integrate GenAI in some place anyways, because otherwise their boss will not give them the money. And of course, that boss also has a boss who also only frees up budget for GenAI.
And that just repeats upwards, until you have shareholders at the top, who eat up the hype, because other shareholders eat up the hype.
And if you tell them “no” too often they’ll choose your scummy competitor who’ll just tell them “yeah we put all the AI in it, whatever” over you who want to actually help them.
I'm going to ask ChatGPT how to prepare a garotte and then I am going to strangle you with it, and you will simply have to pray that I roll the 10% chance that it freaks out and tells me that a garotte should consist entirely of paper mache and malice.
Facepalm again and again every time my non technical boss asks me if Ive been using genai to speed up my work. No boss, I haven't, that actually slows me down
I used GitLab’s version of Copilot when it was free and that was net helpful. It predicted for loops and stuff and was close enough, enough of the time that it was net positive. Not enough that I’d actually pay for it…
I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.
The CEO of the company that fired me consistently goes up on stage and talks about the transformative power of AI. The company does not use AI for shit.
Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out "uh...emails and productivity and things."
I got pulled into a meeting with a team from AWS. I was told they were looking to implement a new solution, so I had to explain in detail how our data lake and data warehouse solution worked. I showed them how we pull data from all these different sources, how we have different integration patterns, etc.
At the end of my presentation, I asked "does that give you what you guys need? Or do I need to go into any more detail about anything specific? I don't know what you all are actually building, so I'd be happy to provide more detail where you need it."
Their response was "yeah that was all great info. We're looking to build an app using AI and ML that allows you to run the business with a click of a button."
I'm glad it was a remote meeting without cameras, because I literally face palmed. They didn't have an actual use case or problem they were trying to solve. They were literally just selling a solution built on AI and ML. They didn't know what it was gonna do, but by God they were committed to selling it.
Great read. Even in STEM research as a grad student I'm very tired of every saying "let's try machine learning on this problem" to get something that works marginally better than some conventional models but requiring huge amounts of computation and data.
I work professionally with actually useful ML stuff (we parse a lot of weird ass files and it's extremely powerful in that context) - we've looked at integrating gpt3 and it scored much worse on accuracy than the model we trained in-house. We're also investigating adding front-end AI bullshit to placate the CEO. Even at the good shops, you'll probably get buried in this bullshit - but there are good opportunities out there!
When I was younger, I read R.A Salvatore's classic fantasy novel, The Crystal Shard. There is a scene in it where the young protagonist, Wulfgar, challenges a barbarian chieftain to a duel for control of the clan so that he can lead his people into a war that will save the world. The fight culminates with Wulfgar throwing away his weapon, grabbing the chief's head with bare hands, and begging the chief to surrender so that he does not need to crush a skull like an egg and become a murderer.
Well this is me. Begging you. To stop lying. I don't want to crush your skull, I really don't.
Fucking awesome writing style there - and a lot of salient points. The only weakness is that it's preaching to the choir - the use of jargon and technical references probably makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't agree with its conclusion.
Right‽ This was seriously the best rant I've read in ages; not only was it spot on, it was fucking hilarious.
This has to be the best way I've seen anyone describe what the problem with the current AI woo-woo is:
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
Can you tell that a known human being is not an 'AI' chatbot, based on text correspondence?
Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.
The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.
Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!
Solution: Don't hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.
The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.
Ok, so here is OpenAI wanting to make... well basically it seems to want to have not only an AI agent in a text support chatbox telling you how to fix a problem...
...but give it the ability to completely take over your computer and just do it for you, presumably via Remote Assistance and whatever the Mac equivalent is.
No way this could go wrong and lead to fake support sites just fucking writing a batch file and executing it in the blink of an eye.
Then we've got both Zoom and Otter who yes, straight up, want to build AI powered avatars, based on each employee/user and replace the human entirely in meetings.
Could AI personas attend your work meetings for you? One tech CEO says yes
One tech CEO has drain bamage, I take it. To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.
Like, what the fuck is the point of this? If you think meetings are a problem and AI is the solution, there are a countably infinite amount of ideas you could come up with that aren't this idiotic
Yeeeaaah you're supposed to regularly test that you can actually restore your backups, because boy do a lot of companies find out they can't only after shit goes sideways and to their horror they then realize that they can't restore some system's backups because reasons.
Not sure I've worked in a company that did that, and frankly even when I was CTO in a startup we didn't have automated backup tests – mostly because it was still early days and I just manually tested restoring our in-house service when a change was made that would warrant it. N + 1 other things to do besides automating backup tests so I deemed that Good Enough™.