I've always been concerned about the hype and misrepresentation of AI but I've struggled making my case when arguing with "less techie" folks about it. Thank you for all you do to cut thru the BS and make it easier for the rest of use to explain the perils of AI to our loved ones by making the issues around it clearer for the layperson. Finding your substack has been sanity saving for me!
Hey look on the bright side. Within a year or two we're going to have twice as much work fixing all that messed up code when the bubble pops, and we'll be able to bill huge hours for it too, because it's going to take forever to untangle the mess of copy-pasted chunks of code or multiple similar but not quite identical objects and functions and whatnot.
There are so many people (including myself) that have mentioned this same impending trainwreck. How many hospitals, utility companies and such would have to shut down while that fixing is going on...
And how many are going to shut down when hackers encrypt everything and hold the data hostage. Yeah it's going to be a mess. Almost guaranteed to cause another decades long AI winter if it's bad enough.
The problem will extend far beyond the companies that used AI to generate their code.
Society will pay the ultimate price as buggy, insecure bot generated code permeates our electrical grid, hospitals, power plants, communications, military and other critical infrastructure.
Thanks for the headsup, Gary! Looks like nothing more than opening public pockets for private benefit, open doors to whatever is thunk up, and boosting energy resources, all in the name of "Maimlining" AI "into the veins of society. What could go wrong? As far as the Sky News reports indicates, nothing. Good to know. It's just that not a lot of good comes from the tried and true substances we usually associate with "mainlining." Neither the word, nor notion, of 'regulation' or caution makes an appearance in the piece of puff pastry - a press release passing as journalism.
It’s going to be amusingly ironic if AI is used by an anti-Oligarchy terrorist grouping, angry about wealth inequality, to plot and deliver a series of assassinations of high profile Silicon Valley executives
UK PM Sir Keir Starmer wants to mainline AI in society. At the same time he wants to make Brexit work. May I suggest that he first asks AI how to make Brexit work? If that doesn't cure him from his silly plans I don't know what will.
I'm quite worried about a different security threat, being an educator. I wonder if students and teachers alike in a future classroom will be checking ChatGPT or Google's Gemini or something for answers, and if Russian hackers just for fun will hack ChatGPT to say that 2+2 is 5 in some way, and then everyone in class will start nodding along to completely wrong statements. Just because someone thought it'd be funny to ruin American education and screw up our ability to think critically even more. We live in an international world with international enemies, some of whom have very bad senses of humor. I think there are a number of other security threats you could imagine. And everything just seems to be going down the tubes in this sense, as Americans buy more and more BS if it's said by something or someone authoritative. These hacks wouldn't even be noticeable as huge problems right away. Imagine that a classroom teacher asks students to do research on a public figure and the first thing they do is ask ChatGPT and it starts lying because someone in some country thought it was funny.
Gary, before you wrote about LLMs as being "automplete on steroids". But then how does the agency get in here? I mean, can you explain in simple terms how much of it is coded in and how much mimicry of things scraped from the internet?
This is a helpful place to start. Agency is a bit overstated when it comes to LLM's in my opinion, and what many consider to be agentic AI cases are actually workflows.
No AI without semantic/symbolic AI. Generative AI is code not magic. Hinton is the grandfather of a neat algorithm not AI. The sooner it is understood that semantic AI at massive scale is in reach the sooner we can get on with building safe AI.
Code and data are all we are discussing. Generative AI has a massive data quality problem. So did SQL. IBM spent billions on relational model with a logic foundation (Codd,Date). But SQL did not work to guarantee answers were correct. A second technology was needed to extract transform and load (ETL) before the data integration industry took off. Not an analogy. ETL required accurate data to function. Random errors sunk it. Generative AI does not have data let alone accurate data.
I am glad Microsoft does this, even though it is a bit of a "fox and henhouse" situation. People I know are often very reluctant to read the safety and security literature specifically on these systems for whatever reason, and punted to places like our policy arm or Microsoft only, so far. I keep trying to get more traction, including our host's work, but ... maybe this will help!
My understanding of AI is very basic and I value the info and opinions from you (GM) and other level headed, experienced professionals who provide in-depth analyses, and appreciation for the larger implications.
I've always been concerned about the hype and misrepresentation of AI but I've struggled making my case when arguing with "less techie" folks about it. Thank you for all you do to cut thru the BS and make it easier for the rest of use to explain the perils of AI to our loved ones by making the issues around it clearer for the layperson. Finding your substack has been sanity saving for me!
and on top of that, AI "writes" code that's unsecure and easily hacked. Technical debt up the wazoo for any naive org that dares the shortcutting. https://davidhsing.substack.com/p/ai-replacing-coders-not-so-fast
Hey look on the bright side. Within a year or two we're going to have twice as much work fixing all that messed up code when the bubble pops, and we'll be able to bill huge hours for it too, because it's going to take forever to untangle the mess of copy-pasted chunks of code or multiple similar but not quite identical objects and functions and whatnot.
There are so many people (including myself) that have mentioned this same impending trainwreck. How many hospitals, utility companies and such would have to shut down while that fixing is going on...
And how many are going to shut down when hackers encrypt everything and hold the data hostage. Yeah it's going to be a mess. Almost guaranteed to cause another decades long AI winter if it's bad enough.
The problem will extend far beyond the companies that used AI to generate their code.
Society will pay the ultimate price as buggy, insecure bot generated code permeates our electrical grid, hospitals, power plants, communications, military and other critical infrastructure.
Thanks for the headsup, Gary! Looks like nothing more than opening public pockets for private benefit, open doors to whatever is thunk up, and boosting energy resources, all in the name of "Maimlining" AI "into the veins of society. What could go wrong? As far as the Sky News reports indicates, nothing. Good to know. It's just that not a lot of good comes from the tried and true substances we usually associate with "mainlining." Neither the word, nor notion, of 'regulation' or caution makes an appearance in the piece of puff pastry - a press release passing as journalism.
(De)generative AI is the latest generation of designer hopioids to hit the streets.
It soothes the masses and makes the dealers incredibly wealthy.
Move over Fentanyl.
Make way for Gentanyl
The canaries singing in the mines? Pretty scary future world.
It’s going to be amusingly ironic if AI is used by an anti-Oligarchy terrorist grouping, angry about wealth inequality, to plot and deliver a series of assassinations of high profile Silicon Valley executives
quantum risk - a wicked problem that emerges at the boundaries of our data dependency
https://opengovernance.net/quantum-risk-a-wicked-problem-that-emerges-at-the-boundaries-of-our-data-dependency-2dc36dfb21fb
Aw man. Request; Put it on substack, I want to read it!
UK PM Sir Keir Starmer wants to mainline AI in society. At the same time he wants to make Brexit work. May I suggest that he first asks AI how to make Brexit work? If that doesn't cure him from his silly plans I don't know what will.
If Musk’s bot ever becomes autonomous, it won’t need to hire a hit man.
It will be able to do the job itself
I'm quite worried about a different security threat, being an educator. I wonder if students and teachers alike in a future classroom will be checking ChatGPT or Google's Gemini or something for answers, and if Russian hackers just for fun will hack ChatGPT to say that 2+2 is 5 in some way, and then everyone in class will start nodding along to completely wrong statements. Just because someone thought it'd be funny to ruin American education and screw up our ability to think critically even more. We live in an international world with international enemies, some of whom have very bad senses of humor. I think there are a number of other security threats you could imagine. And everything just seems to be going down the tubes in this sense, as Americans buy more and more BS if it's said by something or someone authoritative. These hacks wouldn't even be noticeable as huge problems right away. Imagine that a classroom teacher asks students to do research on a public figure and the first thing they do is ask ChatGPT and it starts lying because someone in some country thought it was funny.
Gary, before you wrote about LLMs as being "automplete on steroids". But then how does the agency get in here? I mean, can you explain in simple terms how much of it is coded in and how much mimicry of things scraped from the internet?
Anthropic has written a summary guide to LLM workflows vs agents here: https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents
This is a helpful place to start. Agency is a bit overstated when it comes to LLM's in my opinion, and what many consider to be agentic AI cases are actually workflows.
Don't worry, once Sam Altman ships thousands of those agents to customers, we will figure out how to make them safe.
No AI without semantic/symbolic AI. Generative AI is code not magic. Hinton is the grandfather of a neat algorithm not AI. The sooner it is understood that semantic AI at massive scale is in reach the sooner we can get on with building safe AI.
http://aicyc.org/2024/12/22/no-agi-without-semantic-ai/
http://aicyc.org/2024/12/11/sam-implementation-of-a-belief-system/
The commercial version is offered at intellisophic.net.
The public benefit is described at aicyc.org
Code and data are all we are discussing. Generative AI has a massive data quality problem. So did SQL. IBM spent billions on relational model with a logic foundation (Codd,Date). But SQL did not work to guarantee answers were correct. A second technology was needed to extract transform and load (ETL) before the data integration industry took off. Not an analogy. ETL required accurate data to function. Random errors sunk it. Generative AI does not have data let alone accurate data.
I am glad Microsoft does this, even though it is a bit of a "fox and henhouse" situation. People I know are often very reluctant to read the safety and security literature specifically on these systems for whatever reason, and punted to places like our policy arm or Microsoft only, so far. I keep trying to get more traction, including our host's work, but ... maybe this will help!
well at least the british government is attempting to grow the economy in some way..
My understanding of AI is very basic and I value the info and opinions from you (GM) and other level headed, experienced professionals who provide in-depth analyses, and appreciation for the larger implications.
How long will you be off-line?
This is terrifying.