Thinking As a Service (TaaS) is not a good model!

[swatts]

Everyone who knows me would probably consider me a contrarian,

Where normal people see trends, I tend to be thinking about who, what is pushing the trend.

In the case of AI, I was primarily sensitive to the type of person pushing it. These were generally pushers of crap digital pictures (NFTs) and money for criminals (bitcoin). In short not the kinds of people who I take seriously. 

I also hate people telling me what I should be feeling, I view the technical FOMO as just another manipulation technique. If something is really that good I shouldn't need bullying into appreciating it.

Finally most of the "great" examples I was given for AI sent cold ethical shivers up my spine or would quite clearly be jettisoned as soon as they tried to monetise them.

As mentioned before the other turn-off for me are the ethical issues ..

Sycophancy - Vulnerable people are making unhealthily close bonds to the machine that thinks their every idea is "Great", personally I think this is actually one of the biggest issues (and liabilities) of LLMs. 

Plagiarism - Nothing in the answers is imagined, it all comes from somewhere and usually without the tacit permission of the originators.

And I view the tech billionaires as somewhat diminished on the ethical scale. Their surety that they know what's best for us is a massive red flag in my book.

A previous post discusses some of these issues - AI is going to take our jobs - everyone should panic now.

It seems a good time to look a bit closer at SaaS (software as a service), in this world of companies renting their infrastructure to a cloud based monolith we can see some cracks appearing in the system.

Yesterday my local supermarket could not perform basic financial transactions (something humans have been doing for thousands of years), all because their cloud based financial system had been compromised. As a designer I would always have a local system that would sync with the cloud based system, but no..  

So we end up with a Supermarket that has to throw away food, because it can't take cash. I suspect these problems will get worse, and the majority of the catastrophes will be fat fingers, not hostile actors.

Which leads me to argument missing in the conversations about AI. We are becoming dependent on AI companies for important parts of our business logic and support. Are we confident that the pillars of society running these businesses won't take advantage the moment they can (or the moment they need to recoup their investments).

I really view dependency as the biggest business risk, LinkedInWorld doesn't seem to care tho'.

I mean, look at the investment!, how will these 100s of Billions $$$ be recouped. Investors don't expect a 1x return on risky investments... more like 7x. So actually how will >Trillion $$$ be returned?

Like a drug dealer they entice you in with freebies and when you are dependent they extract all the money from your account.

"We’ve seen it before. As an example, previously Microsoft limited themselves to Autocorrect in the Word monopoly. In the future their AI engine will drive core portions of your business increasing your vulnerability as they will continue to offer to integrate all your MS apps and services into an increasing monopolistic empire. And the entry price will be until you are caught inextricably in their web. And the AI engines will be so resource demanding that they can only run cloud-based except for very large corporations who can afford their own farms." Carsten Thomsen captures this predatory business approach very nicely in his reply to me on a LinkedIn post.

Is my hatred of this industry Luddite thinking, somewhat I guess, but I really detest snake oil, it tastes very bitter.

And all the money being poured into this bubble, could be being spent on boring, steady and robust innovations. A lot of tech is not being funded, because the AI sponge sucks it all up.

When the bubble pops we will not be left with any interesting remnants (the telecom bubble left us with fiber infrastructure, the .com bubble eventually led to transformative businesses), just a load of last years GPUs that can't be used for graphics!

If you are in the tech business, please make sure you have a FU Fund of 6 months in the bank if you can... The Telecoms bubble affected the entire industry for about 6 months and then it bounced back.

Right I need to go think about something more positive

Love

[Intaris]

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@swatts wrote:

Everyone who knows me would probably consider me a contrarian,

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I don't believe you.... 😋

Seriously, though. I share most of your opinions. It seems to me that the ever-faster cycle of AI companies (nVidia, AMD - whose CEOs are cousins by the way, surely no conflicts of interest there, right?) making "mega deals" public while the actual production capacities are drying up (Open AI apparently looking for up to 900k DRAM wafers from TSMC per month!!  https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/samsung-sk-hynix-supply-memory-chips-openais-stargate...  ) has escalated beyond normal business sense.  Literally fever-pitch. And in the end, who is going to produce all of this, and who is going to power it?

AMD has a deal for 6 GW. Apparently similar power levels to the entire city of Houston during the hottest part of the day. nVidia has a deal for around 10 GW. What was all the buzz around global warming again? But sure, we should stop flying because it causes too much CO2 emission. So stop eating beef because it's bad for the environment!

I remember when it was legally required to accept "legal tender" when paying. Hence the name. I'm assuming this is no longer the case? With money going digital, everything we do is traceable, fueling someone's hunger for data. But it's OK because <social scapegoat> behaviour needs to be controlled for all our benefit. Controlled by who? And to what end? The signing of the Patriot Act in the USA after 9-11 was the first time I really thought things were going too far. But things have advanced so much further now, it's dizzying.

Maybe forcing businesses to go back to cash is one step in the right direction? And growing our own food. And learning carpentry (A long-standing wish of mine).  After all this time, maybe our old friend Ben Rayner was also on the right track all along.

[swatts]

Isn't measuring compute power in GW a bit like measuring car speed by amount of fuel consumed?.

Carpentry would be my thing outside of tech stuff, untidy, solid and very human carpentry!