In other news, the catholic church is suing OpenAI because they had the idea to simply make suicide illegal a thousand years ago and have been using it ever since.

Not sure if it's a trade secret or a copyright case, the news often don't mention the fine details.

That's a good point. Here on /. I can assume people know what open world games are. Out in the real world movies are probably the better analogy.

Apple did just do a round of layoffs with their sales team but that's the exception not the rule for them. They vary rarely do layoffs. They seem to manage their staffing levels better than most of the other tech companies.

The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

I have a bunch of older SSDs sitting in a bin in my hardware horde...er...closet. Occasionally find a use for them but for the most part they were replaced by larger drives over time. Luckily I don't care about whatever data is on them, anything important is backed up.

Most organic food is still treated with pesticides, just from the "organics allowed" list. Bt and pyrethrums for example.

We see these ideas that are obviously nonsense all the time. This one has been picked apart by multiple people with industry experience already.

What these things are is essentially the venture capital version of the scam mails you get in your mailbox every day. If you make it big enough and insane enough, someone with more money than brains will think he spotted an opportunity that everyone else missed and will invest.

Why is it, you think, that 99% of these things vanish without a trace after an initial storm of publicity?

Could? Yes. Absolutely. Will? Not a chance. There is just not enough political will to try to solve the issues preventing it, not to mention funding it.

Well, pretty sure the cops thought it was a great idea.

No, it doesn't mean they are going it "one way or another". This is an feature you can turn on or off in powertoys. And since it's open source, you can audit it yourself if you have doubts.

You mean the MS Recall that processes data 100% on device and doesn't send any of it to Microsoft? Now I have to ask WTF are you trying to say?

You just making shit up to strawman now?

Going back to this

The last line of OP's post is to a article titled "New Research: AI Is Already the #1 Data Exfiltration Channel in the Enterprise". So yea, I think they were implying data exfil even with local AI processing in the powertoy application (you know the thing we are actually talking about here).

Powertoys, Microsoft Foundry Local, and Ollama are all open source, so show us the code where they are 'still listening to and record [sic] everything':
https://github.com/microsoft/P...
https://github.com/ollama/olla...
https://github.com/microsoft/F...

That is exactly the issue this is solving for.

This is impossible for an AI or even a human to do. An AI will never be able to tell just from a photo if you glass has Coke or Diet Coke, if your dressing is full-fat or light, if that soup was made with cream or milk, or if your cupcake is made from fortified flour or a gluten free, unfortified alternative. Thinking it can is just a pipe-dream. But AI is hot so got to put AI in everything. I saw a post with an AI ready screen protector for a phone the other day. WTF?

What they could do is have AI identify how many main dishes and sides are in a shot, take general guesses as to what they are, then prompt the user for details. It might save a bit of time on the user's part, but probably not enough to be worth the time, effort, and inference cost to do it.