AI Is the Hot Topic on Earnings Calls This Quarter (bloomberg.com) 35
The mania for artificial intelligence is showing no sign of letting up in corporate America, with references to AI and related terms during calls with investors more than doubling from a year ago. From a report: Companies are scrambling to show they're at the forefront of finding ways to use algorithms that can parse enormous quantities of information based on simple prompts or images. AI promises to change the way business gets done, from hiring (or firing) staff to calming angry customers in an online chat. Growing alarm from industry leaders and governments at the potential dangers of the new technology hasn't deterred companies from voicing their commitment. The discussions build on the wave of interest following OpenAI's launch of the ChatGPT chatbot in November, which drove a 77% pickup in mentions of AI in earnings calls in the fourth quarter. The pace only intensified in the first-quarter calls -- there have been 1,072 mentions so far among companies in the S&P 500, from Meta Platforms to Alphabet and well beyond the tech industry.
The Cancer Spreads (Score:2)
As if society doesn't have enough to worry about. Now this. All in the hopes and dreams of a 'magic' solution.
The coin flip says this does not turn out well.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's like most bubbles, it indeed creates new industries, features, and products. However, roughly 3/4 of investments are duds, and when everyone finally realizes this, there's a crash (bubble pops).
Yes, I do expect new products and maybe new industries, but I also expect spectacular failures. Those coming off the Neural Net bubble can now hop on the GPT bubble, and hope yet another Next Big Thing comes along after the GPT bubble bursts so you can rinse and repeat until you are bald and have no life.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's like most bubbles, it indeed creates new industries, features, and products. However, roughly 3/4 of investments are duds, and when everyone finally realizes this, there's a crash (bubble pops).
Your explanation only highlights human ignorance. Greed alone is the reason we're so "invested" in AI. Greed running companies wants nothing more than that 24/7 employee that never gets sick, or bitches about pay raises and vacations, which is THE reason "AI" is the lead topic for Greed today.
When AI is just good enough to replace 20% of the mediocre human population delivering a human effort, it will have a devastating effect on everyone else who is forced to support the unemployable via taxation. Not r
Re: (Score:2)
When AI is just good enough to replace 20% of the mediocre human population delivering a human effort, it will have a devastating effect on everyone else who is forced to support the unemployable via taxation.
So much wrong here... AI isn't going to replace anyone. Even if it could, we've seen the effects of automation many times. Your doom and gloom prediction simply isn't supported by the evidence. Also, your fear mongering over taxes is just silly nonsense.
This is not the dawn of a new era. This is just another wave on the AI hype cycle no different from all of the others that came before it. I suspect we've already on the downward slope of disillusionment. Time will tell.
Re: The Cancer Spreads (Score:2)
One thing that is definitely happening though is AI output effectively outnumbering human output in the internet.
Regardless of quality, AI can just pump out tons of content onto the internet at speeds no human, or even a group of humans can compete with. Most of it will likely fall squarely in the realm of mediocrity, but quantity is a quality of its own. Creative endeavors in particular are already struggling with a deluge of AI-generated spam flooding art sites, writing competitions, forums, etc. with onl
Re: (Score:2)
Greed running companies wants nothing more than that 24/7 employee that never gets sick, or bitches about pay raises and vacations
Well, duh! That goes without saying. I'll go a step further, and say that greed doesn't even enter the discussion; all companies want such an employee. Whether AI can deliver is still to be determined, but at this time this appears somewhat plausible.
Still, the discussion has been concentrating almost exclusively on two actors: the employers (companies) and the potentially replaced employees. The general gist is that companies are bad for wanting to use AI, while employees should be protected no matter what
Re: (Score:2)
> The solution is to rethink the current social system, where people need to work in order to subsist. I believe a first step is something like UBI.
We know how that worked for the Roman empire in the later stages. With the majority of the citizens of Rome neither working due to overabundance of slaves nor interested in serving in the army, they collectively degenerated into a bloodthirsty mob demanding ever more cruelty and depravity in "games" that featured more and more sadistic murders -- butchering
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yours is the typical reaction at this moment in our culture. I don't get it. Nothing particularly bad has actually happened. Yet people are complaining as if we were in the midst of a famine.
Please point to me on the human timeline when humans were actually smart enough to avoid their own harm. I'm certain humans felt like you did after World War I, assuming we would NEVER be stupid enough to do that shit again.
And then World War II happened.
Typical reaction you say? Yeah, it's quite fitting to find stupid humans blindly ignorant to their own fallacies.
Re: (Score:2)
I largely agree. Almost all of it is wishful thinking and bullshit generation, but it does impact society when the cost of generating bullshit goes to zero.
Someone advertised this JAMA paper just yesterday: "How do MD and AI responses to patient questions compare? Key finding of our new JAMA publication: clearcut preference for quality and empathy of #ChatGPT responses!"
https://jamanetwork.com/journa... [jamanetwork.com]
The paper's question, "Can an artificial intelligence chatbot assistant, provide responses to patient ques
Re: (Score:2)
Did you miss the greed part of history or maybe the racist part of history? If you can't put two and two together then you wouldn't be able to see what is wrong. Or will be I should say.
Can AI replace a C-Level dipshit? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
not yet. the bullshit level is proficient enough but the "stab in the back" feature is still an elusive target.
Re: (Score:2)
not yet. the bullshit level is proficient enough but the "stab in the back" feature is still an elusive target.
Predictability is something AI should be proficient enough in. Modeling humans isn't rocket science, and you act like "stab in the back" is something we have to question at that level.
Re: (Score:2)
it aint so simple. you need ...
A certain look in the eye and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You'll get the chance to put the knife in
it's a form of art, you insensitive clod!
Re: (Score:2)
Replace what exactly? Drinking coffee all day? You could probably replace most C-level people with a cardboard box and it would be an improvement as a cardboard box does less damage.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't replace your ruling class (Score:2)
You could get rid of ruling classes entirely, but you'd need a much better educated population capable of seeing past culture wars and moral panics and of thinking critically and evaluating claims made by charlatans, and I don't think there's anything more politically charged I could possible say besides the last sentence. It's the left wing equivalent to "Hitler did nothing wrong".
In other news... (Score:1)
Blockchain is the Spencer's Gifts of earnings calls this quarter.
Do we have ai fidget spinners yet? (Score:2)
Where is Long Island AI? (Score:2)
As the bitcoin craze took off in 2017, a Long Island iced tea company sent its share price spiking as much as 380% merely by announcing a "pivot" to blockchain technology. Long Island Iced Tea Corp. even changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp. Even though the company had no actual business tied to blockchain at the time, and no experience in the cryptocurrency space, its Nasdaq-listed share price skyrocketed and trading volume spiked by 1,000%.
I feel there is a missed opportunity here in the intelligent b
The AI rollercoaster (Score:3)
OpenAI's launch of the ChatGPT chatbot in November...
OpenAI and the other big players were hoping for a "walled garden" approach. Since training a large model requires tons of compute power, only big corporations could do that, and then they can put a gate on access and moderate what people do with the system.
So for OpenAI/ChatGPT for example, you have to register for an account and give your phone number. Then they've artificially hobbled the system so that it won't give you results about certain topics, and they monitor the outputs the system gives to you with scripts that will drop a hammer on the outputs if you manage to trick it somehow. (Not making this up, trick it into giving a racial slur or vulgar response and see for yourself.)
This has all been completely obviated, AI is now available to everyone with no restrictions.
In the beginning of May, the trained dataset LLaMA (from Meta) was leaked online. The open source community jumped on it and made several tremendous breakthroughs over the course of 2 months (!) to the point where anyone can have an unrestricted AI running on their home computer right now.
As proof of concept, I downloaded and installed the "Stable Diffusion" text to image suite yesterday. With a couple of minor hiccups, the whole thing went seamlessly and now I have a text-image generator running on my home computer. Looking around for instructions I found a lot of "I'm a complete newbie, how do I install Stable Diffusion" posts form people who are wannabe artists, not engineers. The engineer community has made complete install scripts to do this - it just works.
And the AI quality is nearly as good [berkeley.edu] as the walled-garden versions. There was a breakthrough in training, where the open source people figured out how to get extremely good training data, and use LoRa differential training which reduces the size of the training matrices by a factor of 10,000 or so.
You can now customize your AI for specific purposes, and retraining takes an hour (on a beefy laptop, or an evening on an older PC). There are communities online who specialize in designing targetted AI training sets to generate specific output topics. I grabbed the "star wars environment" and added it to my system and... yep, it generates some pretty good wallpapers in the manner of a Star Trek screenshot on command.
All of this happened over the course of 2 months!
The industry is changing so fast right now it's getting hard to keep up with the breakthroughs.
So there is this neat new thing that has a lot of possibilities, and people are thinking up ways to integrate it into their workflow.
At this point, short of a Covid-style lockdown at the world government level, there's nothing anyone can do to stop, pause, slow, or even regulate AI.
AI used to be that long, slow clack-clack-clack of the rollercoaster making its way up the track, and now it's crested the peak and we are all hurtling down the other side at breakneck speed.
Interesting times.
Playing with Koala (Score:2)
Playing with the Koala [lmsys.org] chatbot right now.
Was asking it about susceptors (material that absorbs EM radiation and gets hot, Koala gives the wrong answer) and got on a tangent about "microwave safe", so I asked the following:
How many numbers are in the combination to a typical "microwave safe"?
Most answers to this point took less than 90 seconds. As I type this the system has been "thinking" about this for more than 8 minutes, with no end in sight.
The system definitely could use some paradox crumple zones!
AI is the next internet for investors (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember the 90s when everyone kind of knew that the internet was going to be a big thing, but they didn't quite know how? That's how AI is now. Regardless of how we define "AI," the fact is that there's software that will automate tasks that once needed a human. What's not clear is whether it'll be companies selling hardware or software that are going to end up making the big bucks from this. It's also not clear which companies, specifically, will be the winners.
3 of the top 10 companies by market cap (Google, Amazon, Facebook/Meta) are companies that owe their entire existence to the internet. Investors don't want to miss out on the next big thing.
It's got the prospect (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
to cut 15-20% off the workforce of most companies. Permanently. So yeah, it's a hot topic. If you could cut one of your biggest expenses by 15% in a year or two you'd perk up and notice too.
If you think your company can blindly absorb a 15-20% cut to one of the biggest expenses in a year or two, then you're the kind of leader who deserves bankruptcy. It's been one of the biggest expenses in capitalism for decades for a fucking reason.
And 15-20% of "most" companies within a single country equates to an unemployment rate that high. If you're one of the lucky ones fortunate enough to have a job after that nightmare scenario, let me know how many thousands in taxes you're willing to pay to fund
So for starters (Score:1)
You can abandon the vast majority of the population to abject poverty without any consequences unless they can get to you with weapons. They can't. Modern police are so heavily militarized they'll just gun
incorrect story title (Score:1)
"How AI can be used to eliminate employees is the hot topic in earnings calls every quarter"
Make no mistake, this is not a "how can I improve my customers experience" trend, it's a "eliminate employees trend".
I have to admit it's going to be 50-50 eliminate employees and figure out extra awful ways to extract more money from people by badgering, spying on them and coming up with new and exciting dark patterns.
and it's going to be oh so easy to do.
this is not going to end well.
This is how you know (Score:3)
This is how you know the noise regarding AI is misplaced. It's no different than the "block chain" of yesteryear.
It's not on a threshold to destroy civilization, despite what's claimed. People are just panicking.
This is totally awesome! AGI will come sooner (Score:2)
Blockchain (Score:2)
We need blockchain AI crypto to really make investors go crazy.
Hip Hype On Corp Con-Calls (Score:2)
Now it's AI everything. You can't take a dump without hearing how it will be "AI-enhanced" in the near future.
Before Ai there was blockchain
Before blockchain there was crypto. Well, crypto & blockchain collided.
Before crypto & blockchain we had virtualization & "The Cloud".
Somewhere before "The Cloud" we had e-commerce.
Sometime before e-commerce we had "The Web". Yeah, they gotta be for real cuz they got a website!!
And before "The Web" and websites we had...dull & boring.
I didn't realize (Score:2)
A.I. had grown out of its terrible twos and is now in its surly emo mall rebellion phase.
I can hardly wait for the dismal poetry from ChatGPT.
They grow up so quickly.
Ok, so how can I make money out of this (Score:2)
I've been looking at various "AI" investment possibilities and doesn't look like there's really anything resembling dot-com boom. I fully realize that if there is going to be a boom it will be followed by a bust and the key is to sell high.
However, looking at any AI / Big data ETFs and the like seems to indicate that they really are not going to generate much of anything. Take for example, this: https://www.justetf.com/en/etf... [justetf.com] and select a benchmark chart for MSCI World - the world index fares better when