Right. Like the proposition that admitting China to the WTO would cause them to democratize and dump the commies after they became prosperous. How’s that working out?

A lot of the low performance is driven by the insane proliferation of tech and screen time, which MS and Amazon both have plenty of blame for.

What I also think people don't appreciate, is how much work it is to use SNP data even for this. Figuring out how a 3-4 cousin-level match is related, is hard, and it's not easy to automate.

It's enough work that authoritarian goons are more likely to use it as a pretext for punishing whoever they'd like to punish, than to use it to actually find the "guilty" (even after their own standard).

He's a 78-year old with dementia, you could tell him and he wouldn't remember is 10 seconds later.

If you scan a thousand British faces and compare them to a thousand criminals, you will do 1,000,000 comparisons. (that's the birthday paradox part).
If your error rate is 0.8%, you'll get roughly 8,000 false positives and negatives.
That's bad enough if they are all false positives: people get arrested, then released.
It's way worse if they are all false negatives: 8,000 criminals get ignored by the police dragnet.

That was Britain: false positives are life-threatening in countries where the police carry guns.
0.8% is a good error rate. 34% wrong is typical in matching black women. See
https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/news/biased-technology-automated-discrimination-facial-recognition#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%20facial%20recognition%20technology%20is%20biased.,published%20by%20MIT%20Media%20Lab.

I'm not sure they're cheating, but I think the significance of the benchmarks is pretty overstated.
I suspect that even though the benchmarks are supposed to test something other than information retrieval and interpolation in practice they end up being amenable to being "solved" by information retrieval and interpolation.

But a lot of what makes us go is our ability to switch out of that mode and into other modes, like pure logic, or other modes that are typically disparaged like emotional states or interactions with others.

And of course there's the wildly narrow view of reality in terms of empirical truth as defined in some dataset of choice. Reality is a lot less measurable than that.

We don't go through our days dealing in a world of known or even latent data. Rather truth and reality have a mix of subjective and objective dimensions that we deal with in an ongoing way.

I just don't see these LLMs being able to operate like that.

I also suspect that the messy nature of reality means that this large dataset Boltzmann distribution thing will always be involve trading off an "average" kind of knowledge against more specific knowledge and perspective.

I have had a similar experience with code generated by pre-AI low-code platforms.
I attribute that to the code generation framework adopting a relatively generic and inflexible approach to representing the problem and associated logic in code.

I'm not surprised that AI has a similar quality, since I believe that current LLMs really don't have much internal logic, regardless of what the likes of Sam Altman say.

"Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" isn't even a metaphor here - the company I currently work for runs a SAP which has been heavily customized by IBM.

At a certain company long long ago, managers had a mainframe-based planning app that looked like a sort of spreadsheet.

The company did a study to see how much it improved the manager's team's productivity...

Oops! Use of the tools was correlated with declining productivity.

Most of the ideas about how tech would improve learning were hype-filled, speculative baloney. It's a testament to how hard it is to resist this kind of bs that schools are as deep into "educational" technology as they are now.

Another negative effect that Bloomberg didn't name but that I see with my daughter and the children of my friends and family- platform fragmentation. Most classes I took 30+ years ago were based on a textbook. Whether the textbook was good, bad, or indifferent, it was coherent. You read a chapter, did some exercises and then moved to another unit. If your teacher assigned some extra source material, s/he would photocopy them and give them you. Those were generally supplemental to the textbook, so if you didn't understand that extra material you knew you could go back to the textbook and try to figure it out. And a parent trying to help could read back through the textbook and refresh their memory enough to try to be helpful or could at least help coordinate with the teacher to figure out where the student was getting lost.

Now that textbooks are relics, teachers pick instructional material and exercises from a dizzying array of platforms. Some of these are licensed by school systems, so students have to go through some sort of SSO thing to get to them. Others are third party that require account creation, and still others are free stuff on the internet. It is very difficult for students to keep track of all of this even when the teacher is disciplined about posting/linking all the material in the primary course management system. For parents it is essentially impossible to follow what is going on.

And on top of that students are very good at figuring out how to use their computer for non-class uses, regardless of the filters on them. My daughter often emails me or my wife multiple times in a day. This is not good for her or us - she needs to just be in school and not communicating with her parents all the time.

I could not agree more with Bloomberg's idea of getting computers out of classrooms, except for very specific uses.

This is true. I think people should be ready for a bunch of layoffs in the near term.

However, over the longer term, I'd be surprised if there aren't some pretty good opportunities to service or rewrite codebases that companies actually need..

You're profoundly stupid.

I think what you're essentially saying is that the teacher is being interesting or innovative enough to overcome the students' desire to use an internet service to shortcut their entire learning process. That's nice in theory, but pretty damn hard in reality.

Sure, plenty of teachers in secondary and post-secondary education could stand to broader their suite of teaching techniques. But actually doing that is very hard, and that's before all the students who do the least work come and do the most complaining about not getting the grade they wanted.

If you want to take this tack, perhaps you can talk about your own experiences motivating people to learn things they want to get a shortcut to?

Otherwise, it sure sounds a lot like Monday morning quarterbacking to me.