Yeah, they're not going to stop shoveling AI and "give us all your data" initiatives. And while I have no outright proof, I have to think the data-suck and honestly too-fast addition of AI features is leading to a lot of the instability issues we've been hearing about. I've found that if I keep networking completely turned off I get much better performance on local-only tasks. Even without opening an email client or a web browser but leaving the network adapter turned on I see CPU and RAM usage climb fairly quickly. Which tells me there's something running when the network is on that isn't when it's turned off. I would pop a network sniffer if I got real curious about it, but I just want to use my computer during my limited time each day to record some guitar, program some drums, and do a little writing. Turning off the network allows me to accomplish that.

It's too bad the network is required for so many workflows now. It leaves the great big gaping window open, and Microsoft is both the construction company of the house you're living in, and the peeping tom desperate to catch your digital life in its underwear.

The end game is profit for the corporations without needing people. And some of them are beginning to find ways to make it happen.

I'm not sure an entire economy can forever churn that way, but it's starting to look like we're going to try to find out.

It's OK. We'll use AI to hallucinate an economy for us.

It's not stupid and pointless to them. They'll be able to generate revenue from nothing if this catches and takes off. They can have their AI browsers constantly soaking up ad impressions, that they can charge their advertising clients for as if they were views, and possibly even generate click-throughs by the browser, making it seem as if the ads are generating real interest in the products being advertised. Think of the amount of money people will waste advertising to AI bots! And Google gets to soak up all of it! HURRAH! NO MORE HAVING TO PROVIDE LEGITIMATE SERVICE! INFINITE GROWTH, ZERO DOWNSIDE!

This is what happens when greed is your god and profit is your only goal. What a glorious time to be alive.

This has been the dream for them from the moment AI started becoming the next big thing, if not before. If they can set it up so that most of their ad traffic is auto-generated by their "AI enabled browsers," they can pick success stories however they'd like for advertising dollars spent vs. impressions. And they can ramp up those impressions beyond all reason. Imagine a few million AI browsers auto-refreshing ads at a pace far beyond the capability of a human. Yeah, those impressions are gonna count. And they can determine which get clicked through.

The real dream is when they don't even need a human on the other end to make a request before the browser starts gobbling down ad views. It's corporate self-fellation, and they're currently coiling themselves into a pretzel to make it happen.

HEY! Middle Management is just big boned!

To be fair to you, it's been so long since any of our three branches of federal government have actually done the job they were supposed to, it's all sort of become a giant blur of ineffectiveness when looking at it from a distance.

Actually, in research capacity, provided it backs up its "conclusions" with links to the original documents, it can help speed things up. it's about the only thing current generation AI is good at. Granted, some goober is going to suggest you can pose a research question to the AI and have a fully written and cited report without any domain-knowledge human involved, and that person is going to need to be slapped, hard, repeatedly, until they sit down and shut up. There are way too many people that think current gen AI is going to remove the need for humans in so many roles, when in reality it's just barely a decent research assistant. And it won't have the capacity to back up its research results with any form of reasoning.

I wish I had mod points. Bravo, good sir. Bravo.

Yeah, but his Big Ai will have a cooler name than the other guys Big AI. It'll lean up against its car and smoke cigarettes and maybe, if it's feeling edgy, squeal its tires when it peels out of the parking lot.

These god damned idiots thinking throwing around billions of dollars at the most popular smoke and mirrors of the moment will make them appear rebellious is one of the funniest things I've heard so far this year. And while the year is young, it's gonna be tough to beat this one.

I know it started as a doomsday nuclear war clock, but they really should set up time zones now. Maybe one for western Europe, one for Eastern Europe, one for Asia, one for Australia, one for the US & Canada, one for Central America, and one for South America. That would give them more opportunity to climb on their soapbox, and cause all sorts of hilarity as people argue over the merits of the various zones and their current time(s).

He covered his ass. Further in he said he's pretty confident they'll get there, they just aren't there yet.

This is more a rippling pebble in the stream of bullshit, not a diversion.

While true, it's easy to call it late stage when technology is helping the rich fuck us over in new, creative, and admittedly impressive ways. In fact, they're fucking the poor over so well that they'll ultimately end up fucking themselves as well, they're just too blinded by greed to see that particular moment coming.

They're well on their way. Give it another couple years and the government will have to pay them a few billion dollars every time they have an outtage. That's the big business dream. Too big to fail = government handouts for failure.

I challenge someone to provide actual proof of this supposed enormous value. Thus far we've seen a gigantic amount of money slung at AI, for it to have the ability to sort of summarize reports, sometimes code things a little quicker than humans but in ways that require humans to expend tremendous effort sorting out the chaff after the fact, and capable of creating tremendous hallucinations not only within themselves, but within the C-suites of every company that makes more than a few thousand dollars a year in profit. Can anybody point us to some factual data that shows "enormous value" in current day AI systems? That needs to be proven before we worry about "capturing" that value.