this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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[–] EnderMB 242 points 6 months ago (52 children)

All of big tech is really worried about this.

  • Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple's scientists put out a lot of solid research.
  • Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it's the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn't belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
  • Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don't worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored...
  • Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they're still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there's a real concern that they'll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn't sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.

[–] justaderp 49 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Monopolies don't care about the user experience, only profit. The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter. The continued degredation of the user experience is a likely indicator of an increase in revenue as function of successful application of AI.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter.

Do you possibly mean "The AI evangelists" or something similar?

Like, I could totally understand it in the "software will also include the biases of those who wrote it" kind of way (a la Amazon's failed attempt at automating job candidate search). If the only incentive you're given as a programmer is "make it make money", then yeah, your AI is going to bias towards that end.

Just couldn't tell on first reading

[–] justaderp 4 points 6 months ago

I'm not actually asking for good faith answers to these questions. Asking seems the best way to illustrate the concept.

Does the programmer fully control the extents of human meaning as the computation progresses, or is the value in leveraging ignorance of what the software will choose?

Shall we replace our judges with an AI?

Does the software understand the human meaning in what it does?

The problem with the majority of the AI projects I've seen (in rejecting many offers) is that the stakeholders believe they've significantly more influence over the human meaning of the results than exists in the quality and nature of the data they've access to. A scope of data limits a resultant scope of information, which limits a scope of meaning. Stakeholders want to break the rules with "AI voodoo". Then, someone comes along and sells the suckers their snake oil.

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