Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation
- Reference: 1690554425
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/07/28/sysadmins_left_out_of_ai/
- Source link:
According to a study by patch management platform vendor Action1, 82 percent of sysadmins said their employers did not require AI implementation in their roles, while 73 percent lacked understanding of strategic AI implementation in their area of expertise.
The result contrasts with a Gartner study which found 79 percent of corporate strategists see AI as critical to their organization's success in the next two years.
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The poll of 560 sysadmins worldwide found that 63 percent were looking for additional training for better AI integration understanding, while 47 percent said they were concerned about being left behind by AI.
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"AI holds immense potential to free sysadmins from routine work and enhance their overall productivity," said Mike Walters, Action1 president and co-founder. "To fully leverage it, companies must allocate resources for identifying application and implementation areas for AI. Given IT departments' constrained resources and potential fatigue, it's vital to provide IT admins both with relevant training and convenient tools enabling them to automate current tasks."
The task most likely to be automated by AI was log analysis, with 44 percent of respondents citing it. Monitoring of server CPU and memory usage, vulnerability prioritization, patch management, and analysis of security controls were also in the top five.
[4]Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network
[5]Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice
[6]Boffins find COVID changed the way sysadmins work – probably for the worse
[7]Microsoft places huge cap-ex bets on datacenters for cloud and AI
The Action1 report said the introduction of AI in sysadmin roles would free up time for tasks which require more human judgement, "creativity, empathy, complex decision-making, and an understanding of organizational context." These tasks include user permissions and password management, and defining system usage policies and procedures, the report said.
Today, July 28, is System Administrator Appreciation Day, when its organizers say the world should take the "opportunity to pay tribute to the heroic men and women who, come rain or shine, prevent disasters, keep IT secure and put out tech fires left and right."
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The event was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator, in 1999 and has been celebrated on the last Friday of July each year to honor and appreciate the contributions of these dedicated, but often under-appreciated, band of IT professionals. ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/who_me/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/07/on_call/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/09/sysadmin_work_changed_by_covid/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/28/microsoft_places_huge_capex_bets/
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[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
IMHO...
The "problem" with AI (LLMs et al) is that strategically it's got sod all to do with logs'n'all and everything to do with precision targeting of sales and is/will be driven by brand and marketing. IT just provides the plumbing. I'm not having a pop, it's just that IT is not commercial in its focus. You start spouting phrases like "sentiment analysis" at IT admin types and they think you're taking the piss.
Re: IMHO...
You start spouting phrases like "sentiment analysis" at IT admin types and they think you're taking the piss.
If pushed too far they're liable to take a baseball bat and start hitting the machine the LLM is running on while shouting "analyse this sentiment you bastard".
Today, July 28, is System Administrator Appreciation Day, when...
when we inform our appreciated System Administrators that they will all be replaced by AI and are ordered to provide the learning materials for said AI and provide feedback on the said AI's responses for the remainder of their employment. Any under performers, deviations of expected work or lack of accuracy will translate in cut severance pay. Anyone showing bad performance may be sued for loss of profitability margins of their replacements.
are ordered to provide the learning materials for said AI
How could this possibly fail? Let me count the ways.
AI: sysadmins: what could possibly go wrong.
"AI holds immense potential to free sysadmins from routine work and enhance their overall productivity"
I don't think these people understand the nature of A.I. First of all it isn't intelligent, it's trained on a large set of data and uses a predictive engine to generate output. Sometimes phrasing the same question differently generated different and contradictory responses. Going on current versions of ChatAIs these things don't have any common sense and will happily do the wrong thing if fed false data. May be useful to run what-ifs, but not to have direct control of the system.
[1]Mentour Now! does interesting videos on what can happen when the computers on-board an aircraft disagree with the pilot. One such incident, the pilot put the landing gear down and set the auto-pilot to landing-mode. At an air-show so as he could do a fly-pass for the audience. So the plane duly flew past and did a landing in the forest next door. I'll leave the final word to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT: “ The reason for giving different answers when a question is phrased differently lies in how language models like GPT-3.5 process and generate text. These models are based on probabilistic methods, which means they assign probabilities to different sequences of words based on the context they have learned during training. Consequently, minor changes in the input phrasing can lead to different probabilities and, thus, different answers. ”
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourNow/videos
Mentioned "Today, July 28, is System Administrator Appreciation Day" to my users and 5/6 were looking forward to "AI Appreciation Day". Sigh
probably a misunderstanding
What "system admins" view as AI vs what "management" views as AI are different things. In most cases I suspect "AI" to be implemented in some kind of service or basic software that end users can understand, and that software will have proper names not generic "AI" (but "management" will more likely view said solution as "AI"). vs when a "system admin" may be asked about AI they will probably think the topic is much more in depth like setting up a LLM from scratch or something which is probably going to be a super rare occurrence more fit to a specialized set of skills.
I've been working with MySQL for 20 years and can set up the basics just fine but there's a whole different level of how you can set it up/understand how it's working beyond what I know for example, and I leave that to the DBAs(I can then take&duplicate the config easily enough, doesn't mean I fully grasp what the settings mean). Same for Oracle, I can setup an Oracle DB server, but if it's for a serious application I certainly won't volunteer myself to do that from scratch.
If it's a service providing the "AI", then likely the only stuff system admins may need to bother with is perhaps managing accounts, or other generic things that apply to any kind of service not specific to AI.
Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do...
[1]...but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
Everyone always forgets about us :(
[1] https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Re: Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do...
Nice link. I read the bit
“Is that called arrayReverse?”
“s/camel/_/”
“Cool thanks.”
and knew exactly what it meant.
"Dear Agony Aunt, should I worry?"
“ These tasks include user permissions and password management”
No way something could go wrong here.
So as a sysadmin training my replacement -
If I put something in the training set, say a “back door” then all systems built using that training set could be owned by me?
Just doing a BOFH here.
AI?
Sysadmins don't need no steenking AI. The already have an abundance of on-line resources to generate dubious/useless/just plain wrong "help".
> Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation
Expected to fix it anyway.