The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty
- Reference: 1724747348
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/08/27/opinion_ai_ml/
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There is a more accurate tech use of "partner," as in the sort that comes with a toxic relationship. Windows is that partner as it keeps doing things even when told to stop. It promises to change but doesn't. It constantly angles to take control. You want evidence? [1]Recall is coming back .
Readers may remember Recall as a big part of Microsoft's AI/ML Windows 11 strategy. It creates a searchable timeline of your desktop activity by [2]constantly taking snapshots of work going on and feeding them to a remote analytics engine. How this universal auto-snoop was compatible with corporate privacy and data protection policies, Microsoft couldn't say. Because it wasn't. After [3]copious helpings of the whoop-ass nope stick , Recall was, er, [4]recalled for unspecified fixes .
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Now it's on the way back, and the fixes remain unspecified. Microsoft really wants us to have it, despite nobody asking for it. If we did want it, there are ways of doing it without all the centralized AI/ML nonsense. It's still not a great idea to create a huge database of work done across multiple apps and services, even if kept locally. A tempting target indeed. It doesn't make much sense – and in that, Recall is a microcosm of how the misapplication of AI/ML may risk a new AI winter.
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AI winters, like their seasonal counterparts, come around regularly. The mechanism is as clear as climate change: Some technology is declared to be AI in egg form, just needing the warm fluffy hen's bottom of massive investment to hatch as a miraculous giant robo-god. The egg is never what it's cracked up to be, and the resultant stench makes AI deeply unfashionable for a decade or two until people forget.
How are things looking this time? There are some good questions to ask: Is it useful? Is it worth it, and can you build a sustainable industry on it? Targeted machine learning using the immense capabilities of modern hardware has done good things in medicine, science, and engineering – all fields that foster niche techniques of incredible ingenuity and capability, but not generally applicable. Pull out from the vertical to the horizontal, the things we all use that create the most rewards, and it's very different.
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It's not at all clear that consumers care very much for the AI/ML bait that's being dangled. Google is making big bets here, with the Pixel 9 launch being more about it as a platform for Gemini and AI/ML apps than the usual flagship phone features. Reviewers have yet to find a single aspect that justifies this change in emphasis. They're like the hundreds of online AI/ML services that are really clever and really forgettable. It's not just that there's no business model here, it's that nobody's going to use them.
Which may be just as well: Googling the question "How much has Google invested in AI?" that same AI, now baked into the search engine, reports that "In April 2024, Google CEO Demis Hassabis said that Google would spend more than $100 billion." Direct cut and paste, dear reader. This will come as news to Google's actual CEO, Sundar Pichai. Google's flagship AI built for Google's flagship product does not know who Google's CEO is – and the company has arranged for this to be the first line of the first result shown on screen.
[9]Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play
[10]LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape
[11]The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world
[12]Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy
This is not good. This is very far from good.
Perhaps actually spending those billions will help? Perhaps not. Microsoft is already spending close to $19 billion a quarter on AI/ML infrastructure, but recently had to [13]officially remind people that its AI wasn't entirely trustworthy . ChatGPT itself, the standard-bearer for general-purpose AI, looks like it has [14]saturated its market already .
Even Microsoft's umbrella Windows AI/ML tool, Copilot, is getting cold glares in the company's most reliable market, enterprise computing. COO after COO is saying "not today" because the claimed benefits are nowhere near enough to balance the [15]danger of damaged data governance .
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With no revenue model, initial buzz dying, and an atmosphere of lukewarm to hostile, the reason Recall is coming back exemplifies the only path forward through the blizzard – the bet that AI/ML must become a huge general market because it's too clever to fail, and that the huge investments needed will serve to lock out everyone else when the miracle comes to pass.
Technology doesn't work like that. VR/AR is another example – again – because outside of niches, it's a bad experience not worth the hassle. Driverless cars are stalled because the hard bits are far harder than money can fix, and it's no good getting 80 percent of the way when the 20 percent can kill you. AI/ML has no clear path through to sufficient reliability, no business model that makes sense, and its promiscuous, gargantuan appetite for data cannot be safely supplied.
This isn't an AI bubble. Bubbles happen when lots of people literally buy into an unsustainable idea. Not many people are buying into broad AI/ML. A few people are spending a lot of money. If you don't flip your smartphone to an AI/ML platform, what else are you going to do? If you don't flip your productivity platform to an AI/ML platform, what else are you going to do?
If the economic impact of broad AI/ML isn't a hallucination, it's going to have to connect to reality soon. Winter is coming, and for once in this business, the word means what it says. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/07/microsoft_recall_changes/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/22/windows_recall/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/04/microsoft_analysts_recall/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/microsoft_recall_release_delayed/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zs2jx-FDMakn8JOTZBN6igAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zs2jx-FDMakn8JOTZBN6igAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zs2jx-FDMakn8JOTZBN6igAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zs2jx-FDMakn8JOTZBN6igAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/sorry_moxie_blaming_agile_for/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/12/opinion_column/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/opinion_ml_social_media_cybersecurity/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/29/opinion_column_space/
[13] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming
[14] https://www.thewrap.com/chatgpt-growth-2024/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/microsoft_ai_copilots/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zs2jx-FDMakn8JOTZBN6igAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
A long read but it gives you a good view of the approach of the "AI bros"
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/
AI isn't always AI same as a vacuum cleaner isn;t always a hoover
Generative AI is (for now) hot garbage. I've got the allegedy super duper license and it's like having a malcious sociopath as your PA. Give it some data (always assuming it's going to snaffle it so you have to anonymise and declassify first) and it'll do some very clever analysis for you pretty quickly. But then you notice that if the AI disagrees with your prompt it'll basically ignore it and do what it thinks is best. Then if you correct it it'll deny the error and gaslight you that your prompt was what it did anyway. Also if your data isn't perfect, say a sensor failed and you've no data for a short period it'll hallucinate data to fill the gap. It won't tell you it's done this and false data is likely plausible and hard to spot unless you've already identified the gap.
So you've got this supposed wonderful tool that you don't trust so you can only use low value data within, doesn't do what it's told and lies about changes, that hallucinates at the drop of a hat in ways that can be very hard to spot. So if you do use the tool you need to prep it, then spend time interogating the results to ensure correctness.
This is where driverless cars fall down too, unless I can trust the tool to take over the portion of the work and IT be responsible then it is actually worse then doing it myself. If I need to supervise a driverless car then it's not autopilot and (studies have shown) that this observation status is the worst of all worlds with the machine not trusted but in control and the human half alseep from bordom from doing nothing.
So is all AI crap, no not at all. The non-generative stuff seems to be very useful, but it's not very exciting so doesn't get the headlines. Thos AI/ML tools that are predicting industrial component failures, or estimating erosion patterns or highlighting potential illness from scans. All that stuff, brilliant. Generative, shit, less than useless.
Re: AI isn't always AI same as a vacuum cleaner isn;t always a hoover
Even the non-generative AI has serious drawbacks, such as the same privacy issues you mentioned, and high error rates when presented with an input not well-represented in the training data.
"Black person = Criminal", computer says you have cancer but it's just a piercing, military drone thinks you are the enemy, etc.
Worse, I predict that future non-generative AI may be trained on fake data from generative-AI, either deliberately (to quickly create fast embedded classifier models) or accidentally due to data pollution
Perhaps actually spending those billions will help? Perhaps not. Microsoft is already spending close to $19 billion a quarter on AI/ML infrastructure, but recently had to officially remind people that its AI wasn't entirely trustworthy.
I don't know how much money Microsoft has, but you can't keep that level of burn going very long without severe questions being asked. If I were a Micros~1 shareholder, I'd be writing some rather incendiary letters to Redmond asking why they're setting so much money on fire for a product that doesn't even give the right answer.
The current AI Winter ...
... actually started about four years ago.
Unfortunately, people were stuck at home playing with themselves (Covid), and didn't notice. The marketards took advantage of this and suckered billions out of the investors. The investors, not wanting to take a bath (who can blame them?) have continued to prop this up artificially, all the while keeping their fingers crossed that this "new" technology will somehow magically start producing something (anything!) useful.
The coming crash will be spectacular. Totally predictable, mind, but spectacular nonetheless.
Decisions, decisions...
Linux is slowly getting better; Windows is slowly getting worse.
At what point does one change?
If there is no way to remove Recall from Win 11, I think I'll stay with 10 until its updates run out, then hope that all the 'Windows only' applications have a better Linux version.
And before you bother to reply; Wine doesn't do it for me, unless it's a nice Coonawarra red.
Re: Decisions, decisions...
"At what point does one change?"
25 years ago would have been nice. The learning curve would now be some 24 years in your rear view mirror. As would your near constant grumbling about your OS of choice.
> Googling the question "How much has Google invested in AI?" that same AI, now baked into the search engine, reports that "In April 2024, Google CEO Demis Hassabis...
Acually it doesn't. It shows a Bloomberg article that says Deep Mind CEO Demis Hassabis said those things.
Follow the money
It is a great tool to make lots of money,... for the speculative investors and CxOs able to over-fill their bullshit-bingo cards.
The whole affair is executed using a standard Pyramid/Ponzi scheme operating procedure: Invest, hype, invest, hype and sell just before the inevitable crash.