Architeuthis

Basically

Companies probably actually need to curate down their documents so that simpler thinks work, then it doesn’t cost ever increasing infrastructure to overcome the problems that previous investment actually literally caused

Definitely, but the current narrative is that you don't need to do any of that, as long as you add three spoonfulls of AI into the mix you'll be as good as.

Then you find out what you actually signed up for is to do all the manual preparation of building an on-premise search engine to query unstructured data, and you still might end up with a tool that's only slightly better than trying to grep a bunch of pdfs at the same time.

I mean, that was definitely a thing when I was at school, only it was mostly about teaching undergrads graph search algorithms and the least math possible in order to understand backpropagation.

As an aside, weird that we don't hear much about genetic algorithms anymore, but it's probably just me.

Current flavor AI is certainly getting demystified a lot among enterprise people. Let's dip our toes into using an LLM to make our hoard of internal documents more accessible, it's supposed to actually be good at that, right? is slowly giving way to "What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?"

I am overall very uninformed about the chinese thechnological day-to-day, but here's two interesting facts:

They set some pretty draconian rules early on about where the buck stops if your LLM starts spewing false information or (god forbid) goes against party orthodoxy so I'm assuming if independent research is happening It doesn't appear much in the form of public endpoints that anyone might use.

A few weeks ago I saw a report about chinese medical researchers trying use AI agents(?) to set up a virtual hospital in order to maybe eventually have some sort of a virtual patient entity that a medical student could work with somehow, and look how many thousands of virtual patients our handful of virtual doctors are healing daily, isn't it awesome folks. Other than the rampant startupiness of it all, what struck me was that they said they had chatgpt-3.5 set up up the doctor/patient/nurse agents, i.e. they used the free version.

So, who knows? If they are all-in in AGI behind the scenes they don't seem to be making a big fuss about it.

Ah yes, Alexander's unnumbered hordes, that endless torrent of humanity that is all but certain to have made a lasting impact on the sparsely populated subcontinent's collective DNA.

edit: Also, the absolute brain on someone who would think that before entertaining a random recent western ancestor like a grandfather or whateverthefuckjesus.

I like how you lose faith in your argument the longer your post goes on. Maybe start with the last sentence next time.

To have a dead simple UI where you, a person with no technical expertise, can ask in plain language for the data you want in the way you want them presented, along with some basic analysis that you can tell it to make it sound important. Then you tell it to turn it into an email in the style of your previous emails, send it, and take a 50min coffee break. All this allegedly with no overhead besides paying a subscription and telling your IT people to point the thing to the thing.

I mean, it would be quite something if transformers could do all that, instead of raising global temperatures to synthesize convincing looking but highly suspect messaging at best while being prone to delirium at worst.

Google pivoting to selling shovels for the AI gold rush in the form of data tools should be pretty viable if they commit to it, I hadn't thought if it that way.

It's a sad fate that sometimes befalls engineers who are good at talking to audiences, and who work for a big enough company that can afford to have that be their primary role.

edit: I love that he's chief evangelist though, like he has a bunch of little google cloud clerics running around doing chores for him.

Enshittification

Once [a company] can make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job becomes a fait accompli.