onfocus

This is the latest example of a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don't get on the AI bandwagon.

No hint of desperation here. I'm sure the quarterly numbers for adoption and engagement are off the charts and the only reason to strong arm people is because he's excited about the potential of the technology.

A new study from MIT found that 95 percent of enterprise organizations report zero measurable gains from the adoption of AI tools.

Those billions spent on no gains are going to be a problem.

In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us to consider a different vision for the near-future—one in which A.I. might not get much better than this.

What if we're closer to the end state of AI rather than the beginning?

The DeepMind CEO is dead-set that advanced AI models will bring about a renaissance in human existence. The “golden era” is only five short years away. “AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources,” Hassabis said.

Someone needs to check in on the standard tech CEO ketamine dosage. I feel like it's dialed too high at the moment.

While publishers contend with how AI is changing search, they are also seeking ways to protect their copyright material. The large language models that underpin the new generation of chatbots are trained on data hoovered up from the open web, including news articles.

This was always the central transaction of Google. It can display portions of your site (or maybe even a fully cached version) and in return site owners get traffic. The deal is off. Now it's all crawling/scraping but keeping most of the traffic for themselves.

The media has provided OpenAI with an aura of vast authority, with its executives publicly proclaiming that its tech is poised to profoundly change the world, restructuring the economy and perhaps one day achieving a superhuman "artificial general intelligence" — outsize claims that sound, on a certain level, not unlike many of the delusions we heard about while reporting this story.

Hadn't made this connection before. Yeah, if you claim your new technology is going to reorder society—and media outlets credulously parrot it—you're going to trick people into thinking they're tapped into genius. Some healthy skepticism about new technology is important.

That being said, there's no excuse for how everybody covered this Jony Ive fiasco. Even if you think this device ships, it took very little time and energy to establish how little Jony Ive has done since leaving Apple, and only a little more time to work out exactly how ridiculous everything about it.

Righteous rant from Edward Zitron about fawning, credulous OpenAi coverage.

Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

I think this article article helps bring many background assumptions of the AI mindset into the foreground. I've found thinking about AI as an ideology rather than a technology helps me process our current moment. Highly recommended.

"But I just use AI for boilerplate!" you whimper, clutching your Co-Pilot subscription. Listen to yourself. If you’re writing the same boilerplate every day like some industrial-age cog monkey, automate it yourself. Write a library. Invent a macro. Reclaim some dignity.

LOL, enjoyed this rant. Sometimes I feel like the only person who isn't an AI enthusiast.

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

ok, this isn't just weird memes and goofy youtube videos anymore. This is cult brainwashing shit.

As grim as some of these responses feel, I hope there’s at least some small solace to be taken from the fact that so many artists remain firm in their resistance to AI technology that devalues their work, and are championing human creators in the face of it.

This is a tough read but a good antidote to the ai cheerleading you see everywhere.

Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed "for most things" in the world, says Bill Gates.

LOL, man these billionaires are telling on themselves by promoting the idea they don't need labor anymore. AI's primary function is to devalue labor and it's not much more than that. These sorts of predictions are part of that devaluation process. Your work is valuable! Join a union.