SimianSci
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
Microsoft overhired due to the spike in global usage during the pandemic. Some jobs are being automated but it’s more a question of "How many." And Microsoft was one of the first to start dumping its cash reserves into data centers. There is a good chance these will remain profitable even after any sort of bubble pop because they still remain a hyperscaler that can provide services beyond just AI compute.
overall, given where the economy is at and how much of their war chest is gone, im not surprised to see this happening.
Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware. So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.
I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.
Now we can basically say that its not Facebook and Google doing this directly, its our televisions and appliances that are listening and just selling that data back to the ad-networks.
Its not surprising to me that this press release looks half-baked.
Aside from this, I’m led to believe that the AMD stack when it comes to local models has more overhead related to its need to translate more NVIDIA native instructions and therefore can be less performant than Nvidia. Not sure how true this is anymore, but ive yet to hear otherwise.
Windows Pro > Work or School Account > Join a Domain instead > Set password & recovery questions
The one component here that is not present on most machines straight from the manufacturer is the presence of the Pro version. The home version of windows requires the account with increasingly limited alternatives.
There have been multiple times where my software dev team has gone back to prior implemented tests they had the model generate and found that after some time eventually the model got frustrated with the test no longer passing eventually modifying it to fit current needs around a feature push. You can probably anticipate how we came to discover this, as it ended up introducing a regression around multiple edge cases which the test was meant to control for.
The only answer is to inject actual engineering into the process as much as possible without giving it all up to the models to generate more slop in response to slop. tests are a great answer, but only if you treat them with serious intentionality.
What have we gained aside from shifting where time and effort is spent in the design loop?
Models and harnesses have gotten really good, but they still are hard-capped by the operators that use them. The sycophancy of models is perhaps their greatest weakness, as when a user who might be experienced in one area attempts to use AI to build within an area they are less familiar with, the model does not take a step back and examine the "why" of what is being built from an architectural standpoint, it simply performs the expected task in a direct manner, ultimately creating sloppy work that may be easy to ship but difficult to maintain.
A good example of this was a recent interaction I had with a Dev who was very familiar with how to develop embedded and system level applications. He and every other dev are being asked for increasingly more due to AI, and he had to bring something he had built as a single-user desktop application into a distributed cloud environment. He ended up rsyncing a copy of his working directories including multiple credentials and sensitive internal project documents to a virtual machine binding it to a public ip address. Thankfully our tooling detected this before he could get any farther but it illustrates how the AI model isn't doing any real thinking or engineering at the end of the day. Unless the operator knew to instruct the model about proper cloud architecture and understood best practices around deployment of public systems, the model simply did what it was being told to do by a user who didn't know any better.
Another example of this is the sheer amount of unsophisticated users we've been detecting using Javascript injection into their web browser sessions as a form of automation for web services they may use. These users would never know to ask how to request an API token which may allow them to accomplish things in a much easier and approved way, and instead are relying on the frailest possible automations that expose them to risks of credential exposure.
We've got to be careful with how we engineer things with AI models. Just because we've made boilerplate easier to generate doesn't mean that we can avoid the actual engineering of what we do. And I can't help but think that firms which are fully committed to AI code generation, won't just be introducing an avalanche of slop into their product which will explode the costs of maintenance over time.
"I hate this damn machine"
"I wish they would just sell"
"It never does what I want"
"Only what I tell it."
I've yet to be convinced we will evolve these systems to a point where we can just click the "Magic Button" thoughtlessly and get results we are satisfied with.
We may have reduced the loss of data between thought and action, but nothing suggests these systems will be able to intuit our every want and desire.1. The American frontier labs made a gamble that training more capable models would be their best return on investment and invested trillions into an area of research that has yet to prove profitable and capable of returning on this investment.
2. The frontier labs have created models that have reached a point of danger where their functionality has exceeded a point where it is responsible to release the product to the public.
The answer here is NOT to start regulating the space to the point where these frontier labs can entrench themselves into the economy and create a regulatory moat. We instead need to be holding these companies liable for their misuse. They took a gamble that hasn't paid out what they were hoping.
When car manufacturers competed over the size and power of their engines, they eventually found that the incredibly large and dangerous engines had a very limited customer base as many evaluated the increased speed to be of marginal benefit when paired with the cost and danger. We've reached a similar point in AI development. But this time the manufacturers seem to want to regulate the field to a point that will ensure the only thing anyone can sell are bigger and bigger engines.