> After a year in which trillions of dollars worth of AI investments buoyed global markets and the economy, 68% of CEOs plan to spend even more on AI in 2026
They are too far in to turn back. They got into AI via fear of missing out (FOMO) and now they are too heavily invested to write it off on their balance sheet. To revert now would cause nothing but trouble.
> Less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said. They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources.
I.e., the best success has been in cutting jobs, not in aiding the productivity of individuals.
The promise of being able to run a business without having to employ people is just too alluring to these guys. They feel like they're nearly on the cusp of it: Like any day now, the technology will be there, and it can just be AI + robots, and the C-suite and shareholders can just pocket all the returns. No more pesky bags of meat to feed and clothe. You can feel it--they are absolutely salivating over the idea. "If we can just get rid of the need for human labor, Line Will Go Up forever!"
The whole history of AI from at least the 1930s happened in waves, and each wave could be accurately summarized by what you just said. Oh, and add Bitcoin with the same logic.
But it never happened. None of the AI waves, not perceptrons, not "deep neural networks", not RNNs, not support vector machines, not ... made zero-human companies possible, or even less-human companies, in contrast to buying from China I might add, and other nations before China.
> Then they can stand alone on a pile of ashes at The End of the World and then see how much happiness their "money" bought them.
Like the book "Don't Create the Torment Nexus," the wisdom of this cartoon is an inspiration to business leaders everywhere who know that shareholder value is paramount:
Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics. Every time I see one of these abominations on YouTube I think "is this working for you?"
With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI. A lot of companies will over invest, just as they did during the dot-com bubble. But some of those investments will actually pay off, because this technology is not going anywhere.
Regarding your first paragraph, I've even talked with people who go out of their way to actively _avoid_ said product after encountering AI-generated advertising.
So that'll probably continue to have an effect for as long as average people with good eyes can still distinguish "AI"/generative media from "real"/traditional footage.
I have observed this as well, and we've already seen some pushback when major brands use AI in their creative. I wonder if we're entering an era where AI will actually taint a brand.
> Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics.
I'm sure that firing tonnes of marketing people for prompt engineers will be a good return on investment... Perhaps it reveals something deeper - which is that a 30 second Youtube ad doesn't generate that much revenue at all.
> With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI
In the long run, yes. But a lot of people will end up losing their shirts over this.
Measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns, particularly in the short term, is notoriously difficult. They likely mostly don't _know_ if it's working at this point (though, yeah, I'd kind of assume it isn't.)
Really? It shouldn't be difficult to measure the performance of a YouTube campaign. There are very clear metrics related to watch time, CTR and conversion rate (if applicable).
> Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics. Every time I see one of these abominations on YouTube I think "is this working for you?"
they likely track conversions, so someone is clicking and buying.
Remember, Hong Kong was supposed to be in a 50 year transition period from 1997 where there were supposed to be one country, two systems [1]. The national security legislation is just one in a long line of failures [2]. If nothing else was learned, it was this: China, specifically the CCP, cannot be trusted.
It makes me sick that the UK sends billions to Ukraine to interfere in a war we have no fundamental right to involve ourselves in, meanwhile, Hong Kong was allowed to fall with only light media coverage. It is outrageous. The politicians that oversaw it should be ashamed.
Not to mention that Carrie Lam, former leader of Hong Kong, sold her people up the river by allowing the national security law in [3]. She was even hiding out in the UK with her husband from her own countrymen.
Hong Kong Basic Law also required a national security law since 1997. Lets not be selective.
> Article 23 is an article of the Hong Kong Basic Law. It states that Hong Kong "shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies."
The only lesson that China can learn from Russia is to not invade their neighbor. It did not work out at all for Russia; if China invades Taiwan it will not work out for them either.
From China insisting that the two lands will be united no matter what while building weapons aimed at Taiwan and systems that will be very effective at shooting at Taiwan and building literal invasion barges that are only usable at invading little islands that have heavily built up the defenses on their beaches.
There’s no way China is going to be an aggressor. It’s more akin to “don’t come into my lawn or else”. If you don’t go into their lawn nothing happens.
Um, at the time of the National Security Legislation (your reference [2]), we were not sending billions to Ukraine, because Russia hadn't started their open attack yet.
I wasn't suggesting the time periods are the same. The point is that we were willing to defend Ukraine against Russia, when it's the EU's problem, and refused to defend Hong Kong against China when it's a problem of our making.
The explanation in the news at the time was that Hong Kong was indefensible. For example almost all its water came from China. China could have taken it easily no matter how hard the UK tried to defend it.
In Universities in the UK, and likely elsewhere, you get extra time during an exam if you have a qualifying disability.
As said by Charlie Munger: "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome". In the UK, 23% (and climbing) working age adults are now registered as disabled [1]. For a qualifying disability you can claim personal independence payment (PIP) that gets you between £73.90-£110.40 for living plus £29.20-£77.05 for mobility, which is not means tested [2]. That's up to $249.98 USD a week untaxed on top of your regular income - you can imagine why people may be incentivised. Worse still, Citizens Advice which is 60% taxpayer funded [3], actively tell people how to fill out the forms to guarantee a positive outcome.
I have no idea why people would want to register as disabled though... /s
I get the feeling that MathML will win out, simply because Firefox supported from early on [1], there is first move advantage. I use an old JS library for backwards compatibility [2] that adds just enough support for any math I'm math'in [3]. I would still prefer SVG, but it ended up being a pain to implement reliably.
One thing I noticed about this site though is that it is laggy - and I have a pretty good system.
Uses Go, a language written by and maintained by Google [1]. Uses co-pilot written by GitHub for development [4].
Mu is £11 a month and you cannot see any screenshot of what you are getting [2], the same price you could buy a cheap VPS for [3]. The two authors of the project are asim and co-pilot. The commits have meaningless messages [4].
I guess I should be more specific about why "big tech failed us". They essentially control all the dominant social platforms. While they have great developer tools like Go, GitHub (owned by Microsoft), the consumer products have been a point of exploitation. I think it's OK to both admire yet be critical and to try hold systems and people to a higher standard when they have such an impact on everyones lives.
To address some of your other comments on commits/copilot. Commit messages are about as meaningful as email subject titles. At a certain point they really don't offer much value when you have powerful search tools. Essentially the source of truth is the current codebase. Maybe the commit message is going to provide insight into what was happening at that time, but when you're coding with AI toolings it feels almost irrelevant if not dated. If anything it should autocommit with a useful message if its that much of an issue. Second to that, Yes I use copilot, why, because hand coding is 10x slower. I lay the foundations by hand but then started to rely on copilot for a lot of changes beyond that. Again going back to the point, yes big tech failed us, but on social and consumer. The dev tooling and technology is fine, but the addictive and exploitive nature of the consumer tooling is not.
In all honesty, thank you for highlighting the depths of the warts on the project. It's always good for people to see the truth.
Note on £11/month. It's free to use. Membership is just for those who want to support it and help with roadmap, get access to features, etc but point taken about the screenshot.
I've tried it with one of my quick circuits - it does work to some extent. It found a requirement for an IC that I missed in the datasheet. Querying it further did confuse it a bit, instead of talking about the IC it started referring to the MCU and it's limits whilst referring back to the original document.
The real question is whether this has enough value to justify the pricing model [1] - I think so for a company, but would be difficult to justify for a hobby. One thing that should be defined is what "usage limit" actually is.
I think it's possible we see some people now use other OSes, there should at least be an "Other" option. The *BSD's, Nix and some more bespoke options.
They are too far in to turn back. They got into AI via fear of missing out (FOMO) and now they are too heavily invested to write it off on their balance sheet. To revert now would cause nothing but trouble.
> Less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said. They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources.
I.e., the best success has been in cutting jobs, not in aiding the productivity of individuals.
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