Over on Bluesky, I’ve been saying for a while now that the push for AI ultimately comes down to a desire to have Tony Stark’s AI. Now we have proof from Scott Jenson:
I just left Google, they have AI fever. This is NOT something driven by a user need. It is a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind.
The vision is that there will be an Ironman Jarvis in your phone that locks you into their ecosystem so hard, you’ll never leave. That is just catnip and they can’t afford to let someone else get there first. (Apple is no different)
When the emperor, eventually, has no clothes, they’ll be lapped by someone thinking bigger.
I get why having Jarvis would be cool–it’s like having a 24 hour/day non-judgemental personal assistant that doesn’t get sick or go on strike. It’s no different than the appeal of self-driving cars: you get a chauffeur without having to worry about having a human around.
But I don’t think a massive correlation engine–which can potentially do some very useful things–is going to get us there any time soon, if at all.
mikethemadbiologist
It won’t get us there. I’m as sure of that as I am of any event I cannot actually predict.
But it’ll make the people behind the hype train some money before the chickens come home to roost.
It’s already going to make Amazon, Google, and Microsoft some serious money no matter what happens to the technology down the line, because the AI vendors, particularly Anthropic, are locked into deals to use their infrastructure.
Ed Zitron chewed the whole scam a new one back in February: https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-fried/
“These golden handcuffs have already led to massive swells of revenue for Microsoft, increasing by 30% in the last quarter alone thanks to the increased usage of graphics processing units (GPUs) which have become essential to the power-hungry demands of AI applications. Google’s investment in Anthropic was made in the hopes that it’d see a similar revenue multiplier, and I’d argue Amazon’s was made in the same vein — though it was too late to force Anthropic to use AWS as their preferred vendor.”
Ya know. Your link posts always post above your content posts. Would be nice if you could reverse this order to have content of day at top followed by links. Not a fan of the long scroll to hear what you have to say.