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CansaFis Foote's avatar

…no one personally held accountable for the decisions they make that effect others…

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Philip Teale's avatar

"AI will almost certainly do a much poorer job of answering customers’ questions than AI will" that doesn't sound quite right to me Brian, was that intentional?

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Chris Buijs's avatar

Seeing Peter Thiel in this article gave me the creeps. I do see the point, that even one of the head-honchos of bad and evil is also against GenAI, but is that valuable looking at his history and credibility? Again, not disagreeing, just wondering why this example, don't want to make it political. It just distracted me from a bit from the great article and topic during reading ;-).

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Brian Merchant's avatar

Yeah, longtime readers know that this newsletter grew out of a book about the Luddites, so seeing Peter Thiel reference them in a positive light was a surprise — the context there, that this is like the Onion's 'Worst Person You Know Made a Great Point' meme on the theme of the newsletter, is perhaps not as apparent as it should have been for new readers. Thanks for the note, will keep this in mind for the future for sure.

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Chris Buijs's avatar

Gotcha! Already got that feeling reading your other articles. This one just jumped on me :-).

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Jim Amos's avatar

AI companies are hallucinating that any of the genAI crap is worth burning our planet some more. When even Peter Thiel (Sauron) is skeptical it's time to put this tech back on the shelf, right next to metaverse. It might be much harder to stop the new fossil fuel bubble though, that thing will fuel itself once it gets going. Thanks for joining all the dots!

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Michael Spencer's avatar

Now the UAE has been lured into the AI Infrastructure consortium and OpenAI's funding round, this means oil money of the Middle East will directly fuel dozens more datacenters including far bigger AI supercomputers that will challenge local communities for their water, energy, real-estate and even their talent.

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Lynn hamilton's avatar

AI, Militarism, Fossil fuels = very dangerous intersection (latter 2 deadly enuf already!)

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Zed75's avatar

WILL those AI call centers be "good enough", though? For example, if the answers given are too often wrong in ways that are legally actionable, companies may decide it's cheaper and safer to stick with human call centers.

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Zed75's avatar

I guess I'm curious how much answering questions at a call center is like driving a car—conceptually it seems simple enough, but the devil is in all the unconsidered details that a human intelligence can patch over.

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