I have to agree with you there. Yes, definitely.

Your 40% depends a lot on how you ask the questions and the field of these questions.

Dude, they fail that exam with even worse error rates than I see!

When you can verify it, it’s OFTEN and REGULARLY wrong. It’s stupid to trust if for anything you can’t personally verify.

The designed purpose of LLMs is to respond to human interaction, not to be correct. They are the showoff who pretends he can answer every question. They are the confident drunkard at the bar who will tell you anything that pops into their head. Intelligent, knowledgeable people say “I don’t know” when they don’t know. LLMs don’t do that. Ever. Trouble is, they don’t “know” anything. They’re a chatbot from the bottom up. Chatbot through and through. It’s their fundamental nature.

Yes there was knowledge and deep understanding in their training data. Also, I ate chicken curry for tea. However, I am not a chicken, I do not cluck, I haven’t started eating worms, I cannot produce any chicken, and my poop is not chicken either. My poop smells faintly of curry. So it is with LLMs and the knowledge and understanding in their training data.

How come it’s inaccurate about 40% of the time when I know the answer then? It’s a bullshit factory. A chatbot that’s fundamentally designed to sound like a person and be able to respond to any prompt. But truth isn’t any part of the fundamental architecture of an LLM.

I don’t need it. I’m not addicted to gravy. Sure, I love gravy, but I don’t need it. I don’t have it every day. Like pizza day. You don’t need gravy with pizza. And fried chicken. Although KFC’s gravy is worth upgrading to a box meal for. And my wife’s gravy is to die for. But I could stop any time. I just don’t want to.

And which vehicle you go to work in dwarfs them both. Two things can be true at the same time.

Let’s hope the winners are slightly less ghoulish than our Oil barons.

What a foolish hope!

$200,000,000,000 debt.
Who well pay it?
You talk like gravity doesn’t exist!

You’re wrong if you think that it won’t be heavily reliant AI customers like software companies who spend five years removing codewriting skills from their workforce and building up technical debt in their codebase because no one has to understand it in those five years and there’s a lot of subtle, hard to spot bugs that got through code review because humans simply don’t make those kinds of errors and no one ever had to spot one in their life before claude came along.

Did you think that enshitification wouldn’t affect the product? Yesterday’s computers and cars were easy to disassemble to replace parts. Now it’s much, much harder, and it’s very common to void your warranty if you do that. Today’s ai generated code is easy to tinker with and you can do what you like with your end product. Why would it stay that way? Why wouldn’t they engineer it to make that harder? It’s not difficult to make code confusing by changing variable names. I could fuck up your codebase for humans by simply swapping names like productSKU and customerID, let alone writing obfuscated code for any purpose whatsoever and with whatever variable names I like.

Some software companies are outsourcing their talent to AI behemoths with mountains of debt to recoup. Guess who’s going to pay the debt! And what’s the point of such a company in the long run? Why are you speedrunning paying to replace yourself?

There will be an AI crash and “consolidation”, meaning a switch to monopolies or near monopolies. Some companies are shedding institutional knowledge and programming skill like it was waste water. Once dependence comes, value extraction will follow it like disease follows unvaccinated infection.

There is already $200bn in debt and growing rapidly. The shareholders aren’t going to be paying it. The ai customers are.

There was an article a bit ago explaining that most AI companies are making a 95% loss. You know, spending 100, receiving 5 loss. All that debt is going to mean the price for AI is about 20 times lower than it needs to be just to break even. The software teams that came to rely on AI to save costs will soon enough find themselves on the hook for this mountain of debt. Enshitification is real. Enshitification is coming. AI will not stay cheap, convenient and free of advertising.

And so it begins.
We will all pay for this in the end.

How else are they going to begin to recap their billions and billions of debt? Someone has to pay for all those data centres, all that hardware, all that power, etc etc etc. It will be the companies that have come to rely on AI.

Sure, for now, AI is a lot cheaper than an intern, but it doesn’t become an expert like a human does. And Amazon used to be cheaper than other retailers right up until they had achieved vast market share.

This cannot be the last 10x price multiplier they pull. Not even close. Firstly they’re way, way, way off from recouping their costs, and secondly, they’re still way, way off market value for an incompetent human intern who isn’t learning much.

Uber didn’t enter the market to open up taxis to new drivers and bring down prices, that was marketing. They entered the market to take a cut out of ever taxi fare in the world, and drive up prices at peak times to many times the agreed fares, especially in regulated areas.

Similarly, AI didn’t enter the coding market to drive down prices and enable greater access for folk to generate code. They entered the coding market to receive the wages of programmers and drive up prices in in-demand fields. They are not unaware of how much companies pay devs. Why else would they have spent all those billions in advance? Where is the payback coming from?

Your brain.

I assume those costs are closer to the real cost to provide the service, ouch!

Not even close. Most AI companies are making something like 95% loss according to an article here a bit ago. So if you’re an AI provider, you need to multiply prices by 25 before you even begin to eat into your insane levels of debt.

AI has the same relationship to truth and trust that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has: truth is absolutely not part of the equation whatsoever, except in as much as it may be necessary to say some true things in order to establish trust.

Giving such an entity executive power is to ignore a vast and ever growing body of information that you ought not to trust, yet here you are, hanging over the keys to the plausible-sounding nonsense monger.

What about Nigel Farage? Well of course, he’s an absolute liar, a man who chose the dark side decades ago, who knows he’s in the wrong but strangely thinks it’s somehow bad to try to do good.

Boris isn’t a liar or evil in the conventional sense, it’s just that he absolutely wouldn’t dream of letting whether something is true or good be part of decision-making any more than he would lock himself in a cage in public for the week, consult with ants about his route to work or hop on one leg all the time.

So it is with AI.

I enjoyed these two sentences so much.

you aren’t allowed to talk about it.

And yet here we all are, talking about it.

I think in British English buggered literally means to have received anal intercourse and figuratively means for everything to have gone wrong for you. Synonym for shafted.

I’ve never heard it used in reference to sexual crimes against animals, so I don’t think “usually” is right.

I don’t think the animal bit is right.

What?! Dad didn’t mention animals, just “some men”.

May apologise on behalf of my people. I shall endeavour to only call it rectal intercourse from now on.

When I was still in junior school, our team lost badly at football. I went home and told my parents we were well and truly buggered. (That’s what Jamie had said and I thought it sounded appropriately drastic.) Mum gasped and sternly said my name, and Dad firmly said that I shouldn’t use that word. I asked why not. Very patiently, he explained to me what it meant. I was a little taken aback and did indeed stop using that word.

The youngster’s precocious, certainly.