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Rent-free Thoughts

Some thoughts that have been living rent-free recently in my head about AI...

We should be more precise when we talk about it. We’ve had "AI" for decades. Google Translate, Alexa and Siri, computer vision in video games, OCR in mail sorting, protein folding models all fall under artificial intelligence, but there’s no mass panic over these. The current progress is in generative AI, and that's where most of the public concern is. I’m guilty of the shorthand myself, saying "AI" when I mean "generative AI".

People are afraid of generative AI, but the real problem is concentrated power and corporate greed. Someone wanting to sow disinformation could do so without generative AI models, and deep-pocket organizations of state could finance extreme actors if they wanted to. The tools evolved, but the risks aren’t new. The bigger problem that few are talking about is corporations who are aligning the technology for their own goals; they increasingly dictatate what we can use and how we can use it. Railroads were good for America, but robber barons were not. The new American technological libertarianism can lead to innovation and profits, but how do we ensure profit doesn’t eclipse regard for human worth or societial integrity? I don’t have an answer.

AI coding tools could lock in bad practices. Models are trained on massive amounts of code, much of which is dated. But best practices evolve. What was considered good PHP or JavaScript ten years ago is not what we consider best practices today. And retraining models is expensive. If models mostly generate code from old samples, and languages for new projects are picked based on AI support rather than if they're the best fit for the problem domain, the industry is going to end up stagnating with mediocre JavaScript and Python code.

Generative AI is useful, but the truly valuable applications have yet to arrive. The real winners won’t be those who use AI tooling to solve niche problems, like writing code, generate marketing plans, or “talking” to PDFs. And cramming chatbot technology into existing apps and websites isn’t what the market really wants. The real winners will be those who find a genuinely useful application for it. The first example of an interesting AI driven application I’ve seen is Google’s NotebookLM as a study aid. There are probably a lot of behind-the-scenes wins available too, for example reliable data structuring and other ETL tasks.

A few extra stand-alone assertions:

  • No one cares about prompting, they just want things to work.
  • I have no issue with generated content. I do have issue with slop. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of lazy slop right now.
  • I don’t trust Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk’s vision for humanity’s future. Unless they’re offering me a job.
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