Day: September 10, 2024

Has AI Peaked?

Lots has been written in the past months about AI….some positive and some negative.

I have noticed that in the past month or so the posting on AI has declined to the point that it is barely mentioned….so does that mean that it has become acceptable?

Since I am not AI’s biggest fan I still read stuff about what is going on with the social monster.

One of the most popular platforms is ChatGPT…..and what’s going on with it…..

If you think AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT seem dumber than before, you aren’t alone.

In a blistering opinion column for Computerworld, writer Steven Vaughan-Nichols says he’s noticed that all the major publicly-accessible AI models — think brand-name flagships like ChatGPT and Claude — don’t work as well as previous versions.

“Indeed, all too often, the end result is annoying and obnoxiously wrong,” he writes. “Worse still, it’s erratically wrong. If I could count on its answers being mediocre, but reasonably accurate, I could work around it. I can’t.”

In a Business Insider article that he flagged, users posting to the OpenAI developer forum had also noticed a significant decline in accuracy after the latest version of GPT was released last year.

“After all the hype for me, it was kind of a big disappointment,” one user wrote in June this year.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-dumber

With that said….is AI slowly killing itself?

AI-generated text and imagery is flooding the web — a trend that, ironically, could be a huge problem for generative AI models.

As Aatish Bhatia writes for The New York Times, a growing pile of research shows that training generative AI models on AI-generated content causes models to erode. In short, training on AI content causes a flattening cycle similar to inbreeding; the AI researcher Jathan Sadowski last year dubbed the phenomenon as “Habsburg AI,” a reference to Europe’s famously inbred royal family.

And per the NYT, the rising tide of AI content on the web might make it much more difficult to avoid this flattening effect.

AI models are ridiculously data-hungry, and AI companies have relied on vast troves of data scraped from the web in order to train the ravenous programs. As it stands, though, neither AI companies nor their users are required to put AI disclosures or watermarks on the AI content they generate — making it that much harder for AI makers to keep synthetic content out of AI training sets.

“The web is becoming increasingly a dangerous place to look for your data,” Rice University graduate student Sina Alemohammad, who coauthored a 2023 paper that coined the term “MAD” — short for “Model Autophagy Disorder” — to describe the effects of AI self-consumption, told the NYT.

https://futurism.com/ai-slowly-killing-itself

Since I am not lazy enough to use AI I ask if anyone here has any thoughts about these two reports?

Let us know.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Climate Change Initiatives

I am so damn old that I remember the first so-called ‘initiatives’ to save the planet from ruin…..as far back as the 1970s and ever since that ‘bold’ step the can has been kicked down the road at every ‘summit’…..the year 2000 was a target and then after another summit it was 2020 and then 2030 and now it is 2050 (but there has not been another ground breaking summit yet).

After all these ‘summits’ it is shown that only a fraction has ever been applied….

A recent analysis of global climate efforts by a coalition of researchers found that only a small fraction of the policies implemented over the past two decades have been effective in reducing carbon emissions. The study, which examined 1,500 climate initiatives across 41 countries, found that only 63 of these strategies made a meaningful impact on reducing greenhouse gas output.

“It is easy for countries to say they will reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, but these statements do not mean that the policies they adopt will be effective,” said Jesse Smith, the senior editor at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “This work illustrates the kinds of policy efforts that are needed to close the emissions gaps in various economic sectors.”

The research investigated the success of a variety of policies, including bans on coal plants, fossil fuel taxes and emissions trading schemes. However, the study’s lead author, Nicholas Koch, emphasized that the sheer number of climate regulations does not necessarily correlate with better outcomes. Instead, countries that successfully reduced their greenhouse gas emissions did so by employing a diverse mix of policies tailored to their unique circumstances.

“Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate targets necessitates better knowledge about which climate policies work in reducing emissions at the necessary scale,” the report reads. “Our insights on effective but rarely studied policy combinations highlight the important role of price-based instruments in well-designed policy mixes and the policy efforts necessary for closing the emissions gap.”

The study also noted that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to reducing emissions. Different nations have varying needs and resources, meaning that the most effective strategies for lowering emissions will vary across the globe.

(san.com)

Then there is the waste of cash…..money spent on impotent measures to change the climate degradation.

And as usual the US leads the waste (it is something we do expertly….waste taxpayer money)….

Among the world’s wealthiest countries, the U.S. leads the way in spending public money on so-called climate “solutions” that have been proven to “consistently fail, overspend, or underperform,” according to an analysis released Thursday by the research and advocacy group Oil Change International.

The group’s report, titled Funding Failure, focuses on international spending on carbon capture and fossil-based hydrogen subsidies, which continues despite ample data showing that the technological fixes have “failed to make a dent in carbon emissions” after 50 years of research and development.

The report details how five countries account for 95% of all carbon capture spending, with the U.S. investing the most taxpayer money in the technology, at $12 billion in subsidies over the last 40 years.

Norway comes in second with $6 billion going to carbon capture and storage, while Canada has spent $3.8 billion, the European Union has spent $3.6 billion, and the Netherlands has poured $2.6 billion into the technology, with which carbon dioxide emissions are compressed and utilized or stored underground.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/carbon-capture-2669098434

Sounds like the old “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” approach by our government and others….no one is serious about climate change….and that will eat us all up and spit out our charred remains for future archeologists to find and analyze.

What a wonderful world we are leaving for our grand kids.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”