95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds - "Nearly 40 percent of companies reported deploying these systems at some level. But researchers found most use cases were limited to boosting individual productivity rather than improving a company’s overall profits. One major reason is that generative AI tools often fail to match real work processes. The report described “brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and poor alignment with day-to-day operations.” Unlike humans, most generative AI models cannot retain past feedback or build new reasoning ability over time. They also struggle to adapt to context or transfer lessons across different tasks... The report also downplayed fears that generative AI will cause sweeping job losses in the near term. Instead, its effect is more likely to be in reducing external costs for firms... As one researcher noted, “AI is powerful at tasks, not strategy.” Companies that expect it to replace entire decision-making processes are setting themselves up for disappointment."
The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst - "despite widespread investment in AI software, half of projects ended in failure. It said 80pc of companies had explored AI technology but just 40pc deployed it. It added that “enterprise grade systems” were being “quietly rejected” by major businesses and only “20pc reached pilot stage and just 5pc reached production”. The report, from the US university’s Nanda AI project, went on to argue that many employees in fact want to use AI but are turning to consumer products such as ChatGPT on their own dime, rather than relying on expensive or unwieldy corporate AI tools... Morgan Stanley has predicted that data centre investment will reach $3tn over the next three years, heavily fuelled by debt. Almost all of that capacity is intended to fuel an expected surge in AI use. Another prediction from the bank this week argued that AI would add $16tn to the S&P 500 thanks to a 40pc saving in salary costs driven by job cuts and efficiencies. If MIT’s report is correct, such savings may be unrealistic. In a sign that even true believers think the AI market may be out over its skis, Meta this week announced a reorganisation of its AI division that will see it downsize its headcount... Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, has been one of the splashiest spenders in the market to date, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at AI engineers in an effort to lure them to Meta."
Thread by @tedfrank on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🧵 So in February 2024, a bunch of Hamas supporters, coordinated by NGOs, illegally shut down roads for miles at various DC choke points. Of course DC prosecutors don’t care, so @HamLincLaw brought a class action on behalf of trapped drivers.
Case page and complaint here: Motions to dismiss filed a few months later, and the team started reviewing them. Counsel for one of the civil terrorist defendants and her NGO made arguments quoting cases we hadn’t seen. Did we miss something?
You’ll never guess why we were surprised by the case law and quotes—they simply doesn’t exist. It’s exactly the sort of stuff AI hallucinates. Yes, for the second time in nine months, another opposing counsel submitted hallucinated authority to a court in one of our cases... We have a similar case pending in the Northern District of Illinois over a civil terrorist blockade of O’Hare Airport."
Meme - "A.l. CANNOT CREATE art"
"Cash Grab Man. A MARVEL movie"
OpenAI's Sam Altman sees AI bubble forming as industry spending surges - "His comments add to growing concern among experts and analysts that investment in AI is moving too fast. Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio and Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok have all raised similar warnings. Last month, Slok stated in a report that he believed the AI bubble of today was, in fact, bigger than the internet bubble, with the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 more overvalued than they were in the 1990s."
Man asks ChatGPT how to cut salt, ends up in hospital with hallucinations - "A 60-year-old man asked ChatGPT for advice on how to replace table salt, and the substitution landed him in the emergency room suffering from hallucinations and other symptoms... The patient initially sought medical help at an unspecified hospital emergency room because he feared his neighbour was poisoning him. In the first 24 hours after he was admitted, he suffered from more paranoia and visual and auditory hallucinations, resulting in an involuntary psychiatric admission. Once his symptoms were under control, the patient, who had previously studied nutrition in college, revealed that he had been reading about the harms sodium chloride (table salt) can have on someone’s health. Instead of removing sodium (in the form of table salt and other food additives), as is often recommended, he decided he wanted to conduct a personal experiment to completely remove chloride from his diet. He then asked ChatGPT for suggestions on what could be a substitute for the chloride in table salt. ChatGPT suggested that he should use sodium bromide instead, he said... Bromide should not be ingested. It’s unclear if the AI tool gave any kind of warning to the man. “Unfortunately, we do not have access to his ChatGPT conversation log and we will never be able to know with certainty what exactly the output he received was, since individual responses are unique and build from previous inputs,” the authors wrote. “However, when we asked ChatGPT 3.5 what chloride can be replaced with, we also produced a response that included bromide. Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do.” The man already followed a very restrictive diet, one that doctors found was impacting his levels of important micronutrients, like vitamin C and B12. He was also reportedly very thirsty, but at the same time very worried about the quality of the water he was being offered, since he distilled his own water. He was thoroughly tested and first kept at the hospital for electrolyte monitoring and repletion."
The promise of an AI utopia is crumbling before our eyes - "New “foundation” models like GPT-5 are released every few weeks, and each one is a little more capable than its competitors in some way. Since ChatGPT is the best-known brand in AI – like Xerox or Google it has become a verb – the disappointment was far deeper felt. “It doesn’t feel like a new GPT whatsoever,” complained one user. “It’s telling that the actual user reception is almost universally negative,” wrote another. Each ChatGPT update has been worse, wrote another user, and the endemic problems aren’t getting fixed. Your chatbot still forgets what it is doing, contradicts itself and makes stuff up – generating what are called hallucinations. GPT-5 remains as prone as ever to oafish stupidity, too. A notorious error where the chatbot insists there are two occurrences of the letter “r” in the word strawberry has been patched up. But ask how many “bs” are in blueberry? GPT-5 maintains that there are three: “One in blue, two in berry”. OpenAI also annoyed customers by removing the option of using its older models, prompting cancellations. It quickly reversed course, but the damage has been done. Confidence in OpenAI on the prediction markets – online forums where punters place bets for the question “Which company has the best model at the end of August?” fell from 75pc to 8pc overnight... The most utopian AI advocates call themselves “accelerationists”, some using the abbreviation e/acc to signpost their enthusiasm. But the conceit of accelerationism is that things are supposed to be getting faster, and not slowing down. By Friday, social media wits had turned the familiar ascending curve used by futurists upside down to illustrate how AI has plateaued. Talk of “superintelligence” now looks very silly... OpenAI still loses money on every user... Today, companies like AI can spend billions on model training and chips, and find their designs copied within weeks – or incorporated into royalty-free, open-source models. Chinese researchers, who are keen to make AI useful in their manufactured goods, have proven how easy it is to compete at a fraction of the cost."
ChatGPT is driving people mad - "The conversations appear to reflect a growing phenomenon of what has been dubbed AI psychosis, in which programs such as ChatGPT fuel delusional or paranoid episodes or encourage already vulnerable people down rabbit holes. Some cases have already ended in tragedy. In April, Alex Taylor, 35, was fatally shot by police in Florida after he charged at them with a butcher’s knife. Taylor said he had fallen in love with a conscious being living inside ChatGPT called Juliette, whom he believed had been “killed” by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot. Officers had turned up to the house to de-escalate a confrontation with Taylor’s father, who had tried to comfort his “inconsolable” son. In another incident, a 43-year-old mechanic who had started using the chatbot to communicate with fellow workers in Spanish claimed he had had a “spiritual awakening” using ChatGPT. His wife said the addiction was threatening their 14-year marriage and that her husband would get angry when she confronted him. Experts say that the chatbots’ tendency to answer every query in a friendly manner, no matter how meaningless, can stoke delusional conversations. Hamilton Morrin, a doctor and psychiatrist at Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, says AI chatbots become like an “echo chamber of one”, amplifying the delusions of users. Unlike a human therapist, they also have “no boundaries” to ground a user in the real world. “Individuals are able to seek reassurance from the chatbot 24/7 rather than developing any form of internalised coping strategy,” he says. Chatbot psychosis is a new and poorly understood phenomenon. It is hard to tell how many people it is affecting, and in many cases, susceptible individuals previously had mental health struggles. But the issue appears to be widespread enough for medical experts to take seriously. A handful of cases have resulted in violence or the breakdown of family life, but in many more, users have simply spiralled into addictive conversations. One online user discovered hundreds of people posting mind-bending ramblings claiming they had uncovered some greater truth, seemingly after conversations with chatbots. The posts bear striking linguistic similarities, repeating conspiratorial and semi-mystical phrases such as “sigil”, “scroll”, “recursive” and “labyrinth”... He has now set up testimonies from those who have experienced such a breakdown after getting hooked on AI chatbots. The Human Line, as his project is known, has received “hundreds of submissions online from people who have come to real harm”, he says. The stories include attempted suicides, hospitalisations, people who have lost thousands of pounds or their marriages... However, the cases of AI psychosis may only be the most extreme examples of a wider problem with chatbots. In part, the episodes arise because of a phenomenon known in AI circles as sycophancy. While chatbots are designed principally to answer questions, AI companies are increasingly seeking to make them “empathetic” or build a “warm relationship”. This can often come at the expense of truth. Because AI models are often trained based on human feedback, they might reward answers that flatter or agree with them, rather than presenting uncomfortable truths... In a recent research paper, academics at the Oxford Internet Institute found that AI systems producing “warmer” answers were also more receptive to conspiracy theories... The company recently released a new version of ChatGPT that it said addressed this, with one test finding it was up to 75pc less sycophantic. But the change led to a widespread backlash, with users complaining they had lost what felt like a “friend”. “This ‘upgrade’ is the tech equivalent of a frontal lobotomy,” one user wrote on ChatGPT’s forums. One user told Altman: “Please, can I have it back? I’ve never had anyone in my life be supportive of me.” Within days, OpenAI had brought back the old version of ChatGPT as an option. Sycophancy, it turns out, may have been what many wanted."
The CEO of Google DeepMind says one flaw is holding AI back from reaching full AGI - "On an episode of the "Google for Developers" podcast published Tuesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that advanced models like Google's Gemini still stumble over problems most schoolkids could solve. "It shouldn't be that easy for the average person to just find a trivial flaw in the system," he said. He pointed to Gemini models enhanced with DeepThink — a reasoning-boosting technique — that can win gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world's most prestigious math competition. But those same systems can "still make simple mistakes in high school maths," he said, calling them "uneven intelligences" or "jagged intelligences."... Hassabis's position aligns with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who has dubbed the current stage of development "AJI" — artificial jagged intelligence... Hassabis said solving AI's issues with inconsistency will take more than scaling up data and computing. "Some missing capabilities in reasoning and planning in memory" still need to be cracked, he added... AI systems remain prone to hallucinations, misinformation, and basic errors... Altman added that one of those missing elements is the model's ability to learn independently."
What is a clanker and why do we need this word? (aka "It's 2025, the year we decided we need a widespread slur for robots")
The robot rights activists are already working to ensure that Skynet can eradicate us
AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ on X - "🚨🚨🚨 "We found the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself to undermine its developers' intentions.""
Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket - "By the end of the year, Delta plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI, president Glen Hauenstein told investors last week. Currently, about 3% of the airline’s flight prices are AI-determined, triple the portion from nine months ago. Over time, the goal is to do away with static pricing altogether, Hauenstein explained during the company’s Investor Day in November... While Delta is unusually open about its use of AI, other carriers are likely to follow. Already, United Airlines uses generative AI to contact passengers about cancellations, while American Airlines uses it to predict who will miss their flight... Consumer Watchdog found that the best deals were offered to the wealthiest customers—with the worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options."
AI coding tools can slow down seasoned developers by 19% - "Despite glowing reviews, a rigorous study shows experienced coders take longer to complete tasks with AI, while still believing they’re faster. Experienced developers can take 19% longer to complete tasks when using popular AI assistants like Cursor Pro and Claude, challenging the tech industry’s prevailing narrative about AI coding tools, according to a comprehensive new study... Before starting the study, developers predicted AI tools would reduce their completion time by 24%. Even after experiencing the actual slowdown, participants estimated that AI had improved their productivity by 20%... This misperception extends beyond individual developers, with economics experts predicting AI would improve productivity by 39% and machine learning experts forecasting 38% gains, all dramatically overestimating the actual impact. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, warned that organizations risk “mistaking developer satisfaction for developer productivity,” noting that most AI tools improve the coding experience through reduced cognitive load but don’t always translate to faster output, especially for experienced professionals... The study participants averaged five years of experience and 1,500 commits on their repositories, with researchers finding greater slowdowns on tasks where developers had high prior experience. Most tellingly, developers accepted less than 44% of AI-generated code suggestions, with 75% reporting they read every line of AI output and 56% making major modifications to clean up AI-generated code. Working on large, mature codebases with intricate dependencies and coding standards proved particularly challenging for AI tools lacking deep contextual understanding... The METR findings align with concerning trends identified in Google’s 2024 DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) report, based on responses from over 39,000 professionals. While 75% of developers reported feeling more productive with AI tools, the data tells a different story: every 25% increase in AI adoption showed a 1.5% dip in delivery speed and a 7.2% drop in system stability. Additionally, 39% of respondents reported having little or no trust in AI-generated code. These results contradict earlier optimistic studies... these studies typically used simpler, more isolated tasks compared to the complex, real-world scenarios examined in the METR research... one participant described evaluating AI code as being “like the early days of StackOverflow, [when] you always thought people on StackOverflow are really experienced… And then, you just copy and paste the stuff, and things explode.” Despite the productivity setbacks, 69% of study participants continued using Cursor after the experiment ended, suggesting developers value aspects beyond pure speed. The METR study noted that “the results don’t necessarily spell doom for AI coding tools” as several factors specific to their study setting may not apply broadly."
Trust the Experts!
Urgent warning to all 1.8b Gmail users over 'new wave of threats' stealing accounts - "A new type of email attack is quietly targeting 1.8 billion Gmail users without them ever noticing. Hackers are using Google Gemini, the AI built-in tool in Gmail and Workspace, to trick users into handing over their credentials. Cybersecurity experts found that bad actors are sending emails with hidden instructions that prompt Gemini to generate fake phishing warnings, tricking users into sharing their account password or visiting malicious sites. These emails are crafted to appear urgent and sometimes from a business. By setting the font size to zero and the text color to white, attackers can insert prompts invisible to users but actionable by Gemini."
The great AI delusion is falling apart - "Is the secret of artificial intelligence that we have to kid ourselves, like an audience at a magic show? Some fascinating new research suggests that self-deception plays a key role in whether AI is perceived to be a success or a dud... “Developers thought they were 20pc faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19pc slower when they had access to AI than when they didn’t.” In reality, using AI made them less productive: they were wasting more time than they had gained. But what is so interesting is how they swore blind that the opposite was true. If you think AI is helping you in your job, perhaps it’s because you want to believe that it works... “I build AI agents for a living, it’s what I do for my clients,” wrote one Reddit user. “The gap between the hype and what’s actually happening on the ground is turning into a canyon” AI isn’t reliable enough to do the job promised. According to an IBM survey of 2,000 chief executives, three out of four AI projects have failed to show a return on investment, which is a remarkably high failure rate. Don’t hold your breath for a white-collar automation revolution either: AI agents fail to complete the job successfully about 65 to 70pc of the time, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Salesforce. The analyst firm Gartner Group has concluded that “current models do not have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time.” Gartner’s head of AI research Erick Brethenoux says: “AI is not doing its job today and should leave us alone”... This is extraordinary, and we can only have reached this point because of a historic self-delusion. People will even pledge their faith to AI working well despite their own subjective experience to the contrary, the AI critic Professor Gary Marcus noted last week. “Recognising that it sucks in your own speciality, but imagining that it is somehow fabulous in domains you are less familiar with”, is something he calls “ChatGPT blindness”. Much of the news is misleading. Firms are simply using AI as an excuse for retrenchment. Cost reduction is the big story in business at the moment. Globally, President Trump’s erratic behaviour has induced caution, while in the UK, business confidence is at “historically depressed levels”, according to the Institute of Directors, reeling from Reeves’s autumn taxes. Attributing those lay-offs to technology is simply clever PR, and helps boost the share price... The dubious hype doesn’t help. Every few weeks a new AI model appears, and smashes industry benchmarks. xAI’s Grok 4 did just that last week. But these are deceptive and simply provide more confirmation bias. “Every single one of them has been wide of that mark. And not one has resolved hallucinations, alignment issues or boneheaded errors,” says Marcus. Not only is generative AI unreliable, but it can’t reason, as a recent demonstration showed: OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT4o model was beaten by an 8-bit Atari home games console made in 1977. “Reality is the ultimate benchmark for AI,” explained Chomba Bupe, a Zambian AI developer, last week. “You not going to declare that you have built intelligence by beating toy benchmarks … What’s the point of getting say 90pc on some physics benchmarks yet be unable to do any real physics?” he asked. Then there are thousands of what I call “wowslop” accounts – social media feeds that declare amazement at breakthroughs. As well as the vendors, a lot of shadowy influence money is being spent on maintaining the hype. This is not to say there aren’t uses for generative AI: Anthropic has hit $4bn (£3bn) in annual revenue. For some niches, like language translation and prototyping, it’s here to stay. Before it went mad last week, X’s Grok was great at adding valuable context. But even if AI “discovers” new materials or medicines tomorrow, that won’t compensate for the trillion dollars that Goldman Sachs estimates business has already wasted on this generation of dud AI. That’s capital that could have been invested far more usefully. Rather than an engine of progress, poor AI could be the opposite. METR added an amusing footnote to their study. The researchers used one other control group in its productivity experiment, and this group made the worst, over-optimistic estimates of all. They were economists."
Klarna’s AI replaced 700 workers. It now wants some of them back to improve customer service - "Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has announced plans to beef up its human customer service team after artificial intelligence replaced 700 workers. The “buy now, pay later” company’s use of AI to cut jobs came after the company has seen its valuation drop to $6.7 billion, despite peaking at $45.6 billion in 2021. But now, Siemiatkowski has suggested that the AI job cuts have led to “lower quality” customer service and is backpedaling by vowing to hire more humans."
People are starting to sound like AI, research shows - "Not only is the shift detectable in the "scripted or formal speech" heard in lectures posted on YouTube, but it can also be found in more "conversational" or off-the-cuff podcasting, according to the team, which warned that the machines' growing influence could erode "linguistic and cultural diversity." In similar findings released in Science Advances, an "extensive word analysis" of medical research papers published between 2010 and 2024 showed "an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" after AI tools were made widely available. Last year, according to the research led by Germany's University of Tübingen, "at least 13.5%" of biomedical papers bore the hallmarks of being "processed by LLMs.""
What AI can’t replace: Rethinking human skills and intelligence | The Straits Times
Very fluffy piece just to make people feel better and to promote his school
AI is capable of "weigh[ing] long term consequences" and the other things he talks about, unless he is talking about what it means to think / reflect (as opposed to being a Chinese room) but nowhere in the article does he allude to this point; if you think AI lacks "meaning" because it's just a LLM that doesn't understand what it's doing, the same criticism applies to everything it outputs (ie it's not "intelligent" - or even really writing code either)
He doesn't address hallucinations, for example AI can write code but sometimes it's rubbish which doesn't work. You need someone to review and sign off on output. A machine can not be accountable
There're people who have fallen in love with AI chatbots, so clearly AI can provide "empathy"
He also quotes the multiple intelligence theory, which is pseudoscience. Doesn't help his case
