A new report has shown that Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” AI checkout process is actually processed by 1,000 staff in India.Tech companies are under pressure to d…
Welcome to the world of venture capitalism. It’s all “come on, guy! This is the next thing! Trust me bro!”
But by that token energy is the possibility collusion and cooperation within the industry, to front these technologies in board rooms and to shareholders. The problem is the question of the how and why. We can compare the current AI boom with the crypto boom.
The crypto boom just made NVIDIA more exploitative and fronted scams, grifts and rugpulls in the form of smart contracts and NFTs.
Everyone pretty much abandoned it, like in the gaming industry, because being associated with crypto was tantamount to being declared a plague bearer.
Then we see NPUs being integrated into SoC’s by Intel, AMD, Apple, etc, platforms like Hugging face, frameworks like pytorch.
Sure, there’s a crapton of illegal data harvesting and new swathes of content farms, as well as the premonition of mass layoffs in the future. But all these things are strictly speaking speculation.
I personally think that some of the moves being made to distribute AI processing is good, because it is far better to having access to AI processing from within the SoC of your device, rather than being locked to the GPU market. But the question still remains.
Will localised SLM’s, LLM’s and stable diffusion really take off? Or will these NPU’s be gangrenous limbs come the next decade? Will we all have to bend over to our AGI overlords? Only time will tell.
Place your bets.
Welcome to the world of venture capitalism. It’s all “come on, guy! This is the next thing! Trust me bro!”
What’s surprising is more and more people keep falling for it.
Like 20-30 years ago it made sense. But we have “kids” all the way up to their 20s who literally grew up in this over hyped environment that still believe all this bullshit is days away from changing the world.
It’s like a cult insisting the Messiah is coming back tomorrow, and every night the day “to morrow for sure”
Nobody should be surprised by this, and I don’t see how it’s “fake” at all.
Systems like this are extremely error prone. There’s no way you can get an acceptable level of accuracy without extensive human review. Doesn’t mean there’s no AI — there is. It’s just the AI is merely to help those humans do their job.
You’re completely missing the point.
It’s portrayed as all AI to get investors, but in reality most of the “human help” end up having to do like 90% of the work.
But the company runs around telling potential investors lies to get money
To be fair, the bulk of AI advancements aren’t visible to anyone but the people closest to the code who were doing machine learning / data analysis anyway.
All of the “magic” of it that’s somehow swindling billions out of venture capitalists because it’s going to replace so many people is made up hype garbage. Yeah, it can write the same paragraph on any subject you choose. Hooray. Also, that’s not really helpful unless not giving a shit is part of the communications process.
It’s replacing human scammers, I guess. There’s that.
It’s replacing human scammers, I guess. There’s that.
It’s not tho…
That’s why Amazon cancels their “just walk out to checkout” program.
They kept saying it was AI, but then eventually admitted they were paying overseas workers to do it via webcam because AI couldn’t do it.
They kept that program going for years before they gave up on it
It’s not faking, it’s Mechanical Turk.
Reduce workforce to an API https://www.mturk.com
Man, I know people love to throw the word “dystopian” around, but holy shit is that description dystopian as fuck.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.
I used to do mechanical turk jobs for some quick and easy pocket money. There were several types of tasks you could do, and there was a sort of ranking system to dissuade anyone from just inputting junk instead of answering seriously. I usually stuck to surveys and things I would describe as fancy captchas. I recall a few jobs where the task was to record yourself in different environments reading the same script of text. I can’t see that type of job for being anything other than training data for AI/ML
reading the same script of text
Audio testing? I was involved with a thing like that at one point. For a major telecom. Just a whole room of people of different accents reading the first page of the Great Gatsby and recording.
I was never told exactly what it was for. My suspicion was that it seemed more like acquiring training data for an audio processing machine learning library. This was about 10 years ago, so after the likes of siri, but way before something like chat gpt
Same as Siri when she was new :)
I never quite got that. Apple boys and commercials alsways treated siri like that smart, super useful thing that can answer questions and is basically a thinking being. In reality it’s some speech to text google machine that can do a few things sometimes. Same with the android equivalent, i use it to set a timer while cooking, for the life of me i can’t imagine using it for anything else.
Unit conversion, weather info, set reminders, control music…
Is “Hey Siri, skip this track” really any better than just, reaching up and tapping your earphone?
I usually listen to music on some Google home device, so it works for me. Or if I’m cooking and have dirty hands.
Of course when I’m commuting I just control it on the earphone.
Imagine living in India and witnessing American consumption intimately is your job. That’s a special kind of cruelty.