Rov_Scam
1d ago
No, but most of the companies that went bust weren't ISPs but ancillary companies that had nothing to do with the Internet itself. Telecom definitely took a hit, but thatbwas due to optimistic demand projections that led to infrastructure build out that wasn't needed, not because they weren't charging customers enough. The current situation is like if they did what they did while offering everyone free access while undercharging people for faster connections. In any event, that build out was based largely on what the technology could already do, not what it theoretically might be able to do in the future. The money also wasn't nearly as much. The current situation is like if the ISPs were spending ten times as much money and were all unprofitable, and traditional telecom companies providing the same service were all losing money on it. In that case it's likely that Internet service would become hard to come by and expensive after the crash and it would have delayed the technilogy's adoption.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
If that were the end of the story it wouldn't be an issue. It's that it evidently uses significantly more computing power than the performance improvement would suggest, raising the spectre of rapidly diminishing returns.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
And LLMs are horrendously incapable of returning all matches for a query, even a super simple one.
Good God, that's a frustration that I totally forgot about in my various AI criticisms. I have, on multiple occasions specifically asked it to "Provide a comprehensive list of X", which list would include dozens of items, and it instead provides 5 examples, complete with shitty summaries I didn't ask for, which examples are the most obvious and well-known examples (obviously pulled from the Wikipedia page) that I wouldn't need a trillion-dollar technology to find.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I had my first "AI at work" experience the other day when I sat through a luncheon meeting presented by a rep for one of the big legal research companies. It was billed as a continuing education event but was really just a sales pitch for their AI products. The guy was able to cite two uses for AI in the legal field:
- Legal research
- Pulling information from documents (in this case up to 5000 pages)
That's all well and dandy, but I don't do either of those things very often. This wasn't presented as "the technology is quickly changing and you'll be able to do more in the future" as much as "this is all you can do within the bounds of ethics and without exposing yourself to a malpractice suit". The idea that law firms will consist of a few partners handling a suspiciously large number of cases by prompting AI to generate outputs is pure fantasy. The people who think that AI will take over everything do so on the assumption that all work boils down to a set of deliverables that simply need to be generated, when that's not the case. If I'm looking to generate deliverables, I can already have a paralegal do all the drafting and research and just put my name on it, because there's nothing that says you need a law license to do legal research or draft documents.
What the client is paying for is for someone to take responsibility for the case, and it would be irresponsible of me to "handle" a case about which I knew nothing. Most of my time is spent reviewing and analyzing facts. Sure, an AI may theoretically be possible that can determine what's relevant and formulate a strategy better than I can, but the AI is not going to be responsible for its output. I'm never going to trust AI with tasks I wouldn't trust to support staff, no matter how much I trust my support staff (and they're great, btw), because the client doesn't want to hear about how it's the paralegal's fault. If I allow AI to do all my work for me, and I go into negotiations missing something, that's a pretty big matzo ball hanging out there. It's not that I'm perfect, or even necessarily better than AI theoretically could be, but the client is ultimately trusting me to make the relevant decisions, and I can't make them without a thorough knowledge of the case. It's the same problem with autonomous vehicles. I said a decade ago that they would never catch on, not because of any technical limitation, but because auto manufacturers aren't going to take responsibility for them. We've already seen this with Tesla being very aggresive in their defense of lawsuits stemming from autopilot. I don't necessarily disagree with Tesla's stance on this as things stand now, but if a vehicle is truly autonomous then an accident isn't caused by negligence on the part of the driver but on products liability on the part of the seller and manufacturer. As long as auto makers take the stance that the owners of vehicles are ultimately responsible for them, true AVs will never exist.
The other big issue is data security. You can tell me all day long about how great Claude, or ChatGTP, or Gemini are, but in the legal world using any of these is a complete nonstarter. Any lawsuit is going to deal with confidential data, and some suits are going to deal with little but confidential data. At the very minimum, we need to use settlement histories to evaluate potential settlement value of a case. Google literally built its business around data harvesting, and the tech sector as a whole doesn't have a stellar reputation for protecting client data. Regardless of whatever "opt out" provisions are allegedly in place, no law firm in their right mind would take the risk of feeding reams of data into a chatbot if there's any risk whatsoever that that information will show up later in a chatbot response. And no, this isn't the same as companies feeding their proprietary code bases into chatbots; the code's confidential status is subject to the discretion of management. An attorney does not have the discretion to reveal confidential information, especially if that information will be harmful to the client in the wrong hands.
This is before you even get to the fact that the current technology is underwhelming even for legal research. It looks good in demos but as soon as you try to use it for anything it proves its inadequacy. For document summarizing, 5,000 pages sounds generous, but it's rare that I'm concerned about finding information in a single document. I said this in a comment last week, but the utility would be more like "search all the depositions we have on file and pull all the ones where a witness testified about X". Well, we have tens of thousands of depositions on file, most in PDF but some in a special format used for court transcriptions. Conservatively assuming 100 pages per depo and 140 words per page, that comes out to something like half a billion tokens of context required, before we even consider that PDFs take more tokens than plain text, and a lot more if they haven't been OCR'd (which most of these haven't). Even the document functions described by the sales rep weren't that good; the example he gave was that if you were searching medical records for mentions of cancer it could broaden the search to include mentions of specific cancers.
I don't know that this is true. I used to do a fair amount of genealogy for work and large age gaps were pretty common in the old days. Even in my own family, my great aunt married a guy in 1931 (when she was 20) who was about 20 years older than her, and only a couple years younger than her parents. This aunt was like a grandmother to me but I never knew her husband, as he died in 1963, and I didn't really know much about him. Years later, my dad a comment about him along the line of the following when we were talking about the family history: "I don't know what she saw in him. He was like an old man, he never had a steady job, he was mean. I don't understand why my grandparents let her marry that guy." My uncle told a story about his first driving experience, when Uncle Lee asked him to take him to Oakland so he could buy a piss urinal for his basement. He used to tinker around down there and didn't want to walk upstairs and was tired of peeing in a bottle. So he asked my uncle, despite the fact that my uncle was only 13 at the time. My uncle said "Don't you need a permit or something?" and he just waved his hand and said no. So my uncle drove him to Oakland. He had a winter coat on and turned the heat up all the way in the car even though it was June. When they got there the place didn't have one and Uncle Lee got pissed off at the manager. Then when they were leaving my uncle backed into the alley and ran over a bicycle that was lying in the street. Uncle Lee got out and threw it while yelling "Goddamn kids with their toys!" Apparently my grandfather hit the ceiling when he found out about it.
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