I did an interview with Phil Ferguson, a financial advisor with a podcast. First half is crypto, second half is AI. This came out very well! The content you crave! The sound is not awesome (Zoom being weird?) but you can hear all the words just fine. It’s on video (33 minutes, ju … | Continue reading
The UK government is still flat out of ideas and still convinced “AI” is the magical fix-all for bureaucracy. By “AI,” it means ChatGPT it buys in from Microsoft. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, plans to fire 10,000 civil servants by the end of this parliament, 2029 at latest. Ree … | Continue reading
Game studio executives love AI slop — because they despise paying artists and writers. The execs hire art directors who also love AI slop: [Aftermath] He’ll just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the … | Continue reading
Google is very upset that a lot of the public don’t really like AI. You might think this was because of AI slop and explicit threats to their jobs, but Google is pretty sure it’s because people saw the Terminator films. So Google is funding films about how AI is good really. Mira … | Continue reading
Telstra is Australia’s former monopoly phone company, now privatised. How do you squeeze more money out of your fixed user base? With “AI!” [Press release; investor presentation, PDF] Telstra CEO Vicky Brady told investors that AI “will be a significant unlock when it comes to en … | Continue reading
Yes, it’s time to rattle the tin again! You can sign up to the Patreon at whatever level, but $5 a month is a good one. That’s the level where I’ll sometimes post previews of works in progress. AI, crypto, whatever. Not very often, but they’re fun when they happen. If you’d buy m … | Continue reading
Business owners hate employees more than anything. Unfortunately, AI’s not very good at doing human jobs. We noted last month how chatbots hadn’t knocked down wages or hours in any occupation. Orgvue surveyed 1,000 executives. 39% of them had fired employees for AI — but of those … | Continue reading
Anthropic AI promotes itself with increasingly frenzied science fiction about AI doom. In every case, the chatbot does an evil thing because the researchers specifically told it to. This weekend’s headlines: “AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed”! [BBC] This … | Continue reading
GitLab is a program code repository. It’s got an AI coding bot, because of course it does — it’s called Duo and it runs on Claude. Duo will make suggestions, analyse submitted pull requests and even give security tips! [GitLab] You can prompt-inject the bot by submitting a malici … | Continue reading
There’s been a lot of discourse lately from AI boosters making excuses for AI’s ghastly power consumption. The reason you’re seeing these excuses now is because even the mainstream media is writing up how the AI industry’s power and water use is horrifying. Quite often these are … | Continue reading
Another day, another preprint paper shocked that it’s trivial to make a chatbot spew out undesirable and horrible content. [arXiv] How do you break LLM security with “prompt injection”? Just ask it! Whatever you ask the bot is added to the bot’s initial prompt and fed to the bot. … | Continue reading
Builder.ai let you build a website or an app without coding — but with AI! Allegedly. Builder was the great hope of Artificial Intelligence for the UK. It scored $450 million in venture funding — mostly from Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Fund. Customers had mixed experiences … | Continue reading
We asked a week ago: if AI is such a superior programming method that it’ll produce live quality code for Microsoft and live code for Facebook that actual money relies on — then where are the AI contributions to open source? GitHub has decided to gift open source with more AI con … | Continue reading
Peat soils in the UK have been hugely over-mined. But in 2021, the UK government put forward a Peat Action Plan to conserve and restore peat bogs. To this end, they started work on a map of peat sites in England. [DEFRA, 2021] Natural England released its official England Peat Ma … | Continue reading
Back in 2023, we wrote how lawyers were filing briefs they’d written with ChatGPT. They thought it was a search engine, not a lying engine — and the bot would proceed to cite a whole pile of supporting cases that didn’t exist! And then the judge would sanction them into the sun. … | Continue reading
In a fast-moving field like “AI”, with buzzwords and dumb money flying about, researchers don’t have time for for the peer review process. Preprints can have all the impact you need! Let’s look at “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” which was … | Continue reading
President Donald Trump has announced yuge deals with the United Arab Emirates — including a fantastic new AI data centre in Abu Dhabi! [White House] The question is how to sell millions of Nvidia chips to the UAE. The UAE is under US export restrictions on Nvidia GPUs because the … | Continue reading
Yesterday afternoon, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot went nuts on Twitter. It answered every question — about baseball salaries, Keir Starmer, or the new Pope’s latest speech — by talking about an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa. You could reply to any tweet with just “Is this … | Continue reading
There’s not enough spare utility power for the xAI data centre in South Memphis, Tennessee — so it runs off 35 gas turbines with no emission controls. They’re just pumping nitrous oxide out into the air. [Politico] The gas turbines are “temporary” — which means they’re running of … | Continue reading
You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is absolutely up to production quality! Also, you’re all fired. But if AI is so obviously superior … show us the code. Where’s the receipts … | Continue reading
You’ve replaced those annoying human employees with a website chatbot. Unfortunately, it keeps hallucinating discounts for your customers or swearing at them and badmouthing your company What if we insured you against this? Technology error and omission insurance covers some AI l … | Continue reading
Soundcloud is a site where musicians can host their music. On Friday 9 May, Bluesky user Thomas Brunet noticed something in the Soundcloud terms of service: [Bluesky; Soundcloud] You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to art … | Continue reading
Pivot to AI comes to you every day with a blog post and a video. It’s time to rattle the tin — so please send money to help keep the stories coming daily! I’m getting okay at this video presenting lark. The heartwarming rants to camera you love. [YouTube] (If you have a podcast, … | Continue reading
Will AI help you in your career? No. Not if anyone finds out, anyway. Today in science discovering the obvious, if you use chatbots to pump out the AI slop at work, your coworkers think you’re an incompetent and lazy arse. And they are absolutely judging you for it. [PNAS] This a … | Continue reading
Who remembers “prompt engineering”? Ask ChatGPT questions real good and pull down $200,000 a year! In 2023, a Washington Post headline said: “Prompt engineers’ are being hired for their skill in getting AI systems to produce exactly what they want, and they make pretty good money … | Continue reading
In 2021, Gabriel Horcasitas shot and killed Christopher Pelkey in a case of road rage — Pelkey had jumped out of his car and come after Horcasitas, who panicked and shot at him. Horcasitas was found guilty of manslaughter. [Fox 10 Phoenix, 2021] When Horcasitas was sentenced last … | Continue reading
Intel’s Q1 2025 earnings press release talked up their new AI-enabled chips. But these are not selling. [Intel] In the earnings call, CFO Dave Zinsner mentioned they had “capacity constraints in Intel 7 which we expect to persist for the foreseeable future.” Asked for more detail … | Continue reading
OpenAI has revised its plan to turn into a for profit company. [OpenAI] The original OpenAI corporate structure was bizarre. The nonprofit owned the for-profit company that spent the money and did the work. But OpenAI went weird. The for-profit company didn’t sell shares in itsel … | Continue reading
The UK government very much wants to give the AI grifters everything they ever wanted — including open slather on UK creative works. If you didn’t want the AI companies training on your stuff, you would need to opt out — rather than them doing a deal and paying you. UK musicians … | Continue reading
Popular language app Duolingo has declared it’s going “AI first.” The contractors who write the language courses will be replaced with LLMs. But Duolingo will “remain a company that cares deeply about its employees.” [LinkedIn] Founder and CEO Luis von Ahn is a machine learning e … | Continue reading
Venture capital is screwed. A bubble in AI is their last hope, and they’re betting everything on Sam Altman. It’s heartwarming. Today, we have the Pitchbook-NVCA Venture Monitor for Q1 2025. This is the National Venture Capital Association telling its members how things are going … | Continue reading
Here’s a headline from the Financial Times: “Microsoft shares jump after strong AI demand lifts cloud unit.” Wow, that’s amazing! [FT, archive] But guess what — it’s false! The actual reason Microsoft’s stock price went up is a 33% revenue increase from Azure cloud. The FT claims … | Continue reading
Worldcon is the science fiction convention where the Hugo Awards are voted on, the biggest award in the field. It’s had controversy in recent years, such as the 2023 convention in Chengdu in China removing Hugo nominees they thought the Chinese government wouldn’t like. But Seatt … | Continue reading
AccurX Scribe is a medical transcription tool. It listens in on your consultation and gives the doctor a transcript. Surely poor acoustics and the range of accents in the UK won’t cause problems? [press release] These ambient transcribers are being mandated by health secretary We … | Continue reading
The purpose of generative AI is to oppress labour. That’s why all that money to OpenAI. But for all the claims that you will be replaced by an Excel macro with pretentions … it’s not working out that way. A new paper by Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard states bluntly: “AI cha … | Continue reading
Google has a fancy “AI Principles” statement. In January, they quietly removed the bits barring AI that would “cause or directly facilitate injury to people” or “surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.” Google was selling AI-based systems for military purposes sinc … | Continue reading
HEY, CHECK THIS OUT: https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/ Yes, it’s the YouTube channel without the pictures! Some patrons asked for a podcast RSS feed — just the audio — because they wanted to just listen to it like the podcast it is really, and YouTube isn’t helpful for that. I realis … | Continue reading
All industries assume international trade and depend on equipment from around the world. That includes data centres — especially for “hyperscaling” AI. [Reuters, archive] Most data centre electrical equipment is only made outside the US. President Trump’s tariffs exempt electroni … | Continue reading
Back in the 1990s, there were several search engines for the World Wide Web, and they were all unusably bad. Then a new team called Google cracked the code of what made a website useful. Suddenly, the first search result was just gonna be good! That was 1998, and it was revelator … | Continue reading
The Australian Radio Network has three main brands: KIIS, GOLD and CADA. Across nine stations, there’s one non-white presenter — and she’s a bot. Thy has been CADA Sydney’s weekday host for six months now. It turns out Thy is an AI voice clone created by ARN and ElevenLabs. [Medi … | Continue reading
For the February 2025 California bar exam, the State Bar of California used a remote testing platform that just didn’t work. 80% of the candidate lawyers had technical issues. For over half the candidates, the platform crashed or froze. [LA Times; State Bar of California, PDF] Ma … | Continue reading