IIRC the cards thing was originally from a Gebru paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03993 but that dates from the "fairness" era and not the "safety" era. Hugging Face has "a" standard - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/model-cards - but I don't think it's "the" standard.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/untenable-middle-ground-responsible-ai-use-emily-m-bender-8jyfc/

So what is the best way out of that uncomfortable, untenable space? I think one key step is disaggregating the (non-coherent) set of technologies sold as "AI". If you don't call the stuff you work with "AI", you aren't saddled with trying to defend any of the rest of it.

The most recent iteration of this conversation I was involved in turned in part on a strange, over-expansive definition of "genAI" which included, for ex, optical character recognition (OCR).

OCR can be a useful tool for many research projects! OCR is also the kind of technology that gets better with better language models, i.e. more fine-grained models of which word(parts) go where. That has been true since before "genAI" and will be true after.

Just because you can use the synthetic media extruding machines to approximate the task of OCR, however, doesn't mean that that task can or should be used to justify the use of "genAI" in research.

I interviewed at two different glorified-OCR startups pre-pandemic (?pre-AI?) for an ML role, and neither CTO knew what a spline was. That is my OCR story.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism

Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.

More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.

? the kids are alright ?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer

For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like "write this app" or "write this functionality" which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.

Please, just fucking don't, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don't actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.

https://www.adexchanger.com/ai/one-chatbots-journey-to-introducing-ads-that-dont-suck/

Often, the ad loads before the chatbot’s query response, said Baird, and Koah’s goal is to “deliver such a relevant result to the user that they just click on the ad before the result loads.”

LLM's bad performance and inefficiency is a feature to /someone/. And chatbots are themselves not immune to enshitification.

From fellow traveler stats consultant John Mount:

https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/WeAreCookedLLMs.html

Somehow he manages to touch on so many different subplots, a shotgun sneer instead of snipe

if “tech-bro” plus a LLM is a “100x engineer”, then “bro” isn’t needed for much longer as the LLM alone must be a “99x engineer.” However, I don’t think “bro plus” is often really a 100x engineer, and the LLM alone isn’t a 99x engineer. However, “bro plus” may outlast their peers who make the mistake of trying to do the actual work in place of talking LLMs up.

The above may or may not be the case. But if it is, then it is the LLM-bros (which include non-technologists, con artists, financiers, men and women) that are destroying everything - not the LLMs.

The problem with this iteration is the full court press of finance and technology. The major players are using financing to dump results at a price way below production costs. This isn't charity, it is to demoralize and kill competition.

claiming "after we take over the world we will consider adding Universal Basic Income (UBI)". The LLM bros already have a lot of the money, and they are not even rehearsing diverting it into basic income now. Why does one believe they would do that when they also have all of the power?

You don't have to hand it to Altman, but he did fund the largest UBI experiment through Open Research with his il gotten gains. OTOH, one interpretation of that data was that UBI "decreases the labor supply" which was then used directly as an argument against it.

Any worry about scope or power of LLMs is fed back as an alignment threat so dire that only the current LLM leaders should be allowed to continue work (inviting regulatory capture). Any claim the LLMs don't work is fed back as "you are prompting it wrong"

Orbital deployment makes all of radiation tolerance, connectivity, power, maintenance, and heat dissipation much harder and much more expensive. We are still at a time where putting an oven or air-frier in space is considered noteworthy (China 2025, NASA 2019 ref).

air friers IN SPACE ha

I am more worried about the LLM-bros and their auto-catalytic money doomsday machine than about the LLMs themselves.

100% - ACMDM is a nice turn of phrase as well.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rentahuman-musk-ai h/t naked capitalism

Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.

gah

Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.

lmao of course they were

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science | Nature h/t naked capitalism

One reason for the boom is that LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity, by as much as 89.3%, according to research published in Science in December.

Let's not call it "productivity" - to quote Bergstrom, twice as many papers is not the same as twice as much science.

Rusty's response nailed it imho:

You sling beads to a hook which activates a polecat according to GUPP. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

At first this all seems like gibberish, and it is. But I think Yegge is one of those people with an innate and preternatural sense of the power and purpose of naming things—someone who understands that names are marketing and marketing is not always about attracting the largest possible audience. In this case, the best outcome for Yegge is for Gas Town to appeal to a relatively small number of absolute sickos who vibe hard with his personal brand and who can usefully contribute to the project, and also for Gas Town to actively repel looky-loos and dilettantes like me (and probably you), who will only waste his time with a lot of stupid questions like “huh?” and “molecules?” and “did you say seances?” Oh yeah: there are seances. Don’t ask.

By this standard, Gas Town has apparently been very successful.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/all-gas-town-no-brakes-town

I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

In UCLA's Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to "Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles" and Goal 5 is to "Become a more effective institution". By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

My question is:

If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

Thank you.

They put 'environmental impact of AI' on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this

kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus