In the new Washington Post profile, Malcolm implies that he “engineered the scene” because “he knew smacking his kid would draw attention, help the article go viral and get their message out.”

How does beating your kid for clicks make anything better!? You still beat your two year old kid!

Good question!

The guesses and rumours that you have got as replies makes me lean towards "apparently no one knows".

And because it's slop machines (also referred to as "AI", there is always a high probability of some sort of scam.

Biblically accurate gymnastics.

But they make up for it in volume!

So they named the product sucking the data after the Facehugger? At least they know that they are in the abomination business. Will they be releasing an AI named Bursting Chest?

I have so far seen two working AI applications that actually makes sense, both in a hospital setting:

1. Assisting oncologists in reading cancer images. Still the oncologists that makes the call, but it seems to be of use to them.
2. Creating a first draft when transcribing dictated notes. Listening and correcting is apparently faster for most people than listening and writing from scratch.

These two are nifty, but it doesn't make a multi billion dollar industry.

In other words the bubble is bursting and the value / waste ratio looks extremely low.

Say what you want about the Tulip bubble, but at least tulips are pretty.

Gerard -> Assange -> creates Wikileaks -> Wikileaks receives and publishes hacked or leaked DNC emails -> DNC emails shows Clinton cheating Sanders in the primary -> depresses turnout among potential democratic voters in the general election -> Trump wins.

On can question each step on how influential it's for the next, but if one doesn't Trump was all his fault.

I have noted two AI companies going belly up with earnings in a year matching costs per month. So I assumed that was around the worse case scenario, and for not yet bankrupt AI companies earnings were probably a bit better, perhaps just losing ten times their earnings.

I now see the flaw of my reasoning. Capital isn't allocated on profits, it's allocated on hype. Having profits draws the company down because it's no longer pure hype, and thus doesn't contribute to the hype bubble the same way.

So existing, not yet bankrupt, AI companies probably has significantly worse cost to income ratio than twelve.

"National socialism" is the term the Nazis invented to describe themselves. "Nazi" is the abbreviation of the term "national socialism". Could be good to know.

The world has enough for everyone's need, just not for everyone's greed.

On average we humans use too much, yes. I don't know if WWF (not the wrestling one) still does their yearly report, but anyway they used to and the only part of the world that in average was over carrying capacity was the West (the first world, the golden billion). And within countries there are also stark differences.

Placing the blame on the poor billions of the world is at best ignorant and at worst racist (not saying that you are, but placing the blame on poor people with more pigments has been very common). Placing it on the billionaires is more fitting, though really it's societal structure that upholds the growth obsession and produces billionaires. But at least the billionaires has power, and in general fights every attempt at making things slightly better, which makes it more fitting to blame them.

A Danish ad company made a Google interface that they called "impersonal me" which searched Google with no personalisation. And not only was it better than Google search, it found things that normal Google just didn't show. In particular old comments I had written and lost track of. In the impersonal search they were easily found, in the normal search they weren't way down on the list, they weren't in the list at all.

Fascinatingly bad.

Knowing just a smidgeon about how the statistical parrots work, I wonder were they will get the dataset for the animal languages.

This reminds me, I read an article in Nature about teaching dogs to read. Now, this was a 19th century article in a 19th century Nature, so it described how the author had written "food" on a note and placed it on the food bowl and placed a blank note on an empty bowl and eventually gotten his dog to fetch the note that had "food" written on it. Alas, due to unforeseen circumstances, it was hard to expand into more advanced literature.

So where to get the dataset? Nevermind, Magical AI to the rescue!