Waiting for Musk to turn up and announce "infinity plus one more than you can ever say nah nah nah nah" momentarily!

TBF he has indirectly killed a bunch of people via doge cuts so that'd do the trick...

Oh... Well that's disappointing.

I was an academic in computer science in the last 10 years or so (keeping it vague to avoid doxxing myself) and it has been so depressing seeing so many of my colleagues selling out to OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and even Google (for some reason the latter often gets a reputational free pass because people associate them with the golden days of big tech 10+ years ago)

This has always been a huge red herring. Llms are built on top of the transformer architecture which does text autocomplete (and yes we can combine text embeddings with other inputs like images). They have some interesting properties where they seem to be able to do text autocomplete in a bunch of different scenarios that they weren't explicitly trained for, but they were never designed for precise dna analysis. It is their architecture that prevents them from other long horizon tasks like playing chess and the way that they represent text is why they can never count the letters in strawberry (most have this specific question hard-coded in their training data now).

Anyone who believes that LLMs are going to solve cancer either has no idea how they work or has been one-shotted from talking to Claudia

Those things are barely related, no wonder the staff voted with their feet. It would be a bit like taking a team of seasoned architects who design amazing skyscrapers and telling them they have to spend all their time on low density suburban houses from now on... Come on guys it's still architecture. Where are you going?

Missed this paper last week from Google

Funny how now that it's widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their "it's going to take your job" stance. Surely just a coincidence

Funnily enough they said that back then too. What a weird coincidence!

So it's been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year's work in 1 hour

So... Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind?

All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects.

It's almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)

GitHub have finally achieved zero 9s stability for the last 90 days. Congratulations to all involved

Think of all those poor billionaires who won't be able to afford that 29th yacht if we made them pay their fair share instead of externalising their costs onto an already stretched general.public!

Turns out Google Gemini will let you use any old Google API key from things like maps and firebase to access it. So, baddies can do key scanning in public repos and then charge LLM usage to anyone who has committed an API key to their repo!

So many layers of stupidity going on here!

https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules

IBM stocks take a tumble after anthropic release a COBOL skill - the rational market strikes again.

I wrote up my take here but TL;DR - a few markdown files telling Claude it's an expert at COBOL development aren't going to unpick decades of risk averse behaviour from bank and government cios. Similar to the SaaSpocalypse this is pure nonsense. Investors don't tend to let reality dissuade them though.

AI bros are seizing the means of computation: RAM, GPUs, SSDs and now HDDs...

I don't think there's an actual conspiracy, just lots of MBAs following their noses towards the $$$.

That said, time to buy a new lipo battery for that 10 year old laptop in the loft and stick Linux on it - before the lithium miners announce they've sold the next 12 months global supply of Lithium to Altman because he needs it to sleep at night...