John Healy's Tech Blog

Category: Research

Looking at technology

  • The darkside of AI – outages and shortages

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    Another gold rush is underway. Recast as the AI tech boom. Yet, AI is power hungry, a voracious beast consuming vast amounts of electricity. And water [1]. And those gas-fired power plants [2] … Generative AI data centers are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and tax the electric grid and our limited water resources

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  • Rabbit holes of misinfo – keeping critical thinking in play

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    Who likes being fooled by a con? Scams are one thing, and there’re tips to avoid those, whether via USPS (paper) mail, phone, email, text, etc. Whether obvious or not, the business model typically is about money – monetizing your personal data, either directly or indirectly. But what’s the business model for misinfo, disinfo, and

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  • Generative AI sans horse sense – unreliable narrators by design?

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    I like the way that I can do a Google search using a photo – drag & drop it into a search box – to identify its content. I like the way I can extract text from a photo (providing the photo has sufficient resolution on that content). And Amazon uses AI to summarize the gist

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  • Spending for AI’s pot of gold – powering profit?

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    High hype … trippy chips … gooey guardrails … pending legislation … the electric grid … pay, pay, pay, payday … cloudy cloud forecasts … • Washington Post > “Big Tech keeps spending billions on AI. There’s no end in sight.” by Gerrit De Vynck and Naomi Nix (April 25, 2024) – Much of the

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  • AI chatbot hallucinations – mind those P’s and Q’s

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    This is no joke! You’ve heard about this – whether AI chatbots mind their Ps and Qs. So, beware of nonsense. Statistically, how often do AI hallucinations happen? Yes, there’ll be updates … “We can’t stop hallucinations, but we can manage them.” (Maybe like the Id and Ego?) • Wiki > Hallucination (artificial intelligence) In

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