John Healy's Tech Blog

Category: Research

Looking at technology

  • AI regulation faces a test in California

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    Benefits and costs of the new AI gold rush. Move fast and break things … vying for supremacy (“America’s AI edge,” like another Manhattan Project) … but … who’s a developer, and what are their responsibilities in some type of regulatory framework? Who does AI safety testing? Are there 3rd party evaluations? Certifications? Kill switches? Incident logging and reporting? AI “meltdowns” and lawsuits? Collateral damage…

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  • 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 (like the Colorado River). Companies that invest in AI see…

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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 all the varieties of outright falsehoods / fabrication / propaganda?…

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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 of product reviews (to some degree). But in the rush…

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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 money is going to new data centers, which are predicted…

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