Any time a local government fails people these same kinds of incentive misalignments are at the real heart of it.

The fact that it has the word AI in it just gives it that cool cyberpunk dystopian sheen, where you call 911 and the AI says something about mechahitler instead of trying to help you.

Otherwise I can code this state machine condition for you in 10 minutes.

The article says it's basically to handle high call volumes maybe during some kind of widespread incident. But in those cases why would AI even be needed- if calls are flooding in for something and people need to be put on hold why do you need AI to ask them if they are calling about incident x? Just automate a voice for that and ask them that while they're on hold / when the system first picks up.

This smells like a bandaid over an underfunded system, and a way to sneak in further cost-cutting in the future where the real calls will be actually answered by AI.

It comes back to your perception of what AI is because to people who say AI is glorified auto-complete won't believe that the money is worth it.

The AGI-pilled true believers who say it will end all money and result in a post-scarcity world believe literally any amount is justifiable.

Most people, me included, land somewhere in the middle- it seems like AI is a humanity-level sea change in technology and how computers work and serve us. It seems plausible that a few trillion is a reasonable amount.

*edit to add: that code quality (or lack of quality) is it's own cost

For coding my own work I don't trust the model router, and it would have to be shown to be to save a real dollar amount.

From a buying perspective it's a hard sell to save x but lose out on bugs you are probably introducing at an unquantifiable severity and frequency. How much is it worth to hedge your bets by doing every single inference request on the frontier model?

How much will it cost to go back later and fix things, but also the meta question of how to be able to decide on a hypothetical unknowable? (You'll never know how much better or worse your code was gonna be, it's untestable at a project level)

I would say human made slop writing isn’t any better or worse quality than LLM writing.

Knowing if it was made by a real person makes a difference to me, but I also know it won’t to everyone.

In terms of how writers think about creativity this doesn’t reflect reality- there’s the old writer’s saying that there are only 7 stories (and other variations of this idea) and that writing is about creatively remixing these well-worn ideas.

The LLM’s capability to write acceptable fiction and nonfiction is coming soon if it’s not already here. (I think right now it still needs some high level input from humans, depending on length and topic)

It’s clear to me that, especially as LLMs get better and better, there’s only one real difference- it’s that I don’t want to hear what an LLM has to say. I’m only interested in what other humans have to say. I feel the same way about AI music- even if it sounds ok, even as good as the kind of unoriginal pop music that’s not AI made (but is a kind of it’s own slop) or a bad committee made hollywood movie, it’s still fundamentally more interesting than something that’s been generated. Even if it’s 100% fiction it’s still based on a real human’s life experiences.

From the outside they look like they're behind in terms of frontier models, but I think they might be the best positioned to not go out of business when the bubble pops.

Also look at the fact that they've been able to deploy AI-assisted search at google scale. It must be another order of magnitude larger (at least) than the model deployments for OpenAI and Anthropic.

Of course unless you're inside Google it's impossible to know for sure.

Or, the infected package could also copy that file into the parent project's root.

The whole mecha-hitler thing doesn't seem to reflect fine-tuning, it was just a prompt change.

There's been some studies that suggest that certain usage of LLMs reduces political bias, which seems reasonable. Like, how credible is climate change, are Haitians eating pets, etc. THings that have a basis in fact.

I don't put it past Elon to train a model with political bias, just that it hasn't happened yet.

After this I can't take the essay seriously- this sort of blanket statement about the one true hierarchy of consciousness and knowledge is BS.

While it seems to have been disproven that words in other languages cause people to speak and think differently, that also doesn't mean that words don't have any effect on the way we think, or that the concept of a word always has to come before the word itself.

The reason why we experience the uncanny valley of LLMs is because they don't represent a true consciousness, BUT it's also clear that the architecture represents certain qualities of consciousness- as the models have scaled we can see that it has some other non-word related understanding.

The evidence points to consciousness as a set of interlocking systems- attention, long term memory, short term memory, emotions, etc.

People with stable jobs and good credit qualify for no-fee credit cards with rewards / cashback. As a consumer you benefit financially from having a credit card. Those elsewhere in the thread worried about "debt" - you just set to auto-withdrawl the entire balance of the card every month from your bank account. Now you have free money. I can't think of a reason not to take advantage of this system in some way.

But people with unstable jobs and poor credit help subsidize these "higher-end" credit cards when they pay high interest rates on their because they missed payments or hold a balance over multiple months. For those people credit cards could help with monthly cashflow issues but are essentially a scam and not much better than payday loans.

Yet another system that American consumers are kind of forced to participate in that's a sort of tragedy of the commons (high-reward cards wouldn't exist without the exploitation of other people not savvy enough to avoid high interest and fees)