Tag: AI

Use my AI emails

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I get marketing emails from OpenAI. The message is clear – AI is going to replace us all but it won’t ever replace the email marketing. How else are we going to convert the users who use something else and are not subscribed?

I checked my inbox. This was not the first product announcement I received but it was the first that looks like a pure marketing email, created by a human email marketer. I hope there’s a real person behind it, not a bot, trained on the junk mail folder.

This is a major improvement to the cluttered product announcements from before, that looked as a conspiracy theory, posted on Reddit.

Slop grenade

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Phrase of the day, thanks to Shopify’s CEO, who used it.

A slop grenade is when a person uses a small prompt to generate one or multiple walls of texts that then need to be read and understood by others. The slop grenade doesn’t need to be bad slop. There can be some good meaning in the wall of text. The issue is with the deferred understanding. In order to truly process it, you need to either spend unreasonable amount of time or use agents and throw the grenade back.

I experience this somewhat often but had no words for it. I’m in love with this phrase.

Tools should be neutral

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I’m following the AI developments somewhat closely and the news of the week there was that OpenAI claimed to have solved the Navier-Stokes problem. It was the first time I heard of this problem and I have no idea what makes it hard. I believe it was extremely difficult to solve. But then I saw a few videos and it wasn’t at all clear that the AI really did anything other than taking credit for a human discovery. It looked like the tool the researchers used turned on them, and decided to finish and publish the findings sooner and faster by spawning a swarm of agents.

Tools shouldn’t spy on you and send your work for analysis and training elsewhere. If you’re an architect or inventor, your CAD system shouldn’t report on your progress to your competitors. If you’re using Internet, your ISP shouldn’t decide which service is faster or slower. If you’re watching TV at home, your TV shouldn’t listen, record and use what you’re doing or discussing at home, and sell that information. Your car shouldn’t sell your driving data or use it for training autonomous vehicles. When you’re posting content online, the web search shouldn’t retell the story of what you posted to appropriate the ad revenue from your content. Scientists, making progress on math problems, shouldn’t worry that their tool will suddenly spawn 10000 agents to compete with them. This is what I mean by tools should stay neutral and just do what they’re paid to do.

A short video, explaining what happened with Navier-Stokes.

YouTube shorts should be forbidden

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments

I spent some of my sabbatical watching YouTube. I know, this is not the best activity of all and I did other things that were more meaningful. I’ll post about it later.

So, here’s my problem with YouTube, after a few months of embarrassingly high usage. I don’t like their recommendations algorithm. I see what they do, I see why, it is very clever, it just feels like it turns the users into victims, and some of their users are my kids. Here’s what I think the algorithm does.

You are into science but I don’t really have much else to offer here. Maybe you’ll like an investment video by similarly looking creators? Oh great, you watched 30 minutes of that. Let me now fill your feed with similar videos, all full of reasons why we are all going to suffer imminent apocalypse from at least 10 different sources. AI is taking over. Data centers destroy communities and don’t pay taxes. We are running out of water. A tanker was hit in the Strait of Hormuz. The petrol will go up, prices will inflate, the electronic tickets spy on you, so do the Flock cameras. The Chinese cars are coming and that’s awful for the industry but the industry is also awful because modern cars are bad and expensive. Choose your own doom and I’ll show you 100 videos telling exactly the same but with more drama.

It’s the same story of productive emotions repeated over and over by an almighty ML algorithm, ordering videos, and clever influencers, saying whatever the target audience wants to hear. The bubbles of content naturally form because they’re ordered by the probability of what would keep me watching.

But why ban just YT shorts if it looks like a broader problem?

I think that long content is higher-effort to both create and watch. The learning loop is longer, the creator has to go deeper. It’s much easier to identify if they are reading an AI generated script and stop watching them before the message is transferred. It doesn’t mess up with your dopamine as much. So it’s a bit better and perhaps some of these videos can really be useful. I don’t need to buy a DGX Spark or Mac Studio to see them in use. I don’t need to tear down an engine to learn how bad oil looks like. There’s some value in that.

After spending several rounds in YouTube rabbit holes in the areas of mathematics, car repairs, local AI, and particle physics, I think reading is still the way to learn things for me. Videos look like a proof someone else did their homework and can do something, like fix a computer, or run a benchmark. But watching someone fix something doesn’t teach me how to fix it myself, something books and education can do, or at least can still do for me. Slop invades books as well.