Category Archives: AI

The One Big Benefit Of NOT Going AI …

You don’t have to worry about your AI vendor going toes-up when power costs go through the roof and your AI vendor can no longer charge pennies for compute when its costs rapidly become dollars and it can’t pass them on due to contractual commitments to existing clients (or to new clients who won’t pay dollars for computations that might return hallucinations).

The new generation of AI tech — Gen-AI LLMs / AGI — requires way more compute power than the last generation, 100 to 10000 times more on average, for most requests. Grids are stretched and beginning to break. We’re at the point where only nuclear can power the data centre needed for a modern Gen-AI/AGI offering. And, as per Koray Köse’s recent article on AI leadership is about who controls the power, U.S. nuclear plants operated at 92.3% capacity last year. OUCH!

THERE IS NO ENERGY LEFT!

You can’t build a new nuclear plant overnight — if you can even build one at all anymore! Last year, DOGE’s Firing Fiasco at the NNSA stretched an already stretched organization even more. Many returned to work, but not all, but budget cuts likely left them without the capacity to even properly monitor existing aging nuclear infrastructure, yet alone approve more plants.

And it’s not even clear how much know-how is left in the US to build new plants. The Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia were the first units built from scratch in over three decades. The experience and expertise isn’t there to safely build these plants en-masse.

And the last thing the US wants to risk is another meltdown. Three Mile Island wasn’t a Chernobyl, but all it takes is a rushed private sector job with a lack of proper oversight and testing and one small mistake to trigger the next meltdown on US soil.

In other words, the power isn’t there for more AI.

So those organizations that can do without modern AI, that can use classic solutions with fit-for-purpose last generation AI that requires a fraction of the power and can run on already strained, non-nuclear, grids will be the big winners when the power squeeze hits and the Big AI players start dropping like flies.

AI is Exacerbating the Need for Global Data Centres NOT Controlled By US Firms!

A recent post by Joël Collin-Demers on why Your LLM Doesn’t Need a US Passport pointed out two very important facts that you’re probably not aware of but should be:

1. Your company is feeding sensitive data to US-based LLMs every single day.

2. The US CLOUD Act lets American authorities demand data from any US-based provider REGARDLESS of where their servers sit in the world!

In other words, you’re giving the USA full access to all of your proprietary and confidential data anytime they want it — in full breach of your data localization laws if you’re NOT in the US and in a country with such laws (and if you’re not in the US and don’t yet have data localization laws to adhere to you will soon have such laws to deal with as a result of the US global over-reach for your data to feed its AI).

This is not just an AI problem (which, if you think you really need, you have other non-US options if you are not a US company as per Joel’s extensive list), it’s an overall SaaS/SaS problem. If you’re not a US company, you need to make sure that not only your data, but all of your applications (including, but not limited to, AI) are hosted in non-US owned data centres off of US soil without safe harbour agreements.

The Best Article Xavier Olivera Has Ever Written!

In what “good” looks like today, and what it enables next, Xavier writes:


The next phase of P2P evolution will not be defined by who adds the most AI features fastest. It will be defined by who builds systems that make better decisions easier, safer and more repeatable, without losing the discipline that P2P was designed to enforce in the first place.

Truer words have never been spoken, especially in the Age of AI hype where the A.S.S.H.O.L.E. floods us with AI BS faster than we’ve ever been flooded with tech propaganda before!

Gen-AI LLMs (which are now powering the AGI craze, because if the first offering flops, just tweak and relaunch it with a few new buzzwords and claim it just needed more time, processing power, and tweaking) are not intelligent. They’re not even reliable. Hallucinations are a core function, Predictions are based on data available, even if it’s incomplete, incorrect, or indicative of actions known to be wrong for the situation in question that is typically an exception to the rule (or pattern). And many actions that can be taken automatically by these systems can’t be reversed (as there is not only no mechanism, but when they trigger an external event, the ability to reverse an incorrect action is completely out of your control).

Given this harsh reality, while they can monitor and make suggestions on how to govern, they can not govern and they do not count as governance. Governance is the only way to get to better, safer, and repeatable decisions. In reality, these Gen-AI /AGIs count as risk. Any error made with respect to a commitment (transaction, obligation, contract, large financial transfer) is an error that increases organizational jeopardy!

Governance is predictability, determinism, explainability, and traceability. This is not modern LLM-based Gen-AI / AGI system, but a traditional RPA or modern ARPA system (where all suggested rule and workflow changes and adaptations to prevent a future exception from occurring must be approved by a human) where all actions are governed by unbreakable rules, all exceptions are approved by a human, and all actions are completely traceable and 100% explainable — with no lies.

Remember that when you’re looking for your next Procurement solution, or you’ll end up with one that is worse, more dangerous, and less repeatable than the last generation solution you have now. For example, let’s say you implement an agent that monitors the inbound email channel for supplier communications regarding payment instructions and invoices. A communication comes in requesting a change of banking details for a supplier. The IPs and source domain look good so the change, and the change is to another bank local to the supplier (that they did business with in the past), so the update is sent to the AP system. The next day, an invoice comes in from the supplier for 10 times the number of units on the last PO. It’s from a supplier where shipment quantities never match the PO and where the buyer always approves the discrepancies, so the invoice is automatically paid. The next day another request comes in to change the bank account back to the original. It also passes the AI’s sniff test, so it happens. No one notices that a multi-million dollar payment was made to a fake supplier on a fake invoice, until the real invoice comes in a few days later, gets rejected because the PO has been matched, and the supplier flags an issue two weeks later when its AR team finally gets around to processing the exception, the AP team investigates, tells the supplier an invoice was paid, a back and forth occurs, and when the supplier finally gets the “proof”, informs the buyer that is NOT their bank account. By now, over three weeks and a day have passed, and the funds are unrecoverable as the thieves transferred the money out of the country and closed the fake account the day the fake invoice was paid. This is the “governance” you’ll get from an unintelligent agentic solution (masquerading as an AI employee) that does everything on probabilities.

San Altman is definitely the P.T. Barnum of our age …

But to repeat claims (as per this Futurism article) that he’s the Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried of our age without proving he has the IQ he says he has (which some of us don’t believe he has), or providing evidence he’s the world’s biggest sociopath (as that’s who you’d have to be to knowingly defraud major investment funds of hundred of billions of dollars, funds that likely hold the retirement funds of hundreds of millions of people) seems just a little unfair. After all, if Sam can barely code and misunderstands basic machine learning concepts, which I totally believe (as that would seem to be a fundamental requirement to believing AI actually works and is actually capable of intelligence in its current form), that would seem to indicate his IQ is on the low side and that he thus believes that his AI works and is actually intelligent.

If this is the case, then even though all of his investors will most likely eventually lose Billions (and likely Tens of Billions, and maybe Hundreds of Billions) of dollars on “AI” that will never work, it’s not fraud because he might actually be dumb enough to believe every word of what he’s selling. Fraud, like many major US crimes, requires intent (and, in Sam’s case, would require understanding what his firm’s offering actually does vs. what he seems to believe it does).

18 U.S. Code § 1341 starts off with “Whoever, having devised or INTENDing to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses …”. He didn’t devise the scheme of raising venture capital and private equity, so that doesn’t apply. If he believes his garbage actually delivers intelligence (even though it doesn’t), and will work better with bigger models and better data centres funded by the money he’s trying to raise (even though it won’t), he’s not intending to defraud either. Which means that he’s not a Madoff (who devised a Ponzi scheme with the intent to defraud) or a Sam Bankman-Fried (who willfully misused crypto funds for his hedge funds and pay personal debts).

He’s just a showman peddling his digital puppet theatre (who is blissfully unaware of how bad it is) and if you’re dumb enough to fall for it, that’s on you, not him!

If you’re looking for real fraud, maybe look to your federal government?

PS: I never thought I’d feel the need to defend an individual who I see as one of the biggest scourges of the digital age! But when there are a lots of individuals out there actively defrauding consumers with knowledge and intent every single day and getting away Scott free without any effort whatsoever to even formally recognize the fraud, that was a really unfair byline.

STOP USING AI FOR WRITING NOW! (BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE FOR YOU!)

If you think AI writing is becoming excellent, that’s the SIGN you should STOP using AI for writing immediately.

The reason you think this is multifold, and no part of it is good.

1) AI is too agreeable (and sycophantic)

(Source)

2) This increases your dependence on it

(Source)

3) Which leads not only to cognitive decline

(Source)

4) but cognitive surrender

(Source)

And as for the “I know how to use it, I’m in control” argument, that’s all BS. It’s an illusion because frequent use of AI BREAKS THE MOST RATIONAL OF THINKERS!

(Source)

You might think you’re guiding it, but it’s brainwashing you to accept without question the same derivative cr@p it always spits out because that’s all it can do. Remember, just because the token size is large enough for the LLM to generate grammatically proper English 99.999% of the time, that doesn’t mean there’s any logic or meaning to what it generates!

And yes, the doctor saw all of this coming, as he understood early on exactly what LLMs were and were not. That’s why SI has had a formal NO AI policy (as well as a NO AI BS policy) for a long time now (and never used AI)!

(You have to remember that, as humans, there is a relatively significant chance we will end up using a nursing home at some point in our lives in North America, with some estimates now putting that chance over 50%, and an ever greater chance that when we end up there, it will be [partially] due to mental decline, dementia, and similar conditions. We’re also suffering population stagnation, if not decline, in most western countries. As a result, it’s in our best interest to do everything we can to keep our mental faculties about us for as long as we can, because there’s barely enough health care workers to care for those who already need care as it is. Think seriously about what’s going to happen if, en-masse, society goes all-in on technology that is essentially turning us into drooling mindless idiots and greatly increasing the chances we become unable to care for ourselves immediately upon entering retirement … )