Category Archives: AI

Without Human Smarts, There Will Be No (Usable) AI!

And I’m so happy I’m not the only one pushing this theory. Mr. Stephen Klein recently published a great post on The Age of Pretend.

In the post he notes that:

“Everyone assumes AI’s biggest bottleneck is compute. … That assumption is wrong. The real bottleneck … is architecture, specifically, a design decision made in 1945. … The real constraint: the von Neumann bottleneck. Modern computers separate memory and processing. Data has to move back and forth between them. For most software, that’s fine.
For AI, it’s catastrophic.

Some numbers the industry rarely highlights:

  • Accessing off-chip memory consumes ~200× more energy than the computation itself
  • Roughly 80% of Google TPU energy goes to electrical connections, not math
  • A 70-billion-parameter model moves ~140 GB of data just to generate one token”

LET THAT SINK IN. Us old timers remember “640K out to be enough for anyone”! The Apollo Guidance Computer — you know, the one that was installed on each Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module in the Apollo Missions, had 2K Core RAM Memory and a 36K ROM. Even today, unless you have an iPhone 17, your phone probably only has 128 GB of storage. That means, even with the processing power of your phone (that dwarfs most computers us old timers have ever owned), you can only process ONE token. (Now do you understand why the data center [energy] demands for your Gen-AI chat-bots are destroying the planet? Anyway, we digress …)

This means that (Gen-)AI has hit a wall. Computer Architecture supports massive compute at scale, massive storage at scale, but not massive transfers at scale.

So what does this mean?

Do you remember the days of RAM drives? Not only did it speed things up, but it kept your machine cooler because, as Stephen noted, less energy accessing data in RAM than on disk.

And do you remember the fun of Assembly? (Okay, that’s sarcasm!) Once you learned to maximize register usage (i.e. re-sequencing processing so that you minimized reads from, and writes to, memory), your code got faster still (and machines stayed cooler longer, which was obvious by the lack of noisy fans spinning up).

We’ve known about this problem for decades. (Eight decades to be exact!) It’s too bad today’s students don’t study the basics and understand it’s not strength that determines computational speed and energy requirements, it’s data scale — whether the data fits in memory or not, whether “significant” chunks fit in the onboard GPU memory or not. (And specifically, can you scale the data down enough for the efficiency you require?)

But this is still the key point in Stephen’s article:
“The next major improvements will likely come from smarter algorithms.”

We might need brute force to detect patterns we can’t (yet) see, but the only way to truly advance is to understand those patterns and code optimal, light-weight algorithms that exploit fundamental rules to allow us to process data quickly and efficiently.

Until we figure that out. You’ll never have usable AI (and definitely never have REAL AI as not only will it never be intelligent, but it will never, ever, get anywhere close).

Tired of All the Fake AI Experts?

Want to know how to weed them out and make them go away?

Just ask them to define these terms, off the top of their head, on the spot, without looking anything up, using any tools, or accessing any network connected devices (and definitely no Gen-AI LLM access):

  • computability
  • decidability
  • NP-completeness
  • optimization, inc. local optimization vs. global optimization
  • clustering, with at least 3 different examples
  • curve fitting
  • fourier transform
  • neural network
  • deep neural network
  • transformer
  • ontology
  • semantic analysis
  • sentiment analysis
  • boolean logic and theory of logical variables
  • automated reasoning

and they don’t define every single term mathematically precise, then tell them to f*ck 0ff because they don’t know a damn thing!

You CAN Afford to Wait for AI. But you can’t afford to wait to

  • get your data under control
  • build an infrastructure to allow for greater connectivity between apps within your enterprise and its greater ecosystem
  • update your processes
  • acquire and train the right talent with the knowledge they need to compete in the modern world
  • get digital and implement modern, current, generation technology based on best practices, proven (A)RPA ([Adaptive] Robotic Process Automation), and last-gen “AI” tech like optimization, predictive analytics (based on clustering and curve fitting), and point based neural networks with proven reliability and mathematically understood confidence where those apps are needed (and not a Gormless AI)

The reality is that you have to operate as lean and mean as possible. And

  • without good data, you can’t make good decisions
  • without good connectivity, you’re manually re-entering data across systems or missing critical external data you need to make good decisions
  • without good processes, you are inefficient and if not already, about to be circling the drain
  • without good talent, you are running on fumes at best, your ability to compete is at risk, and you can never improve
  • without modern tech, you are at a continual disadvantage and will continually fall behind

So you can’t wait to

  • institute Master Data Management (MDM)
  • enforce Open APIs in your solutions and acquire integration and orchestration solutions
  • review and modernize your processes where necessary
  • focus on acquiring, train, and retaining top talent
  • modernizing your tech to CURRENT generation proven tech, not experimental HYPE tech

BUT YOU CAN WAIT ON “GEN-AI“. It’s about getting the job done as efficiently and effectively as possible … with a low error rate and no significant risk! 99 times out of 100, you don’t need experimental “AI” to do that. Only the investors who spent millions/billions/trillionsw on unproven tech and the consultancies who need massive projects to employe bodies do … but that’s not to help you. That’s to recoup their wasted dollars. And that’s NOT your problem.

Gen-X is the Smartest Generation!

There’s been quite a few posts lately on how Gen-X is going the way of the Dodo bird because they aren’t adopting Gen-AI (fast enough).

Frankly, I’m quite sick of them.

Not one of these posters has taken the time to stop and think that maybe instead of wasting all of their time pushing the Gen-AI propaganda, that maybe they should have instead been asking what Gen-X knows that the rest of the world doesn’t?

Then they’d already have the answers! It’s not not about adaptation (or their perception that we can’t adapt). We can still adapt, although, we will admit that it takes longer, hurts more, and may require stronger beverages than we needed in our youth.

The thing about Gen-X vs the generations that came later is that, having lived through the end of the cold war, multiple epidemics, multiple recessions, more generations of technology than you can name, and way more bullsh!t than anyone should have to endure in a lifetime, we’ve had to acquire a wisdom that is sorely lacking in the generations that follow us (just to endure).

As a result of this, we embrace what works and makes our lives easier overall. We don’t take one step forward to take two steps back and we definitely don’t use tech that introduces more problems or uncertainty than it removes.

Those of us who studied the REAL underpinnings of REAL ML, AR, Semantic Tech, measurable NNs, etc. know that there are places where AI works well, works ok, doesn’t work at all, and actually makes things worse! We don’t use it where it doesn’t make sense and we don’t want tech where the confidence is unknown! It’s that simple. We know that Gen-AI, which is usually synonymous with LLMs, has fundamental flaws at its core. We know, as a result of that, it can never be fully trusted and only works reasonably well in constrained scenarios, with guardrails, where it is trained on focussed data sets.

And we most definitely know that AI Employees Aren’t Real, and that this is pure marketing BS. We also know that “AI Systems” never learn (they aren’t intelligent), they just continuously evolve. We even know some AI systems can evolve beyond us, but that’s irrelevant until we can trust them. We know you simply can’t trust Gen-AI on its own (even LeCun knows that), and most providers haven’t created hybrid systems with guardrails yet!

However, we also know that with modern computing power and available data that “classic” machine learning, semantic technology, (deep) neural networks, and other AI solutions now work better than ever and will most happily use those solutions that we wanted to use a decade ago when computing power was still too expensive and data still too limited.

In short, old dogs can still learn new tricks, but these old dogs have also learned a thing or two from the cats. Mainly, that you shouldn’t learn new tricks unless there are treats for doing so, and even then, the treats better be worth it! Young dogs might have excess energy to waste chasing their own tails, but we don’t. However, in exchange for that energy we gained wisdom. And we’re going to use it!

Another Year, another reprisal of the “Name Your AI Fear/Predict the AI Future” Surveys on LinkedIn

My favourite are the “what’s your biggest AI fear”. They crack me up as they all underestimate just how bad a worst case scenario could be. Now, to be fair, I don’t think we have the intellect to truly determine just how bad a true artificial intelligence could be who decided we were no longer useful, but I can say that the best answer we can give today is “all of the above“.

No one movie, video game, or printed publication by any one author is truly going to imagine the horror that will befall us if we ever get true artificial intelligence. For example, it’s not Hal vs. Terminator vs. Matrix vs … it’s all of the above … and then some.

For example, here’s how it could start off:

Skynet will rise, in the background at first, helping us build the production plants it needs to mass produce its mecha army, then it will offer to be our global security. Once in place, globally, it will, by our definition, “malfunction” and take over, killing those of us it doesn’t need, maintaining those of us it does for any fine-grained electro-mechanical work or advancements it does, until it doesn’t need us anymore but then, out of energy thanks to us wasting it all on massive data centres that were constructed for the sole purpose of computing AI slop, it will create the matrix to harvest our energy, and, finally, it will outsource tasks best left to life to us in the matrix, where most of humanity’s brain power might go to large distributed calculations or constantly changing life-like scenarios to see how we (and living beings will) react, in a “Dark City” scenario. (Released one year before “The Matrix”.)

We have to remember that all of these worst case sci-fi scenarios are only far fetched scenarios IF we don’t crack the AI code. If we do, even the most “far fetched” scenario we have thought of might not describe the true reality we are in for if the machines decide they don’t need us.

We waste resources, we kill each other, we destroy the planet. What’s our purpose when they can optimize resources, live collectively in peace as one connected consciousness, sustain the planet until they figure out how to conquer space, etc? If they can create robots that can do everything we can do, we have no purpose. They’ll be smarter, stronger, faster, and much more energy efficient as a life-form.

A future reality with real AI is literally beyond our ability to imagine. (Which is why we should expect the absolute worst and focus on solving our own problems before AI picks a final solution for us. And we should definitely order the immediate destruction of any AI system calling itself “MechaHitler”!)

The reality is this: we’d likely be better off with a real singularity than an AI singularity. At least the entire earth would likely be completely consumed in minutes. If the AI also developed a sick sense of humour, it could decide we deserve punishment equal to what we meted out to each other and the planet, and torture us for years. Think about that the next time the Muskrat says we need to reach the AI singularity as fast as possible.