Rob Bowley (@robbowley) header
Rob Bowley (@robbowley) profile picture

Technology Leader | Advisor | Mentor. No longer active here, find me on Bluesky @robbowley.net or LinkedIn https://teapawt.net/t.co/qYlwa4uIN2

Manchester, England
Joined January 2009
Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)Photo by Rob Bowley (@robbowley)
Rob Bowley retweeted
🧵What do the public think about the riots and those taking part in them? A reflection of legitimate concerns Or the actions of far right thugs? I've written for @FT today on new @moreincommon_ polling and focus group research into Britain & the riots. ft.com/content/46450035-2be0…
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X added a setting for "we'll take your data to train grok" without any notice and just defaulted to "yes" for everyone. This is BAD.
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People who think agi is imminent aren’t overestimating how quickly ai will improve. They are underestimating how complex the world is. Being an expert on deep learning doesn’t necessarily make you an expert on how the world works.
it's just so weird how the people who should have the most credibility--sam, demis, dario, ilya, everyone behind LLMs, scaling laws, RLHF, etc--also have the most extreme views regarding the imminent eschaton, and that if you adopt their views on the imminent eschaton, most people in the field will think *you're* the crazy one
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How do the LLMs compare? Leveraging our "code grading" tech to introduce weekly computationally grounded LLM benchmarking... wolfram.com/llm-benchmarking…
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Rob Bowley retweeted
Newsletter: Goldman Sachs has called BS on Generative AI, and I believe that it's time that everybody follows suit - generative AI is unreliable, unsustainable, requires an entire rebuild of America's power grid, and is most decidedly not the future. wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/
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Java is dead Kubernetes is dead DevOps is dead And now: Serverless is dead... In this context, 'dead' means: mature, stable, well understood by the industry. It's not the hot topic for marketing, devrel, or conferences anymore.
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Rob Bowley retweeted
Given the divergence of platforms, I decided to return to blogging for longer form thoughts. To start, I thought I might as well offer an opinion on the question of the day: Is AI A Silver Bullet? lnkd.in/guzFyhUs You will want a coffee; it's long.
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Rob Bowley retweeted
What surprises me about talented people in tech is their capacity to be brilliant in one area and entirely delusional in another, even within their domain. For instance, those who invented modern machine learning, fully aware of its mechanics and inherent weaknesses, might still claim, "Superintelligence is near; we need to prepare." I want to scream, "How can you, knowing exactly how it works, believe it will soon consume us?" Yet, they somehow do. A language model, however good, is still a machine learning model—a simple mathematical formula whose parameters are only as good as the dataset used to estimate them. Any dataset, no matter how large, has high-density regions, like news articles or fiction books, and low-density regions, like cutting-edge scientific and medical articles. Thus, the model excels in high-density areas and becomes unreliable in low-density ones. Anyone capable of training an LLM knows this; it's common machine learning knowledge. Yet, they persist in saying "superintelligence is near." So, I wonder if it's just human nature to excel in one area and be utterly mistaken in another, or if they are cold-blooded liars causing panic to profit from scared people?
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In the late 1960s top airplane speeds were increasing dramatically. People assumed the trend would continue. Pan Am was pre-booking flights to the moon. But it turned out the trend was about to fall off a cliff. I think it's the same thing with AI scaling — it's going to run out; the question is when. I think more likely than not, it already has.
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If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
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If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely - not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers: news.ycombinator.com/item?id… 1/
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Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies. 1/
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I spent a long time experimenting with AI before finally writing about it in depth. It can be pretty useful — but is it worth it? citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-…
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I wanted to see if AI could code me a complex app. Not a crappy little one-off script. A real program. Just one little problem: I mostly suck at coding. So can AI make magic for someone like me? Yeah. But...it's complicated. Here's what I learned along the way. 1/
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One of the bigger mind-bends in tech is how Spotify never *truly* used the Spotify model (they iterated and moved on). The #1 ranking search result is Atlassian indirectly promoting this tooling with it. We now have companies thinking they are copying Spotify: but they are not!
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This is without a doubt one of the most important pieces of reporting on Gaza, and by far one of the most disturbing: 972mag.com/lavender-ai-israe… All by Israeli journalist @yuval_abraham based on whistleblower accounts from within the IDF and intelligence agencies. Israel has developed an AI called "Lavender" to generate kill lists, with almost no human verification to double check the targets selected by the machine: only a a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” just to make sure the AI target is male. Moreover, the Israeli army "systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity". In fact Israel developed another automated system called “Where’s Daddy?” used "specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences" 🤮 One of the intelligence officers who spoke to Abraham is quoted in the article: “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” In fact the article reveals a ratio, I think for the first time: "according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians... The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander." A ratio of 20 civilians killed for one target works out to about 95% civilian deaths. Please do read the whole article as it describes in details how the whole process works with the Lavender AI. It's industrialized extermination the likes of which we haven't seen since... you know when.
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Why AI for creativity is dead in one slide. 🧵
One of my favourite figures from the assembly theory paper. The assembly observed gives grounding to the theory in experiment & and explains why contingency is so important in explaining what exists. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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Rob Bowley retweeted
Don't let them fool you: AGI today is no nearer to us than it was two years ago. While ChatGPT might appear to be a step closer to AGI, from a scientific standpoint, it's not: training a neural network to predict the next word is not groundbreaking science. Achieving AGI would necessitate multiple significant scientific breakthroughs. I'm talking about genuine breakthroughs, where real scientists engage in real science, not just enlarging the scale of the autocomplete.
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Rob Bowley retweeted
Generative AI is polluting the entire internet, but what bothers me most is toddlers being fed synthetic dream slop on YouTube
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A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed *magic* - suddenly turned into a pile of shit. 1/
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