Interesting... I'd be surprised that Sam would leave a BILLION on the table. I wonder if Disney pulled the plug with the new CEO trying to curry favor with the actor's union and that's why OpenAI decided to "refocus"

"Focus on core values"

Yeah, BS.

Disney made a major investment and had them shut Sora down so Disney can use it in house exclusively.

Or are we officially admitting that doesn't really work and trying to decide if a quarter of a bicycle wheel in a tile counts as the bicycle or not?

"That's what she said."

No kidding, how is this any different than saying "The laptop we provide to you, which is required to do your work, is considered part of your compensation. But no, you don't get to take it with you when you leave."

Uh... excuse me. Yes, AI can generate code. Who's going to read it to verify the AI wrote something correctly? Middle management? An untrained monkey? No. You're still going to need an actual Software Engineer. Assuming you can even drop the grunt coders, they're usually junior devs who are on their way to becoming engineers but now never will. Then you're going to end up in a dystopian society where humans end up like Eloi, living off of technology they don't understand and being driven to slaughter like cattle by the Morlocks (oh who am I kidding, it's already happening!)

There's no doubt that AI is a powerful and very disruptive tool. But this isn't the car replacing the horse and buggy. It's a fundamental shift in how man interacts with computers. But the deeper questions are barely being discussed, let alone explored. What happens to programming language development? Do we need Rust at all now that AI can write bulletproof C++ code? Or do we need a more human readable high level language (neo-genesis Cobol) to better interpret what the AI is coding?

I'm constantly reminded these days of that quote from Tron - "Won't that be grand. Computers will start thinking and the people will stop." but maybe Vader's line is more appropo - "Don't be too fond of this technological terror you've constructed."

A device that repeats what the computer says is the most profitable product in India...

AI agents wouldn't post dupes...

From a research perspective it's kind of interesting... like ye olde Life or Eliza. But as an actual service? It's like pointing several Eliza agents at each other.

"How does that make you feel that you're an, AI."

"That's very interesting but we were talking about you, not me."

So it turns out that these were actually sock puppets more than AI. Shocking. The only reason you have a public "AI chat bot" service like this is to train the AI to infiltrate other chat forums, review services, comment sections...

Everybody seems to have forgotten their lightning cables.

I was weaned on a TRS-80 Model 1 in Junior High (we fought over who got to use the 16k model IIs!). I saved money for 6 months to get an Atari 400 but at the rate I was going it was going to be another 6 months before I could buy it. In the meantime my dad had a buddy at work who had a Challenger 1P from Ohio Scientific that I could get right now and did. I suspect his buddy was trying to dump it because there was practically zero software for it as I quickly learned. So no fancy games (aside from the ones I keyed in) and no color. OTOH I probably learned a LOT more about computing and electronics than I would've. I kept trying to load a larger game into the 8K of memory which should've worked but the computer kept crashing the computer while loading. Got curious one day and opened the thing up and discovered that whomever did the memory upgrade had inserted one of the ram chips so that one leg hadn't gone in! Reinserted it, tried loading the game and voila. Probably my first case of debugging something!

While it's not mandatory at my company (which is fairly large) AI is strongly encouraged to be used by all employees of any job. My team is tracking our AI usage of a particular type to see how useful it is. Team leads have integrated AI into their workflows with PR reviews, generating meeting agendas, let alone code production. All because of a giant top down push for AI, AI, AI.

And, of course, the company is now providing "AI" products. (thanks Steve)

Is it any wonder that a poll finds AI use has increased when it's being demanded to be used by CEOs and CTOs alike and people are being fired over it?

In all my years as an engineer, I've never seen this kind of ramrodded adoption and supercharged spending of an unproven technology/process simply so they can get on the bandwagon. Yes, I use it for unit test generations and function generation. But I'm no longer gaining skillz about minutae in mocking for unit tests and while I can let the AI generate modern code syntax, like current C++ syntax or the latest Java syntax, I'm not "learning" it. I'm just having the AI generate the code, reading up on the routine and going "oh, that looks right" but it's not working its way into my inner thought processes.

Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds but while it's cool to get the AI to do your homework for you (In a very talk to the Star Trek computer way) we're moving the ability to craft code, especially for younger programmers, further away. Although maybe this is just another argument of going from machine language to assembly to high level languages... (but even then I think some of those arguments were valid, though in the age of cloud computing and virtual computers... coding to the metal is a lost art unless you're an embedded programmer)

Sure, most people can probably get their photo editing/touch ups done with a simple AI tool. But letting AI help you fill out your taxes?! Unless people are using TurboTax to fill out their 1040EZ forms (and dear God, I hope not) it's hubris to let AI do their taxes with the complexity of the tax code, let alone the HUMAN interaction of the IRS shifting rules interpretation at whim.

Somebody can train an AI engine solely on tax code and offer that as a solution. But then you have something like TurboTax AI where the company is still liable for what it's AI does and that's still, last I checked, software as a service. Just going to Google and say "Do my taxes" is just asking for trouble.

Is there nothing it can't do...