Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

AI has eaten the world. It is the latest and greatest thing…or is it?

I hang around America’s Federal government. There are many new programs in our Federal government to push and pull and take advantage of AI. AI will do wonders. Isn’t it wonderfully wonderful? Sigh.

Perhaps I am just too old for all this.

Generative AI generates things that were not there, hence the adjective “generative.” Well, actually it doesn’t generate, it predicts based on things that were already present. Oh, so it’s Predictive AI. Wait, we’ve had predictive AI for many decades.

Wait, before that we had mathematics that predicted things. Remember y=mx+b? Put a new value as x, use the slope of the line and the Y-axis intercept point and predict the next value of y. But that wasn’t Predictive AI, that was just the equation of a straight line. Yes, and the equation of a straight line was a mathematical model of the line. And the AI model (like GPT-whatever) predicts the next word. The AI model is based on all the text that was fed into some software to build a model. The equation of the line is based on all the numbers fed into … wait, there must be something wrong here.

Could it be that all this generative AI is just a clever packaging of mathematics and software and … ? Naw, couldn’t be that. Must be something else, huh?

‘Fraid not. Predicting the next thing is as old as the equation of a straight line. Except now, we have super duper computers that consume lots of electricity and are clever enough to be cleverly deceptive.

Perhaps I am just too old for all this.