The Ai thread

[dada_dave]

Not sure what anyone expected.

Microsoft says Office bug exposed customers' confidential emails to Copilot AI | TechCrunch

Microsoft said the bug meant that its Copilot AI chatbot was reading and summarizing paying customers' confidential emails, bypassing data-protection policies.

techcrunch.com

I see people swearing "agentic-AI" is different, including people I otherwise respect, and yet ... okay I haven't tried claude bot or any of them myself and maybe I would change my mind, but the underlying tech, the neural net, is the same as the chatbots and the "thinking" versions. Yes the bots and the "thinking" versions improve on the base way, the chatbot way, of interacting with the models, but at a much higher token cost and they still only partially remediate the problems with the underlying tech. Further, that such AI agents are security nightmares is obvious - the Signal president talked about that a while ago. Further this:



doesn't feel like actual productivity gains for the most part with people addicted to their uses, burning out over it, and like people discussing which bot hallucinates more "smoothly". It's not that it can't make productivity gains ever, but ... the Tom's article mentioned Solow's paradox, how computers "at first" didn't improve measures of productivity because of what they say is workers getting overworked by the newfangled machines in line with AI, but the article Tom's actually links to on the subject has several arguments against it being a real paradox in the first place.

 

[Nycturne]

Was browsing the urban dictionary, came upon

ai;dr​

no need to even look at the definition.

That was kinda fast. But I guess anyone can put something up there, and hope it catches on.

I see people swearing "agentic-AI" is different, including people I otherwise respect, and yet ... okay I haven't tried claude bot or any of them myself and maybe I would change my mind, but the underlying tech, the neural net, is the same as the chatbots and the "thinking" versions. Yes the bots and the "thinking" versions improve on the base way, the chatbot way, of interacting with the models, but at a much higher token cost and they still only partially remediate the problems with the underlying tech. Further, that such AI agents are security nightmares is obvious

And I find myself rolling my eyes even harder whenever I see MSFT talking about re-investing in security. Well, if you want agentic AI, you need a good rethink about how the LLMs work, how to better isolate control plane and data plane, limit context along security boundaries, etc, etc, etc.

But Agentic AI is the thing behind all the "stop hiring humans" advertising, and the idea that agents can replace low-code/no-code line of business stuff. So it's not surprising that's where the race has ultimately gone to. Rather than say, more muted NL processing stuff.

 

[dada_dave]

That was kinda fast. But I guess anyone can put something up there, and hope it catches on.



And I find myself rolling my eyes even harder whenever I see MSFT talking about re-investing in security. Well, if you want agentic AI, you need a good rethink about how the LLMs work, how to better isolate control plane and data plane, limit context along security boundaries, etc, etc, etc.

But Agentic AI is the thing behind all the "stop hiring humans" advertising, and the idea that agents can replace low-code/no-code line of business stuff. So it's not surprising that's where the race has ultimately gone to. Rather than say, more muted NL processing stuff.

I know it's hard to predict where everything is going and everything could change, but in your experience, which is vastly more than I have in this space, is the Agentic AI race ... justified? Like despite the current drawbacks, there is something real behind the bullshit? And, if so, how much is real vs the marketing bullshit? I know you and @tomO2013 have written about this at length previously, so if nothing has changed since then, you know feel free to point to previous answers.

 

[dada_dave]

Here's maintainers for the open source Godot engine saying that AI has led to an increase in wasted workloads for them:

 

[Katbel]

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes

…It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it's harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it's happening on a massive scale.

 

[Cmaier]