I think avoid any kinds of buzzwords like AI, high tech, whatever and just focus on what it actually does, which is a lot more impressive.
You can try to wow the customer with a bunch of words but it’s all fluff - and everyone is implementing AI now, and usually these “implementations” are ChatGPT with RAG on the docs or something else that everyone’s done before. What you end up getting is only slightly better than typing in chatgpt.com.
If you’ve managed to get something that solves a problem just explain what it does to solve that.
Yeah, it's the same way that ".com" or "online" used to be buzzwords too, that nowadays just feel kind of cheap. If most things have AI, then simply saying you have AI doesn't really mean much. Sell the solution, not the technology, etc.
Reminds me of ancient motels (with signage that probably hasn't been updated in decades) that proudly announce that their rooms are air conditioned and have color tv. Not that those aren't nice to have, but they are pretty much expected today.
you don't realize it, but you are suggesting bog standard marketing advice: "Customers don't buy features, they buy benefits. You need to point out how your product benefits the customer." Around here that would correspond to "addressing pain points"
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." - Ted Levitt HBS
They probably ran A/B test and this wording led to increased registrations rate.
Not sure why everyone instantly assumes product teams are not aware of marketings basics. It is consumers driving how the products evolve, not the other way around.
Ah, well, there you run into a problem. Generally consumer ‘AI’ is pointless, and is there only because the markets are (or at least were; there are some indications that this may be ending) fixated on AI.
There may well be valid applications of consumer AI, but I don't think we've seen any good ones yet. Most consumer products currently clearly use AI as a marketing buzzword.
Most blatant example I've seen is Logitech's AI mouse.
At least when it comes to apps and software, the term "AI powered" automatically gives me the impression of "bloated crapware" these days! But I'm sure sales folks must be making good use of that term to get more projects and revenues from non-technical or less aware managers.
Crapware maybe, but I don’t see a correlation between AI and bloat. If anything, AI features are correlated with less bloated software since the AI is supposed to smooth over complexity.
And some companies are using it to deliver real value. Adobe has been killing it with AI features. I switched back to Lightroom and Photoshop specifically for the new automasking, generative AI fill and such.
I wouldn't deny that some companies are using it to deliver real value, but I feel like the typical case I see is barely above the level of the Logitech AI mouse. (For anyone who's not familiar, the mouse itself doesn't use AI in any way - it just has a built-in keybind to a ChatGPT integration, and of course is sold at a $10 premium to the same model with no AI button.)
Few in the consumer mass market have ever even opened photoshop before.
The average person’s experience with “AI” is Siri telling them “I found this on the web” as a response to half of their questions. Or some streaming service suggesting a show they don’t want to watch. Or the Will Smith spaghetti meme.
People who understand LLMs are on average fairly excited about what is happening recently. But those who don’t know what LLM stands for are skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
Many people who do know what LLM stands for (and could implement the architecture themselves) are also skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
I'd agree the marketing vibe is very hype-y. And just like every other hype cycle (crypto, and nft included) it feels very scummy.
But there's a lot more substance behind AI than NFTs. As much as the hype? Maybe not. More than 0 (NFTs had 0 substance)? Very much so.
I'm more hype-adverse than the next guy, but I've gotten value from AI (just plain old ChatGPT) recently as I've deep-dived into a new area. It's kinda like having a tutor in the room to whom I ask questions as they occur to me. My "tutor" isn't perfect, but neither are humans, Google, or the internet.
So I wouldn't categorize this as "no substance". There is a lot of substance here, even if it's not quite as much as the marketeers are selling.
It seems likely that if you can present a problem that customers have and a solution involving AI you’ll get a better response. It needs to be a real problem and the solution needs to be a better solution, though.
AI isn't being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors. Regardless of whether or not it boosts sales, so long as it keeps driving up the stock price, they'll keep tossing around the word AI.
Exactly. Marketing dollars come from investors. A big part of modern marketing for startups is spending tons of investor money to "grow" quickly. How long the fire burns doesn't matter, it's all about throwing dried out February Christmas trees onto the flames for quick bursts of flame.
It's literally true that it is being marketed to consumers. GP was being somewhat poetic. Marketing to consumers is an instrumental goal in service of marketing to investors. The aim is to sell more stock to investors rather than more product to consumers.
That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
You missed metaverses. Also there was another AI one; there was a smallish computer vision oriented bubble early last decade. Main product was a lot of money wasted on putative self-driving cars, but there was other stuff.
Also wearables, VR/AR (possibly included in your computer-vision category), 3DTV, nanotech, tablet computers (possibly breaking out), brain-computer interfaces, IoT (AI is the new IoT, IMO), 3D printing, Big Data, Theranos (and other highly-customised healthcare, think 23andMe).
Oh, huh. Totally forgot about IoT, yeah. I think tablet computers are a _bit_ different; they were never really sold as changing the world, and have carved out a definite niche (certainly more so than any of that other stuff).
Tablets: These should be revolutionary. In practice, they're not, and I'm trying to sort out why.
The biggest gripe is that there's no single use for which a tablet is a preferred option, other than as an e-book reader, and numerous others for which it is distinctly less-than-optimal, with smaller smart (or "dumb") phones being better for on-the-go comms, and full-featured laptops or notebooks being preferably for virtually all compute applications.
I've used tablets for about a decade now (first an Android Samsung device, 3+ years on an Onyx BOOX e-ink ebook-reader, though it's really an Android tablet), and my assessment of them as less-than-serious compute devices remains, even with the addition of an external keyboard and Termux (a Linux-on-Android environment). There are simply too many compromises from the Android environment. And everything I've seen about iOS suggests that they would be worse as a general-compute device, despite some clear wins over Android/Google/Samsung elsewhere.
I'm not sure if tablets can break through or not. I'm leaning increasingly to a number of independent devices: tablet (for ebooks and podcasts), laptop (for real work), a small phone, preferably feature, possibly something like the Light Phone, independent image/video and audio capture (dedicated camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, handheld audio recorder, see NYT's reviews: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-voice-re...> ... and note that reporters make heavy use of such equipment). At this point I'm not even sure I want a general-purpose phone of any sort given the heavy abuse of that channel (smishing / robocalls / fraud / harassment), though a wide-spread alternative doesn't seem to have emerged yet.
Can't wait for my washing machine to be able to make an API call to OpenAI so it can worked out how best to tackle the stain on my undies. We really are living in the future.
No internet / dns fail / openai failed patching and bam! Whole world wears dirty clothes.
I hope EU will make this illegal if it isnt yet, they seem to be the only real power these days not giving a fuck about revenues of corporations in the first place when deciding stuff.
I've seen this and it's very silly. Every step where the machine makes an automated decision, it displays a message like, "using AI to xyz." I have to imagine the "AI" to determine how long the cycle should be is a linear function of some metric like weight.
But I suppose you could view that as a neural network with a single neuron.
"AI Bubble which mixes water, air and detergent..."
It's so Samsung. Back when Internet of Things was a thing, I went to an IoT meeting in SF where one of the speakers was from Samsung. They had a refrigerator with a tablet built into the door. The tablet and refrigerator shared nothing but power, and cost more than a comparable refrigerator and tablet separately. I asked the speaker why they built this, and was told that there's a fraction of the market that likes to show off their kitchens who will buy this stuff.
It's still very much a product that you can buy. One of the "features" was being able to look into the fridge with an inward facing camera from your phone while you're away from home. Potentially useful if you really can't remember what you have while at the grocery store.
One problem... it only showed 3 shelves on the fridge side. You couldn't PTZ the camera around the entire fridge. No way to see the stuff stored in the door. No way to check the freezer, etc. Most reviewers concluded it was practically useless.
I can imagine a fridge with an (outside) camera that can take a picture of your groceries (make the user hold it for a fraction of a second in front of the camera) and categorize it as well as see its expiration date (or estimate, e.g. for fruits and vegetables) would actually be useful, considering we throw away so much food.
And if it can't identify the item, it can even ask the user to identify the item ("pasta I made last night") and how long they think it will last.
If it's made by a committee of idiots, it will just repeatedly say "Cannot identify item. Please name this item."... if it's actually good it will just have different beep tones for different states (Beep A: "All good", beep B: "Can't identify item", beep C: "Can't see expiration date", etc)
But this is a great example of something no one has ever asked for. Even the suckers buying it never wanted it, they would just buy “top of the line” no matter what useless “features” that means.
For corporations I’m sure they like whatever cash they squeeze out of whatever percent of people have this “get the most expensive offering” strategy but it seems likely the end goal is more about gradually normalizing more expensive offerings at all levels. After you get there, you can start removing useful things that justified cost originally (like headphone jacks) to push whatever else people now need (ear buds). Smart phones are the obvious example of this sort of thing, where major carriers will basically force customers to get use either the latest iPhone or android, and then act like your existing phone is a potato and you must be crazy to think that they could make it ring.
Not just a push to require smart phones but the latest ridiculously large one with features no one cares about, at a price point that it becomes a major investment for many households, and now needs a payment plan. whereas logic,progress and naive expectations of capitalism would suggest that such things would be getting cheaper, and represent a *smaller* chunk of your monthly wages.
See also the similar situation with everything from smart tvs to toasters. I try to enjoy experiences with flashlights and paper maps while these things are still available. If toothpaste were invented today it would be engineered with a short shelf life and require a subscription
You’d be shocked at how brain dead the csuite who influence buying decisions can be.
Oh walstreet cares about ai. What’s our ai plan. Internal team, we are buying a new AI dev product that’ll reduce headcount needs by 10%. Csuite sounds great!
True, but there's a lot of room for ulterior motives there too.
I mean, some of it may be about getting end-users to pay for AI-thingies, but running the ads can also be seen as investor-posturing even if if it doesn't say "buy our stock", and there may be a corporate goal of boosting the (free) usage-numbers in order to present that to investors, etc.
We saw the same thing with crypto ads dominating the Super Bowl a couple of years ago and gambling apps during the NBA playoffs. TV advertising for major sporting events is a "flex" as so few companies can afford the cost of a national ad slot. The ones that do usually have money to burn from investors.
It is still not marketed to you the same way the millions of ads you see of prescription drugs that can only be prescribed by doctors are marketed on tv.
Of course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor.
Likewise, everybody and their dog has ChatGPT installed and think of AI as this magical thing that's gonna change the world, so they are potential indirect customers.
Does everybody really have ChatGPT installed? I, and most of my colleagues at work in the development department, don't use ChatGPT for anything. A couple of us use Copilot-esque tools, but even then, the suggestions are almost always useless.
I have used ChatGPT a few times instead of looking up documentation. It can give you a better start point for common stuff, like draw a scatter plot with upper and lower limits with matplotlib.
I then tweak the example to suit my needs exactly.
But it takes away only a small amount of busy work. It's not as helpful as AI proponents make you believe.
I don't use any form of "AI", and I'm a software engineer. At least two of my friends, who don't work in software, have somehow learned about ChatGPT and routinely use it for whatever.
"Of course the drug ads are marketed to you, so you go and get a prescription from your doctor."
The main purpose of Big Pharma's saturation advertising spend on TV networks is the buying of influence with those networks - not marketing, secondary or otherwise.
After spending time abroad you begin to realize just how insane these commercials are. Only the US and like Australia allow these weird doctor-bypass medical advice/brainwashing sessions.
I just returned from vacation in Wisconsin, where the Olympics were on everywhere. Every single time an ad prompting AI came on, people loudly booed, and it was not uncommon to hear "don't be a sucker!" and "fuck that bullshit" yelled out. When I asked, people would say "I'm not stupid, I'm not touching AI anything."
I grew up and live in small town Wisconsin. Sounds very believable.
I say this with the utmost respect and concern for my friends, family, and neighbors:
This attitude is part of the reason why the rust belt exists - filled with towns and cities that are a shell of their former selves. Areas of constant economic hardship, endemic drug use, etc.
The two big factories in the town I went to high school in are closed. Needless to say things aren’t going well… Yelling at the TV didn’t do anything to prevent that and it’s not going to do anything to prevent the next wave of it.
It’s harsh, but an important lesson since the beginning of time:
I disagree. It's good that people scrutinize and resist corporate greed. Accepting that "AI" (whatever that means) should be in every single product I use is not adapting. It's bending over. People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists. Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
> It's good that people scrutinize and resist corporate greed.
I agree. Problem is it didn't do anything when they were saying the exact same things that led to the closure or significant job loss of the manufacturing that was the core of these communities:
1) "Hah, my factory job is complicated. The Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, etc will never figure it out." Racist/xenophobic but said at the time. Even more wrong.
2) Look at robotics. It also took some time for the technology to develop and many of these same people looked at early implementations and thought the exact same thing: "Oh those robots don't really work and they never will". Then their factory jobs became a fraction of the head count with a completely different skill set...
Throughout history this has played out over and over again.
> People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Key word being /should/. Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets. The same people who laughed at and dismissed the Chinese are going to Wal-Mart everyday and buying goods from (you guessed it) - China. They're also voting for the same corporate-funded politicians.
For many of these people their best option now is working at the large Amazon warehouse down the road where they pick and pack goods largely from (you guessed it again) - China. But even then there just aren't that many of those jobs and as the horror stories reported in the media show they're routinely abused there.
> Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists.
Next time you're in the US visiting New York, California, Florida, etc come visit the rust belt in "flyover country" and see just how devastating the effects of this are. I see and live it (to some extent) everyday.
> Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
A huge factor and the ultimate root of the problem but back to voting, wallets, etc: in the real world this isn't going anywhere and from what I see it's just getting worse.
My concern comes from seeing the blight and literal deaths in MY community. My concern now is AI is coming for the white collar workforce as well.
I agree with most of your points. However, I stand by my point that corporations looking to cut costs moved those production jobs abroad. This will happen time and again under capitalism. I think blaming the working poor is not the right conclusion to draw.
The only way to prevent this is to reign in capitalism. Neoliberalism does not work.
> Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets.
Unfortunately, yes. People are strongly influenced by propaganda. Propaganda is often bankrolled by corporations. A good start with be curb lobbyism and make it more transparent.
> Or they have developed a good filter for BS marketing.
Maybe. Or (maybe) yelling at the TV is a lot easier (and more visceral) than thinking "Hmm, this whole AI thing just might work out. Maybe I should treat the threat seriously this time just like my dad should have with the Chinese, robots, etc". As I said in my other reply it's generally not a good idea to outright dismiss what is even in the early stages a pretty clear potential threat to your livelihood.
> The markets can adapt also.
This can mean nearly anything and I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate in this context.
> You could be out of a job with as little control of the whole situation as those rustbeltians you have such disregard for.
I'll admit I was a bit angry and offended when I first read this. Did you miss the part about how horribly this has affected my friends, family, and neighbors? I say this expressly out of concern and literal, actual love.
Where do you live?
> NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt.
As I said in my other reply the generation before this one also outright dismissed the ability for Mexico, China, etc to take their jobs. In any case it certainly wasn't prevented.
> The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
Again, as I said in my other reply what little manufacturing is left is a fraction of the jobs with a completely different skill set - CNC programming, etc. While you're off on Java because (frankly) you don't know what you're talking about it's pretty much exactly this.
I live in the Midwest. I don’t know what all your other reply’s to other people say.
I’m not sure what your point is substituting one language for another - you can’t take a guy who’s painted cars his whole life and retool him to “cnc programming” even if the lathes didn’t git moved with the rest of production. The c suite did hit their stock goals tho so at least that is good!
If you’re telling a blue collar worker who’s been laid off “adapt or die” then you have contempt for those very love ones you claim to sympathize with.
Frankly the fact that you expect everyone who lived around you to just up and reskill shows that even if you lived there, you did not understand the people you lived with. People are limited, flawed, and 50% of them are below average in most any stat you could come up with. Does that mean it's their fault when the legislators in Washington decide it's time for their industry to go bye-bye? To put it concretely, is the fair punishment for "being too slow to adapt to industry trends" the total destruction of their family and the communities which once supported it? You seem to think that if people just swallowed their fear and dove in head-first, things would be OK. But in reality, the people who can, generally -do-: it is the people who don't think they have a chance at reskilling who are the most afraid, and are the most likely to lash out against the possibility of it happening. Because if it does, what are they going to do? Not every press operator can turn into a CAM engineer, there just aren't enough roles. Destitution was prearranged for the large majority of them.
This is the economic system you and others choose to support, by your rhetoric if nothing else. The purpose of a system is what it does &c &c
The Rust Belt exists (primarily) because the companies who owned all the big manufacturing in the late 20th century outsourced all of that labor to Asia.
If people who live there have a higher-than-average distrust of big corporate bullshit, it's an effect of being abandoned by them, not the cause of it.
Arent the Investors the main consumers for software goods by now? The customer consumer (cc) is just a stage to mass adoption on the way towards en-shitification, basically some late stage fracking process chemical, needed yes, but not a decisionmaker when it comes to drilling.
Well at least you can switch your crypto mining toothbrush with AI infused one that will analyze movements of your hands and once sold to insurance brokers conclude you have an old injury and are a risky driver raising your insurance premiums.
Current model massage chairs are marketed as having AI (which I think actually just means they have pressure sensors which they use to detect your height/weight... but who knows these days?)
You need to put AI to raise money or appeal to a broad swath of consumers, but educated consumers and enterprise buyers are increasingly rolling their eyes at it.
Exactly, I had an interview at some company last year that had AI in their name and got a million invested in them. I read their website and saw nothing that really showcased AI it seemed like just something you could code with basic filtering. The interview felt like I was consulting them on what to do next and I probably should of been paid.
90% of AI companies are just thin layers on top of an LLM, sometimes useful but they have all the problems LLM have (I will explain)
For existing companies with AI features: more useful but mostly LLM bolted on with the same use cases. They can improve the product if used right. But for me it’s mostly often just a gimmick.
The problem with LLMs: They mostly generate stuff they have seen and are bad as truly new stuff. They make mistakes You need to put time and energy in the review it.
For stuff that transforms data it’s useful. Like rewriting a piece of text.
It’s also useful for search queries on the corpus the LLM is trained on.
It’s good at pattern recognition and lastly: human like voice interfaces.
But for generating novel stuff: good luck reviewing it.
People who just blindly copy paste the output of an LLM: that’s quite dangerous and potentially plain wrong.
I thought for a few years at Apple keynote presentations, they were saying "machine learning" while Google was saying "AI" hundreds of times. I assumed because they thought "AI" had a privacy-invasion or anti-human connotation to it.
But, then this year they came out with "Apple Intelligence", which people will just see as "AI". So, I guess they finally gave up on that.
‘AI’ became a bit of a term non grata after the last big AI bubble popped in the late 90s, and people just called everything machine learning or similar. Google was merely more willing than Apple to try reviving it; up until recently very few companies dared use the term.
I like they still do not really use AI but capitalized on the hype still. But they presented actionable features with intelligence behind it unlike many companies.
With Apple Intelligence it can be whatever they want it to be. Could be ChatGPT, could be rule based. AI is now being linked to ChatGPT/conversational for many people
Depends on who your customers are. In B2B anything that mentions “AI” still sells like hot cakes, especially enterprises where the person who buys (ie signs the contract) isn’t the person who uses the product.
We’re currently doing a bunch of “AI at the Edge” projects, even though it’s hardly justified (“edge” in this case is just an on-prem datacenter), but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives.
every Wed I have a meeting with MS.
I've started tallying every time co-pilot/AI/Chat-GPT is mentions. week before last its was 100 times in 34 mins, last week it was about 15 times. (not) looking forward to what this week will be.
> said Dogan Gursoy, one of the study’s authors and the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University
The irony… I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor.
Who eats there in Europe? Its mcdonalds of pizzas, the worst quality on the market, in this case a product that has little in common even in appearance with traditional pizza, more like hearthy focaccia. Less good, less healthy.
Maybe good for late night drunks and stoners with nothing else still opened, but I know literally nobody who ever even mentioned eating there.
Yeah, I know all this, but my question still stands - who apart from desperate with lack of other choice would ever decide to eat there? I get they end up with tons of customers, just that either people I know are ashamed of going there to even mention it (way more than mcdonalds) or I just don't know anybody who ever went there.
Folks I know end up in MCDs all the time when partying, not much else open around midnight, even kebabs close at 10-10:30pm where I live.
At least in my area, Pizza Hut's target market is families.
They're not trying to be the kind of posh place you'd go for an important business meeting, or with a date you wanted to impress. It's a bit more raucous - if your kids are a bit excitable they won't be spoiling the experience for the other diners.
The food quality is fine - it's not haute cuisine but it's easy to make pizza taste great because it's packed with great tasting melted cheese and pepperoni and tomato sauce.
If you don't know any people who go there it's probably because you don't know many people organising birthday parties for 13 year olds.
While I imagine it just means they sponsored the academic institution, likely a good thing, but there's something unshakeably "idiocracy"-flavored dystopian about fast food product placement on professors.
It turns from Idiocracy-flavored comedy-dystopian into bona fide dystopian rather quickly once you dig into what a multinational corporation does around and besides the product they're recognized for. "Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management" may sound funny, but if I ever heard about McDonald's Professor of Genetics, or Disney's Professor of Applied Robotics, I'd start getting worried.
(In other words, "Continuum" vibes. An underrated Canadian sci-fi show featuring "Corporate Congress" and a bunch of luxury brands of today turning into serious industrial/energy/medical players under 50 years from now.)
That's precisely my point. Disney may still be mostly a kids' brand, but I bet their robotics department would hold its own if corporate decided to enter heavy industry or military robotics markets. The brand may seem like a joke, but the expertise isn't.
I think the reply was to point out that people respect disney robotics. I bet more people know about disney robotics than boston dynamics.
I think it is a "you"-thing thinking others also devalue disney because "kid movies" or some other property. There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds. Or marketing by coke.
Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.
> Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.
Maybe it's' indeed a "me" problem, but I only vaguely know about "imagineering" thing via HN; it's not something I think I'd stumbled on otherwise. As far as I can tell, for most people I know, Disney is the kids programming producer that often makes stuff adults enjoy just as much, if not more, than kids, plus the company that took over Star Wars. A subset of them is also aware that the House of Mouse has a scary legal department.
> There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds.
McDonald's must be a powerhouse in logistics and process engineering - and in case of the latter, it's not a big leap from making food to making drugs or advanced materials. I know a little bit about adjacent fields from the software side; the food processing plant and a chemical manufacturing plant use pretty much the same tools and processes.
And that brand naming also sounds terrible. Candlestick Park or Comesky Park is a way better name than Levi's Stadium or Gauranteed Rate Field, for eff's sake.
Western Australia announced a "Greentech Hub" for environmental technology and innovation, sponsored by Chevron [0].
Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.
As usual, nothing has been heard from the Greentech Hub since it was announced by the relevant minister almost a year ago. Which is fine, because the entire point of the thing was to have it announced by the relevant minister.
It's all very Yes Minister / Utopia, and we all see straight through it.
And to think Australia was basically the first major country to try to introduce a carbon tax back in the Julia Gillard days. Now, it looks more like the last major country still resisting any change, no matter how small, to the oil-fueled economy, by spinning words and actions to the extreme in order to look "green" while splurging in oil like Texans gushers in the early 1900's.
> Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.
Yea, but that would just make some other player take their place.
The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while
allocating some of that dirty money towards research in green tech.
Ok but what if I said: we shouldn't arrest cartel hitmen, because that would just make some other murderer take their place. The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while allocating some of that dirty money towards research in nonviolent conflict management?
Believe it or not, law enforcement agencies actually do that, more or less every day, in every country. There is value in having crime organised, predictable, somewhat circumscribed, and controlled by people you can communicate with and influence to a degree.
> Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations.
The catastrophic levels of human deaths resulting from food shortages and supply chain disruption (and basically everything supporting civilization) would surely lower global CO2 emissions!
Y'see, I have more faith in human ingenuity than this. We'd cope. Yes, there'd be a bunch of deaths and life might get a little less pleasant. But we'd cope. We'd find something else to fill the gap, and get everything back to a new normal.
There was a post a TechCrunch article posted here a couple of months ago referring to the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT. This probably happens in other fields too, but every time I've seen one of these brand-deal titles has been in an AI related article.
Coca-Cola Professor of Marketing seems fitting though - Coca-Cola is probably one of the most capable marketing organizations the planet has ever seen.
They have been common for at least 1,000 years. Much much longer than that but "a millennium" is enough to get my point across.
Sometimes it seems as though half of the biomedical professorships in Europe are funded by Merck and Roche.
Every single philosopher at Plato's Academy and the Lyceum was "sponsored" by wealthy merchants and politicians, the corporations and billionaires of that era.
Can you give any example of an academic title being defaced by an ad placement? I doubt there was any "Zorba's Olive Oil Philosopher" in Plato's Academy.
A classic example would be folks sponsored by the Medici’s or their numerous competitors.
Or, for example, the numerous (often controversial) concessions Michelangelo had to make for the church. Which frankly, come across a bit like the Simpsons poking fun at Fox all the time. Albeit, more classically artistic of course.
That's not how any of this works. Even the UK, which does do direct provision, doesn't have state pharma manufacturing. Most European countries have a sort of hybrid approach of universal insurance but private regulated providers.
Historically lots of academics were sponsored by the nobility, right? Say what you will about Taco Bell, I’ll take their sponsorship over a bunch of pretentious thugs and hereditary gangsters.
Not an especially precise or traditional equality.
Most, but not all, noble and titled aristocracy had a landowner in the family, young aristocrats with older siblings would rarely inherit the land titles.
On the flip, relatively few of the landowners were part of the nobility. Many of the grand landowners were, of course, but certainly once the merchant class started earning serious coin and commissioning all the best gardens on large estate they purchased from poor nobles, well, that relationship started to fall away.
The English aristocracy might have disagreed 1000 years ago, but nobody cares what they thought because the French (Normans, mostly) would shortly prune those noble family trees quite aggressively.
Consider: the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Coca-Cola death squads, Nestle's reliance on slave labor for cocoa (through a scheme of indirection that is common among other companies), etc.
There's plenty of thuggery in the dealings of megacorps, and plenty of pretension in the sponsorship of a professorship by such a corporation
Extra ironic that Costco HQ is in WA as well. Feels like we’re one step away from Costco University where distinguished Taco Bell professors would dole out their wisdom about AI.
The academic path is tempting for many. The myth is that you get to spend all day in research and working with ideas. The truth is, a huge amount of time is spent writing grants and funding proposals. It's a whole industry and researchers and scientists at well-known institutions are expected to bring in a steady stream of funding, including funding their own positions. Historically that has been through foundations and government sources (which are massive). It's entirely unsurprising that brands have gotten involved.
The Taco Bell professorship is an endowed chair, not something you apply for. It’s paid for by Taco Bell as a gift to the university, then the university awards it as part of a recruitment (or retention) process for senior professors. It means the professor gets a nice salary and research stipend that is independent from the rest of the school, and can live the life of research and thinking.
It is a different path through the same system. Your description is the exact language that Yum! Brands, Inc. is hoping people will use. It softens the crass branding of academic projects and positions the effort as altruistic. The American academic environment is filled with these obfuscations.
> I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor
Reminds me of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the main character's lawyer said he went to Costco Law School[1] and that he was lucky since his dad pulled some strings to get him in.
The advertisements for co-pilot during the Olympics were laughably bad. An attempt at the sentimental and way overplayed trope of people using search/apps interwoven with touching life moments. In this one though, it was all a bunch of sports related achievements they had to really stretch to tie back to co-pilot. Someone using it to make a chart tracking heart rate - like I'd put any health data in that thing.
Then you have Google writing letters for your children or showing how their camera AI integrations can help you live a lie. Frankly I'm glad to see data showing consumers are turned off.
Oh! And then for the executives they have Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba talking about data security and productivity.
Oh well, it was good while it lasted. But now we need a brand new hype to replace the malfunctioning AI neon sign. Maybe "neural meta computing", or "quantum hyper reasoners"?
You see, a calm, factual, truthful and informed conversation of different technologies actual maturity, merrits and risks is in nobody's interest. /s
No one is dropping the term AI. There's only one culprit in all this: McKinsey. They are never the first to write the research, but when they do everyone follows.
> McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent.
When McKinsey releases a report, all product managers will present it in the next marketing slide and the ad budget will follow. If it fails to materialize, it's never their fault of course. The leader in market research is to blame.
Google has no business advertising Gemini on TV. Like who is the target really? But an enterprise not embracing AI after the biggest Market Research firm says it's the future? I'm putting my money on Long Island Ice Tea AI next.
> McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent.
That's about the same number McKinsey used for "the metaverse" a few years back.
Oh, they absolutely will. Like, they did _last_ time; in the early noughties the term ‘AI’ was poison and everything AI-adjacent got called ML. I suspect we’re already there again with consumers, though ‘AI’ may still work for investors for another year or so.
I have never heard of a sound advice originating from McKinsey that improved a company. It is hot air and promoted by the powerful who are in the right circles.
> A study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management in June found that describing a product as using AI lowers a customer’s intention to buy it.
For the ones interested in the actual study instead the headline, this is the link for the original paper:
It is nothing new. It is a nature of the economic models. We live in the bubble.
The connection with reality is eroding progressively. You look at the information cycle you see opportunity, growth, futurism, promises, and social networks silos amplify what they find profitable.
In reality: Economic instability, layoffs, wars, eroding of democracy everywhere, progressive government control, poverty, bad infrastructure, etc.
Soon the reality will catch with tech bros and investors. Things are inflated to the brink. In this situation, AI marketing looks like a bad joke.
ML is useful and applicable in a lot of use cases. But consumer AI fails time and time again to deliver the promised productivity boost and is expensive.
So...
Marketing people is trying to shovel AI in everything in the sense of AI as in video games not as in AI as in General AI.
It's the same as the Smart products era.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadYou can try to wow the customer with a bunch of words but it’s all fluff - and everyone is implementing AI now, and usually these “implementations” are ChatGPT with RAG on the docs or something else that everyone’s done before. What you end up getting is only slightly better than typing in chatgpt.com.
If you’ve managed to get something that solves a problem just explain what it does to solve that.
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." - Ted Levitt HBS
Not sure why everyone instantly assumes product teams are not aware of marketings basics. It is consumers driving how the products evolve, not the other way around.
Product teams are often wrong, and A/B tests can lead to inferior long term solutions.
As always, it's best to criticize the idea, not the people.
Nah, speaking for plenty of guys, I'd say we want the drill. Maybe with an impact hammer too, of we can afford it. :)
Ah, well, there you run into a problem. Generally consumer ‘AI’ is pointless, and is there only because the markets are (or at least were; there are some indications that this may be ending) fixated on AI.
Most blatant example I've seen is Logitech's AI mouse.
And some companies are using it to deliver real value. Adobe has been killing it with AI features. I switched back to Lightroom and Photoshop specifically for the new automasking, generative AI fill and such.
The average person’s experience with “AI” is Siri telling them “I found this on the web” as a response to half of their questions. Or some streaming service suggesting a show they don’t want to watch. Or the Will Smith spaghetti meme.
People who understand LLMs are on average fairly excited about what is happening recently. But those who don’t know what LLM stands for are skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
What passes for AI these days is a fun toy, sometimes a useful one, but it isn't anything I want to have to depend on.
But there's a lot more substance behind AI than NFTs. As much as the hype? Maybe not. More than 0 (NFTs had 0 substance)? Very much so.
I'm more hype-adverse than the next guy, but I've gotten value from AI (just plain old ChatGPT) recently as I've deep-dived into a new area. It's kinda like having a tutor in the room to whom I ask questions as they occur to me. My "tutor" isn't perfect, but neither are humans, Google, or the internet.
So I wouldn't categorize this as "no substance". There is a lot of substance here, even if it's not quite as much as the marketeers are selling.
This makes sense if you ignore every single example of AI-based features popping up all over consumer-facing services
That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
How would you pitch a feature with erratic behavior?
To your second question, I believe a popular adjective might be 'invigorating'.
As "creative", "diverse", and "enriching". ;)
"the AI browser".
So yes I do see it in marketing.
what’s the next big bubble?
I think everybody remember that all but a few addicts got quickly bored of second life in the mid 00's and it was not worth trying a second time.
That's harsh, dude! ;-)
Tablets: These should be revolutionary. In practice, they're not, and I'm trying to sort out why.
The biggest gripe is that there's no single use for which a tablet is a preferred option, other than as an e-book reader, and numerous others for which it is distinctly less-than-optimal, with smaller smart (or "dumb") phones being better for on-the-go comms, and full-featured laptops or notebooks being preferably for virtually all compute applications.
I'd made that case in a Diaspora* post a few years back: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>.
The most detailed critique is in this comment to that thread, with a (sorry, poorly-rendering at most screen-widths) table:
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>
I've used tablets for about a decade now (first an Android Samsung device, 3+ years on an Onyx BOOX e-ink ebook-reader, though it's really an Android tablet), and my assessment of them as less-than-serious compute devices remains, even with the addition of an external keyboard and Termux (a Linux-on-Android environment). There are simply too many compromises from the Android environment. And everything I've seen about iOS suggests that they would be worse as a general-compute device, despite some clear wins over Android/Google/Samsung elsewhere.
I'm not sure if tablets can break through or not. I'm leaning increasingly to a number of independent devices: tablet (for ebooks and podcasts), laptop (for real work), a small phone, preferably feature, possibly something like the Light Phone, independent image/video and audio capture (dedicated camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, handheld audio recorder, see NYT's reviews: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-voice-re...> ... and note that reporters make heavy use of such equipment). At this point I'm not even sure I want a general-purpose phone of any sort given the heavy abuse of that channel (smishing / robocalls / fraud / harassment), though a wide-spread alternative doesn't seem to have emerged yet.
I hope EU will make this illegal if it isnt yet, they seem to be the only real power these days not giving a fuck about revenues of corporations in the first place when deciding stuff.
But I suppose you could view that as a neural network with a single neuron.
Maybe the real AI was the friends we made along the way.
-- https://soyacincau.com/2024/05/15/samsung-bespoke-ai-laundry...
If you can't defeat the people talking about the AI bubble, join them?
It's so Samsung. Back when Internet of Things was a thing, I went to an IoT meeting in SF where one of the speakers was from Samsung. They had a refrigerator with a tablet built into the door. The tablet and refrigerator shared nothing but power, and cost more than a comparable refrigerator and tablet separately. I asked the speaker why they built this, and was told that there's a fraction of the market that likes to show off their kitchens who will buy this stuff.
One problem... it only showed 3 shelves on the fridge side. You couldn't PTZ the camera around the entire fridge. No way to see the stuff stored in the door. No way to check the freezer, etc. Most reviewers concluded it was practically useless.
And if it can't identify the item, it can even ask the user to identify the item ("pasta I made last night") and how long they think it will last.
If it's made by a committee of idiots, it will just repeatedly say "Cannot identify item. Please name this item."... if it's actually good it will just have different beep tones for different states (Beep A: "All good", beep B: "Can't identify item", beep C: "Can't see expiration date", etc)
Fix photos?
Oh walstreet cares about ai. What’s our ai plan. Internal team, we are buying a new AI dev product that’ll reduce headcount needs by 10%. Csuite sounds great!
Every ad break included ads for Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Salesforce Einstein.
We are in a full on AI product marketing cycle.
I mean, some of it may be about getting end-users to pay for AI-thingies, but running the ads can also be seen as investor-posturing even if if it doesn't say "buy our stock", and there may be a corporate goal of boosting the (free) usage-numbers in order to present that to investors, etc.
Likewise, everybody and their dog has ChatGPT installed and think of AI as this magical thing that's gonna change the world, so they are potential indirect customers.
I then tweak the example to suit my needs exactly.
But it takes away only a small amount of busy work. It's not as helpful as AI proponents make you believe.
It’s a fraction of a percent of the population that have used it.
The main purpose of Big Pharma's saturation advertising spend on TV networks is the buying of influence with those networks - not marketing, secondary or otherwise.
I say this with the utmost respect and concern for my friends, family, and neighbors:
This attitude is part of the reason why the rust belt exists - filled with towns and cities that are a shell of their former selves. Areas of constant economic hardship, endemic drug use, etc.
The two big factories in the town I went to high school in are closed. Needless to say things aren’t going well… Yelling at the TV didn’t do anything to prevent that and it’s not going to do anything to prevent the next wave of it.
It’s harsh, but an important lesson since the beginning of time:
Adapt or die.
Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists. Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
I agree. Problem is it didn't do anything when they were saying the exact same things that led to the closure or significant job loss of the manufacturing that was the core of these communities:
1) "Hah, my factory job is complicated. The Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, etc will never figure it out." Racist/xenophobic but said at the time. Even more wrong.
2) Look at robotics. It also took some time for the technology to develop and many of these same people looked at early implementations and thought the exact same thing: "Oh those robots don't really work and they never will". Then their factory jobs became a fraction of the head count with a completely different skill set...
Throughout history this has played out over and over again.
> People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Key word being /should/. Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets. The same people who laughed at and dismissed the Chinese are going to Wal-Mart everyday and buying goods from (you guessed it) - China. They're also voting for the same corporate-funded politicians.
For many of these people their best option now is working at the large Amazon warehouse down the road where they pick and pack goods largely from (you guessed it again) - China. But even then there just aren't that many of those jobs and as the horror stories reported in the media show they're routinely abused there.
> Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists.
Next time you're in the US visiting New York, California, Florida, etc come visit the rust belt in "flyover country" and see just how devastating the effects of this are. I see and live it (to some extent) everyday.
> Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
A huge factor and the ultimate root of the problem but back to voting, wallets, etc: in the real world this isn't going anywhere and from what I see it's just getting worse.
My concern comes from seeing the blight and literal deaths in MY community. My concern now is AI is coming for the white collar workforce as well.
Another old adage:
"Don't underestimate your enemy/competition".
The only way to prevent this is to reign in capitalism. Neoliberalism does not work.
> Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets.
Unfortunately, yes. People are strongly influenced by propaganda. Propaganda is often bankrolled by corporations. A good start with be curb lobbyism and make it more transparent.
Maybe. Or (maybe) yelling at the TV is a lot easier (and more visceral) than thinking "Hmm, this whole AI thing just might work out. Maybe I should treat the threat seriously this time just like my dad should have with the Chinese, robots, etc". As I said in my other reply it's generally not a good idea to outright dismiss what is even in the early stages a pretty clear potential threat to your livelihood.
> The markets can adapt also.
This can mean nearly anything and I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate in this context.
You could be out of a job with as little control of the whole situation as those rustbeltians you have such disregard for.
NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt. The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
When you ship off a persons job in mass this is what happens.
I'll admit I was a bit angry and offended when I first read this. Did you miss the part about how horribly this has affected my friends, family, and neighbors? I say this expressly out of concern and literal, actual love.
Where do you live?
> NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt.
As I said in my other reply the generation before this one also outright dismissed the ability for Mexico, China, etc to take their jobs. In any case it certainly wasn't prevented.
> The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
Again, as I said in my other reply what little manufacturing is left is a fraction of the jobs with a completely different skill set - CNC programming, etc. While you're off on Java because (frankly) you don't know what you're talking about it's pretty much exactly this.
I think OP referenced Java because it was the hot language of the 90s/early 2000s that people would harp on about studying.
Sort of like how people nowadays go to bootcamps to study JavaScript and Python
I’m not sure what your point is substituting one language for another - you can’t take a guy who’s painted cars his whole life and retool him to “cnc programming” even if the lathes didn’t git moved with the rest of production. The c suite did hit their stock goals tho so at least that is good!
If you’re telling a blue collar worker who’s been laid off “adapt or die” then you have contempt for those very love ones you claim to sympathize with.
This is the economic system you and others choose to support, by your rhetoric if nothing else. The purpose of a system is what it does &c &c
The Rust Belt exists (primarily) because the companies who owned all the big manufacturing in the late 20th century outsourced all of that labor to Asia.
If people who live there have a higher-than-average distrust of big corporate bullshit, it's an effect of being abandoned by them, not the cause of it.
You need to put AI to raise money or appeal to a broad swath of consumers, but educated consumers and enterprise buyers are increasingly rolling their eyes at it.
For existing companies with AI features: more useful but mostly LLM bolted on with the same use cases. They can improve the product if used right. But for me it’s mostly often just a gimmick.
The problem with LLMs: They mostly generate stuff they have seen and are bad as truly new stuff. They make mistakes You need to put time and energy in the review it.
For stuff that transforms data it’s useful. Like rewriting a piece of text.
It’s also useful for search queries on the corpus the LLM is trained on.
It’s good at pattern recognition and lastly: human like voice interfaces.
But for generating novel stuff: good luck reviewing it.
People who just blindly copy paste the output of an LLM: that’s quite dangerous and potentially plain wrong.
At least that’s my experience.
But, then this year they came out with "Apple Intelligence", which people will just see as "AI". So, I guess they finally gave up on that.
With Apple Intelligence it can be whatever they want it to be. Could be ChatGPT, could be rule based. AI is now being linked to ChatGPT/conversational for many people
We’re currently doing a bunch of “AI at the Edge” projects, even though it’s hardly justified (“edge” in this case is just an on-prem datacenter), but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives.
And yet we’re told execs are smarter than the rest of us and deserve to make so much more than we do.
Someday I pray the executive class gets its comeuppance.
Everytime that happens, I go back to that meme that got created after Google's IO when Sundar Pichai said "ai, ai, ai..." like 113 times.
The irony… I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor.
Maybe good for late night drunks and stoners with nothing else still opened, but I know literally nobody who ever even mentioned eating there.
not a big fan of Pizza Hut, but believe me: there's much worse.
A massive commercial success, with tens of thousands of restaurants worldwide and hundreds of thousands of employees?
Folks I know end up in MCDs all the time when partying, not much else open around midnight, even kebabs close at 10-10:30pm where I live.
They're not trying to be the kind of posh place you'd go for an important business meeting, or with a date you wanted to impress. It's a bit more raucous - if your kids are a bit excitable they won't be spoiling the experience for the other diners.
The food quality is fine - it's not haute cuisine but it's easy to make pizza taste great because it's packed with great tasting melted cheese and pepperoni and tomato sauce.
If you don't know any people who go there it's probably because you don't know many people organising birthday parties for 13 year olds.
It's gross
(In other words, "Continuum" vibes. An underrated Canadian sci-fi show featuring "Corporate Congress" and a bunch of luxury brands of today turning into serious industrial/energy/medical players under 50 years from now.)
Disney's robotics are legit though, they do a lot of work and research in that area
I think it is a "you"-thing thinking others also devalue disney because "kid movies" or some other property. There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds. Or marketing by coke.
Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.
Maybe it's' indeed a "me" problem, but I only vaguely know about "imagineering" thing via HN; it's not something I think I'd stumbled on otherwise. As far as I can tell, for most people I know, Disney is the kids programming producer that often makes stuff adults enjoy just as much, if not more, than kids, plus the company that took over Star Wars. A subset of them is also aware that the House of Mouse has a scary legal department.
> There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds.
McDonald's must be a powerhouse in logistics and process engineering - and in case of the latter, it's not a big leap from making food to making drugs or advanced materials. I know a little bit about adjacent fields from the software side; the food processing plant and a chemical manufacturing plant use pretty much the same tools and processes.
Ex.
The Poulan/Weedeater Independence Bowl
Guaranteed Rate Field
Smoothie King Center
And my fav: Bargain Booze Stadium
The Barclay Card English Premier League comes to mind.
But nowadays only the weathered shadows on the facade remain where the letters "Shell" once were mounted.
Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.
As usual, nothing has been heard from the Greentech Hub since it was announced by the relevant minister almost a year ago. Which is fine, because the entire point of the thing was to have it announced by the relevant minister.
It's all very Yes Minister / Utopia, and we all see straight through it.
[0] https://startupnews.com.au/news/minister-dawson-announces-ne...
Yea, but that would just make some other player take their place. The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while allocating some of that dirty money towards research in green tech.
Real life is rarely binary.
The catastrophic levels of human deaths resulting from food shortages and supply chain disruption (and basically everything supporting civilization) would surely lower global CO2 emissions!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheaties
It's not a compliment. ;)
So a "Taco Bell professor" sounds like a similar kind of thing, except it's real.
They have been common for at least 1,000 years. Much much longer than that but "a millennium" is enough to get my point across.
Sometimes it seems as though half of the biomedical professorships in Europe are funded by Merck and Roche.
Every single philosopher at Plato's Academy and the Lyceum was "sponsored" by wealthy merchants and politicians, the corporations and billionaires of that era.
A classic example would be folks sponsored by the Medici’s or their numerous competitors.
Or, for example, the numerous (often controversial) concessions Michelangelo had to make for the church. Which frankly, come across a bit like the Simpsons poking fun at Fox all the time. Albeit, more classically artistic of course.
ASML Endowed Chair in Advanced Optical Technologies
Callaway Golf Chair in Structural Mechanics
Chugai Pharmaceutical Chair in Cancer
Ericsson Chair in Wireless Communications Access Techniques
Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Embedded Microsystems
Etc, etc.
Credit Suisse Asset Management (Schweiz) AG-Professur für Distributed Ledger Technology/Fintech
Cambridge had a BP Professor of Chemistry until 2019 when BP stopped paying.
Their price list is online: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/endowin...
Are three examples sufficient? Taco Bell is a more ethical and apt supporter of higher education than BP, Credit Suisse, or Roche, lol.
Novo Nordisk is not part of the state of Denmark.
Most, but not all, noble and titled aristocracy had a landowner in the family, young aristocrats with older siblings would rarely inherit the land titles.
On the flip, relatively few of the landowners were part of the nobility. Many of the grand landowners were, of course, but certainly once the merchant class started earning serious coin and commissioning all the best gardens on large estate they purchased from poor nobles, well, that relationship started to fall away.
Consider: the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Coca-Cola death squads, Nestle's reliance on slave labor for cocoa (through a scheme of indirection that is common among other companies), etc.
There's plenty of thuggery in the dealings of megacorps, and plenty of pretension in the sponsorship of a professorship by such a corporation
I'm not sure if it's worse than 'AI distinguished professor' though.
Also Taco Bell Distinguished Professor at.. WSU. yup that tracks
Reminds me of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the main character's lawyer said he went to Costco Law School[1] and that he was lucky since his dad pulled some strings to get him in.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y
Jokes aside, one does not get to pick their academic sponsors or reject funding, and no offence intended to the guy's obvious expertise.
It reminds me of the 100 Thieves Totino's Fortnite training room.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685
Then you have Google writing letters for your children or showing how their camera AI integrations can help you live a lie. Frankly I'm glad to see data showing consumers are turned off.
Oh! And then for the executives they have Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba talking about data security and productivity.
It’s clearly working well for her.
You see, a calm, factual, truthful and informed conversation of different technologies actual maturity, merrits and risks is in nobody's interest. /s
- reliability
- relAIbility
* The AI Browser
* AI note taking app
* AI photo gallery
* AI habit tracker
* AI budget planner
* AI music player
* AI bank
* AI hike planner
* AI icon pack(wtf?!)
* AI launcher
* AI camera
* AI news
* AI PDF reader
* AI comics viewer
* AI Maps
* AI food delivery
* AI shopping experience
* AI calorie tracker
* AI video editor
* AI backup
* AI share
* AI Authenticator(??)
* AI partner
* AI RoboAdviser(?)
* AI Wallpapers
* AI package tracker(?!)
* AI health tracker
And plenty other things I am forgetting. Even things that already had AI before are now new AI. This is getting out of hand.
> McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent.
When McKinsey releases a report, all product managers will present it in the next marketing slide and the ad budget will follow. If it fails to materialize, it's never their fault of course. The leader in market research is to blame.
Google has no business advertising Gemini on TV. Like who is the target really? But an enterprise not embracing AI after the biggest Market Research firm says it's the future? I'm putting my money on Long Island Ice Tea AI next.
[0]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
That's about the same number McKinsey used for "the metaverse" a few years back.
Oh, they absolutely will. Like, they did _last_ time; in the early noughties the term ‘AI’ was poison and everything AI-adjacent got called ML. I suspect we’re already there again with consumers, though ‘AI’ may still work for investors for another year or so.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp...
I have never heard of a sound advice originating from McKinsey that improved a company. It is hot air and promoted by the powerful who are in the right circles.
For the ones interested in the actual study instead the headline, this is the link for the original paper:
Paper page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
PDF: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...