> The bot, built using Microsoft’s cloud computing platform
When is the last time there was positive news involving Microsoft? This bot could've easily been on AWS or GCP but I find it hilarious that here they are, getting dragged yet again
> A spokesperson for the mayor, Dora Pekec, confirmed in a text message that the new administration plans to take down the chatbot. She said a member of the Mamdani transition team had seen reporting on the bot from The Markup and THE CITY and presented it to the mayor as a possible place to save funds.
Why did NYC release it in the first place? Did they not QA it?
Or was it perhaps one of those cases where they found issues, but the only way to really know for sure that the deleterious impact is significant enough by pushing it to prod?
The chatbot was released under the Eric Adams administration. The same Eric Adams, as soon as his term finished, went to Dubai and launched a cryptocurrency.
I think he is simply not very bright, and got mesmerized by all the shiny promises AI and crypto makes without the slightest understanding of how it actually works. I do not understand how he got into office in the first place.
It’s an LLM. The dirty little secret of LLMs is that they cannot be used for anything important, unless the output is checked by an expert (which typically rather defeats the purpose).
It was implemented by our scammy, grifting, Republican in a Democratic lawmaker suit former mayor Eric Adams who should probably be in prison but who made a deal with Trump to not be prosecuted.
We’ll likely see a lot of these AI pet projects get axed in the coming year or two… especially things rushed out in the early phases of the AI bubble when folks were desperate to appear to be using AI.
Being in and around the NYC area, while also knowing plenty of small businesses, I'm glad Mamdani killed this bot. Telling bosses to steal tips from their employees is run-of-the-mill corruption and common over here. The vibe for businesses is that everyone has to be exploiting someone else or have a schtick. If you were to talk about morals, you would be ridiculed. Most lawyers wouldn't even prosecute small businesses for this. It's probably why the agent was put into production, the level of business ethics in NYC is cartoonishly evil.
> The Office of Technology and Innovation spent nearly $600,000 to build out the foundations of the MyCity chatbot, which will be used for future chatbot offerings on MyCity. [0]
This was experimental tech... while I admire cities attempting to implement AI, it seems they did not spend enough tax dollars on it!
I always ask this question about these bots: is the literature the training data or is the understanding of literature the training data? Meaning, sure you trained the bot on the current rules and regulations. But does that mean the model weights contain them? Such that really is a guess at legal accuracy? Or is it trained to be a lawyer and understand the docs which sit outside the model? Every time I've asked the answer is the former, and to me that's the wrong approach. But I'm not an AI scientist so I don't know how hard my theoretically perfect solution is.
What I do know is that if it was done my way it would be pretty easy for it to do what the Google AI does. Say it's not responsible, give links for humans to fact check it. I've noticed a dramatic drop in hallucinations after it had to provide links to its sources. Still not 0, though.
> I've noticed a dramatic drop in hallucinations after it had to provide links to its sources. Still not 0, though.
I’ve noticed that Google does a fair job at linking to relevant sources but it’s still fairly common for it to confabulate something that source doesn’t say or even directly contradicts. It seems to hit the underlying inability to reason where if the source covers more than one thing it’s prone to taking an input “X does A while Y does B” and emitting “Y does A” or “X does A and B”. It’s a fascinating failure mode which seems to be insurmountable.
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[ 609 ms ] story [ 2324 ms ] threadWhen is the last time there was positive news involving Microsoft? This bot could've easily been on AWS or GCP but I find it hilarious that here they are, getting dragged yet again
Journalism works.
Or was it perhaps one of those cases where they found issues, but the only way to really know for sure that the deleterious impact is significant enough by pushing it to prod?
https://apnews.com/article/eric-adams-crypto-meme-coin-942ba...
I think he is simply not very bright, and got mesmerized by all the shiny promises AI and crypto makes without the slightest understanding of how it actually works. I do not understand how he got into office in the first place.
There’s no amount of qa that could save this.
This was experimental tech... while I admire cities attempting to implement AI, it seems they did not spend enough tax dollars on it!
[0] https://abc7ny.com/post/ai-artificial-intelligence-eric-adam...
What I do know is that if it was done my way it would be pretty easy for it to do what the Google AI does. Say it's not responsible, give links for humans to fact check it. I've noticed a dramatic drop in hallucinations after it had to provide links to its sources. Still not 0, though.
I’ve noticed that Google does a fair job at linking to relevant sources but it’s still fairly common for it to confabulate something that source doesn’t say or even directly contradicts. It seems to hit the underlying inability to reason where if the source covers more than one thing it’s prone to taking an input “X does A while Y does B” and emitting “Y does A” or “X does A and B”. It’s a fascinating failure mode which seems to be insurmountable.
https://organiser.org/2026/02/10/339366/world/zohran-mamdani...