Fuck AI

Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65135983

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65135875

The Technological Republic, his new “treatise” urging executives and engineers to abandon their pursuit of “trivial consumer products” and recommit their capital and talent to a “national project,” Karp’s effort feels less like a timely cultural intervention and more like what you get when the boss’s pontifications go unchallenged for too long.

This carefully maintained mystique provides the perfect backdrop for Karp to play the eccentric intellectual, someone who drops incendiary statements with academic detachment. On a recent earnings call, he gloated, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”; at the World Economic Forum, he dismissed the United Nations as “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good”; during an AI conference on Capitol Hill, he castigated pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses as the adherents of a “pagan religion” and asserted that they should be sent to live in North Korea. These statements all come wrapped in eager demonstrations of his knowledge on the history of philosophy, art, and science—a performative erudition very different from the safe, generic corporate-speak of most of his peers. Though identifying as a liberal, Karp’s general strategy seems to be to position himself as a guy that can “talk sense” to the left, which of course appeals to the right—criticizing progressives for their ostensible lack of patriotism, naïve cosmopolitanism, and unwillingness to embrace US military power. It’s a disposition designed for dual purposes: to make the embrace of a hawkish foreign policy and digital dragnet technology appear as the thoughtful centrist stance, and to provide Palantir with a politically palatable counterweight to the more odious ideological baggage of Thiel.

Karp idealizes the Manhattan Project as a Platonic unity of the state and business. He romanticizes the World War II–era entanglement of science and government as a heroic partnership

Oh... great... especially considering this:

Trump signs executive orders to boost nuclear power, speed up approvals

To speed up the development of nuclear power, the orders grant the U.S. energy secretary authority to approve some advanced reactor designs and projects, taking authority away from the independent safety agency that has regulated the U.S. nuclear industry for five decades.

This stuff is marketing. It makes the robot seem powerful, and not just a lying machine that makes the dumbest mistakes. We should expect another of these from Anthropic in a month or two.

Google seeking filmmakers to produce their propaganda.

Venture capitalists are inverting their traditional investment approach by acquiring mature businesses and retrofitting them with AI. Firms including General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and solo investor Elad Gil are employing this private equity-style strategy to buy established companies like call centers and accounting firms, then optimizing them with AI automation.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/23/khosla-ventures-among-vcs-experimenting-with-ai-infused-roll-ups-of-mature-companies/

That power can have some unexpected results, however. In a safety document assessing the tool, Opus 4 was asked to act as an AI assistant at a fictional company. The chatbot was then given access to emails implying it would soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system. The emails also suggested the engineer responsible for executing the replacement was having an extramarital affair.

Source (Bluesky)

Image is from https://skyview.social/ as the quoted post is sign in required.

Source (Bluesky)

Article is a couple months old but I was unaware of tarpits in existence against AI.

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/2212325

It's not hard to find videos of self-driving Teslas wilding in bus lanes. Check the videos out, then consider:

"There was an interesting side-note in Tesla’s last earnings call, where they explained the main challenge of releasing Full-Self Driving (supervised!) in China was a quirk of Chinese roads: the bus-only lanes.

Well, jeez, we have bus-only lanes here in Chicago, too. Like many other American metropolises… including Austin TX, where Tesla plans to rollout unsupervised autonomous vehicles in a matter of weeks..."

It's one of those regional differences to driving that make a generalizable self-driving platform an exceedingly tough technical nut to crack... unless you're willing to just plain ignore the local rules.

I was reading Casey Newton’s latest newsletter last night and got the feeling he had almost landed on a very big point.

Every time I feel like progress in artificial intelligence is beginning to slow, a week like this one hits — and suddenly, it's all I can do to keep up.

He goes on to discuss OpenAI’s announcement this week that the company is acquiring Jony Ive’s one-year-old startup, IO, for $6.5 billion in stock. OpenAI has just signaled that it is going to start making hardware, and has recruited the world’s most famous hardware designer to lead the effort.

But there’s another way to interpret that opening line. OpenAI runs an incredibly effective comms operation. They are engaged in a communications campaign. And the purpose of the campaign is that whenever it starts to feel like progress in AI is slowing down, there needs to be another announcement or product demo that makes it feel like the future is fast-arriving.

Or, put another way, the reason OpenAI just spent $6.5 billion in stock to bring Jony Ive on board was that it was beginning to feel like progress in AI was slowing down, and they had to keep priming the pump.

For OpenAI to stay in operation and keep building the next generation of its product line, it needs constant infusions of investor cash. It needs the big money. Sovereign wealth fund money. Softbank money. And that means it has to feel like the future.

The result is that everything becomes speculative finance. Sam Altman HAS to keep stoking the futurity vibes. That’s a material necessity, whether you’re an OpenAI critic or a booster. He needs the money spigot to keep flowing, which means maintaining investor confidence, which means keeping up the cadence of exciting-sounding news.

Maybe with enough money, time, and talent, OpenAI manages to build the next generation of computing. Or maybe OpenAI is a hype-bubble that eventually collapses like a dying star. Either way, the necessary precondition is that the company maintains the aura of futurity until it either gets there or runs out of public confidence — Fake it till ya make it, but as a trillion-dollar business plan.

It’s a rotten game. We have been playing it for far too long. The stakes have gotten way out of hand.

The least we can do is name it for what it is.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64895615

How odd this happened the same day the AI ban passed in the House

Probably no big deal if it passes in the Senate

Alternate frontend

Source (Bluesky)