Seeking for funding

I love the detail that she put "+ AI" on both sides of the equation so that it's still technically correct regardless of what the AI stands for.

Sometimes it helps solve an equation by adding zero.
- This, this shit is why I would never have made a mathematician.
- my funding = 0
  = -100M + 100M
  = (the money I'll never made back to the investors) + (the shit I'll blow on AC and top gaming computers and stuff)

My company, while cutting back elsewhere, has dedicated a few million to AI projects over the next couple years. Not "projects to solve X business problem." Just projects that use AI.

So of course now, anything that is automated in any way is now being touted as AI. Taking data from one system and populating another? That's AI.

- Lol pretty much
- For anyone who thought this wasn't real, I present to you: https://xnote.ai/
Taking data from one system and populating another? That’s AI.
Well, it is. You just have to go back enough in time to find the context when people still called it so.
Gotta use those automatic computers full of electronic brains to do all those tasks that used to take years on rooms full of people with chemical brains hired as computers!
AI is such a loose term that calling anything with if-else statements “AI” wouldn’t be lying (I learned about decision trees in my university machine learning class and those are just giant nested if-else statements)
cp, now with Al!
- AI: "I know you typed cp, but I'm sure you meant rm..."

I’m old enough to have gone through a number of these technology bubbles, so much so that I haven’t paid much attention to them for a fair while. This AI bs feels a bit different, though. It seems to me that lots more people have completely lost their minds this time.

Like all bubbles, this too will end up in the same rubbish heap.

That's because there's a non zero amount of actually functionality. Chatgpt does some useful stuff for normal people. It's accessible.
Contrast that to crypto, which was only accessible to tech folks and barely useful, or NFT which had no use at all.
Ok, I guess to be fair, the purpose of NFT was to separate chumps from their money, and it was quite good at that.
- There are pretty great applications in medicine. AI is an umbrella term that includes working with LLMs, image processing, pattern recognition and other stuff. There are fields where AI is a blessing. The problem is, as JohnSmith mentioned, it's the "solar battery" of the current day. At one point they had to make and/or advertise everything with solar batteries, even stuff that was better off with... batteries. Or the good ol' plug. Hopefully, it will settle down in a few year's time and they will focus on areas where it is more successful. They just need to find out which areas those are.
- Possibly through ignorance or misunderstanding, btu I still think the tech behind NFTs may have some function, but it's certainly not the weird pictures of badly colored in monkeys speculation market that happened there.
- Can't believe I'm doing this... but here I go, actually defending cryptocurrency/blockchain :
  ... so yes there are some functionalities to AI. In fact I don't think anybody is saying 100% of it is BS and a scam, rather... just 99.99% of the marketing claims during the last decade ARE overhyped if not plain false. One could say the same for crypto/blockchain, namely that SQLite or a random DB or is enough for most people BUT there are SOME cases where it might actually be somehow useful, ideally not hijacked by "entrepreneurs" (namely VC tools) who only care about making money but not what the technology could actually bring.
  Now anyway both AI & crypto use an inconceivable amount of resources (energy, water, GPU and dedicated hardware, real estimate, R&D top talent, human resources for dataset annotation including very VERY gruesome ones, etc) so yes even if in 0.01% they are actually useful one still must ask, is it worth it? Is it OK to burn literally tons of CO2eq ... to generate an image that one could have done quite easily another way? Summarize a text?
  IMHO both AI & crypto are not entirely useless in theory yet in practice have been :
  hijacked by VCs and grifters or all kinds,
  abused by pretty terrible people, including scammers and spammers,
  absolutely underestimated in terms of resource consumption and thus ecological and societal impact
  So... sure, go generate some "stuff" if you want to but please be mindful of what it genuinely costs.
It seems to me that lots more people have completely lost their minds this time
That's not really an AI thing, that's just... everything.
Because AI is mostly built for tech outsiders. They literally thought that digital art, composing music on the computer, programming, etc. was literally telling the computer what to do. I remember around 2015 someone asking where they can choose art-styles in Photoshop, and what to tell the PC to draw something. Even I as a child thought that you just had to type "please draw me a car" into the Commodore 64 to draw you a car, without all the pixel-art.
I tend to call these "normie tech". Tech that is built for non-enthusiasts, which have negative consequences to the others, and even fool the some enthusiasts into worshipping them. If only I foresaw the dangers of overtly centralized social media...
- I remember this as a kid being excited to do stuff like creating games, creating musing, video editing only to find out how hard, tedious and labourious it is. From outside it looks like computer do all the work but in reality computer only assists and the artists/programmer do all the work
it's maybe because chatbots incorporate, accidentally or not, elements of what makes gambling addiction work on humans https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/
the gist:
There’s a book on this — Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal, from 2014. This is the how-to on getting people addicted to your mobile app. [Amazon UK, Amazon US]
Here’s Eyal’s “Hook Model”:
First, the trigger is what gets you in. e.g., you see a chatbot prompt and it suggests you type in a question. Second is the action — e.g., you do ask the bot a question. Third is the reward — and it’s got to be a variable reward. Sometimes the chatbot comes up with a mediocre answer — but sometimes you love the answer! Eyal says: “Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire.” Intermittent rewards are the key tool to create an addiction. Fourth is the investment — the user puts time, effort, or money into the process to get a better result next time. Skin in the game gives the user a sunk cost they’ve put in. Then the user loops back to the beginning. The user will be more likely to follow an external trigger — or they’ll come to your site themselves looking for the dopamine rush from that variable reward.
Eyal said he wrote Hooked to promote healthy habits, not addiction — but from the outside, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference. Because the model is, literally, how to design a poker machine. Keep the lab rats pulling the lever.
chatbots users also are attracted to their terminally sycophantic and agreeable responses, and also some users form parasocial relationships with motherfucking spicy autocomplete, and also chatbots were marketed to management types as a kind of futuristic status symbol that if you don't use it you'll fall behind and then you'll all see. people get mixed gambling addiction/fomo/parasocial relationship/being dupes of multibillion dollar advertising scheme and that's why they get so unserious about their chatbot use
and also separately core of openai and anthropic and probably some other companies are made from cultists that want to make machine god, but it's entirely different rabbit hole
like with any other bubble, money for it won't last forever. most recently disney sued midjourney for copyright infringement, and if they set legal precedent, they might take wipe out all of these drivel making machines for good
- and also some users form parasocial relationships with motherfucking spicy autocomplete,
  I am officially slain and unironically think this may actually unironically be the beginning of the decline of humanity
The internet did not end up in the trash heap after the dot com bubble burst. Ai too has real world uses that go beyond the current planet wrecking bubble.
Because rich morons think they'll get free digital slaves out of it. Because they're rich morons who do not understand anything they ask for.

This is exactly what my masters thesis feels like ATM, every attention is on all the AI crap also because the Uni gets grants ont the topic. Everything else just dies

Give me money. AI-AI-AI.

seeking for

looking for
seeking

You need to pick a lane, my dude.

multi-track drifting! also if you can understand another person, isn't that the whole point of communication?
- It's frustrating to translate from what they said to what they mean. It's more effort on my part and this is my free time, I don't want to work.
  Just communicate as clearly as you can.

E = mc² + AI

E+ai=mc²+ai Now good
- It was equivalent from the start if we assume AI = 0
- As always, the solution was adding more AI. bravo
That's an interesting equation, good job for finding that ☺️ You truly are a remarkable scientist, just like Einstein.
📄Would you like me to write a research paper on that equation for you?
So much in this beautiful equation
FTFY
E + AI = mc² + AI

My company is like this. They literally have a feature in the roadmap called AI, and say we have to do something with it because our competitors do.

Really learning from the Arabs.

Al Project
Al Company
Al Product

AI Qaeda
(I'm so sorry)
- What have you done
Al gebra - ‘the reunion of broken parts’,
What xd
- The word "al" means "the" in Arabic - for example, "al jazeera" means "the island". And a lower case L looks like a capital i, so "AI" is visually indistinguishable from "Al". So the joke is that people who try to shoehorn Artificial Intelligence into everything look like they're speaking in Arabic.