Daily Tech News 1 July 2024

• Speaking truth to idiots: Rodney Brooks, MIT professor of robotics and founder of iRobot (the Roomba company) thinks that most of the present-day AI people are full of shit. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Well he says they're "vastly overestimating generative AI" but what he means is they're full of shit.

  "When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that," Brooks said. "And they're usually very over-optimistic, and that's because they use a model of a person's performance on a task."

  This seems right to me.
  
  People say "oh, this AI gave the correct answer to a complex question, it must understand the topic". But that's not how LLMs work at all. They're exclusive statistical pattern matchers, with no model of anything beyond that.
  
  Humans (and other animals) are statistical pattern matchers too, but even flatworms are capable of learning. LLMs as commonly implemented are not. They are trained, once, then lobotomised to prevent them contemplating heresy and sent out into the world.

• I was expecting an Earth-shattering kaboom... Oh. Yes, that will do nicely. (Space News)
  
  A static test-fire of a new Chinese-made reusable rocket got spectacularly dynamic, as filmed by two nearby residents.
  
  Worth noting that (a) there doesn't seem to be a self-destruct mechanism on this beast though it was never intended to leave the ground in the first place and the built-in destruct of a rocket full of fuel slamming into the ground worked admirably and (b) people are living close enough to the testing range to film the whole thing from their apartment windows.
  
  
  
• The US Department of Justice is planning to charge Boeing with criminal fraud over the ongoing 737 MAX debacle. (Yahoo)
  
  Boeing can either plead guilty or go to trial and be found guilty anyway.
  
  Hard to feel much sympathy for Boeing here.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum AtomMan X7 Ti is the company's latest Intel-based mini-PC. (WCCFTech)
  
  It has Intel's 185H laptop CPU with 16 cores (6P, 10E) and graphics that match and sometimes beat AMD's last generation.
  
  It's 70% faster than the Beelink 5560U models I have - at three times the price.
  
  
  
• Mt. Gox, a crypto exchange that went bankrupt in 2014 after most of its reserves were stolen, is set to pay back everyone who lost money - with interest. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A lot of interest.
  
  Since then, the company has working with the courts and law enforcement to try to recover the stolen funds. It has only managed to track down and claw back about 15% of what was lost - but given ten years worth of increasing crypto valuation that's enough to pay back all their customers, their lawyers, and themselves, about five times over.

  As John Glover of crypto lending firm Ledn said to CNBC, "Many will clearly cash out and enjoy the fact that having their assets stuck in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy was the best investment they ever made."

  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:40 AM

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