Joseph Cox, writing for 404 Media (paywalled, sans gift links, alas):

Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio. [...] It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks. [...]

At one point in the meeting, Kwak and Eduardo Salamanca de Diego, senior manager of product management at the company’s Center for Advanced AI, start presenting about what is described as “token ops.”

Kwak says he knows people aren’t using slides these days, but he has some. As he appears to be preparing to present, Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into Markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into Markdown: is that right?”

That’s when Kwak says that’s what Accenture’s own data shows.

My impression of consulting giants like Accenture (McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, KPMG...) has always been that they are very good at looking smart but in fact very bad at actually being smart. The idea that they’re spending serious money on AI tokens to turn PDFs and PowerPoint decks into Markdown only makes me think I’ve overestimated the median intelligence of the people who work there. I really thought Markdown couldn’t get more successful but this takes the cake. I love it that my little baby is helping burn these companies’ cash. This is so stupid it hurts to think about.

Markdown is something you start with because it’s easy to write and universally readable. You write Markdown and use that to make slides — like, say, with iA Presenter — not the other way around.

(Via Simon Willison.)

Link: 404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies-are…

The recent revelations that Jho Low has once again sought to negotiate a pardon from both Malaysia and the United States revives concerns about how this fugitive managed to escape to China with so much of his stolen Malaysian loot apparently still available for him to access.

When his name appeared on a notorious ‘‘250 pardons for 250 years’ list that the US president Donald Trump purportedly mulled signing on July 4th, there were even reports Jho had offered key intermediaries at least a billion dollars to arrange the favour.

Sarawak Report simultaneously learned the fugitive was separately negotiating a similar pardon from Malaysia as part of a settlement designed to draw a veil over China’s damning role in the criminal cover-up of 1MDB.

This is not the first but the third recorded episode of pardon seeking by Jho, who plainly desperately longs to escape from China The previous round in July 2022 was confirmed by the intermediary, ex-AG Apandi Ali, during which RM1.5bn ($370m) was reported to have been offered by Jho’s US lawyers to the Malaysian authorities to wipe his slate clean.

How the fugitive retained such enormous levels of ready cash and where it is being managed and protected is therefore a question of considerable interest to the people of Malaysia to whom the money actually belongs.

Did ‘Swiss Banking Secrecy’ Protect Jho’s Stash?

It is now a decade since the devastating press conference at the Department of Justice in July 2016 which initiated the US action against the Malaysian fraudster.

The then Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, and her colleagues described 1MDB as the world’s largest recorded theft, conducted on behalf of Jho’s political master, the now-jailed former PM Najib Razak, who is still facing a recovery action through the civil court.

Many of the stolen assets were subsequently confiscated and returned, but the evidence suggests  by no means all. Malaysia remains burdened by the crippling costs of the original $5.6 billion dollar theft and then the further theft of similar sums incurred during the later attempts to cover it all up [for the full details of this cover up refer to SR’s upcoming book The China Contract]

However, during the course of this subsequent decade the various investigations, law suits and official disclosures have bit by bit revealed more, not only about how the money was stolen but about how it was laundered and where it ended up.

In particular, details from regulatory actions taken against employees of Rothschild Bank and affiliated Rothschild trust in Switzerland, which came to light in 2023, raise a number of questions that Sarawak Report has now put to the Rothschild group about how much of the stolen wealth they managed on behalf of Jho and the Low family was surrendered to the authorities at the time they were revealed to be fraudsters, as opposed to being quietly moved elsewhere at a later date?

Top Customer 

It first came to light that Jho Low was a client of the Swiss based Rothschild Bank SA (and of its subsidiary Rothschild Trust SA) in 2017, after FBI investigators traced the ownership of Jho Low’s assets in the US to a series of BVI companies placed under a separate New Zealand based trusts which had been incorporated and were being managed by the Rothschild group in Switzerland.

These included his Beverley Hills mansion, New York apartments, his private Bombardier jet, flats and buildings in London and Paris, a super-yacht, company shares in EMI, shares in the New York Park Lane and L’Hermitage hotel groups, incorporated under 23 named companies each held by these separate trusts.

Rothschild dutifully surrendered its control of these contested assets to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and a major court battle ensued whereby the Low family, together with Jho, sought to remove the bank from its formal control as trustees in order to appoint another management outfit called FFP in the Cayman Islands that was willing to resist the US seizure orders.

In early 2017 the Low family won an initial victory in the New Zealand court which agreed they could appoint the new managers, thereby side-lining Rothschild. Reporting on the litigation Reuters and others put a value on the trusts at stake of $260 million.  These were transferred to the management of FFP which then continued to support the family in their legal battle with the DOJ.

Eventually, in October 2019, the Low family reached a ‘global settlement’ with the DOJ surrendering those assets, including ownership of Jho’s share of the Park Lane Hotel (earlier off-loaded to Greenland Properties in Hong Kong), which the US press release of the time claimed now represented a total value of $700 million.

The US court’s relevant confiscation order named the 23 trusts that were involved in that settlement and the asset each represented. At which point it was widely assumed that Rothschild Bank’s relationship with Jho Low, which had by then been denounced by the Swiss regulator FINMA as a ‘serious breach’ of compliance rules, was over.

Indeed, FINMA had stated at the time that this admonishment of Rothschild, which took place earlier in July 2018, represented the ‘conclusion of its final 1MDB proceedings‘, leading observers to logically conclude that there was no more stolen Malaysia money in the Rothschild banking group – nor indeed any Swiss bank subject to FINMA regulation.

No financial or other penalties were exerted against the bank itself over these blatant institutional failings on the basis that a new monitoring process had been agreed and implemented by FINMA to supervise future activities by Rothschild Swiss and its subsidiary, Rothschild Trust.

The CEO of the group, the British banker Nigel Higgins (who had spent 36 years at the bank) departed shortly after to take up a new position as the Chairman of Barclays in the UK, where he remains in situ.

However, a full four years later and barely remarked by wider media, further proceedings prosecuted by Switzerland’s Federal Department of Finance against a relatively lowly compliance officer and the former CEO of the Rothschild trust management subsidiary revealed some startling new information, which slipped out into the financial press in 2023.

Those proceedings took place in German and were covered primarily only by specialist finance platforms, such as the French language site Gotham City which memorably described the charges laid against the former chief compliance officer as reading “like a horror novel when it comes to banking supervision”.

The officer pled guilty to failings in his reporting obligations with respect to blatantly suspicious dealings and money-laundering, and was fined CHF 40,000, even though it was acknowledged that he was only acting according to the views of his superiors at the bank.

Indeed, the prosecution papers clearly show that the senior personnel of the back had been regularly consulted on the thorny issues surrounding their most lucrative client and consistently decided over the course of more than five years not to report him.

Of these, only the Trust company CEO was prosecuted. He was found guilty and fined CHF 185,000, but has appealed.

Thus it is established that the hierarchy at Rothschild Swiss and its wider group successfully decided to ignore red flags for over five years, despite evidence presented that shows Jho Low failed numerous due diligence investigations and reports by independent consultancies who concluded they were ‘unable to verify many of the business activities described in [Jho’s company’s] annual report’ or indeed ‘any significant professional activity since he left university’.

The same reports also pointed to the dire news coverage that followed the young man’s mysterious ostentation, but Rothschild didn’t flinch. The reason is clear from an email sent by the CEO of the trust company to board members of Rothschild Global in January 2015:

 ‘As you know, our largest client relationship in terms of revenues is a Malaysian family. We manage and oversee assets worth $500m and bill around CHF 3m a year (the relationship has been with us for over five years now). The family runs a business in third generation and is estimated between $2 and 3 bn. The family are extraordinarily connected across the globe and we belief [sic] there is more scope for us to offer Rothschild services if we get things right’.

Indeed, insiders have confided to Sarawak Report there was a whole department at the trust management division dedicated to Jho Low’s affairs.

Thus it was that the bank had chosen not to report blatantly suspicious transactions till as late as November 2015, months after the exposure of the role of Jho Low’s Good Star Limited account at Coutts Bank in Zurich during the initial heist from 1MDB. Good Star was the source of hundreds of millions of dollars funnelled into Rothschild, according to the complaint by the regulators at the Swiss Federal Finance Department (FFD), yet Rosthschild still said nothing.

Jho Low’s 130 Rothschild Trusts

The detail to emerge from the FFD submissions regarding the “Over $500 million” Rothschild managed by 2015 is even more pertinent to the questions surrounding Jho Low’s evident remaining wealth.

The regulator reveals that Rothschild’s mystery client had been introduced to the bank by none other than a Swiss wealth manager at Goldman Sachs, the bank with whom Jho Low and Najib had connected with in 2008 to advise on the Terengganu Investment Authority and which later colluded in raising of 6.5 billion dollars in bonds for 1MDB, much of which was stolen.

That introduction took place as early as October 2009, days after Jho Low had made his first $700 million windfall from the bogus 1MDB joint venture with PetroSaudi (money that was paid into Good Star Limited in Zurich).

The wealth manager had tipped off Rothschild that even Goldman Sachs had decided Jho Low was too hot to touch in terms of a personal account.  He nonetheless performed an introduction for Jho Low, accompanied by his brother and father, to Rothschild bankers at the Goldman Sachs offices in Zurich in full knowledge of those concerns.

Rothschild had proceeded to onboard Jho and his family, and just over a year later the Goldman banker who had made the original introduction moved over to become the CEO of the Rothschild Trust subsidiary.

These are not the only facts that stick out from the belated indictments. For the first time, the case revealed that there had, in fact, been no less than 130 trusts with 130 matching bank accounts held on behalf of the Low family by this one bank by the time the matter was brought to the attention of the Swiss authorities.

According to the 97 page FFD ‘criminal order’, the amount of money that had entered this network of cash and assets totalled $613 million by the time of the DOJ crackdown in 2015. As of August 2015, there remained $80 million in cash plus the 130 trusts curating assets purchased with that inflow. $313 million had entered from Good Star Limited 2009-2011, after which just under $300 million was later added from other sources connected to Jho Low.

Those figures, which only became available in 2023, are in considerable excess of what was published at the time of the DOJ settlement in 2019, which named 23 trusts representing a reported investment of $260 million (according to the media reports on the court case).

Neither did the 2019 DOJ settlement make mention of any surrender of the $80 million in cash now known to have been held by Rothschild on behalf of Jho Low.

It appears that $350 million worth of cash and assets may have therefore remained, undeclared, in the Rothschild accounts – assets that could be now worth many times more with the benefit of expert investment.

Hong Kong Hideout?

Sarawak Report repeatedly asked Rothschild Bank to confirm whether all of Jho Low’s accounts were surrendered to the authorities at the time of the US asset seizure in 2016.  If not, we asked the bank to explain what happened to the $350 million that appears not to have been accounted for?

Rothschild responded that “Rothschild & Co has fully cooperated in the 1MDB matter with the relevant law enforcement authorities since 2016 and provided full transparency …. Rothschild & Co has no remaining role in the management of Jho Low’s wealth“.

When asked for clarification as to whether the remaining hundred plus trusts and accounts that apparently were not surrendered to the DOJ in 2016 contained any assets, the spokesman declined to comment further, saying “The previous statement provides our full response on this matter“.

It was not till over one year after that surrender that FINMA announced its conclusion, in July 2018, that Rothschild had been in “serious breach” of suspicious transactions and money laundering reporting requirements with regard to Jho Low, placing the bank and its trust management subsidiary under special monitoring. The announcement did not state whether any assets remained within the bank belonging to Jho Low or his family at that time.

However, enquiries by Sarawak Report have confirmed that US investigators faced considerable hurdles during their original investigations relating to Swiss banking secrecy. The burden remained on the FBI to present its own findings to the bank in order to gain the cooperation and surrender of the trusts they had identified as purchased by the Low family through the money laundering of stolen assets.

There was no commitment made by the bank to reveal further details about their client and at no point did Rothschild offer to open up the Low family portfolio to reveal what other assets were being curated by the bank.

This, despite the fact that Jho Low had been unmasked as a fugitive from justice who had stolen billions from Malaysia and had no legitimate independent wealth. Sarawak Report has written to FINMA to enquire if it investigated whether any of Jho’s wealth remained at the bank or had been transferred elsewhere; so far, we have received no response.

In November 2018, just months after the reprimand from FINMA, Rothschild SA facilitated a ‘management buy-out’ of its trust subsidiary, enabled by a loan provided by the bank to its former staff. This now ‘independent’ operation was named Sequent and appears as a result of the sell off to have no longer been subject to the enhanced monitoring put in place against Rothschild as a penalty by FINMA.

Responding to questions on this matter Rothschild has replied “The sale of the trust business in 2018 was unrelated and a consequence of a strategic review of the entire Wealth Management business of Rothschild & Co.”

It was more than another two years before the Swiss FFD completed its investigations into the Low family funds that entered Rothschild and brought its cases against the two officers in 2022.

Meanwhile, shortly after the Low family’s October 2019 settlement with the US Department of Justice, another development took place in Hong Kong (from where the Low family based their businesses and had worked with local Rothschild investment managers prior to the scandal breaking out). In early 2020, a senior and well-connected former member of that Rothschild team announced the setting up of a private investment fund valued at well over half a billion US dollars.

Sarawak has received information that the fund is believed to represent wealth beneficially owned by Jho Low and his family members: Rothschild itself is a substantial minority shareholder in the relevant fund management company.

The fund management company has failed to respond to questions. Rothschild’s spokesman has told Sarawak Report that, as a minority shareholder, the bank does not have direct access to the investors’ ownership details, however the bank has “received assurance in writing … that none of its investors , nor any of the ultimate beneficial owners of its investors, are connected to Jho Low.”

The fund has advertised minimal activity, supporting just three named investments during the past six years. One investment in a European tech company was originally purchased by a Rothschild trust vehicle for $200 million in 2017 then divested for an extraordinary mark up of $1.3 billion in 2022 to a separate Rothschild Trust vehicle, investing alongside the Hong Kong fund and another private equity partner.

A second investment is likewise linked to a Rothschild-related earlier investment and the third was soon divested. In response to questions as to whether Jho Low or his family did at any point retain a beneficial interest in these investments Rothschild have answered “we have checked our investor records, including the anti-money laundering and Know-your-customer records of … the indicated transaction. According to these records, that are kept in line with our regulatory obligations, we did not identify Jho Low as one of the investors“.

Sarawak Report has asked for clarity on which of the string of transactions this refers to.  Meanwhile, is seem clear that barring further investigation or the release of further information from the bank, a sum of over $350 million identified as having been invested in some 100 of 130 trusts prior to 2015 remain inadequately accounted for following the surrender of Jho Low’s identified US assets to the DOJ.

There appears to have been little oversight of those trusts or the bank over much of the relevant period, during which the later heavily criticised institution was free to manage the accounts and assets as it chose.

If this wealth were to have been transferred to Hong Kong, by 2020 it would have come under the aegis of an increasingly opaque financial centre by then controlled by China, a country which chooses to harbour and protect this global fugitive who has carried out numerous missions on behalf of the Chinese state in Malaysia, the Gulf and United States.

Most recently, in July, Sarawak Report reported the fraudster’s key engagement in the negotiations to settle outstanding 1MDB related debts still owed by Malaysia to China.

Yet, as all Malaysians know, any assets remaining under Low family beneficial ownership are theirs: assisting in their transfer post 2016 would have amounted to aiding and abetting a known criminal.

As for those pardon offers, given the level of profit realised from other investments made by the 1MDB looters (Tarek Obaid’s Palantir shares, for example, were bought for $2 million and are now worth $468 million) the $353 million apparently unaccounted for in 2016 could very well represent billions now – certainly enough to fund the pardon offers Jho Low is reputed to have made.

The almost-natural-language notepad calculator Soulver’s latest release adds better tools for calculating durations or intervals between dates and times, planning travel itineraries, tracking inflation, finding distances, performing bandwidth math, and splitting restaurant bills or other expenses. That’s not all, but a good starting list. Should it do all these things? A point we could argue about! But many of the features it offered in the past, and several of the new ones it provides, previously required one or more web searches to find a tool or to pull together disparate information. That’s welcome.

Soulver 4’s release comes at an interesting time, when many people have turned to chatbots and Google’s search dialog—and soon will turn to Siri AI—to answer questions that are better written out or spoken than described as just numbers or operators.

This significant update succeeds in bringing a sort of authoritative basis to stuff you need to calculate or convert. Behind the scenes, there’s no inference or autocompletion—it’s numbers, baby, all the way down. However, the developers aren’t unaware of the AI glow-up. They’ve addressed it in an interesting way, making it easy for agents to ask questions of Soulver!

How many bushels in a peck as I travel a furlong faster than a parsec?

Soulver has filled a gap for me in my calculating needs since I dug into the subject in 2015. While I love PCalc and use it for regular and advanced calculator needs, Soulver is where I go when I need to mix things up.¹

PCalc and Soulver offer overlapping Venn diagrams of what’s possible in number space, but they are distinctly different beasts at heart. Where PCalc mostly calculates within a calculator-style interface, Soulver mostly offers a way to make sense of numbers, units, percentages, time, intervals, and much more. I think of it as a “take stuff in various units or other formulations and then produce an output in a way I want” tool.

I sometimes go days without using Soulver, and then find myself typing in an array of calculations. For instance, as a tiny print book publisher (it’s just me), I am often dealing with the weight of paper, the weight of books, the cost of shipping, and other variables. The number of sheets I have in some of my Numbers documents is alarming, but I often need conversion that sounds like a story problem: “The printer in Canada is giving me paper weight in gsm (grams per square meter). I know the book’s area per page (typically in inches). I need to calculate the weight of 1,000 copies in pounds.” I can type the query faster than I describe it. For instance, I need to estimate the weight of a new book based on the weight and page count of one I am holding:

(6 inches x 9 inches) / (5.875 inches × 8.25 inches) × (352 / 204) × 302g in lbs

Version 4 continues to offer all of what I consider its basics. You type out numbers and units with operators between them. You can set variables, add comments, and drag results into subsequent lines as part of further calculations. You can force-convert units, as above, telling it to use a metric unit instead of imperial, or to use a different unit scale. Say you want inches instead of feet, or kilograms instead of pounds.

Because it’s a notepad, your work is persistent. You can use Soulver to create the equivalent of tabs within sheets, collected into a “sheetbook.” This is somewhat like the Notes app, and it lets you organize calculations into projects and sub-projects. I have a monolithic sheet I use for essentially everything. Soulver can store files locally or sync via iCloud.

Where version 4 starts to diverge from previous releases is in what feels like a baroque set of options that aren’t stapled on, but most require a bit more effort to get the nuance and make them work for you.

How much did Minions & Monsters make in 1940 dollars?

It took me a few weeks to write this review, quite honestly, because every time I looked at the upgrade page, my eyes glazed over as I thought about how to best present this. I mean, the release notes page is broken into ten sections. The answer—which didn’t require Soulver 4—is that I need to cherry-pick more than usual for an app to give you the flavor.

Here are a few new elements that will keep me away from search engines and other resources more than any other:

Inflation calculation. As a historian, and as somebody who just wants to use his numeracy to interpret the world, I find myself jumping for an inflation calculator all the time.² You need an online source, as it has to have a table of the historical values to provide the correct cumulative percentage between two years or dates. Because of the relatively high inflation in developed nations since the start of the pandemic, I find myself trying to understand why I’m staring at a jar of peanut butter and can’t comprehend what it costs now. (Soulver currently does annual inflation calculations, but will add monthly data in a future update.)

It’s a date: Date math is the hardest math, in my experience. Soulver previously let you perform the magic of subtracting one date from another or adding days to a date to figure out the right month, day, and year. In the update, you can do more tricks, like figuring out work hours (set by default, and you can change) in periods of time or differences, calculating relative to cultural and religious holidays, finding the number of daylight hours in a particular place, and (as should be obvious so far) much more. As a person of the Jewish faith, I honestly never know when Hanukkah starts, and Soulver doesn’t appear to know either. (Soulver says Hanukkah is coming in a future update.) However, it does include Christmas and Ramadan; there’s no list of this category, but you can look in Soulver: Settings: Dates & Times and click Public holidays to see that list, set by your region.

How far away? I don’t know about you, but I regularly want to know the distance between two places, sometimes nearby, sometimes far away. Soulver 4 lets you ask, distance between [place name] and [place name], and get the proper curvature-adjusted distance. (I have a proviso about this that you can read at the end.)

How long to upload? I’ve used Soulver for bandwidth and file-transfer time calculations since I first installed it. With the latest release, you don’t have to punch in nearly as many units or conversions to get an answer to a question like time to upload 1TB at 900Mbps. (Answer: 2.47 hours.)

Elements you’ll find added or improved that I haven’t found a particular use for yet but seem significant include:

• Better formatting: You can highlight expression lines with one of eight preset colors, as well as add divider lines. This makes data in sheets easier to parse. In addition to the previously available export function, Soulver 4 lets you email sheets to yourself with full HTML formatting.

• Trip planning: I’ll be honest that this feature looks powerful, but requires breaking out of the Soulver mold, as it uses a multi-line approach by defining the top and bottom of the trip range as a “time point” via the contextual menu. However, because of how it calculates time intervals and provides warnings if the duration you’ve set doesn’t fit, you can use it for short itineraries (getting to the airport on time) or planning a long trip.

• Tags workflow: Coders are amazing people, and you can see that in the simplicity and complexity of this tagging feature. When you tag a line with a hashtag and a tag name, the associated value can be summed, and operations can be performed on it. For instance, you can tag everyone’s individual orders on a dinner bill, add in tax and tip, and then have it divvied out. But that’s just one example. A spreadsheet could be easier, but it can also be overkill.

• A command-line interface: If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like a GUI, a command-line approach to Soulver might fit you, but the developers created it mostly to allow a simple way for you to have various other things, whether scripts, editor plug-ins, or coding agents, use Soulver as a kind of engine of numerical accuracy.

Weather goest thou?

Soulver is a $59 one-time purchase and gives you access to Mac, iPhone, and iPad versions. (There’s a 60-day free trial to test it out.) While that might seem high, I think given inflation—wink, wink—that’s comparable to the $30–$40 we might pay for a single-platform great utility in 2010! The iPhone version can be purchased on its own for $15. Soulver 3 owners pay $29 to upgrade to version 4. You can also get Soulver 4 via the $15 a month Setapp subscription, and have full access to it and over 330 other apps.

But you might run into one not-quite-hidden subscription option if you make certain weather or stock queries. With the App Store version of Soulver, $26 a year gives you access to what the app labels Live Weather (a number of current metrics), Live & Historical Stocks (a deep trove of data and real-time), and Inline Knowledge Assistant (which lets you use Wolfram|Alpha). It’s included at no extra cost for Setapp subscribers.

I ran afoul of an aspect of this in testing, as Soulver (as of 4.0.2) included about the top 700 most populous cities and leaned on Wolfram for more, but didn’t prompt me as to why it couldn’t identify a city I mentioned. Developer Zac Cohan said the next minor update will add dynamic place-name lookups as part of the base price to reduce confusion and better fit the user base.

This subscription is not at all necessary to use Soulver 4, and Zac says the vast majority of Soulver users don’t need it. However, the cost to provide the data and services is too high to include for all users, hence the subscription to defray those costs.

Fascinating essay by Nikhil Suresh:

On a trip overseas, I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the Fortune 500 executives mentioned at the beginning of the post, who will remain anonymous so that they are not executed by firing squad by their board. As we were chatting, it became clear that they were very switched-on and technically competent, and they also happened to be at a company that had committed to the usual battery of exorbitant claims about their recent innovations — we’ve 100×’d our productivity, AI is the future of everything, I am but a vessel for OpenAI to make love to my wife. You know, normal things. But since I had them there without any microphones around, I asked why this was being repeated without opposition. Was it just sales fluff?

The answer was a lot more interesting. It was partially ridiculous sales material being delivered to an easily excitable audience, but this was not the dominant factor constraining honesty. Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100× productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. And getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired.

The whole essay is very much worth reading, and might make you feel saner for harboring your own doubts regarding just how much has been changed in the world by generative AI. The gist of his argument is that the entire corporate world — not merely the computer/tech industry — is caught up in an AI mania that brooks no dissent. It’s a religious fervor and heretics are excommunicated. But the dissenters, who feel they must remain silent, are largely correct.

One way I’ve been thinking about AI mania is this: Computers have profoundly changed the world. There can be no dispute about that. Computers continue to improve in capability as networking effects grow and especially as Moore’s Law makes them faster and more capable at a pace unlike any other previous technical revolution. But most people are incapable of understanding how computers really work, and thus personally aren’t able to do much with them. Computers, for most people, are communication tools, not creative tools. Generative AI changes that. People with no computer aptitude are able to create things or discover things via ChatGPT and Claude that were simply beyond their ken heretofore. Per Clarke’s third law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Generative AI feels a bit magical to all of us, even those of us with mid-to-high levels of understanding how computers work and how to make them work. But it feels like the first time ever that computers have been tools for their own creation for a lot of rather dimwitted but confident corporate manager/executive types. This moment feels like the Big Bang to them. The religiosity of this is such that there is no way to convince them that AI, as it stands today, is impressive and useful and innovative, yes, but several orders of magnitude less so than they’re imagining that it is. No way to convince them, that is, until the bubble bursts.

Link: ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global…

Interesting:

Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

Part 2 of the story. And a Wall Street Journal article.