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Posted on 08/25/2025 12:15:50 PM PDT by libh8er
The shine may be coming off AI, a tech charlatan that has brought no major benefits for organizations including telcos and has had some worrying effects.
Offloading cognitive effort to ChatGPT or a similar application is extremely bad for the brain. Who knew? It should have been obvious to anyone who's realized that lounging around all day is bad for the body, or that no one became good at anything by not doing it. But it took two separate research projects, one by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University and the other by MIT, to establish that overreliance on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), as the madmen of Big Tech call it, turns you into a technologically lobotomized ape.
It now appears to be even more damaging than all that, according to Mustafa Suleyman, the head of AI for Microsoft and the author of the portentously titled The Coming Wave (spoiler alert, AI is going to be seriously disruptive, writes man who stands to earn millions from serious AI disruption). If you've not heard of what Suleyman and others are describing as "AI psychosis," it is a new ailment whose sufferers are convinced AI is sentient. In a case of life imitating art, some people have apparently grown emotionally attached to the machine voices emanating from their phones and even, like Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Her, fallen in love with their chatbots.
AI psychosis is feasibly a natural consequence of the cognitive decline researchers observed in heavy users of ChatGPT, much as the onset of lung cancer is for the coughing yet dedicated smoker. In defense of the afflicted, it has been encouraged by two years of insane industry babble about what is basically just a very sophisticated search engine, the progeny of the pattern recognition system that Google's founders worked on in the late nineties.
Scaremongering headlines about job losses and murderous robots have probably contributed to AI psychosis. Hardly any commentator has even objected to the marketing of the technology under the AI banner. Yet backers have had to invent the new label of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to describe what AI was supposed to be until ChatGPT came along.
Meanwhile, the world mercifully looks no closer to AGI. It is impossible to see how a superior intelligence that outperforms the smartest humans on all fronts could be a positive for the planet's dominant species, but that hasn't stopped Sam Altman and other latter-day Frankensteins from trying to create one. The highly anticipated GPT-5 has fallen scandalously short of expectations and is merely an incremental improvement on GPT-4 rather than some AGI-like breakthrough. Building even bigger large language models (LLMs) and more powerful graphical processing units (GPUs) hasn't been fruitful and probably never will be thanks to the law of diminishing returns.
GPT-5 also looks as rubbish as its predecessors. Richard Windsor of Radio Free Mobile set it two illustrative tasks – first, "draw a picture of a person writing with their left hand," and second, "draw a picture of a person holding a sign saying AGI is imminent. Circle all of the vowels." The resulting images, shown in his blog, feature a right-handed scribe and a man holding an "AGI is imminent" sign with two circled consonants. It offers proof, writes Windsor, that the generative AI tool "still demonstrates no understanding of causality."
What AI-related job cuts?
But in the absence of any other game changer for their business, telcos still sound captivated by AI, shoehorning it into any gaps they can find. No announcement seems complete without a reference to the technology and its supposed benefits, which remain largely invisible to outsiders. It has neither spurred revenue growth nor boosted profitability, and it has certainly not given telcos an array of new services to sell.
AI has had an impact on networks mainly by generating additional traffic in and between the data centers training LLMs, which looks good for vendors of data center connectivity products like Arista, Ciena, Cisco, DriveNets, Juniper (now owned by HPE) and Nokia. Radio access network (RAN) vendors like Ericsson pray to Loki or some other mischief-making deity that it will eventually have the same impact on 5G traffic, as well. Few are convinced, and the effect of that would be to squeeze telco margins, forcing operators to spend more on 5G infrastructure when there is no obvious prospect of higher sales.
Every week seems to bring another news story about telecom and tech-sector layoffs linked to AI. Yet most are extremely misleading. Even the tech giants perceived to be emptying their buildings of staff and installing AI everywhere employ far more people than they did just a few years ago. Microsoft's workforce grew from 144,000 people in 2018 to 228,000 last year. Alphabet, Google's parent, finished 2024 with 183,323 employees, up from 98,771 six years ago. Amazon's workforce has grown 2.4 times over this period, to an astonishing 1.556 million people – making it bigger than the population of Estonia, although not South Korea, as Google's Gemini chatbot wrongly deduced when tested by Light Reading (see below).
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I’m sure this article’s title will age well.
See the stats in the article.
The same has always been said of emerging technologies. Early adopters will uncover the flaws and shortcomings. And then, technology moves on and acceptance becomes more universal.
Like Krugman’s prediction internet would be as useful as a fax machine. though so far what I’ve seen of it is mostly stupid.
I use logic pro x on a MacBook for my music recording software but use Android AI search when I run into software or settings problems.
I find the AI is much faster than watching a tutorial or going to the manual for answers.
AI is not a universal panacea and never will be. If applications are targeted to specific roles and tasks, then it can certainly be useful... but then only if those implementing the tool have the time and wherewithal to do it right.
The barriers to doing that? Technical skills, the hype machine that’s already promised the moon and a few stars, and (of course) costs.
Example of a bad AI use? I’ve yet to find any AI-operated ‘customer service’ call center that would even entertain even a single question that I needed an answer to.
I’m convinced the Nasdaq will have tough couple of years when investors realize AI is not as applicable as Jensen Huang claims...
AI is the wrong name. Its a marketing name that gives too much credence to software processes that do what software processes have always done, follow rules and search data. Now with faster better computers and more access to data, software is doing a better job. But its not intelligence. Its only following rules very fast. Yes, it appears to think. But it doesn’t. Give it bad data and it comes up with bad answers. Give it bad rules and it comes up with bad answers. To think of it another way. AI can come up with a very complex very fast stupid answer faster than a human can. Humans just need to understand that AI is simply a tool. like a chain saw works better than Paul Bunyan’s axe. It does not know the best trees to cut or when too much is cut. Someone has to tell it that. AI is unfortunately now just a simile for actual intelligence. When it should be just a simile for fast software with all the same bugs and bad designs it had before.
AI can come up with a very complex very fast stupid answer faster than a human can.
“AI is the wrong name. Its a marketing name that gives too much credence to software processes that do what software processes have always done, follow rules and search data. “
AI was a name assigned many decades ago to a type of software processing.
I took a course on AI programming 50 years ago.
Personally hoping for our own Butlerian Jihad
AI can come up with a very complex very fast intelligent answer faster than a human can.
remember that........................
The Great AI Crash of 2025 lurks just over the horizon.
It just takes the right line of code to make this prediction invalid. We just don’t yet know what that line of code might be yet.
I hope it crashes to hell and gone, before they have it controlling every traffic light and air traffic tower in the country from one central AI server...
AI is subject to the most extreme, most over-the-top marketing hype cycles of any technology I’ve ever seen.
And each hype cycle is more off-the-charts than the last one.
I work in the field, and I’ve learned to ignore these cycles and the outlandish promises that are made each time around the bases.
I remember about fifteen years ago, the expression “scary accurate” was being used to describe whatever was the latest LLM “breakthrough” of that time. Does anyone remember that one? No. Long forgotten.
The telecommunications (telecom) industry encompasses businesses and services that enable the long-distance transmission of information via wired and wireless technologies, including phone calls, internet access, and broadcasting services.
Key components of the industry are the providers of telecommunications equipment, such as modems and routers, and the service providers that operate networks for mobile, internet, and cable services, facilitating the transfer of voice, data, and video across global networks.
Key Components
Equipment Manufacturing: This includes the design and production of devices and infrastructure like phones, routers, fiber optic cables, and network hardware.
Service Providers: These are the companies that operate the networks and deliver services to consumers and businesses.
Types of Services and Technologies
Fixed Services: This category covers wired internet (DSL, fiber optics), landline phone services, and cable TV.
Mobile Services: Includes voice and data services for mobile phones, utilizing cellular technologies like 4G and 5G networks.
Broadcasting: Services that transmit radio, television, and satellite content.
Internet Access: Providers that offer high-speed broadband to connect users to the internet.
Societal Impact: The telecom industry is fundamental to global economic growth, connecting people and enabling essential services like online education and healthcare.
Technological Advancement:
The industry continuously evolves, with innovations in fiber optics, 5G, satellite communications, and AI driving new capabilities and user experiences.
Market Dynamics: Fierce competition and constant innovation characterize the market as companies strive to develop new technologies and services.
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