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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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Same
Same
bmrk
Idk much about this but I do know snake oil salesmen will promise the moon!
“Which is not what “AI” today is.”
Same principle. Just more developed.
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