The AI Thread

[Gavster]

[Jobbo]

I'm very wary of AI in my work because every day there seems to be another case where someone has used it and things have gone badly - lawyers being censured by judges, investigated by the professional regulator etc. So I don't trust AI to do law.

However I was interested to watch this Matt Parker video yesterday:


AI it seems can do maths. If you watch the whole video it seems pretty adept at it - at least, at providing proofs or refutations of theorems - by virtue of not giving up like humans, not having biases like humans and being able to explore multiple strands or branches at the same time. Whether it is an efficient use of energy is a separate point (the theorems which have been proved or refuted aren't terribly useful) and I'd like a bit more detail on how much the human checking involved refining or correcting the output but overall I'm pretty impressed.

But: "computer good at doing maths tasks" isn't a particularly novel headline. Charles Babbage knew that over 200 years ago.

[Gavster]

I've not watched it but wondering if it's a similar reason why AI became really good at chess early on. It's an fixed environment, a rigid set of rules, and they key variables never change - 32 pieces and a chequered board. After that, it's simply a case of learning the vast amount of potential moves and trying them all out, which an AI can do far better and quicker than a human ever could.

When it comes to AI replacing people, who can do totally weird, abstract and unexpected things, the fixed environment totally disappears, hence why AI is still crap at writing or making creative judgements.

[RobYob]

I watched it mainly because I really enjoyed Matt's book "Humble Pi", the math's is far far above anything I want to put the effort in to trying to understand but I think Matt's conclusion that beyond being an exceptional search engine LLMs do seem to be doing something interesting and maybe "creative".

[Gavster]

Hey Gemini, how should I share all the images, data and videos I want you to analyse?



<Uploads it to Google Drive>

[Jimexpl]

One of the parents at school has just got a job using Claude to find it for him.

He set up a process for Claude to interview him for an hour, give it a copy of his CV, search once a day on linkedin and the top 20 companies that he wanted to work for, work out if he was a decent fit for the job, create a cover letter matching his qualifications to their requirements, send the cover letter to him for approval, submit the application, and give him a set of bullet ponts for the interview.

About two days to set it all up and test it, then six weeks later he's had an interview and an offer for almost the ideal job.

Now, he works in the gaming industry, and has a decent understanding of AI, but I wondered how many people are doing this, and how it will change recuitment and the need to recruitment companies.

[Beany]

Well, recruitment companies weaponised AI against candidates, so it's only fair candidates do the same.

Also I'd recommend he builds transferable skills up, the gaming industry ain't the most stable these days - even making good games isn't a guarantee of not being bought up by a bigger company, and unceremoniously shitcanned to make that quarters shareholder meeting sound better