All you need to know is that he labeled himself as a consultant. Which reminds me of this joke.
Once upon a time there was a shepherd tending his sheep at the edge of a country road. A brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee screeches to a halt next to him.
The driver, a young man dressed in a Brioni suit, Cerrutti shoes,
Ray-Ban glasses, Jovial Swiss wrist watch and a BHS tie gets out and
asks the shepherd: "If I guess how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?" The shepherd looks at the young man, then looks at the sprawling field of sheep and says: "Okay."
The young man parks the SUV, connects his notebook and wireless modem, enters a NASA site, scans the ground using his GPS, opens
a database and 60 Excel tables filled with algorithms, then prints a 150
page report on his high tech mini printer. He then turns to the shepherd and says:"You have exactly 1,586 sheep here. "
The shepherd answers: "That's correct, you can have your sheep."The
young man takes one of the animals and puts it in the back of his
vehicle. The shepherd looks at him and asks: "Now, if I guess your
profession, will you pay me back in kind?"
The young man answers: "Sure."
The shepherd says: "You are a consultant."
"Exactly! How did you know," asks the young man?
Very simple, answers the shepherd.
"First, you came here without being called.
Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew.
Third, you do not understand anything about my business and I'd
really like to have my dog back."
From my experience working for a management consulting firm. It's more like everyone knows what the problems are and how to fix them, but they are too scared of screwing up to do something about it.
So they hire a consultancy company to tell them what they already knew and take the blame if something goes wrong.
A brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee screeches to a halt next to him. The driver, a young man dressed in a Brioni suit, Cerrutti shoes,
Ray-Ban glasses, Jovial Swiss wrist watch and a BHS tie
I do NOT miss being yelled at by some middle management Kevin about how I'm charging them $275 per hour to justify their getting whatever crazy shit isn't in the purchase agreement. I wish I made $275/hour. That'd be amazing.
As someone who studied CS at uni for 3 years I saw first hand how there's plenty of idiots in this field. Two of my classmates identified as Nazis and thought that the holocaust didn't happen, besides a significant chunk leaning to the right more generally.
There's plenty of really smart people working in the field of AI, but there's also plenty of people who just think they're smart.
I think this pretty much applies to all fields. Everything looks complicated and hard to outside people, but once you get into the field, you realize that most people are just average.
Alternate take: this is the same sort of mark self-sorting that scam artists use.
A reasonable person isn’t gonna reply to a typo-ridden email from a Nigerian prince. But those few who do are going to be easy to get everything from.
Imagine you’re an executive at the company your dad founded. You’re an idiot. Everyone knows you’re an idiot. But you think you’re smart. This guy is willing to consult with you about how your company will use AI (for a modest fee, of course). You don’t understand AI, but you think you do, and you just need someone to help with the details. And everyone has to nod their heads and agree to pay him because they’re afraid of getting fired.
I have watched those exact guys eat an organization I worked for alive. At the end, they had like... 10 business consultants and 1 junior engineer. At an electronics engineering company.
I can still hear the penny dropping in my mind when I went from ‘How can anyone fall for that—it’s so obviously a scam…’ to ‘Oh, right…’ It sounded too Machiavellian to be true. I wonder if it was so carefully designed from the start, or a process of natural selection?
I can suggest an equation that has the potential to impact the future:
Acetyl-CoA + 3H2O + 3NAD+ + FAD + ADP + Pi → 2CO2 + 3NADH + 3H+ + FADH2 + CoA-SH + ATP + H2O + AI
This combines the Krebs Cycle which relates to glucose metabolism with the addition of artificial intelligence (AI). By including AI in the equation, it symbolises my ability to wank myself to completion without touching my cock, simply by massaging my engorged ego.
Phenotype = Genotype + Environment, but now the equation respects the contribution of block chain NFTs. with enough bored apes getting slurpjuice, we can revolutionize dementia into a value-add for the marketplace."
Yes, but that does not mean AI has 0 influence. Rather, AI is a circle, a shape with no beginning or end, suggesting that AI has endless and infinite potential. Now, let's say you want to remove AI from the equation - imagining a world without AI. What happens when you divide by zero? You can't, because dividing by zero is undefined. Thusly, a world (future or past) without AI is now an impossibility. This is simply the laws of mathematics.
This reminds me of that TEDx (I think it was TEDx) talk where the guy claimed that you could see the letters E=mc2 in the Devanagari symbol for Om, as if this revealed some sort of profound truth about the universe.
The funny thing is that that's literally all I remember about that talk. I don't remember what the guy was talking about for the ten to twenty minutes before that point, just that the talk concluded with him looking super self-satisfied while saying something incredibly silly and cringeworthy.
I just listened to the most recent Behind the Bastards on forensic 'science' used in court cases and Robert played a clip of one guy who had a Ted talk where he spoke about how he uses divining rods to find dead bodies buried in the ground.
The worst part is this guy is still employed in the field, testifies as an expert witness to get people convicted of crimes, grifts families of missing persons claiming he can find them for a fee based on their body's "unique frequency" (obtained from fingernail clippings), consults/instructs law enforcement on his techniques using taxpayer funds, and worked until recently at the famous body farm at the Univeristy of Tennessee.
Reminds of various evangelical speakers seeing "crosses" in nature or cheese toasties and thinking they're profound. Truly a Christmas miracle that a pair of lines intersect.
My favorite was the one who claimed to have converted to christianity after seeing 3 waterfalls and because he saw three of something one time that means the trinity is real.
Business homps trying to do math with no understanding or background smacks of clergy trying to do philosophy or athletes composing a symphony, sure you can try it but practically nobody is interested in your uninformed amateur gibberish nonsense.
This implies that either A, I, or both are zero. So A*I means that anything artificial can not be intelligent and anything intelligent can not be artificial.
There's currently a ton of hype around LLMs, so companies are willing to spend a lot of money. And where there's money to be made, scammers aren't far away.
The true meaning of that is that AI development is gonna draw exponentially more energy and that's extremely inefficient to do the way it's done and we're all fucked