You Can’t Trust the AI Hype

Investor hype around AI doesn’t reflect the real impacts of deep learning. That hype rests on a false ideology in which the tech industry is the vanguard of progress.

Last week, Managing Editor Ash Milton explored the hype ideology that surrounds AI, and how it relates to the actual state of deep learning tools. The technological underpinnings of artificial intelligence have evolved over the years but the assumptions about AI have remained strikingly similar. As Ash sums it up: “Computers are smarter than you, lack your weaknesses, and will replace you in all tasks that matter as soon as the computing power involved gets strong enough.” 

The advent of AI feels expected, even inevitable. But the result of this expectancy is a systematic misrepresentation of the actual products to fit the expectations set by hype. Companies hide the vast amount of human labor involved. Meanwhile, the outsourcing companies providing that labor brand themselves as tech companies:

The San Francisco-based company Scale AI made its name, its $7.3 billion market cap, and its client list ranging from OpenAI to the U.S. military based on providing precisely that human support. While the company’s branding is that of a tech company, it founded an in-house agency called Remotasks to manage its core operations, the nature of which is something more like “outsourcing services.” Via Remotasks, Scale AI hires about 240,000 workers for data labeling services, many of them in regions like Africa and Asia. The company maintains a strict brand separation between the two. While the company’s position is that this is for client privacy, it’s hard to ignore the reality that “outsourcing services” is a far less sexy investor hook than AI and is far easier for competitors—of which Scale AI has many—to disrupt.

One French founder put it even more bluntly, referencing his country’s preferred outsourcing jurisdiction: “Madagascar is the leader in French artificial intelligence.”

Ideologies serve the interests of some organized group. In this case, that means the VCs, startup CEOs, and other parts of the tech industry that systematically promote AI hype. By presenting society’s major problems as engineering and technology problems—today, that’s code for software—Silicon Valley gains a natural advantage in solving them. This inflates the value of its work and production, creating an extractive dynamic with the rest of society. The results: Nvidia’s price-to-sales ratio is currently over 40 and Twitter was able to hire five times more people than needed to run its app. This is a destructively low signal-to-noise ratio for the AI industry:

At its worst, such ideological hype causes a systematic over-investment in new technologies that do not actually yield much overall progress or development across society. Bubble-driven investment incurs large economic costs. Pursued in this way, AI may actually be an economic and industrial net negative. Misallocations can continue for generations, free-riding off the functional parts of the structure while the overall reality is one of decay and dissolution.

You can read the whole article here.

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Here’s what’s been on the front page lately:

You Can’t Trust the AI Hype by Ash Milton. Investor hype around AI doesn’t reflect the real impacts of deep learning. That hype rests on a false ideology in which the tech industry is the vanguard of progress.

Walter Kirn on How America Lost the Plot by Matt Ellison. The novelist turns his literary eye to the American story and finds we’re losing our memories under a new imperative to forget.

Don’t Learn Value From Society by Wolf Tivy. We face a crisis of false value. Ancient perspectives like that of Abraham offer a way out.

The Triumph of the Good Samaritan by Ash Milton. Those trying to justify parasitic behaviors often invoke the language of charity and compassion. But true charity is about enforcing a superior form of life.

When Every Child Is a Choice by Ginevra Davis. As a normal life becomes more difficult for middle-class parents to acquire, optimizing a child’s upbringing for educational and career success has become the norm—but at great expense. Is there another way?

That’s all for now.