We, in Doña Ana County, join many other locations as being in the cross-hairs of artificial intelligence, or AI. Project Jupiter is already off and running, aiming at training AI agents on an enormous scale.
What are AI’s prospects, operationally and financially? Skepticism is proliferating for AI functions. AI generates spectacular nonsense at times, the hallucinations. Some can be laughed off, some are sufficiently close to be accepted uncritically. More seriously, AI is subject to prompt injection – a user enters not a question but a request to change the way the AI agent operates… including making it malicious to the user and to other users.
Broadly, how useful is AI? Several AI researchers point out that competition among tech giants such as Open AI, Google, Meta, etc. have narrowed toward them mostly competing to create the same functions rather than new, more useful functions. Re: the financial prospects, many AI researchers and many financial analysts are alarmed by the huge debt burden of AI companies and their house-of-cards investments in each other – e.g., Open AI and GPU chip maker Nvidia. The projected income of all AI is far below what will turn a profit. It appears that a great intellectual investment has a very, very fraught future.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
Source: a large number of published papers, online posts, and YouTube presentations
Image: Walter Frick, column in Futurist (data center); Courthouse News (Sam Altman photo)
