A couple of years ago I met a guy running a company that uses artificial intelligence to help oil companies find more oil. Oil exploration is getting harder, because all the easy oil — and even much of the trickier oil — has been found already. But the geology of each oil and gas basin is different and drilling exploratory wells is expensive; no one wants to hand over their data to some AI model they don’t own.
So a lot of the new AI economy involves selling a model that companies can own, trained with some specialist industry data and ready for further training (with some help from the techies selling the AI) using the private data gleaned from a company’s own activities.
It all makes sense, in theory. But a report from MIT last week suggested that nearly all the money companies are spending on projects like this is going to waste. According to the research, only one in 20 investments of this kind makes a big difference to company profits. So much for the “fourth Industrial Revolution”, or whatever politicians like to call it.
Yet AI is still being taken up en masse. It’s just being done by individual workers making their own lives easier by using publicly available tools like ChatGPT for simple tasks. In one instance MIT cites, a US law firm spent $50,000 buying in and training its own AI model, only for its staff to shun the company tech and quietly use ChatGPT instead, for $20 a month. As one anonymous lawyer put it, the cheaper tech is just “better”. As for complex tasks involving clients, AI is still largely useless.
The report caused a small tech panic in markets, the word “bubble” was thrown about, then things calmed down a bit. In a nutshell, you and your precious data are not as special as you think you are. The big language models have already ripped off practically every piece of literature in existence, after all. It shouldn’t be a massive surprise that some random law firm’s database of corporate contracts is not adding a lot of value. Instead, these firms are becoming the AI equivalent of the gadget-hoarder, the guy with all the gear and no idea. And as any sports guy will discover, all the gear in the world won’t make you an Olympian.
Baddies age poorly
The arrival of a new Naked Gun movie prompted me to rewatch the original. A lot of comedy doesn’t age well, but something about Leslie Nielsen’s doggedly incompetent hard-man cop cackles through the decades. The long table of geopolitical baddies gathered in Beirut in the opening sequence, however, has aged so very much. There’s Colonel Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev and Yasser Arafat, each pummelled in turn by our hero cop before he is whacked by the swinging window he’s about to jump out of.
Aside from the ambivalence you’d presumably find now among a younger audience over Arafat, there’s just one thing missing: a representative of China. Then again, thanks to Hollywood’s Chinese revenue streams, Beijing baddies are conspicuously absent from modern blockbusters.
Roll out the carpet
Proving yet again that Britain does things by less-than-halves, Sweden is close to matching the UK’s order for a batch of small nuclear reactors from Rolls-Royce, despite consuming a fraction of the energy we use and having no national vested interest in the company’s success.
Rolls-Royce still has to edge out an American competitor on Sweden’s shortlist to win the contract, however. If only our government had been more decisive and ambitious, there would be no contest. I’ve written before about Britain’s decade of dithering on new nuclear technology, but as contracts begin to roll in, it’s just underlining how cripplingly cautious our government has been. If Sweden has mooted an order for three reactors, given our size and how much Britain stands to gain from developing such a valuable export, we ought to be priming the order book with ten or twelve. Instead, we’ve agreed to fund three. It’s sabotage in slow motion.