First of all, there are no real signs of technical innovation in the UK economy at present. I know the world is going mad about AI and talking about what it can do, and I have not the slightest doubt that in some areas of technology, for example, drug development, AI is going to be phenomenally useful. But people are already being alienated by AI in some areas. For example, nobody wants to look at an AI-generated video. People can see through that straight away. They don’t want it. They don’t like it. And actually, they’re even rejecting it.
And the same is true of many other products. ChatGPT is nothing more than a glorified Google search. And I’m aware that AI is more than just ChatGPT. But the consumer ultimately has to be persuaded to buy products including these things, and I’m not convinced they’re going to.
Sigh.
‘The Boeing 747 is nothing more than a glorified ox cart. And I’m aware that jet travel is more than just Boeing 747s. But the consumer ultimately has to be persuaded to buy products including these things, and I’m not convinced they’re going to.’
My wife is just in the process of finalising a funding round of several hundred million pounds (with US$ and euro additional components) for a tech company with a new way of doing something (apologies for the vagueness, I’m sure you understand).
At least, she was. She’s just called the whole deal off after I showed her Murphy’s mental ejaculate. Curse you, Murphy!
Sigh indeed. A bunch of statements that are demonstrably untrue! The only justifications for this could be gross professional incompetence or clickbait.
It is however true that both Google search and ChatGPT have similarities… both have fundamentally changed how we interact with information and will lead to major changes in jobs and how we work across many (all?) industries… they have certainly massively improved both my professional and non-professional productivity.
And “nobody wants to look at an AI-generated video”… snigger.
PS: Thanks for the book!
And the same is true of many other products. ChatGPT is nothing more than a glorified Google search.
Once again showing his ignorance by assuming that just because he has no idea how to use a tool nobody else is using it and therefore its not needed. But then this is the world leading futurist who declared the end of mobile IT when Microsoft abandoned its attempts to keep up with Apple and Google in the mobile OS business.
A case in point on ChatGPT, I recently used the free version to search through some data in a spreadsheet selecting data that met certain parameters and then present the remaining data in a format that would make it easy for me to use. I could have asked to to create a chart. That saved me at half a day faffing about.
@Interested,
You might want to listen to Tim Urban on the latest Winston Marshall Show talking about SpaceX and the way some of their technology can be used to improve flight times, like 2 hours LA to Tokyo. He names a couple of companies that are actively raising funds, IIRC one of which has the funds and is in product development. I presume that’s what you’re referring to?
It all depends on what you want it for. I have found ChatGPT and the others (Llama) to be a bit meh. I have tried using it to generate code. A lot of the code generated would not compile with out spending time getting it to compile. In some cases I could not get the code to compile as the code library referenced did not actually exist.
“First of all, there are no real signs of technical innovation in the UK economy at present. ”
For one thing, nobody wants to start businesses in the UK because of the insane red tape and a communist government.
“But the consumer ultimately has to be persuaded to buy products”
Sounds a bit neoliberal. I thought companies forced people to take what they’re given?
” search through some data in a spreadsheet selecting …”
Well, that’s his point – spreadsheets are for people who can’t do algebra or calculus, innit? Zobvious.
“For example, nobody wants to look at an AI-generated video.”
What the people really want are videos of a fat retired bird watcher spouting crap about topics he knows nothing about.
ChatGPT is nothing more than a glorified Google search.
Ironicalary, Google search in 2025 is objectively much worse than it was in 2005.
Remember “Google Fu” was a thing? Nobody mentions it anymore, because the search results are crap.
However, at least Google is now stunningly Diverse (they employ Kshatriyas AND Brahmins).
And yer – a lot of people use ChatGPT as a search engine specifically because Google search has become practically worthless unless you’re googling the URL for ChatGPT
Google search is the new Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer used to be the most popular way to download Firefox.
@BiND
You might want to listen to Tim Urban on the latest Winston Marshall Show talking about SpaceX and the way some of their technology can be used to improve flight times, like 2 hours LA to Tokyo. He names a couple of companies that are actively raising funds, IIRC one of which has the funds and is in product development. I presume that’s what you’re referring to?
God no. I wish. Admittedly I wouldn’t say if it was, for obvious reasons, but regrettably my wife’s firm is not in the SpaceX bracket, nor anywhere near it. Mostly they’re putting together £10-100m deals, and I’d have thought the capital there was in the billions and probably US based?
The deal I’m talking about – while bigger than usual – is nothing to do with air travel; my Boeing 747 comparison, as something which does the same thing as something else, only better and quicker, was just to highlight Murphy’s idiocy.
Only slightly OT, since we’re discussing innovation and “renewables” are certainly that: https://gridwatch.co.uk is a source of levity right now, with https://www.windy.com/ providing the explanation of why ‘Britain scrambles to guard against blackouts as temperatures plummet’.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/08/britain-scrambles-to-prevent-blackouts-temperatures-plummet/
Hollow laughter. Better get the candles out for this evening.
That said, I’ve been thinking about who will get their power cut and have come to the conclusion that Diverse places will be protected (
vulnerable minoritiesclient demographic, see) and you hideous Countryside Fascists will get it in the neck first.Norman – a genius writes:
The vast majority of UK houses use package gas boilers, so the the impact on electricity demand from domestic heating is limited
Lol! Gas boilers that run on AA batteries, I presume.
Steve – even more hollow laugher. Viewed as meters, https://gridwatch.co.uk shows Ccgt already at near maximum. I doubt there’ll be gas cut-offs but yes, our journalist clown is obviously unaware that gas boilers require leccy to run, as does my gas hob with its thermocouples. At least we have a butane camping stove.
” you hideous Countryside Fascists will get it in the neck first.”
The real countryside fascists have log burners, big piles of logs, chainsaws, diesel generators and large tanks of diesel. We don’t need the grid to be toasty warm and well illuminated.
That’s why you’ll get it in the neck, you independent, self-reliant bastard. That’s about as far from collectivist and state-dependent as you can get, isn’t it? We don’t want your sort in our vibrant metropolitan areas.
@Norman
I see that Open Cycle Gas turbines are also running. Cheapish to build but very expensive to run so only used in very rare emergencies.
It will only take one generator to develop a fault around 5:30PM and blackouts will ensue. Of course the “unreliable” old technology that failed will be blamed, not the wind or solar that weren’t producing at the time. If they do get some flack no doubt “climate change” will be the reason for the “unprecedented” lack of wind. The reason for solar doing nothing will be quietly ignored.
>as does my gas hob with its thermocouples
Not all gas hobs though. Most of them use mechanical pilot interlocks, a simple valve actuated by fluid expanding in a capillary tube with a bulb poking into the flame.
You can test this ahead of time, of course, by turning the hob off at the wall and seeing if it does anything: on most hobs the ignition is electric and won’t work without power (though some do use a piezo sparker), but the pilot is mechanical and the gas will stay lit in the absence of electricity.
>the impact on electricity demand from domestic heating is limited
This is a fair statement though. A typical combi boiler uses 20,000-40,000 Watts of gas, but only a few hundred Watts of electricity, to run the pump, the fans, the ignition and the control electronics. Yes, it won’t work without electricity, but it’s hardly a significant contributor to the electrical demand from the grid (competing for gas with the gas power stations is another story). Boilers do use too much electricity to ride out a protracted power cut on a UPS, but it’s practical to operate them from a backup generator. If you’re concerned about losing electricity for several days, it might be worth investing in a petrol generator and a generator switch.
BM – This is a fair statement though. A typical combi boiler uses 20,000-40,000 Watts of gas, but only a few hundred Watts of electricity, to run the pump, the fans, the ignition and the control electronics. Yes, it won’t work without electricity, but it’s hardly a significant contributor to the electrical demand from the grid
Narp, it’s a delusional statement that completely misunderstands the nature of the problem.
Which is that the UK’s energy base has been degraded to the point where – after uncounted billions of (mal) investments into Unreliables – it barely has enough reliable capacity to guarantee the power won’t go off when it’s cold.
Note also, all those people using gas central heating face government menaces to replace them with much more expensive and electric-hungry heat pumps. Whee!
Steve
You can use Chatgtp for searches, but it accesses historic data, not live data from the Internet. The replacement for Google Search is Google Gemini.
Theo – Google Gemini is the product that artificially generates images of negroes and inserts them into historically preposterous settings, while refusing to display white people even if you specifically ask for it.
No fanks, if I wanted that I’d watch TV
Theo, you can say that again. Today my wife was writing an article and asked ChatGPT about summat. Its reply indicated that it didn’t know there had been a general election in 2024.
I’ve been recommended https://www.perplexity.ai, which reveals the sources of its hallucinations, but haven’t had the need to use it yet.
BiND,
“You might want to listen to Tim Urban on the latest Winston Marshall Show talking about SpaceX and the way some of their technology can be used to improve flight times, like 2 hours LA to Tokyo. He names a couple of companies that are actively raising funds, IIRC one of which has the funds and is in product development. I presume that’s what you’re referring to?”
I’m sceptical about this sort of thing because it reminds me of HOTOL (which never happened) and Concorde. And even more so today. LA to Tokyo in 2 hours sounds impressive, but what’s the value? It doesn’t beat Teams in terms of something to urgently address. And in terms of doing a meeting and saving time, it means you get your man back in 1 day instead of 3. Then let’s be generous and put him in a nice hotel, sushi, onsen. Maybe £500 for all of that. Flight at £700. £1K for his labour. So we’re talking £2200. They’ve got to deliver a flight for £2200 to make it worthwhile.
On top of that is the regional problem, which is part of the reason why Concorde failed. If you’re in Seattle, you first have to get to LA Spaceport to ride that. So, that’s 3 hours + 2hours + the time waiting for the connection, instead of 10 hours direct from Seattle. It’s why my father-in-law when he lived on the outskirts of Northampton drove/tunnel to a factory he saw in Paris. I mean, he called it Paris, but it was one of those factory towns around the A86 super-peripherique. Like a French Slough or Watford.
It’s what the planners never get about transport. They thought people like him would ride HS1 to Paris, but it’s you know, by the time he’d have got on the Eurostar at London, he could be getting on the Shuttle at Folkestone.
“Railways: taking you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be for 200 years.”
Carrie stops dancing in front of a dirty full-length mirror just long enough to cry about how social media is walking back some of its worst censorship excesses:
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he didn’t just destroy the good parts of a thriving social network. He also did massive damage to many people’s livelihoods, including creative people for whom Twitter was a key part of their marketing and who saw their post engagement – how many people see and interact with them – effectively disappear. And now the same’s happening over at Facebook, Instagram and Threads thanks to their parent company Meta’s new policy, “it’s great when you hate”.
Lol.
It’s not just the open embrace of online hate, with Meta happily saying it’ll allow the online abuse of women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and more.
Lmao, even.
Meta’s various properties also already engage in significant censorship, such as hiding posts by LGBTQ+ people and content it deems “political”.
Who knew Facebook was so based?
I’ve been online for over 30 years now, and in that time countless social networks have risen and fallen: USENET, CompuServe, AOL, MySpace, Friends Reunited, Friendster, Google Plus, Bebo, Vine, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut, Jaiku and many more.
Maybe it’s time to go offline?
Goodbye, horses.
@Western Bloke
2 hours LA to Tokyo puts you on a suborbital trajectory with a period of weightlessness during which 1 person in 3 would throw up at least the first time. I would seem a very long flight in a floating mist of other people’s last meals.
“Meta happily saying it’ll allow the online abuse of women, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and more”
Doing a good sales job there. Where do we sign up?
As Arthur C. Clarke once said: “For half the flight, the toilet is unreachable, for the other half it is out of order”
Paraphrasing Matt Ridley:
Invention is coming up with ideas that might work, innovation is using inventions to create something people want.
Regulation stifles innovation, because it increases the cost.
The EU is a regulatory monster, which might be why most of the dot com stuff happened in lower regulation USA.
WB,
I’ve no idea whether it will work or not but he’s an informed guy and claims to have talked to some of the people involved including the CEO of one of the companies and investors but I wouldn’t bet against it.
Well, Matt, he’s lifting that from Willam Baumol. Which is a very good source to lift from, obvs….
ChatGPT does do live internet searches. Norman, I don’t know what your wife asked but this is the result I got:
Again that’s the free version.
The thing about the these large language models is that they appear to be improving at an exponential rate.
BiND
How do you know that was a live internet search? The information it provided is 6 months old.
How about this:
“What questions did Kemi ask Starmer at today’s PMQs?
During today’s Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch pressed Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on his refusal to initiate a new national inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs. She suggested that without such an inquiry, there could be public concerns about a potential cover-up. “
(More deleted)
Martin – And here’s me banned from FB for telling a mostly harmless joke about a six-inch pianist.
BiND,
“I’ve no idea whether it will work or not but he’s an informed guy and claims to have talked to some of the people involved including the CEO of one of the companies and investors but I wouldn’t bet against it.”
Technically, it would work, but it’s the whole question of does it add value. Even for super rich people who can spend $100K on a flight? Would a private jet that takes off when they are ready and goes direct be any slower? And this isn’t like the era of Concorde. You’re competing with cheap, reliable videoconferencing and things like global digital banking and e-signatures.
Steve,
The biggest problem with Google is how much they shifted their algorithm towards SSL, speed and freshness.
So you once might have had some guy who wrote about photography and got a new camera and wrote a blog post. Stuck it on cheap hosting. It was a really good, really useful review. And it would score high. It was a thing that made him beer money.
You shift the algorithm to speed and freshness, a newer review of the same camera, on some dull corporate site with pros doing optimisation scores higher. You read the review and it’s just like an expanded version of Canons or Nikon’s blurb. It doesn’t have the thing that the amateur guy did, or using it for a few months and saying “it has this great little feature that I didn’t think I’d use but it works really well for X, Y or Z”.
The thing is all that stuff moved to Reddit. You find someone posting that sort of thing in r/dlsrcameras. So you can just go onto reddit and type in “Canon EOS123 review” in there.
I don’t type in “Restaurant Cheltenham” into Google. OpenTable or TripAdvisor are more useful, especially as I can narrow down price, type of cuisine etc.
If I generally want to know about Instanbul, I go straight to Wikipedia.
WB – I have noticed search brings up a ton of garbage results now that look like AI generated content. GIGO is going to be a problem for the LLMs if they keep training them on data scraped from the web.
Yarp, Reddit – this is why so many Google search autosuggestions now include the word “Reddit”. People are looking for authentic human opinions on stuff, but NB the big tech companies think it’s a great idea to add AI bots to their userbase now so idk how long Reddit will hold out in the face of the Skynet menace.
Candidly, after carefully considering the options, I believe our only hope lies in Butlerian Jihad. Long live the bloggers!
WB,
They’re talking about getting those flight down to the what people are paying now, they’re claiming a step change in the speed of commercial flights.
Western bloke, you make a very good point. I sometimes get a ride in a private jet ( old mate is the pilot) and the time difference to RPT is amazing…… turn up at the airport gate, climb aboard and go. No ghastly security, check in etc. ( Flying from a secondary airport, true, but it makes for a totally different experience.)
The problem with AI is it just rehashes existing stuff. Very quickly and increasingly well. But still old stuff.
Why it isn’t, to Ritchie’s ongoing wrongness, going to be of any use whatsoever in drug development, despite significant pharma wonga being poured into the bottomless pit. It’s not going to be any better at working out what might work than the best of what we have, it isn’t going to make the decision about whether something works well enough to market, humans will still do that. There might be a very niche role in optimising trials in terms of who to recruit, when to do assessments, sample size and such. Any niche application also suffers from the absolute paucity of data to train on. We’ve been doing halfway serious phase 3 clinical trials for what, 50 years? There’s a few hundred, maybe a thousand, worldwide, every year.
ChatGPT and such work because you can let them loose on the entire output of humanity since the beginning of civilization. Pharma companies are not routinely in the habit of sharing the comparatively infinitesimal amounts of data they have. Even if they were, it’s doubtful what you could achieve.
I would however be prepared to put my money in AI diagnostics, especially radiology.
What was the UK GE 2024 election result?
ChatGPT said:
ChatGPT
In the UK general election held on 4 July 2024, the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, achieved a significant victory, securing 412 seats yadda yadda yadda
Completely missing the 5 Reform seats, the Islamic candidates successes & how marginal some of those Labour seats have become. The Labour victory was almost a given. The interesting thing about the election was what happened away from the two main parties.
Hence my disinterest in things like ChatGPT. I like to make my own inquiries & my own evaluations. Understanding the results is what gives me my edge. Understandng rather than relying on someone else’s understanding will always put you ahead of the game.
BiND,
“They’re talking about getting those flight down to the what people are paying now, they’re claiming a step change in the speed of commercial flights.”
Good luck to them, truly. I love the idea of flying to Japan in 2 hours at some point if they can make it happen. I’d like to go there one day and 16 hours is offputting.
BiG,
“Why it isn’t, to Ritchie’s ongoing wrongness, going to be of any use whatsoever in drug development, despite significant pharma wonga being poured into the bottomless pit. It’s not going to be any better at working out what might work than the best of what we have, it isn’t going to make the decision about whether something works well enough to market, humans will still do that. There might be a very niche role in optimising trials in terms of who to recruit, when to do assessments, sample size and such. Any niche application also suffers from the absolute paucity of data to train on. We’ve been doing halfway serious phase 3 clinical trials for what, 50 years? There’s a few hundred, maybe a thousand, worldwide, every year.”
The thing with AI, generally, is it works to do some sorting into “most likely” for humans to process.
Take something like the police looking out for stolen cars. You’re driving down the road, there’s an ANPR camera. It reads your plate, splits it into characters then compares it with a dataset of images of other characters and based on closeness, decides what character it most likely is. If the “most likely” is strong enough, and you can get a whole set of characters, it then sends it to a database to check stolen. This all happens very quickly, fraction of a second. And if it is stolen, it sends a message to the coppers up ahead that AB123XYZ is approaching and it’s stolen.
Now, it doesn’t matter if that camera gets things wrong, because the coppers will see it as AG123XYZ and not stop it (it’s around 3% wrong). But the other 97%, they stop the car and deal with the villain.
And that’s low cost and hugely valuable way to nick car thieves and deter car theft. The police couldn’t do it manually. But you also can’t do it fully automatically because it’s imperfect.
Or how Visual Studio suggests code to me based on what I start typing. It’s often right, sometimes wrong. It can save me some keystrokes as I just hit enter to accept it. But you don’t want to use the code that ChatGPT writes. It’s really not very good.
Really? Whenever I get a search result, the reddit link is always, almost without exception, content-free. It will be someone asking a genuine question, a couple of answers of “yeah, I wish I knew that too” or “yeah, I have the same problem”, and then the rest is pointless sarky attempts to be the cool dude.
It is always a genuine surprise to get anything useful from a reddit link.
BiND
“What questions did Kemi ask Starmer at today’s PMQs?”
That question in effect instructs the AI to look for live data. Chatgpt doesn’t always (or even often?) look for live data. So it is not going to be as reliable as a search engine as an AI like Gemini that automatically looks for live data. Horses for courses…
Western Bloke,
Yeah, and I don’t see much if any use case for that in drug development.
Take the trial optimization. It’s obvious you need to recruit enough patients to show a statistically and clinically plausible effect. It’s also important to recruit just enough patients because every patient in a trial is a cost and a delay. Well we already run models of clinical trials to support that. There are whole companies that sell the service as some great whizz bang thing but it is basically feed parameters around expected efficacy, drop out rate and such in, work out your power (how much you are prepared to accept getting a wrong “negative” answer), and it spits out a number of patients to recruit. You can run thousands of models in a minute with varied parameters.
Said service providers are now doing the same thing, with !AI marketing added. Will it make any difference? Only to the price.
The way AI is being applied to drug development is classic “solution in search of a problem”. We already solved the problems, it’s basically the “slightly advanced arithmetic” end of statistics that helps.
I should add that much of this stuff, that can literally be done on the back of the proverbial fag packet, is driven by regulators and ethics committees expecting to see it. Without legal grounds to expect it but they don’t need legal, feelz does for them. “We calculated the sample size using tried and tested [reference] method, and arithmetically inarguble method Y” doesn’t cut it against “Lots of money was spent on OptiCorp Inc’s proprietary AI-driven service…”
Some people just always need the shiny new thing.
While of course no Pharmaco would use AI for such a purpose it would be magnificent at tidying up /making up trial reports. Check your fake data for Benford’s law breaches, that sort of thing. Perish the thought.
You would think so but it turns out it struggles with that as well. An issue with this as everything else is the really limited amount of training data available.
I’ve heard one anecdote of AI hallucinating non-existent adverse effects that were otherwise consistent with the known safety profile of a drug.
There’s no (for everyday values of “no”) fake data produced in clinical trials (from serious pharma companies) or included in study reports. The ways trials are gamed are far more clever and subtle than that.
How can any company rely on AI collated data/information? What happens if it just hallucinates something that doesn’t exist, thats rather crucial to the matter at hand? I mean is it going to take a building to collapse because the AI design failed catastrophically before people start to think rationally about this, rather than ‘Oooh, shiney shiney techy thing!!!!’?
bis,
“ Completely missing the 5 Reform seats, the Islamic candidates successes & how marginal some of those Labour seats have become. ”
You obviously missed this bit “ [there was more]”
But I agree analysing what it means is still a human soft skill that AI can’t offer but it did save me having to click through the number of links that a Google search of the same question provides to find the data Im looking for. And for completeness the AI search provided its references so I could click through and read myself.
Theo,
Give us an example of what you mean? Presumably you have an example of Google providing results that ChatGPT misses?
BiND – just ask Google whether Gemini is better than Chatgpt…You should get a summary of their relative strengths.