Modern MBA is Wrong about AI
AI is already changing the battlefield. It will change corporate life.
The Modern MBA video essay “Why AI is Tech’s Latest Hoax” has some issues with its logic. While there are some tech grifters out there who are treating AI like a piggybank of buzzwords, AI has some very real applications in Healthcare, Manufacturing and Defense that are already implemented today.
Here are the main problems with Modern MBA’s “AI Hoax” video.
1. Underestimating AI's Potential: While the video makes valid points about the hype cycle in tech, it may underestimate the genuine advancements and potential applications of AI. Unlike big data, AI has already demonstrated significant impacts in areas such as healthcare, finance, and natural language processing.
2. Generalizing Across Technologies: Modern MBA's critique seems to generalize the failures of previous tech trends to AI without acknowledging the unique aspects and successes of AI technology. AI has distinct capabilities that differentiate it from trends like blockchain and big data.
3. Ignoring Successful Implementations: The video does not sufficiently consider successful AI implementations that have led to substantial business improvements and innovations. For example, AI-driven automation, predictive analytics, and personalized marketing have already shown measurable benefits in various industries.
4. Simplifying Complex Issues: The critique may oversimplify the complex issues involved in AI adoption and implementation. Successful integration of AI requires careful planning, skilled personnel, and ongoing adaptation, which the podcast might not fully acknowledge.
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LLMs are not general purpose intelligence. A lot of the investment going into AI has been done without understanding that. ModernMBA is right in that there is presently a bubble and it will deflate because LLMs will fail to live up to expectations. This can be true even though, as Ryan correctly points out, machine learning has been and will be very successful in lots and lots of domains
You know, Ryan, I love and respect you but training that incorporates other peoples intellectual properties in a product that is sold without acknowledgement or royalty payment to the original creator, is theft. And this is what is going on in the cultural industries, music, publishing, motion picture and television production, right now. Moreover, AI in those industries will very soon be able to render whole classes of creative professions obsolete, not because they can make creative products better, but because they can make them cheaper and for a lot of commercial music and visual media, like movies and television (or books) mediocre is usually good enough for a general audience. Just ask somebody who used to work in television (me).
According to the Hollywood reporter, the CEO of Sony just announced that they expect to use AI to create this kind of material at a huge savings. And AI produced video is eerily effective, I have seen it. They sometimes get things like the numbers of fingers on a human hand wrong, but they will fix that as they steal more intellectual properties.
But most informed observers would say that having no human creators in industries which have a huge impact on culture and society is not a good idea. In the same way that our deindustrialization evaporated in a generation anyone with the skills necessary to bring back industry to the United States, all the writers, musicians, directors, producers, cinematographers and everybody else in these industries, will take their skills with them into oblivion. And from your point of view, would like to see the entire information industry, whose vulnerability you often talk about, controlled without a human hand on the steering wheel? And I am not getting into issues like the importance of art, because that is a little far from your original point.
I know that this is not the point of your video, but I think you are acting as a cheerleader for the concept of AI without thinking about or talking about the down side.
First they came for the cartoon animators, but I wasn’t a cartoon animator…
And if this is way off point and not at all relevant to your conversation, well, never mind…