WSJ: “The tech labor market is in an unbalanced state. There is demand for a specific type of tier-one AI talent—namely those who have the technical knowledge or experience working with large language models, or LLMs, that fuel chatbots with the ability to generate content. There are companies seeking candidates with those skills, but not enough workers who are qualified to do them. Then there is everyone else. Thousands of people have been laid off in the past few years, and many of those who remain employed are dealing with new management styles, reorganizations and microcuts, as more resources get shifted into AI. Those workers are now taking courses in AI, adding buzzwords to their résumés and competing in an increasingly crowded field.”
NYTimes: “In the fall of 2020, Amazon looked unstoppable. The pandemic lockdowns had supercharged its e-commerce business, and executives were busy hiring an army of new workers and expanding the number of Amazon fulfillment warehouses across the US. But the tech giant would soon face the biggest threat to its online shopping empire in recent memory, and it would come from an unlikely place: China. Over the last few years, two Chinese-owned e-commerce platforms—Shein and Temu—have quietly become some of the most popular shopping websites in the US. Shein specializes in low-end women’s fashion, while Temu focuses on home decor and household items—the same type of affordable, made-in-China products that many American consumers have come to associate with Amazon.”
Mint: “Systems that rely on more than one chatbot or use multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) are called multi-agent systems (MAS). A chatbot on the website of a bank, auto, insurance, edtech or any other company has improved over the years, thanks to advances in AI and natural language processing. But it still falls short of answering questions that might require more ‘human-like’ capabilities or pulling data from different domains. The solution lies in using multiple bots or more than one AI (artificial intelligence) model—each with a different, specialized capability, and complementing each other to deliver a better response…Just as teams of humans are better in tackling complex problems, more than one chatbot will improve customer interactions. So, a Hindi language chatbot could combine with a math teaching bot and deliver math lessons in Hindi. Each is a separate LLM (which helps chatbots understand human input and offer answers) and is better at executing specialist tasks.”
Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy: “An LLM is a mathematical model coded on silicon chips. It is not an embodied being like humans. It does not have a “life” that needs to eat, drink, reproduce, experience emotion, get sick, and eventually die. It is important to understand the profound difference between how humans generate sequences of words and how an LLM generates those same sequences. When I say “I am hungry,” I am reporting on my sensed physiological states. When an LLM generates the sequence “I am hungry,” it is simply generating the most probable completion of the sequence of words in its current prompt. It is doing exactly the same thing as when, with a different prompt, it generates “I am not hungry,” or with yet another prompt, “The moon is made of green cheese.” None of these are reports of its (nonexistent) physiological states. They are simply probabilistic completions. We have not achieved sentient AI, and larger language models won’t get us there.”
NYTimes: “China’s industrial dominance is underpinned by decades of experience using the power of a one-party state to pull all the levers of government and banking, while encouraging frenetic competition among private companies. China’s unrivaled production of solar panels and electric vehicles is built on an earlier cultivation of the chemical, steel, battery and electronics industries, as well as large investments in rail lines, ports and highways. From 2017 to 2019, it spent an extraordinary 1.7 percent of its gross domestic product on industrial support, more than twice the percentage of any other country, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.”
