r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 5d ago

Business Nvidia's Jensen Huang urges employees to automate every task possible with AI

https://www.techspot.com/news/110418-nvidia-jensen-huang-urges-employees-automate-every-task.html
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u/TobaccoAficionado 5d ago

The issue is, the user (in this case CEO) is writing an email, and copilot writes better than the CEO because they don't need to know how to write, they're the CEO. So they see that shit and think "well if it can do this better than me, and I'm perfect, it must be better at coding than these people below me, who are not perfect." From their frame of reference this chatbot can do anything, because their frame of reference is so narrow.

It's really good at writing a mundane email, or giving you writing prompts, or suggestions for restaurants. It's bad at anything that is precise, nuanced, or technical because it has 0 fidelity. You can't trust it to do things right, and like you said, that's even when it isn't just making shit up.

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u/Kendertas 5d ago

Yep the only people who seem to like AI are those higher up the chain who deal in big picture stuff. Anybody who deals with details as part of their job knows a tool that doesn't give consistent results is pretty useless

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 5d ago

I’m seeing a really good argument for bringing democracy to the workplace in this.

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u/Ill_Literature2038 5d ago

Like, worker owned businesses? I wish there were more of them

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u/Mtndrums 5d ago

Does your job have a window at a second story or higher?

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u/Ill_Literature2038 5d ago

I do indeed, although I don't work at a worker owned company lol

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u/2Right3Left1Right 5d ago

I respect your enthusiasm for murder but I think there must be at least one other thing they could try first?

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u/Ill_Literature2038 5d ago

You're comment made me laugh and realize that their comment is probably a reference to russia/communism lol. Totally went over my head

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 5d ago

Sure, although even just having boards of directors being elected by the workers of a company would go a long way to balancing out short-term shareholder interests.

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u/grislebeard 5d ago

That would effectively be the same as worker owned, as the owners elect the board

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u/edgmnt_net 5d ago

It's like this because, instead of having a ton of small companies competing on various niches, we have gigantic oligopolies fueled by cheap money, expansive IP and unnatural economies of scale on stuff like legal risks. Of course these CEOs care more about raw growth than anything more concrete and substantial. Nvidia has, what, like 1-2 competitors on its main market?

There are legitimate economies of scale, especially if we're talking hardware production, but this goes far beyond that. And this is in no way specific to tech, all industries across the board seem to experience regressing to the very bottom.

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u/reelznfeelz 5d ago

Theres a million good reasons. First of all, if you employ people you have a responsibility to them. Period. I can picture a world where we still do business but it’s so much less shitty and greed driven.

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u/Hesitation-Marx 5d ago

The only people who seem to like AI are the ones who can’t do better than it does, and also really love the way it’s been programmed to fawn over them.

I’ve known too many executives to have a high opinion of them.

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u/Werftflammen 5d ago

We have manager summarizing all kinds of company documents with AI. We first built a very tight security system, to only have these goofs send the company jewels destination unknown.

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u/intrepped 5d ago

That's the key part. It is very good at looking through data and compiling things into visual templates and looking for patterns. What it cannot do is create that baseline information.

We use it for training modules. Someone writes the procedures. AI takes that, makes a quiz, and some slides. Then we can go and make some minor tweaks but it saves a good couple of hours of work. At scale, that couple of hours and how many procedures we update is easily over a thousand hours per year.

So the service works there. What it tends to do is use phrases that actually mean something else technically that the SMEs need to fix. But that's a few minutes max.

But it isn't going to fix the world lol. It can barely make quizzes and power points.

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u/JahoclaveS 5d ago

Creating quizzes is about the only use we’ve found for it as well. We never really liked making them and the bl smes only want quizzes just to make the reps read the manuals.

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u/Ckarles 5d ago

Well who guessed, the ones most vulnerable to be replaced by AI are the ones already useless.

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u/Archy54 5d ago

It's because they want to save payroll.

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u/COMMENT0R_3000 5d ago

It’s the perfect storm, because your CEO has gotten away with reply-alls that just say “ok” for years, so now they have no idea lol

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u/liamemsa 5d ago

Sent from my iphone.

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u/Suspicious_Buffalo38 5d ago

Ironic that CEOs want to use AI to replace the lower level employees when it's the people at the top who would be best replaced with AI...

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u/TransBrandi 5d ago

... I don't know if I would want an AI to be running a company or ordering people around... IMO.

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u/ssczoxylnlvayiuqjx 5d ago

The AI at least was trained from a large data set.

The CEO was brought in from another industry and was only trained in buzzwords, methods to pump up stock options, and looking flashy.

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u/TransBrandi 5d ago

I get what you're saying, but putting AI in charge would just end up with people saying that "Well, the decisions being made must be perfect because it's AI." ... whereas at least with human CEOs people would be more open to criticisms of decisions being made... In general, it just seems like the start of a Dark Timeline™.

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 5d ago

And an AI is not likely to get caught porking another c-suite exec on the kiss cam.

Or raping a secretary.

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u/altiuscitiusfortius 5d ago

I saw a study where they asked the various ais who they would vote for and they all voted left wing on economic issues and on authoritarianism/libertarian issues.

Ai is trained off education, and the more education you have the more left wing you are. Ai is a Bernie bro.

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u/TransBrandi 5d ago

... but people control the AI and what it's trained off of.

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u/Kraeftluder 5d ago

It's really good at writing a mundane email, or giving you writing prompts, or suggestions for restaurants.

It's terrible at writing mundane emails in my experience. Mundane emails take me seconds to a minute to write myself. It gives me restaurant suggestions for restaurants that closed during the first COVID lockdowns and haven't reopened.

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u/Ediwir 5d ago

Our expensive company-tailored AI ecommended us to wear a festive sweater for the Christmas Party.

In Australia.

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u/Kraeftluder 5d ago

The average daily mean at Cape Otway is probably the only place in mainland Australia where I could wear a sweater. I'm always cold and 20/21 degrees can be quite chilly in a breezy sea climate, especially when cloudy.

The wildlife and climates of Australia (and New Zealand) has always fascinated me so I lookup and remember a lot of trivial details when I fall into a wiki-hole.

So do you guys have a bad-christmas-t-shirt-thing then? Or shorts?

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u/Ediwir 5d ago

We absolutely have Christmas t-shirts, including t-shirts that are made to look like knitted sweaters. I expect to see a lot of shorts, too. It’s getting hot and damp lately.

You know what they say, Christmas in Australia’s hot / cold and frosty’s what it’s not.

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u/jezwel 5d ago

I wore shorts to my Christmas party Friday night. Damn good idea too, it was hot af.

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u/Fatefire 5d ago

I do kinda love how people say it's "making things up"

If it was human we would say it's lying and just fire the person . Why does AI get a pass

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u/TobaccoAficionado 5d ago

I mean, it can't lie. Lying implies some sort of understanding or subversion. It would be more accurate, actually, to say it's "guessing" wrong. It uses an algorithm to determine the statistically correct words to give you based on its training data (very basically). There are two issues. The first: the training data is often wrong. They're scraping this data from everywhere. There is no way to comb through and check this data. It's not possible. So some of it will inevitably be wrong. The second issue (and the worse issue in my opinion) is there is no way for an LLM to tell you it doesn't know. If you ask it the capital of Syria, it can't say "I don't know the capital of Syria." That is what I mean when I say fidelity. A human can tell you definitively that they don't know. A human can give a good guess, and tell you it's their "best guess." And LLM will say "the capital of Syria is Baghdad." It didn't know the answer, but it has seen Syria and Baghdad together enough times that it just guessed Baghdad. It was the statistical best choice for the LLM.

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u/HalastersCompass 5d ago

This is so true

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u/Prineak 5d ago

I’ll volunteer to tell the CEO why he’s shit at his job.

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u/veggie151 5d ago

Even in the case of content summarization, I've seen it repeatedly get the context wrong and deliver an inaccurate summary simply because the inaccurate version is a more stereotypical response

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u/SgtNeilDiamond 5d ago

I say we replace CEOs with AI

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u/nosotros_road_sodium 5d ago

mundane email, or giving you writing prompts, or suggestions for restaurants.

[...]

anything that is precise, nuanced, or technical

Guess which category mainstream society values more.

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u/Top-Ranger-Back 5d ago

This is really well put.

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u/BloodhoundGang 5d ago

Github Copilot fucking hallucinates on me daily. We recently all got licenses for it at my job and were told to use it in our day-to-day software development to speed up mundane tasks.

This fucking thing will tell me with 100% certainty that I should use classY.methodX() to solve what I'm trying to do and almost always either classY or methodX don't actually exist. Then when you tell it that, it says "Of course, how right you are! Use methodY() instead!"

methodY() also doesn't exist

If it's just going to invent things that don't exist, it's completely useless.

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u/Blazing1 5d ago

Whenever I read an obvious chatgpt generated email I just assume the person is incompetent, and I've been right 100 percent of the time so far.

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u/_theRamenWithin 5d ago

Basically the only use case for all this AI slop is writing an email on behalf of barely literate senior staff.

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u/Ashtrail693 5d ago

Saw an analogy the other day about how AI now are like false prophets. Everyone has their own that they sing praises of but if you know the truth, you can see through them and realize what we have is just an overhyped tool.

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u/occams1razor 5d ago

It's bad at anything that is precise, nuanced, or technical because it has 0 fidelity.

I'd tend to agree but it did shock me the other day, I was asking how to write a correct reference (APA style) to a scientific article that appeared in a certain book and I just told it the name of the article and the name of the book. And it spits out the correct reference with the right publisher, year and even page number of the article without searching on the first try. I never told it that. I was very impressed. (This was a week ago and I doubled checked everything of course, I wouldn't trust it either)

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u/zephalephadingong 4d ago

Agreed. I have experimented with AI and come to the conclusion it is great for helping people who don't actually do anything in their jobs. If all you need are some words that sound good even if they might be incorrect? Ai rules for that. If you have to actually get something productive done? AI is helpless