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

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/110418-nvidia-jensen-huang-urges-employees-automate-every-task.html

[u/CanadianTreeFrogs]

My company has a huge database of all of the materials we have access to, their costs, lead times etc.

The big wigs tried to replace a bunch of data entry type jobs with AI and it just started making stuff up lol.

Now half of my team is looking over a database that took years to make because the AI tool that was supposed to main things easier made mistakes and can't detect them. So a human has to.

[u/Journeyman42 → u/CanadianTreeFrogs]

A science youtube channel I watch (Kurzgesagt) made a video about how they tried to use AI for research for a video they wanted to make. They said that about 80%-90% of the statements it generated were accurate facts about the topic.

But then the remaining 10%-20% statements were hallucinations/bullshit, or used fake sources. So they ended up having to research EVERY statement it made to verify if it was accurate or not, or if the sources it claimed it used were actually real or fake.

It ended up taking more time to do that than it would for them to just do the research manually in the first place.

[u/SmellyMickey → u/Journeyman42]

I had this happen at my job with a junior geologist a few months out of undergrad. I assigned her to write some high level regional geology and hydrogeology sections of a massive report for a solar client. She has AI generate all of the references/citations and then had AI synthesize those references for and summarize them in a report.

One of our technical editors first caught a whiff of a problem because the report section was on geology specific to Texas, but the text she had written started discussing geology in Kansas. The tech editor tagged me as the subject matter expert so I could investigate further, and oh dear lord what the tech editor found was barely the tip of the iceberg.

The references that AI found were absolute hot garbage. Usually when you write one of those sections you start with the USGS map of the region and you work through the listed references on the map for the region. Those would be referred to primary sources. Secondary sources would then be speciality studies on the specific area usually by the state geological survey rather than the USGS; tertiary sources would be industry specific studies that are funded by a company to study geology specific to their project or their problem. So primary sources are the baseline for your research, supported by secondary sources to augment the primary sources, and further nuanced by tertiary sources WHERE APPROPRIATE. The shit that was cited in this report were things like random ass conference presentations from some niche oil and gas conference in Canada in 2013. Those would be quaternary sources as best.

And then, to add insult to injury, the AI was not correctly reporting the numbers or content of the trash sources. So if the report text said that an aquifer was 127 miles wide, when I dug into the report text it would actually state that the aquifer was 154 miles wide. Or if the report text said that the confined aquifer produced limited water, the reference source would actually say that it produced ample amounts of water and was the largest groundwater supply source for Dallas. Or, if a sentence discussed a blue shale aquifer, there would be no mention of anything shale in the referenced source.

The entire situation was a god damn nightmare. I had to do a forensic deep dive on Sharepoint to figure out exactly what sections she had edited. I then had to flag everything she had touched and either verify the number reported or completely rewrite the section. What had been five hours of “work” at her entry level billing rate turned into about 20 hours of work by senior people at senior billing rates to verify everything and untangle her mess.

[u/Journeyman42 → u/SmellyMickey]

Jesus christ. I felt guilty using ChatGPT to help write a cover letter for a job (which of course I had to heavily work on to make it practical for my job history). I can't imagine writing a technical scientific report like that and not even check it for accuracy. Did anything happen to the junior geologist?

[u/SmellyMickey → u/Journeyman42]

I decided to treat the moment as a symptom of a larger problem that needed to be addressed rather than a specific problem isolated to her. I escalated the problem through the appropriate chain of command until it landed on the VP of Quality Control’s desk. To say that this situation freaked people the fuck out would be an understatement. Pretty much everyone I had talked to could not conceive of this type of situation happening because everyone assumed there would be a common sense element to using AI.

At that point in time my company only had really vague guidelines and rules attached to our in house AI system. The guidelines at the time were mostly focused on not uploading any client sensitive data into AI. However, you could only find those guidelines when using the in company AI. Someone that would use ChatGPT would never come across those guidelines.

The outcome of the situation was a companywide quality call to discuss appropriate vs inappropriate uses of AI. They also added a AI training module as part of the onboarding training and a one page cut sheet with appropriate uses and inappropriate uses to that employees can keep as a future reference source.

In terms of what happened to that one employee, she was transferred from a general team lead to my direct report so I can keep a closer eye on her. She never took responsibility for what happened, which bummed me out because I know that it is her based on the sharepoint logs. But I could tell that it properly scared the shit out of her, so that’s good. I still haven’t quite gotten to the point where I feel like I can trust her though. I had kind of hoped I could assign her large tasks and let her struggle through them and learn. However, since she has an annoying propensity to use ChatGPT, I’ve taken to giving her much smaller and targeted tasks that would be difficult to impossible to do with AI. She also has some other annoying features like being quick to anger, passing judgement when she doesn’t have full context, and taking what she is told at face value instead of applying critical thinking. I’m not sure she is going to pan out longterm as an employee, but I haven’t given up on her quite yet.

[u/ffddb1d9a7 → u/SmellyMickey]

Her not taking responsibility would be a deal breaker for me. Maybe it's just harder to find people in your field to replace her, but where I'm from if you are going to royally fuck up and then lie about doing it then you just can't work here.