The funny thing about Microsoft's new Recall feature is how little actual "AI" it's doing. It's basically just making automatic screen captures, then running OCR and image recognition to create a semantic index you can search. Unless I'm missing something, there's no LLM (or small language model) used in it. Maybe in parsing queries?
@ianbetteridge I think this mostly illustrates the point that "AI" has become a completely hollow signifier by this point. I've been in a loooot of futures workshops in the last nine months, on all sorts of topics, and it's become obvious to me that Those Two Letters are what people now say where before we would have just said "computers".
@ianbetteridge Which is to say: everyone's badging everything as "AI", regardless of how it actually works, because that's just the playground catchphrase this semester.
@ianbetteridge I can only assume that AI is suffering from the same ‘it's sexy, everything is AI' we suffer from at work with one of our mobile apps. It's the new sexy thing so everyone wants to 'integrate with the app' or in some way associate their project with the app even if they have no idea what they are talking about.
@ianbetteridge Doing screen caps seems like a very inefficient way to do this when you literally control the underlying APIs used by the apps. Like, why would you need AI/OCR to read the text? But yeah, got to juice the company valuation by claiming AI everywhere.
@ianbetteridge My main takeaway from doing (admittedly fairly high-level overview type) writing, research, and documentation in the current machine learning/AI space is that a load of things that weren't AI two years ago are suddenly AI.
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