Technology Leader | Advisor | Mentor. No longer active here, find me on Bluesky @robbowley.net or LinkedIn https://xitter.cf/t.co/qYlwa4uIN2

Manchester, England
Joined January 2009
I'd you're personally looking for a last straw to leave this platform 👇
The bloke behind this account was jailed for 3 years today. Came out in interview he was making £1400 per month from X. Yip, he was being paid to post his vile filfh.
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Enjoying setting up home on BlueSky. Very much has the feels of early Twitter. Lots of activity with other people moving over too (esp UK folks) Have been recommended the Sky Bridge Chrome extension for finding and migrating ppl you follow here (link in reply)
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Rob Bowley retweeted
🧵What do the public think about the riots and those taking part in them? A reflection of legitimate concerns Or the actions of far right thugs? I've written for @FT today on new @moreincommon_ polling and focus group research into Britain & the riots. ft.com/content/46450035-2be0…
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First impressions of Bluesky - I like it and feel it's worth the effort of building back up over there. Most ppl I follow here have accounts there (see my Bsky follows if you're looking for folks) Let's face it, this place isn't going to get any better....
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I've not really been posting on here for a while, used to love this place Slowly migrating to Bluesky, let me know if you're on there (if you're still here, most seem to have gone already) robbowley.bsky.social Also: linkedin.com/in/robertbowley
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X added a setting for "we'll take your data to train grok" without any notice and just defaulted to "yes" for everyone. This is BAD.
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People who think agi is imminent aren’t overestimating how quickly ai will improve. They are underestimating how complex the world is. Being an expert on deep learning doesn’t necessarily make you an expert on how the world works.
it's just so weird how the people who should have the most credibility--sam, demis, dario, ilya, everyone behind LLMs, scaling laws, RLHF, etc--also have the most extreme views regarding the imminent eschaton, and that if you adopt their views on the imminent eschaton, most people in the field will think *you're* the crazy one
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How do the LLMs compare? Leveraging our "code grading" tech to introduce weekly computationally grounded LLM benchmarking... wolfram.com/llm-benchmarking…
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Rob Bowley retweeted
Newsletter: Goldman Sachs has called BS on Generative AI, and I believe that it's time that everybody follows suit - generative AI is unreliable, unsustainable, requires an entire rebuild of America's power grid, and is most decidedly not the future. wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/
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Java is dead Kubernetes is dead DevOps is dead And now: Serverless is dead... In this context, 'dead' means: mature, stable, well understood by the industry. It's not the hot topic for marketing, devrel, or conferences anymore.
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Rob Bowley retweeted
Given the divergence of platforms, I decided to return to blogging for longer form thoughts. To start, I thought I might as well offer an opinion on the question of the day: Is AI A Silver Bullet? lnkd.in/guzFyhUs You will want a coffee; it's long.
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Rob Bowley retweeted
What surprises me about talented people in tech is their capacity to be brilliant in one area and entirely delusional in another, even within their domain. For instance, those who invented modern machine learning, fully aware of its mechanics and inherent weaknesses, might still claim, "Superintelligence is near; we need to prepare." I want to scream, "How can you, knowing exactly how it works, believe it will soon consume us?" Yet, they somehow do. A language model, however good, is still a machine learning model—a simple mathematical formula whose parameters are only as good as the dataset used to estimate them. Any dataset, no matter how large, has high-density regions, like news articles or fiction books, and low-density regions, like cutting-edge scientific and medical articles. Thus, the model excels in high-density areas and becomes unreliable in low-density ones. Anyone capable of training an LLM knows this; it's common machine learning knowledge. Yet, they persist in saying "superintelligence is near." So, I wonder if it's just human nature to excel in one area and be utterly mistaken in another, or if they are cold-blooded liars causing panic to profit from scared people?
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In the late 1960s top airplane speeds were increasing dramatically. People assumed the trend would continue. Pan Am was pre-booking flights to the moon. But it turned out the trend was about to fall off a cliff. I think it's the same thing with AI scaling — it's going to run out; the question is when. I think more likely than not, it already has.
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If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
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No, LinkedIn, I don't want help from AI to enhance my posts. Seeing similar in many tools I use. The horse has truly bolted. It won't be long before most of what you read on the Internet is AI written. ...which the models will then be trained on. #enshittification
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Classic "Agile is dead" post. Pointing to lots of things as Agile that aren't working, which are the exact opposite of anything described in the Agile Manifesto
The tech industry has moved on from agile. It was a clear step in the right direction, but we shook it down for what it was worth and left the rest behind. Now practicing a strict version of agile is a sign of rigidity and a top-down management, ironically.
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If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely - not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers: news.ycombinator.com/item?id… 1/
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Anyone who says "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" has been suckered in by Big Tech, whose cargo-cult version of markets and the discipline they impose on companies. 1/
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