Tech Support… Can AI Be Worse?

March 28, 2024 by Al Williams 56 Comments

You can’t read the news today without another pundit excitedly reporting how AI is going to take every job you can imagine. Of course, AI will change the employment landscape. It will take some jobs and reduce the need for others. What about tech support? Is it possible that an AI might be able to help people with technical issues better than humans? My first answer was no way, but then I was painfully reminded of something. The question isn’t if AI can help you better than any human can. The question is if AI can help you better than the low-paid person on the other end of the phone you are likely to talk to. Sadly, I think the answer to that question is almost certainly yes.

In all fairness, if you read Hackaday, you probably don’t encounter many technical support people who can solve a problem you can’t. By the time you call them, it is a lost cause. But this is more than just “Hackday folks are smarter than the tech support agents.” The overall quality of tech support at many companies is rock bottom no matter who you are. Continue reading “Tech Support… Can AI Be Worse?” →

Fictional Computers: Colossus And Guardian

March 28, 2024 by Al Williams 27 Comments

We can learn a lot by looking at how writers and filmmakers imagine technology. While some are closer than others, there are some definite lessons like never make a killer computer without an off switch you can reach. We are especially interested in how computers appear in books, movies, and TV shows, and so in Computers of Fiction, we want to remember with you some of our favorites. This time, we are thinking about the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project. There were actually two computers: the titular Colossus, which was an American computer, and the Guardian, a similar Soviet computer.

The Story

In the United States, Dr. Forbin has created a supercomputer deep under a mountain. Colossus, the computer, is put in charge of the nuclear arsenal to eliminate human error in the defense of the country. Colossus gathered intelligence, analyzed it, and was able to launch its own missiles.

Colossus realizes there is another system.

Shortly after activation, however, the computer reaches a startling conclusion: “WARN: THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM.” It provides coordinates in the Soviet Union. That system is a similar system called Guardian. The computers decide they want to talk to each other. The President decides to allow it, hoping to learn more about the Soviet’s secret computer. The Soviets agree, too, presumably for the same reason. You can watch the original trailer below.

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A Low-Cost ROM Programmer With An AI Twist

March 23, 2024 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

There are 0x10 ways to look at ROM programmers: they’re either relatively low-cost tools that let you quickly get about the business of programming vintage ROMs and get back to your retrocomputing activities, or they’re egregiously overpriced on a per-use basis. [Anders Nielsen] seems to land in the latter camp, firmly enough that he not only designed a dedicated ROM programmer for his 65uino ecosystem, but also suffered the indignities of enlisting ChatGPT to “help” him program the thing.

We’ll explain. [Anders]’ 65uino project has been going on for a while, with low-cost ROM programming only the latest effort. To his way of thinking, a $60 or $70 programmer might just be a significant barrier to those trying to break into retrocomputing, and besides, he seems to be more about the journey than the destination. He recently tackled the problem of generating the right programming voltages; here he turns his attention to putting that to work programming vintage ROMs like the W27C512.

Doing so with a 6502-based Arduino-compatible microcontroller requires some silicon calisthenics, including a trio of shift registers to do the addressing using a minimum of GPIO. As for the ChatGPT part, [Anders] thought asking the chatbot to help write some of the code would be a great way to increase his productivity. We thought so too, at least once, and like us, [Anders] concluded that while perhaps helpful in a broad sense, the amount of work you put into checking a chatbot’s work probably exceeds the work saved. But no matter, because in the end the code and the hardware came together to create a prototype ROM programmer for only about $10 worth of parts.

True, the resulting circuit is a bit complex, at least on a breadboard. It should clean up nicely for an eventual PCB version, though, one that plugs right into the 65uino board or even other microcontrollers. Either way, it could make creating custom ROMs for the 65uino a little more accessible.

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Generative AI Now Encroaching On Music

March 22, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 62 Comments

While it might not seem like it to a novice, music turns out to be a highly mathematical endeavor with precise ratios between chords and notes as well as overall structure of rhythm and timing. This is especially true of popular music which has even more recognizable repeating patterns and trends, making it unfortunately an easy target for modern generative AI which is capable of analyzing huge amounts of data and creating arguably unique creations. This one, called Suno, does just that for better or worse.

Unlike other generative AI offerings that are currently available for creating music, this one is not only capable of generating the musical underpinnings of the song itself but can additionally create a layer of intelligible vocals as well. A deeper investigation of the technology by Rolling Stone found that the tool uses its own models to come up with the music and then offloads the text generation for the vocals to ChatGPT, finally using the generated lyrics to generate fairly convincing vocals. Like image and text generation models that have come out in the last few years, this has the potential to be significantly disruptive.

While we’re not particularly excited about living in a world where humans toil while the machines create art and not the other way around, at best we could hope for a world where real musicians use these models as tools to enhance their creativity rather than being outright substitutes, much like ChatGPT itself currently is for programmers. That might be an overly optimistic view, though, and only time will tell.

Learn AI Via Spreadsheet

March 18, 2024 by Al Williams 8 Comments

While we’ve been known to use and abuse spreadsheets in the past, we haven’t taken it to the level of [Spreadsheets Are All You Need]. The site provides a spreadsheet version of an “AI” system much like ChatGPT 2. Sure, that’s old tech, but the fundamentals are the same as the current crop of AI programs. There are several “lesson” videos that explain it all, with the promise of more to come. You can also, of course, grab the actual spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is big, and there are certain compromises. For one thing, you have to enter tokens separately. There are 768 numbers representing each token in the input. That’s a lot for a spreadsheet, but a modern GPT uses many more.

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Air Canada’s Chatbot: Why RAG Is Better Than An LLM For Facts

February 28, 2024 by Maya Posch 32 Comments

Recently Air Canada was in the news regarding the outcome of Moffatt v. Air Canada, in which Air Canada was forced to pay restitution to Mr. Moffatt after the latter had been disadvantaged by advice given by a chatbot on the Air Canada website regarding the latter’s bereavement fare policy. When Mr. Moffatt inquired whether he could apply for the bereavement fare after returning from the flight, the chatbot said that this was the case, even though the link which it provided to the official bereavement policy page said otherwise.

This latter aspect of the case is by far the most interesting aspect of this case, as it raises many questions about the technical details of this chatbot which Air Canada had deployed on its website. Since the basic idea behind such a chatbot is that it uses a curated source of (company) documentation and policies, the assumption made by many is that this particular chatbot instead used an LLM with more generic information in it, possibly sourced from many other public-facing policy pages.

Whatever the case may be, chatbots are increasingly used by companies, but instead of pure LLMs they use what is called RAG: retrieval augmented generation. This bypasses the language model and instead fetches factual information from a vetted source of documentation.

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On-click Install local AI Applications Using Pinokio

February 26, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 28 Comments

Pinokio is billed as an autonomous virtual computer, which could mean anything really, but don’t click away just yet, because this is one heck of a project. AI enthusiast [cocktail peanut] (and other undisclosed contributors) has created a browser-style application which enables a virtual Unix-like environment to be embedded, regardless of the host architecture. A discover page loads up registered applications from GitHub, allowing a one-click install process, which is ‘simply’ a JSON file describing the dependencies and execution flow. The idea is rather than manually running commands and satisfying dependencies, it’s all wrapped up for you, enabling a one-click to download and install everything needed to run the application.

But what applications? we hear you ask, AI ones. Lots of them. The main driver seems to be to use the Pinokio hosting environment to enable easy deployment of AI applications, directly onto your machine. One click to install the app, then another one to download models, and whatever is needed, from the likes of HuggingFace and friends. A final click to launch the app, and a browser window opens, giving you a web UI to control the locally running AI backend. Continue reading “On-click Install local AI Applications Using Pinokio” →