I questioned the mostly uncritical news coverage of Ed, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new chatbot in March. Turns out the news is much worse than a crappy chatbot experience. The whole project with AllHere is crashing and burning. The worst part is that no one seems interested in the story.
I briefly forgot this was your blog, @Rob, and was going to post to my LinkedIn and tag you before I realized, haha. Great points all around - it's a little (or a lot? ) fools gold right now.
Ha! Hey Will! I think there has been a lot of enthusiasm (and anxiety) over the past year about generative AI. Much of it will turn out to be unwarranted as people realize LLMs are not as useful as they seem in demos and companies that try to replace human workers with them discover that the jobs humans do consist of tasks that LLMs are not able to do.
Great essay. The NYT reported on this debacle this morning. They missed the opportunity to use that amazing pic of Cavalho and "ED," however. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/ai-chatbot-los-angeles-schools.html
Thanks for the pointer to the NYT article. It is a relief to see a mainstream newspaper cover this. I'll update the essay to reflect the coverage.
I briefly forgot this was your blog, @Rob, and was going to post to my LinkedIn and tag you before I realized, haha. Great points all around - it's a little (or a lot? ) fools gold right now.
Ha! Hey Will! I think there has been a lot of enthusiasm (and anxiety) over the past year about generative AI. Much of it will turn out to be unwarranted as people realize LLMs are not as useful as they seem in demos and companies that try to replace human workers with them discover that the jobs humans do consist of tasks that LLMs are not able to do.