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Merged Artificial Intelligence

Allbirds shares soar 580% after pivot from shoes to AI

Shares in shoe brand Allbirds, once seen on the feet of famous people like actor Ben Affleck and former US President Barack Obama, soared on Wednesday after it announced plans to pivot from footwear to artificial intelligence (AI).

The San Francisco-based firm said it has struck a $50m (£37m) deal to become an "AI compute infrastructure" business and change its name to NewBird AI.

Its long-term plan is to offer on-demand graphics chips and cloud services that are specially built for AI.

 
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Allbirds opened dozens of shops in the US and around the world including the UK, New Zealand, China and Singapore, targeting casual joggers, office workers and yoga lovers.

But the company has struggled to turn a profit since it listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York five years ago.
 
Both the linked post and the article the post links to are worth reading.
The source code for Claude Code was leaked a couple of weeks ago. It is staggeringly bad. I have never seen such low-quality code in production before. It contained things I'd have failed a first-year undergrad for writing. And, apparently, most of this is written with Claude Code itself.

But the most relevant part is that it contained three critical command-injection vulnerabilities.

 
I have several books on AI. They all explain LLM language. "It just makes up the last word" is how many dismiss them. But...I had a revelation. When we humans speak, we also are just making up the next word. We don't usually know the actual word that ends the sentence. We know the concept, but alternatives are available. And sometimes we break off...and wander off, as someone interrupted us and led our thoughts elsewhere.

Writing is slower, so we think ahead for several words.
 
no, we don't "just makes up the last word". We have a complete meaning in mind and form a sentence around it. The fact that we might struggle to come up with an exact word is beside the point.
In this, we are very much unlike LLMs.
 
Christopher Summerfield in his book on Strange New Minds goes into some detail on our brain. He claims our brains do not produce hard and fast answes but do in fact operate as probablistic systems. When you are forced to make quick decisions based on hunches, that is what those are. With a lot of bias.
 
Well. Current LLMs are either building a model from a corpus, or they're using that model to respond to prompts.

Their interactions with users and user prompts do not get fed back into the model. It doesn't learn as it goes. It doesn't update its model with new information it receives from prompts, nor from research it does when responding to prompts.

Claude is no smarter, no wiser, no more knowledgeable at the end of a week's worth of conversations about writing, testing, and debugging a program than it was a week earlier.

In this very important and apparently overlooked way, LLMs are nothing like human minds.
 

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