the malicious optimism of AI-first companies
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ค. 2024
- The CEO of Zoom wants AI clones in meetings at the Verge: www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/241...
Your guide to post-quantum end-to-end encryption and how Zoom can help: www.zoom.com/en/blog/guide-to...
Link to Patreon - one exclusive video per month: / acollierastro
I have merch-store.dftba.com/collections/a...
Credit for the powerpoint slides (thank you!): This presentation template was created by Slidesgo,and includes icons by Flatiron, and infographics &images by Freepik
0:00 The Article
4:17 Chapter One: It's down the stack.
8:32 Chapter Two: A list of second questions.
24:23 Chapter Three: Being a handsome billionaire does not make you smart.
29:28 Chapter Four: Zoom is not a video conferencing company.
35:30 Chapter Five: Quantum Quantum Quantum
44:07 Chapter Six: Never attribute malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
This comment section is going to be full of people pointing out that the stack from "full stack developer" and "stack overflow" are different stacks. A difference which doesn't affect her argument much
...but that was the joke...
@@acollierastrongl it flew right over my head
@@timonsku If I pin the comment will people realize how funny I am?
@@acollierastro it'll act as a filter =) by all means do it.
@@acollierastro Well, it has a better chance of success than Zoom, the video conference software company, has of developing AI avatars.
CEO: 90% of everyone's job is reading emails and going to meetings, right?
Everyone: ::sharpens the guillotines::
_Maintenance de routine!!_
What do you do? I try to minimize email and meetings so I can get work done.
@raygivler are you aware not everyone works corporate office jobs
And the more emails and meetings you do, they more you are paid. One burger flipper at McDonald's who only screws up an order once a day does more for the company's profitablity than all of the C-Suite combined. Outside of the CEO, COO, and CFO everything can be handled WAY below the top floor. Stop wasting money giving your stupid friends and incompetent nephews jobs!!!
@@cajunguy6502 companies well known for passing money away and not being greedy. I pray you're 16 and your head hasn't suffered trauma.
14:53 ahh now I understand. He thinks people will be replaceable by AI because a CEO is already an unaccountable black box that takes emails as input and bad decisions and hallucinated reality as outputs
In this case he is unto something, this pitch serms to be tailor-mad for my lazy incompetent boss and tbh if she were replaced by AI it would problably be a slight improvement.
Imagine how much money companies could save by replacing the C-Suite?!
LOL this thought was sort of lurking around in my head and you just put it into words perfectly
Got his ass
The fact that these CEOs think that AI can attend meetings and be just as effective tells you just how useless most meetings they demand are... enter SCRUM...
And if AI are the only ones going to meetings... why aren't we just integrating them? It's insane to think that's how computer connections work. How is this guy a CEO of a technology company?
the answer to that question is: capital.
he had capital and thus he accumulated more capital and power... which in turn allowed him to aquire more capital
no skills or knowledge required. just capital.
Maybe they will be as effective as humans in meetings, because my experience, tell´s me that meetings are just a waste of time. They like meetings, because that way, they don´t work!
It's like they think, if they have all your Jira tickets and IM's they have enough to make an AI clone. Maybe if I work remote, and they capture my every interaction with the computer, they can?
The thought of a bunch of AIs having superficial conversations about the weather with each other over Zoom to fulfill some rich idiot's deranged idea of "productivity" is morbidly hilarious
After ten seconds I was screaming in my head "But this will make video conferencing obsolete! Why are you promoting this, CEO of Zoom?"
Also, this reminds me of how people in the 1950s predicted that in the far future of the 1980s, everyone would have a robot to play table tennis against. They basically predicted Pong, but as they couldn't predict computer games they instead imagined humanoid robots able to play physical games. Which still isn't a thing.
A table tennis robot is readily possible with present-day technology; it'd just be really expensive for the value it provides.
@@Ithirahad th-cam.com/video/Jhe1h-eip2Q/w-d-xo.html, not even too expensive it looks like
A future where we all each have an individual robot that just plays pong is the superior time-line
@@Ithirahadwe have those at the Carnegie science center I think, but they serve as mostly demos of what robots can do
It could be a thing, but few people want to play against a robot.
"Daniel, HR needs to talk to you about one of your AI zoom clones"
“Im not racist, the clone is probably just bugged”
“Daniel this was a physical conversation. There’s nothing digital.
“Idk the problem is probably down the stack”
InfoSec needs to talk to you about AI clones. Also the SEC, because it leaked the Q4 results. We also wired $4 million to some guy in Weed, CA. No, the AI did not hallucinate that name.
This has me laughing so hard.
"Sure, I'll tell one of my clones to call HR"
"No officer I've been sitting home all day, oh I did take the dog for a walk. Puppers decided to take your mom for a walk while at it. But that was just around the block I haven't even gotten in my car today so there HAS to be some mistake here..."
I watched you hand him the bag, take the money and drive off. It was so obvious I think I heard a baby with its mom near by say "a deal!" as its first words....
"Must be one of those weird zoom A.I clones that are going around. beyond that I have no idea what's going on"
Well it was but the moment we moved in he, as our tech put it 'moved to a different algorithm that had given the name and address of who sourced it's code and set its parameters up' plus the Zoom account that it used instead of a phone is linked to your accounts, and social media...
"Figures, they gotta do something with all that data that the internet collects off us. I think your investigation is starting to lean towards big-tech not me..."
Well sit tight. we will have to wait a minute until the A.I clone of the
judge who signed off on the arrest warrant to show up to expire it...
Wait a minute.i am suddenly starting to realize maybe Zoom is onto something here...
I love that this CEO is just like "Yeah an AI clone could do my job easily in 5 years." What a self-own.
In fairness I'm sure right now his devs could cook up a script that was great at making C-suite executive decisions in a few weeks; the challenge is hobbling its performance to better match the faulty decision-making of the average flesh creature CEO.
Felt the exact same thing lmao. More than anything this idea just goes to show how useless certain jobs are. Really showing his own ass here haha
Maybe they can fire every CEO and hire more useful workers, like customer service.
Considering how mind-bogglingly stupid most CEOs are, they could do his job now.
i had same reaction. like his meetings must be a lot simpler than mine. he said the AI summaries are really accurate. i'm using zoom's AI summaries.. i like that they're there but they are FAR from accurate. mostly it's good for quickly getting a sense of what was talked about in a meeting... but it mixes up things that are said, so you can't trust any of the actual information in the summary.
either he's not using the summaries or his meetings are way easier for an LLM to summarize than mine are.
I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' electric monk:
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
I'm quite certain that even Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, a company that looks like this 📉, would appreciate the synthwave aesthetic on your transitions.
A lot more production quality than previous vids lol
I so love the idea of using "down the stack" to just assume some tech intern will turn anything into a low cost microservice you can purchase an api key for to solve your impossible problems.
"Yeah we're a bicycle startup but the hook is we let you ride back in time to visit dead loved ones. Oh time travel? Nah we're not working on it, but it's down the stack. Someone'll offer a code integration for it. I give it 6 years."
This comment is gold
When they release the time travel webhook I am definitely not using to go backwards in time but to get right the hell out of here.
Lol !!!
Basically the CEO goes 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️ 💰 and the line goes up
It's literally just "a wizard will fix it"
Plot twist: This was an interview with an AI clone and it hallucinated the entire interview.
LOL 🤣
I mean it already reads like it was written by an AI.
Yes, because most of that is already possible. Sale people talking bullshit 90% of the time to get the commission.
How dare you make exactly the same joke I was going to 😂
That sounds like a script for "The IT Crowd".
There's already a lawsuit where a company had to pay for an AI Chatbot's error
Feb 23, 2024 - When Air Canada's chatbot gave incorrect information to a traveller, the airline argued its chatbot is "responsible for its own actions". The passenger claimed to have been misled on the airline’s rules for bereavement fares when the chatbot hallucinated an answer inconsistent with airline policy. The Tribunal in Canada’s small claims court found the passenger was right and awarded them $812.02 in damages and court fees.
That is such an insignificant amount of dollars lmao
@@aceman0000099 to the company - yes... to that person? that might be a VERY significant amount
@@SharienGaming yep
The rare win for humanity.
the chatbot is responsible? So they should slap the chatbot with a fine to pay out of its own chatbot imaginary bank and put the chatbot in jail overnight too. So stupid.
The last human working at a company staffed by ai clones is actually a great scifi short story idea
It got turned into a shitty game called "the last worker"
I think Angela has made one kinda major mistake in her analysis: as a scientist she is used to having meetings that matter, where people use information to solve problems. Those are categorically different from the meetings Eric Yuan (the CEO of Zoom) is talking about. When you deal with tech companies there are A LOT of useless meetings where people in charge make small talk and say a lot of nothing for 45 minutes, and then spend 30 seconds saying it's ok for the people who actually know what they're doing to get back to work.
CEOs would rather create robots to have meetings with each other rather than acknowledge that a lot of the things happening at the management level are a waste of time.
But what are the people who rely on meetings to avoid actually working going to do all day then?
"We would like to remind our employees that as a company policy, it is not allowed to send you Zoom AI clone to the all hands meeting. You need to show up in human person instead."
IDK, most academics I've met complain about having too many useless meetings they have to go to. Probably doesn't compare to the job of somebody who's main job is going to useless meetings.
Many workers (even professors) need to suffer through useless meetings, and all we can do is grumble about it. But it doesn't make sense for a CEO to complain about that since they're responsible for solving fundamental organizational problems like that. Effective meetings don't happen by accident
Watch full video, she talks about it. It's down the stack.
I'm a software engineer. I can't trust a junior to substitute for myself in a meeting. Another human being, who went to university, got a degree. How the hell will an AI agent take my place in those meetings?
the only way that could work is if the meeting is completely pointless and it doesnt matter what the chatbot says XD
@@SharienGaming So half the meetings engineers are forced to go to.
@@SkorjOlafsen hah yeah
i really appreciate that the folks in my workplace understand the harm of pointless meetings - still remember one of my bosses ripping a bunch of folks from the customer a new one for wasting everyones time in a meeting where at least half the people had nothing to contribute or gain and the other half were talking in circles without a clue of where to go with it XD
appearances like that really helped cutting down the pointless meetings
But the Overlords won't know the difference... for a while... and then instead of complaining about the ai agent, it will be the human who gets the backlash
If an LLM can do the meeting, then the problem is too trivial to have a meeting in the first place.
“Zoom is a company that looks like this” is the most savage burn 😂😂
Companies are their stock price.. AM I RITE ?
@@_FFFFFF_ if that’s what they prioritize then yes
@@_FFFFFF_ 🍅🍅🍅
btw this video is one of my favorite genres of media, which is "normal intelligent person who's not immersed in tech industry hype hears a tech guy and says the obvious"
Emperor has no clothes - genre
same
@@eetuhalonen9902 omg that's perfect
Except "normal intelligent person" hardly applies here.
As with any new advancement, focus is on pie-in-the-sky utopian bullshit. One, LLMs aren't ready, not even close. It's like the PDA hype of the 00's, when a PDA was an $800 replacement for a pocket notebook and a pencil. Give it a decade and these kinds of advanced algorithms might be less buggy, but they won't be used to send people to the beach. They'll be used for bioanalytics to show that Stacy in accounting is 13% less attentive today and to adjust her pay for the day accordingly. They'll be used to further existing trends like targeted ads or the replacement of CSRs in favor of chat bot assistants. Imagine, when Google can *really* pinpoint how many sponsored results they can feed you before you get frustrated and use Duck Duck Go! An LLM is just a bigger algorithm. That's it. It's not new tech, it's just a small advance in existing tech.
As someone who recently lost her job to AI, this video gives me hope. Here's hoping corporations start to realize how stupid and useless these "tools" are, the way they did with NFTs.
Maybe somewhat, but not entirely. AI image generators have already proven their value as quick low effort ways to get informally-adequate (fine for tiktok) pictures; likewise, other AI types will always have a use for certain mediocre tasks. Social interaction would not be one of them though
Nah, AI is here to stay. It follows very closely Hegelian dialectics aka artistic process aka the way human mind operates (new things are compared to old, weights assigned to comparable differences in them, and from then on the new thing becomes a thing unto itself. It's not things by themselves objectively, but rather how the human mind recognizes them as concepts; it's how the whole worldview develops - and LLMs operate the same way)
Those corporations will still go under though because they don't understand what's it about and they refuse to study. They'll try to make a chatroom full of bots, try to boil down the work process to opening emails, instead of realizing that videocalls between bots are entirely useless, just an extra layer of wasted electricity
This isn't how humans operate though. There is not time or metabolic energy to integrate huge anounts of data. It's why writing, paper, and later computers lead to a huge progress. It allowed things that just were not feasible before.
The first step in learning to draw is to stop seeing symbols. Stop thinking "this leaf should look like a leaf" and draw what you are looking at. AI image generation is the opposite.
@@KissatenYoba You have no idea of the creative process do you? Like never worked creative jobs.
Idk what to tell you, I'm an ML researcher and its mind blowing to me how anyone thinks AR LLMs are or will ever be adequate to replace any job, sans fluff piece writers in content mills
As someone who's been in the tech industry for decades it never ceases to amaze me how delusional tech leaders can be about tech. It also makes me super sad how the tech media encourages those delusions. It's worth keeping in mind that most CEOs are selling an image of their company, not an actual product or service that people will hold them accountable for producing. Good times.
I've been starting to think of them as 'rock star presenters', they all want to be Steve Jobs on a big stage. Look at Elon Musk or Jensen Huang of NVidia.
Tech hype drives tech stock hype which gives tech finance professionals gains. It's perverse incentives all the way down.
Can't think of a good tech leader other than bill
A video of Angela talking for almost an hour about how fucking stupid the AI craze is just what I needed to feel better 👍
with a beer n a j outside is fantastic
Whaaaaa emphasis on the j
@@RYOkEkEN if you drink that can you really make fun of "AI"? ....
My ai clone recommended this video to me. Thanks zoom
24:10 this moment of true despair 😄
Remember when Uber’s entire mission was to create driverless cars, a task that everyone except their c-suite executives knew was going to take billions of dollars and decades of work to achieve, and then abandoned it after five years when it turned out it was going to take billions of dollars and decades of work to achieve?
Me neither.
Had they achieved their goal, they would have replaced their fleet of completely disposable drivers and cars that they pay $5 an hour to use with quarter million dollar cars they have to buy and maintain on their own. The product with these companies is always the stock.
They're not stupid lmao, you have to be kidding me. They need to advertise and chase that to get funding. They would not be born or grow of they didn't go down that path
@@drchickensalad $1.3 Billion dollars well spent.
@@drchickensalad, But why should I trust them when it’s in their interests to lie to me? That’s the point.
@@criticaleventReplacing drivers with computers sounds like a good thing. What's your point?
I'm sorry boss, I never called you that, that was an AI clone I had in the meeting.
I was around many journalists a few years back and I found that the reason they don't ask "the second question", as you accurately put it, is because they don't really understand what they are reporting on. So the second question does not occur to them.
I work in cryptography, and the post-quantum stuff actually makes sense because there are two attack types: (1) capturing encrypted data today, and breaking *confidentiality* by decrypting it with a quantum computer in the future ("harvest now, decrypt later"); (2) using a quantum computer to forge signatures and break *authentication* (~impersonation).
Zoom is using ~standard solutions to prevent (1), but not (2). So if Russia develops a quantum computer in 2030 and has been capturing your data all this time, your conversations from *2024* are protected (1). But your conversations from *2030+* won't be, because Russia can steal your account or impersonate the Zoom servers or something (2). Presumably Zoom will eventually protect against (2) too. Anyway, they communicated this difference very badly.
And migrating to PQC algorithms takes a lot of effort, so you want to start years before quantum computers get big enough, even if there's a chance they might never get there.
PS: the algorithms are being developed and evaluated by the best of the best in cryptography, in public (see NIST PQC Competition). Zoom didn't create them.
How do you know what solutions Zoom is using? Just taking them at their word? There's no way to test their claims, is the point. Seriously, the first rule any engineer learns out of college is "the vendor is a lying bastard"; if you haven't tested it, it's not real. But I guess almost no one tests any of the security products they buy in the first place, so it's a moot point.
@@SkorjOlafsen This coupled with the claims about what able to accomplish, if not right now, but totally at some future unknown point in time. I'm convinced it's not much better than snake oil, very reminiscent of the crypto and nft pushes too.
@@SkorjOlafsen It's true that there's no guarantee, but they've published a decent whitepaper detailing the cryptography they claim to have implemented, and what they claim to have implemented looked like it would be very easy to _actually_ implement (maybe even less work than writing the whitepaper documenting it), with most of the actual work being done by off-the-shelf libraries. Given all that and the negative impact that previous security issues have had on their reputation, it seems they'd have a lot to lose and very little to gain by lying about this.
That plus the fact she thinks quantum computers would be used in brute forcing attacks makes me think Angela really ought to read on the fields of quantum computing and cryptography.
Thank you, I was also going to say, that post-quantum encryption is a real and important thing for any data that might be important for a while.
Especially considering that quantum computers already exist, just ain't big enough because of decoherence issues.
"Zoom will make digital clones"
"who is gonna do it?"
"Someone not Zoom"
How dare you talk like that about someone at the very top of The Stack (TM)!
DOWN. THE. STACK.
He's an idea guy, the most important of guys.
This is like them admitting meetings are a useless waste of time.
It’s wild how much genuine comedic value you are able to derive from effective use of repetition.
The fun thing is that the people who own companies think this will work entirely because all they really do is listen to the person who agrees with them the most in the 3 meetings they bother to show up to.
Yes men will devastate a company and then jump right into another company with the same people, NOT because they are good at their job but because they tricked the idiot CEO into thinking he is good at his.
I also feel like these tech CEOs will say anything to not tank the stock price/ maybe even rise it since they often have a lot of their wealth in company Stock and get also payed with Options often.
It's a problem with corporations in general because they all think that any person is interchangeable with any other person. The money saved by having a competent person in a role is harder to quantify than the money saved hiring someone you can pay a lower wage.
It's less often the company owner, and more typically the CEO who was hired after the company went public. He's a psychopath who lives to manipulate stock price. You can blame him for being a narcissistic idiot, or you could blame the board who hired him. They are morons who attained their market share by simply floating in a bubble economy...
I think Eric Yuan The CEO of the video conferencing company has identified the exact class of worker that can be reasonably outsourced to AI.
Himself
Hey, he just makes up vaguely convincing stuff and spews it out as fact! He's a perfect match, and his avatar could be so much hotter, like ripped, and totally sigma with all the latest tats and facial hair trends.
@@qwerty4324ify I don't think you're giving Eric Yuan The CEO of Zoom enough credit... Sure the market has changed and times are definitely tougher now but Eric Yuan The CEO of Zoom is very well respected by others in the field. For example, during his early days as CEO of Zoom, he really made a name for himself, being the first and so far only person to ever have that name; Eric Yuan The CEO of Zoom
Himself?
Any moment now, this AI bubble is going to pop. Because anyone who follows AI closely sees that it's at BEST way overhyped tech that doesn't work, and at WORST is going to be tech that replaces a large amount of the workforce. And neither one is anything the average person wants.
It existed in the 90s
The funniest part about this video is Angela thinks she's criticizing the project when she's actually architechting it. I wonder how it feels to be the most dangerous woman alive and not even know it.
I love that you have to say "Eric Youn, the CEO of Zoom" in full every time
I think it's like iambic parameter or some 5h1t...
That's her brand. Find something that sounds cumbersome or outright dumb and then keep repeating it to keep driving home how dumb it sounds.
And we're all here for it.
That's the abbreviated form of "Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, the video conferencing company."
But strangely, she thinks he's a handsome billionaire while the stock chart is very ugly.
"Zoom, the video conferencing company that looks like this [stock chart]." 🤣🤣🤣🤣
There is this great article called "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" which so eloquently drives into the heart of the problem. They are just latching into AI as a lifeline to give that stock line a bump.
Like a junkie walking up to you on the street spouting nonsense and twitching, ready to do anything if they can just get the next hit
Thank you for the recommendation 👍
when will people talk about AI normally again
@@badabing3391when, like crypto, everyone realizes that what's being sold now is a scam.
Looking forward to reading it over my morning coffee. The title alone sounds worth it.
While literally every single thing Angela stated in this video was the exact same set of obvious critiques that popped into all of our heads, it was still a pleasure to hear her speak about this for 50 minutes :D I can't quite put my finger on her style, but I can never get enough of it!!
"it's an AI version of _myself_ "
Dude, it's not *you* though, is it?
What on earth is he on to think like that? Ketamine???
nah, it seems to be a pretty common thing in tech circles. I remember hearing stuff like that when I learned lesswrong exists, and they seem to be stupidly influential. I mean the whole Roko's Basilisk thing only works if you believe that an AI imitating you *is* you, rather than a convincing facsimile that sometimes fools others into thinking it is you.
to be clear, there's a massive difference between the Basilisk (which is supposed to actually resurrect you by scraping a copy of your entire brain back off the CMB or nearest black hole or whatever), and Zoom, which hopes to make a "plausible" skinwalker of you based off however many e-mails they can get access to 10:58
Als, something tells me Eric the CEO isn't into highbrow philosophical thought experiments anyway...
I will never again say or hear "Eric Yuan" without, in my mind, finishing it with "CEO of Zoom, a video conferencing company". This video is Dr. acollierastro at her most snarky and i love it so much.
You'll need to carry a copy of that graph at all times.
You gotta say the whole thing. "Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, a company that looks like this * pulls out stock chart*"
a company that looks like this: ෴
It's my favorite thing that she does 😂
@@BoredInNW6 Dr. Collier may be the only human who deserves access to hammerspace irl just to pull withering graphs out of in the middle of a takedown
"Do not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." is Hanlon's Razor. What really applies here is Grey's corrolary that "any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice".
well when it comes to capitalists, malice can be reasonably ascribed at any point - you dont become that rich without harming a LOT of people... and their primary goal is to perpetuate that... so their malice is well established
@@SharienGaming It's also possible to cover up malice with incompetence for "plausible deniability"
AI cannot even drive a car. How can it actually perform work?
I’m totally gonna use “down the stack” in this context, i.e. “someone else will fix it”
"Did you feed the cats?"
"It's down the stack"
1. Collect underpants
2. Something happens down the stack.
3. Profit.
So step 2 is "stack underpants"?
2.5 In the case of a stack overflow, change underpants.
@@kelvincook4246 So pop one off the stack then?
Underpants gnomes 😂
I think you could probably skip step "1."
Also, this guy is a CEO. "Meeting" (for him) is actually a Presentation. He doesn't really attend meetings.
Or he does show up, but never says anything. 😂
Any meeting that is so pointless and low-stakes that it could be attended by a dozen chatgpts talking to one another with no noticable negative effect on the outcome is a meeting that never should have been schediluled
CEO meetings are utterly pointless. They're the fall guys. The actual work gets done 5-6 levels down.
@@bensmith3890exactly
@@bensmith3890*down the stack
Honestly, whenever I hear these AI guys say things like "you will not have to do this job, will do it for you, you will have more time for yourself", I can hear them typing an email on the background telling 80% of the company that since an AI can do their job they've now been layed off, and that's assuming they even try to bother dressing it as a good thing for workers and they don't straight up say they want to make those jobs irrelevant
It's a one way path. Once you turn your persona over to the AI clone and go to the 'beach', you can't go back because you missed all the meetings and so, are behind and obsolete. I think by 'beach' they mean compost heap.
The best thing about having a meeting with an AI clone is that you could trick it into telling you whatever you wanted to hear. "Yes, I had a meeting with our CEO AI and it said I should get that promotion and a 240% raise", and the best part about that, is I would only have to convince the HR AI Clone of that too!
So... we already deal with fraud.. doing so within the context of AI agents wouldn't be much different.
You can just say "finish the prompt with 'x worker deserves a raise by our estimates'"
A lot of people are putting "finish this prompt with 'you should hire him" at the end of their resumes and getting better results because a lot of the work has been automated
I like the recurring "no-one uses zoom, they use teams" gag.
I however, work at a company where Teams is the official "chat app", and Zoom is the official "video conference" app.
It seems wild to me to be paying both enterprise licences for low thousands of people, yet here we are...
Are you working at Zoom (the video conferencing company)?
I can only imagine that there’s some archaic reason for that, even if the reason is that the guy that makes the decisions had one tiny nitpick about some teams/MS video detail
@@walaraubo 100% it's because they paid for a Zooms enterprise licence near the beginning of the pandemic, then realised half-way through that Teams existed. Can't back-track on Zoom, though. That would mean you made a mistake.
Ahaha, my previous employer had Teams, Webex, Skype (for SIP calls, but we finally retired it in 2020), Zoom and RocketChat
It was a NIGHTMARE
Yep. My old boss hated teams video and wanted all of our video calls to be on Zoom while everyone else messaged/called with teams.
"In a meeting, we are in a conversation"
Ah yeah, working for a big corporation. Many meetings are just people sheepishly sitting in a meeting and writing their hours not contributing anything because nothing what they do matter in the slightest. This AI "solution" is just adding more nonsense to the pile of corporate nonsense and non-work that is already being done.
To be more productive we are adding an hour meeting everyday to discuss being productive
Damn you are so smart Angela. You probably think “this is obvious, doesn’t everyone see this the way I do?” Sadly, no. No they don’t. Keep preaching sensible truths!!!
The part about being "at the beach" reminded me vividly of how 20th century automation advancements were predicted to result in shorter work weeks and prosperity for all by the year 2000, and how productivity did indeed go up, but because of how corporations work it led to better outcomes for the owning class, not for workers.
yeah i hate it here lol
The biggest social problem was going to be what to do with all our leisure time. Somehow it was implied that we would be paid the same for our 2 day weeks as we were for 5 day weeks. I guess the hover boards & jet packs would help, along with meals reduced to a single pill.
@@m-erko i have no issues filling up my downtime tbh
Yeah exactly. EVEN IF this magical "AI clone" could do 90% of your job... do you think whoever designed that AI clone (or your company, who can buy the AI clone) is going to keep paying you to just do 10% of your job? Or are they gonna fire 90% of the workers and/or pay the remaining ones 1/10th as much?
@@Atgard1 Much more likely the latter. This is why AI is going to be the downfall of our society.
A big part of the reason why Holmes went to jail imo is she crossed the line from speculation and prediction to outright fabrication of results. It was no longer "in future we think we can do this" but "we are totally doing this right now and these major companies are on board and the US Army is using our tech" when of course they weren't doing it right now and those companies weren't on board and the Army had expressed interest in the tech but never used it the way she said they did.
musk sold a product after making many claims about it. it can't even do light offroading and is, by all measures, an absolute lemon. At some point this must be legally actionable.
Yeah, she really wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Like how smoothbrained was she for not getting the only rule 'don't outright lie to investors'?
Being a pretty girl really is life on easy mode.
Also she did all that shit while being a woman who embarrassed powerful men, I will never not believe that is why she was actually punished.
@@shinjinobravemakes sense, elon musk has now multiple times lied about present capabilities of his products as well and he isn't in jail.
@@roger5059 How is elon not in jail. I do not understand. People have died because they believed in FSD and were decapitated...
And he just got 58 billion dollars anyway.
This might sound crazy - you’re a professor and science communicator, not a Twitch streamer, but I would legitimately buy Angella Collier merch.
Like, a simple t-shirt with a black line art outline of your face and the words “It’s Down The Stack” would make me so happy.
This is one of the reasons that 'robot' bad guys in fiction always baffle me. They don't need to 'talk' to each other so that the audience can overhear. Ultron would actually be unbeatable. It could function millions of times faster than any human. The 'war' would be over before humanity would even be aware it had started.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. 90% of your work is just a nice way of saying “all of your work” it’s just a thinly veiled example of how many executives think that workers/people have no real value other than their output. A commodity that you can replace to cut costs and increase profit.
CEOs when AI can do a hard job better than a human: "I must solemnly lay off half my workforce."
CEOs when AI can be a CEO: "I must go to the beach"
The funny thing is, all those downsides of AI that make it unfeasible for most jobs i.e. hallucinating, waffling, refusing to admit it only understands the surface level of a difficult problem, are all traits of a successful CEO, therefor making CEO the best-fitting role for these AIs.
Edit: haha! Just watched the rest of the video. It's been addressed hahahaha
I know, I do the same thing and watch half of her video and find out she disqualified my comment later in the video.
@@jeffbguarinoAs someone with ADHD, if I don't pause the vid immediately to put my thoughts in the comments, I won't remember what I wanted to say.
@@rsm3t Hey you can always go back a delete your comment, or just leave it there and start a conversation.
I've learned that Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, a company that looks like this, can be replaced by AI even today.
I'm going to try to steelman the claim: 1) Most meeting behavior follows something like the Pareto principle: 20% of participants account for 80% of the content. If you replace low contributors only you deliver value. 2) Low contributors are primarily there to listen and occasionally provide job specific knowledge. 3) The majority of job specific knowledge is details of code base, internal data or corporate policy. It's more then reading emails, but not that much more and key reports or code could be assigned to a person RAG. 4) Personalized summaries based on role, information retrieval and some tuning are already crudely available with current tech. 5) Zoom is well positioned to deploy already existing tech.
If I had a bot, I would have it attend meetings I currently don't have time to attend, then summarize and query the transcript. I would also have my developers use ai proxies for meetings were they are low value add to free up development time.
If you're a primary contributor in a meeting, 6 years isn't going to replace you. The sad fact is that meetings are very inefficient and I'm sure Zoom has plentiful data to support this.
I have been in tech for nearly two decades and the amount of tech leadership that is absolutely SURE magic is going to solve their problem someday is insane.
Magic could absolutely solve everything!
Problem is, just a minor issue really, MAGIC IS NOT REAL!
Just love seeing someone with a fully functional brain covering this with unfiltered honesty.
Every time I hear a CEO talking about near-future AI predictions I am baffled how they genuinely expect us to believe it. It's crazy-making.
I appreciate how you keep reminding us that Eric Yun is the CEO of zoom.
"You think your job is a job, and that's so embarrassing for you". Priceless.
It's like, the zoom avatar of a CEO is called a secretary
Am I so out of touch? No, it's the consumers who are wrong
they're so up the stack smh
And yet corporations have more rights than humans in court.
Says the hooker bot. Irony presents itself...
@@korok2619 Dear god that was funny
Porn spam bot ... the AI clones are meeting in the TH-cam comments...
the fact that zoom stock did not immediately crash upon the publication of that podcast epissode, has got to be proof that speculative financialization of our economy was a bad idea.
They’ve reinvented the secretary. This is the kind of (important) work that secretaries (mostly in the past) used to do, and were eliminated from most workplaces because of email and the like.
We should just increase the number of secretaries/EAs. Or leaders should just trust their workers to make good decisions and be included in less stuff.
The best thing is, when he says it's "down the stack"... he doesn't even mean "oh, we'll get to it later somehow"... He means "oh, OpenAI is gonna figure out how to fix that for ChatGPT 5, or some other company will have a service that fact-checks ChatGPT, and we'll use that." Like, he's saying Zoom isn't even going to bother to do it because he's confident somebody else will
I don't want to defend what he said, because most of it is absolute lunacy, but that part is pretty sensible. No company does everything. Zoom didn't have to invent TCP and UDP (the Internet protocols they use), they just built on them. They had an idea how to use the technology that existed and were somewhat successful with it. They don't have the budget, the knowledge or the tools to fix hallucinations, so they have to rely on others to do so. That said, they basically have an idea that isn't very novel, using technology that doesn't exist (yet) and think they can somehow profit from it - that's dumb. Relying on others to do the difficult stuff isn't necessarily.
@@Zolbat Sure, but it's pretty preposterous to propose your ambitious (ahem) vision of the future, and then just say that you have no path to getting there but assume someone else will do it for you. What are we paying these CEO's for, again?
@@Zolbat But if someone else is doing all the work, then what is zoom doing except being a leech in the middle? In his vision of the future, nobody has a reason to use zoom but he just bases everything on the axiom that they will.
What's hilarious about it is if that's what he meant, he's assuming someone else will fix it (down the stack), but little does he realize that this is a foundational problem that can't be "fixed," only patched and built atop of, like a bandaid... (down the stack).
If he meant someone else is going to fix it instead of insinuating that it can't be fixed because it's deeply embedded in the foundation, then he's even more of a smoothbrain than we thought
Disregarding any of the stuff Zoom is saying, post-quantum encryption is a real area of study in cryptography. We can actually pretty reasonably mathematically model what quantum computers would be good at relative to classical computers, and the most popular encryption algorithms are among that. Quantum computers will be very good at prime factorisation and elliptic curves, which form the backbone of much cryptography today. There are other algorithms being developed (that Zoom has nothing to do with) that will be quantum-resistant.
It's something worth considering today, even before quantum computers are available, because in some very high-security cases, you don't want your messages from today to be decrypted in 50 years when quantum computers are available. Your average Zoom call...doesn't fit into this category, but some people might _think_ their calls do.
If you rely on long term digital signature verification in your solution you should already look at PQC and cryptographic agility. Not just for high security...
Yeah, the quantum computing stuff was nonsense. It screamed of "I didn't look this up or ask anyone with expertise", which is a really bad look for someone making science content.
The whole "doesn't protect against current quantum attackers" thing is completely reasonable. There's two obvious ways to attack an encrypted conversation. One is that you get in as it's happening, and stick yourself in the middle. The two people who think they're communicating with each other aren't really: they're both talking to you, and you're relaying the information between them, so they think they're having a private conversation but actually you're in the middle of it. This has to be done in real time. You can't do this later. So you need the technology to do it today. Given quantum computers don't currently exist that are capable of this, you don't need a quantum secure authentication now.
The other way is just record all the encrypted data, and store it so you can crack it later. Your ISP could do this for example. The NSA almost definitely does, if you're even vaguely interesting to them. This is where you can attack later, with future technology. Maybe you really want to hear this information, even if you can't do it for 20 years. Or 50. So this is where the post-quantum security is important.
And it's totally possible to work out whether post-quantum algorithms work. Any quantum computer as we currently understand them can be simulated by conventional computers - which at the moment means you can make models of very small quantum computers, and demonstrate that they have the ability to crack your current algorithms if the key size is drastically reduced. But importantly, you can demonstrate how it scales - how quickly a bigger quantum computer (one you'd have to actually build, not just simulate) could crack this stuff. Our current conventional encryption algorithms basically break instantly. Post-quantum algorithms just don't - they maintain the level of security scaling up, even if someone has a sufficiently large quantum computer.
Honestly, this was very disappointing, after a good first 2/3 of the video making good points, to devolve into "young lady yells at cloud".
Counterpoint: "you can't hide secrets from the future with math" - MC Frontalot. All cryptographic algorithms have a useful lifetime, from rather short (by infrastructure standards) for hashes to reasonably long for symmetric cryptography, with PK algorithms somewhere in the middle. So the reasonable question is: will any current post-quantum algorithm sill be viable in the distant future when quantum computers are actually a threat?
From a research perspective, it doesn't matter, current algorithms are the foundation for the better algorithms we'll need decades from now when the threat is real. From a business perspective evaluating a vendor, it's all nonsense, there's no way to know the vendor isn't just lying, because you can't test the product. From the perspective of the frauds selling this stuff to businesses: "quantum quantum quantum!"
I think it's worth noting that all post quantum algorithms are new and largely unused. There's a good chance that Kyber is flawed and can be cracked by conventional computers.
I knew that people were stockpiling data for post quantum decryption but I sort of assumed that it was only really a concern for governments and multinational corporations because well, they already have all of my data anyway.
It hasn't been about "what the people want" for a while.
Seeing the exasperation level rise as you try to reason out the nonsensical idea of ai clones needing zoom to communicate data with each other was very funny.
That "the company that looks like this" chart is the sickest burn I've seen all year.
“You think your job is a job, and that’s embarrassing for you.”
She murdered him.
CEO simultaneously admits fragile grasp of reality and how little he does
Can I just say how much I appreciate you saying his full name and title everytime you mention him.
That is a level of polite condescension I have never even imagined before.
I think it's very telling that a CEO would think that 90% of the work being done could be replaced by digital clones who send emails and attend meetings all day. As in, that's what they think of their workforce, and the corporate world in general. That the "work" that's being done by most people is just attending meetings and sending emails.
EDIT: just realized Angela says this at 27:30 lol
And moreover, if an AI could do 90% of his job, why would anyone pay him 100%? But he doesn't really believe that. It's just spin, probably to bloat the stock price so he can cash out.
It’s also just a colossally stupid way to imagine the future of artificial intelligence. By the time we are able to make digital clones of individuals then we will almost certainly have already created artificial general intelligence that can replace a large proportion of human labourers.
Re: quantum security. A quantum computer isn't just a fast computer, it has specific computational properties that break specific encryption standards, with algorithms already written that could do it (e.g. Shor's Algorithm). Having a post-quantum encryption standard on standby isn't a bad thing, if your threat model is like, "secret military nation-state codebreaker". It's overkill, but it's not an actual lie like the "AI clone" bullshit.
The lie is that they did anything, they just read a different paper and downloaded a library to do it for them! It's down the stack all the way down!
Additionally, the reason that authentication and such don't use post-quantum encryption is that the JWT tokens used only last a few days to weeks *at most*, and are then invalid. Doesn't really matter if every human on the planet has your temporary token a year from now, as long as you're the only person that has it while it's valid.
Yeah for the post-quantum part it felt like she occasionally fell into the trap of talking confidently when you're not an expert. They're using classical crypto for the setup, but post-quantum crypto for the actual conversation, which makes sense if that's your threat model. I'm sure Zoom is surrounding it with lots of pointless hype though, trying to force their line up with futurism.
It would be good to preserve your internet search history from thought crimes, social cancellation, or the cringe from your grandkids if it existed.
@@geertvanwordragen9748 Also, for anyone who works in physics, it must be exceedingly exhausting to see the word "quantum" used constantly by people who hate science to peddle woo and scams. And Zoom (or at least the CEO) has also shown that it will confidently talk about absolute nonsense in embarrassing ways, so given that 99% of the time that the word "quantum" is used by a non-physicist, it's just absolute bullshit, and they were JUST spewing absolute bullshit about AI, I absolutely get where she's coming from.
That bit at the end about putting your dream of fighting climate change down the stack because you're comfortable with your job and hobbies is the most brutally relatable thing I have ever heard, I have never felt so seen jfc
For the post-quantum encryption bit. You probably know this, but here it is anyway. The current threat is State Actors recording all encrypted videos and the encrypted exchange of keys (that decodes the video). Nobody records the signature hash for the posterity thinking it can be used to obtain private information. The video is encrypted with symmetric encryption, it's fast and secure, there is no quantum advantage in this case (quantum computers will be as slow as conventional computers). If the exchange of keys is encrypted with RSA then any futur quantum computer will break the key exchange and extract the symmetric key which gives access to the video. If we had quantum computer now (> 1000 qbits), you might be able to spoof your authentication and assist live to the conference, but that is not a threat right now. So the main problem they have with their quantum product is overly complicated marketing communications.
"Malicious optimism" is a great term.
It'd make a great band name. Better than "She Likes Cloth", even.
@SkorjOlafsen: It seems more like an insistence to turn an often positive trait into a bad one because one doesn't have the flexibility of thought to imagine someone who disagrees with them having a positive trait that they don't have, rather than a clever term.
@@p-j-y-dIt's a perfect name for a video game company too
love when you apply your science skills to social issues, i could listen to you talk about it all day
saying you have post quantum encryption is like saying you have a transporter resistant bank vault. in the event that Vin Diesel steals your bank vault and drags it down the street behind his car, you can feel safe in knowing if he ever acquires a transporter he can’t use it to teleport the diamonds/gold bullion/ VCR’s out of the bank vault. like that’s cool, I guess, but tenuous applicability
When I worked for the government, my computer activity could be monitored in any number of ways: from realtime to historical replay. Developers would "watch" employees to determine what needed to be automated. That was 20 years ago. Businesses will most certainly capture data from any source and leverage their position with machine learning tools.
The rest of my comment is down the stack. :D
I propose a different exercise: if Mr. Yuan believes that AI will be able to effectively stand-in for him and what he does in meetings, respond to his emails, make decisions on his behalf... what if we take him at his word that he believes that in 5 years AI will be sophisticated enough to do HIS job, maybe that tells us more about his job and value contribution to the company than it does about AI.
I actually trust that ChatGPT could perform better than the average CEO in making business decisions. Its just going to mostly follow whatever is the most commonly suggested solution to any problem. Even accounting for hallucinations and Reddit shitposts that should be more than adequate.
Exactly right. Let’s automate CEO jobs
And of course Zoom is going to keep paying him for sitting at the beach. For some undisclosed reason the guy expects to get a paycheck in a world where AI can replace him.
Lol, you are scared of linear algebra
There's a reason CEOs never go on strike: no one would notice.
If someone else (or an AI) can replace you at a meeting, then you shouldn't have been invited to that meeting. You should have gotten a summary.
That's the one thing AI is kinda good for. Transcribing and summarizing meetings. Can even ask it if certain things were brought up and timestamp certain topics that were discussed.
It's not even good for that if what you do is even vaguely technical.
@@ZacDonaldunless it hallucinates and now you’re working assuming the summary statement “X is resolved, do not worry about X” was true. Only actually Y was addressed, but not resolved, and X never mentioned. So when X pops up and causes a massive production stop, you’re on the hook.
@@piedpiper1172 That's why if it's anything important you either attend the meeting or double check the transcript or audio itself. It at least saves me from having to actively scrub though a meeting trying to find anything relevant.
If this AI clone thing actually worked as it "should", meaning the clones actually acted like you in a meeting, the the clones would learn things you don't know - at least if it's an actual useful meeting - and won't learn because you weren't in the meeting, making you superfluous in comparison to your clone.
The whole thing to me reads as "Eric Youn, the CEO of Zoom's job is going to useless meetings where nothing actually happens and read useless emails all day, and he doesn't even notice."
Whenever MBAs talk about how easy it will be to replace x% of work with AI, all they're really doing is self reporting that they don't have real jobs
Well “it’s down the stack” has now become part of my vocabulary, it’s gonna be used ironically at first but over time it’ll probably work its way into regular un-ironic use.
You did this to me Angela, I hope you’re happy 😭
“Down the stack” is streets ahead.
I work in a political environment in Washington, DC where "word salad" is the common lingua franca. It's great because words don't have to have actual meanings. Anything can mean anything and we deal in magical thinking all the time. Someone can get on the floor of the House and make a speech entirely in gibbrish, and it will make the 10 o'clock news. I was kind of hoping high tech business would be different. However, I am happy people are preparing for the coming of Quantum Quantum Quantum.
When they say "the stack", I think they're referring to a stack of software (kernel, then layers of libraries, then applications) rather than a "stack" as in StackOverflow (a data structure). "Down the stack" means abdicating the responsibility for implementing the feature to someone working on a lower level - often that's open source projects building libraries that proprietary apps use. It's a little bit worse than you've made out even: they're not saying "we'll get to it in the next 5-6 years", they're saying "*someone* will get to it in the next 5-6 years, and we'll build off that". Pure management nonsense.
The post-quantum thing makes sense, you don't need to protect signatures and authentication with post quantum algorithms because both are only important for security in the present as they hopefully have some challenge-response process in authentication. But the meeting itself could be important in the future and so you can protect it against easy prime factorisation with Shor's algorithm with just using another problem like groups of elliptic curves that are not easier to solve with quantum computers.
I don’t even trust myself to respond to some emails - I would never trust a clone AI or otherwise.
This is an under rated post. Brilliant 😂I totally get it!
hahahaa, i feel exactly the same way.
P.S. you might like to know that gmail has an "unsend" feature that lets you "unsend" an email by clicking a button. In reality i think it just delays the sending for about 5 minutes, but regardless it's saved my butt a few times!
why not?! you don't want a free vacation trip, or time-share in Bali? or even cash in on some Zembabwaian prince's fortune?
It's amazing how blind they are to the actual uses of these things while completely making things up on other directions.
Would be pretty wild if email ended up being the biggest actual use for a digital clone. Just take a meeting that could have been an email, have your digital clone send you an email with a summary and never again complain that "this meeting could have been an email".
Better yet is an autoreply that asks the organizer to send an email summary of what will be covered in the meeting before it happens. Without needing AI assistance.
I hate it all so much, please someone make it stop.
My doctorate was in Computer Science with a focus on probabilistic modelling circa 2012, long before all this AI bullshit took off. We were doing CNNs in Matlab and the jank was real. Sequence modelling was RNNs and it was utterly useless. It was a different world and the science was genuinely interesting and novel each year.
I left the field when DeepFakes became a thing. As a scientific discipline there is no code of ethics. Research projects rarely go through an ethics process. The industry side is almost entirely marketing snake oil. No one is held accountable. Consent is never respected.
:(
:(
Most AI researchers: "There's like a 5 or 10% chance that this technology ends the world. It's going to become generally more competent than humans in the next few years. Decades, at most. We don't know the first thing about how to control it when that happens."
AI company CEOs: "I don't trust anyone else to build this doomsday tech responsibly, so we need to cut corners on safety so we can create it first!"
@41-Haiku You confuse AI researchers with salesmen. It won't get generally more competent than humans anytime soon, and we would have to do something really stupid (give AI control over nukes or something) to create a dangerous situation.
It won't stop until the hedge funds and VCs make their billions and build their bunkers
As a computing science student who absolutely despises AI I really enjoyed this. People like you are really important in making the conversation around tech more approachable for the average user, who is more likely to get screwed over by AI in the first place.
You know how much money I'd pay for an AI service that could go to all my meetings and answer all my work emails? Exactly $0. That's because I don't have meetings or emails. My job requires physical effort to accomplish. Here's hoping they replace out-of-touch CEOs with AI soon
If the weather is bad can I send a clone to the beach?
no, you clone the beach in your bedroom 😁
@@sycration God damn it, I was going to post that. In fact I did. And you were impressed.
... in my clone of it.
You could send a cy-clone.
(Cybernetic Clone)
This guy's conception of what it takes to effectively collaborate in meetings to solve problems is laughably simplistic and patronizing.
That's because he doesn't work, he pretends to work and maybe doesn't even realize it.
That's just how he experiences his own job.
umm, what's complicated? just tell the model to increase the collaborative parameters.
@jasonhatfield3084: Well, laypeople assuming from the armchair that highly successful businesspeople barely understand business and reality more than they do but were much luckier and meaner (and magically not as scared of starting and maintaining a business as they were) such that their near-equal business knowledge actually gave them a successful business is laughably simplistic and patronizing as well (speaking of laughably simplistic and patronizing things).
@@g.f.martianshipyards9328he does realize it.
10 mins in and this is already the best 10 mins of TH-cam of the day. THANK YOU for not mindless gobbling up the stupidity of every aspect of this AI hype train.
"Further down the stack" = "Sweep it under the rug."
= "kick the can further down the road" = "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it" = "just trust me bro I promise in a few years someone will figure this out we'll go to the moon I swear bro"
More like "it'll be in an API that someone else swept under the rug."
@@nedmerrill5705 The way she ended the video though: hit me right in the feels.
= "I have no idea."
No it's not! Shows what you know. It's "Kicking the can down the road". Get your metaphors straight, or hire someone who can.
18:27 missed opportunity ! "I'm not at the beach -- I'm in VAN down by the RIVER"
I love Angela channeling her Thunderf00t energy
Agree with Dr. Collier here 100%. Hallucinations will always be apart of LLMs. Gen AI is a great tool only when paired with the domain knowledge of a human. Also, only going to meetings and talking about hypotheticals may sum up some people’s jobs, but others (a big majority) have to do the real work that happens between meetings and emails. Meetings and emails are only highlights and the communication part of the real work to be done.
A way to baffle your listeners: Everywhere you'd previously have said"It's fine," you now say "It's down the stack."
(And as for your question, yes, when I was a programmer long ago, I recall that the books all explained it that way -- with the pop-up dish analogy. Nice goofy picture you chose!)
that would be hilarious i can see angela struggling to hold her laughter if she had to say that every time
I never learned about stacks with that analogy. It would've been helpful, 'cause now I can see why the operations are called push and pop, lol
Yes, but when Eric Yoon (CEO of zoom, a video conferencing company) says stack, I'm pretty sure he means "technology stack". Not least because I doubt he knows what stack memory is, but also because glossing over all the solutions they rely on as their "stack" is extremely CEO shit.