When meetings are held between people from half a dozen countries spread over three continents, none of whom are speaking their native language and all using uncommon product and project names, then AI summaries are occasionally hilarious and nearly always wildly incorrect.
The big waste of resources is not the 25 separate connections to a high-bandwidth video call. That’s kind of minor. The big waste is these 25 bots running separate LLM queries each.
Just a update on this
I had the same thought! “Isn’t that what happened in Real Genius?!”
Thanks, I was trying to think of what movie that was from.
We really need to just start sending texts.
Where do y’all even get these memes from
I’m gonna save it for future purposes
Here’s the source: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
I get mine from teh intertubes.
Here
ai
If I were the speaker in a call of 25 note taking bots I would constantly make references to “this” and “that” and to things that I point to on screen.
“As you can clearly see in this section of the diagram we can continue to make further improvements here, here and here.”
and end with:
“If you would like to reach out, my contact info is on the screen now. Goodbye. Thanks to all who attended!”
I’d like to see the AI summary of the transcription also!
You don’t even need that, they’re perfectly capable of fucking up on their own.
My organization and most of the other orgs I work with have all banned AI note takers in meetings. We either don’t let them in or boot them at the beginning. Some of the people who send them, I haven’t seen them actually show up to a meeting in months.
Really? Ours just ok’d the use of them with external client meetings and have been using them internally for a year. I do not use it, but everyone else does because “it’s the future, you’ll get left behind!” Everyday, I feel like im taking the crazy pills.
Why even have more than one note taker? Just have one and send the mail to everyone or write the mail yourself for gods sake
So we can waste more resources
My work uses one ai summerizer for all attendees that gets sent out with the recording.
Giving people their own is just stupid.
If I were running an AI, and I saw 25 people each pointing their note taking bots at the same webinar, I’d have it do the work once, and send it to each of them.
There is no reason to think that each of these 25 note taking bots is working separately and simultaneously on the exact same task.
I honestly don’t know how this works. If it’s a built in feature of the platform, sure. If it’s a bot that’s independent and from the view of the platform just another user that saves the notes locally, it might not even be easy to exchange the notes afterwards if they recognize each other and are the same (there might be different bots for the same task, as I said, I don’t know)
They can see eachother in the room, so they should be able to figure out that they are all doing the same work. They might not do it yet, but they will certainly coordinate their efforts in the not-to-distant future. It doesn’t make sense for the AI service to expend resources on actual duplicated efforts, rather than just giving the appearance of duplication.
I have strong doubts about this happening in the not-too-distant future just from bots ‘seeing’ each other in the call. Too many variables (different platforms, different times joining the call, different default languages, different preferences on how notes should be taken). This is why many platforms offer an option to use a single canonical transcription bot - this sort of thing isn’t quite as easy as you seem to imagine.
For most of these calls, every participant is using the same link to join.
Each of these note taker bots is a different interface for the same AI service. The AI is not actually 25 different bots. It is 25 different faces of the same bot.
It is trivial for that one bot to recognize it has been directed to use the same link to connect to the same conference 25 times.
Yes, it is going to consolidate the work for all of those individual “faces” into a single task. It is absolutely ludicrous to assume it will be configured to duplicate its efforts 25 times.
I can absolutely see a single provider of collaborative online meetings spaces offering a ‘notes’ bot to the chat as a whole if they don’t already do so, since that’s already a thing. I see absolutely no reason why they should invest time in rearchitecting the conceptual boundaries of how private a user’s interaction with an AI is. I think you’ve missed some of the implications of collapsing the multiple to a single whilst retaining the illusion that it is a private space
I see absolutely no reason why they should invest time in rearchitecting the conceptual boundaries of how private a user’s interaction with an AI is.
Profit.
If AIs use as much power and resources as we’ve been led to believe, there are massive cost savings to be had by simulating multiple bots instead of using multiple bots. If they’ve budgeted to earn a profit from the operation of 25 independent bots, what are they earning by running only one and claiming it is 25?
There is very little chance that this degree of optimization hasn’t been employed.
As I said, I don’t know if it’s one AI service or several and there might be only one now but in the not so distant future, there might be a market or individualizable versions.
And coordination, exchanging addresses and sending and receiving encrypted messages might be too big of an overhead and delay for the user experience.
You shouldn’t overestimate efficiency. Often the easiest solution is good enough. It would cost real and good paid people to solve this and the other version is less prone to problems.
You shouldn’t underestimate profit motive. They aren’t going to do it for the sake of efficiency, but they will certainly do it for the sake of money. It is ludicrous to think this degree of cost optimization hasn’t already been implemented.
I like to have a group of people forced to listen to me. Makes me feel a little better about myself for a few minutes.
My niece talks to her stuffed animals. Maybe that’s an option?
TIL “frightningly efficient” == wasting kilowatts of power on something that could’ve been five paragraphs of text…
This apocalypse could have been an email.
This could be a tshirt
hold on my AI assiststant is taking notes on that
The funny thing is that if a person can replace themself with an incompetent AI bot for your meeting, maybe your meeting was a giant waste of time!
In other words, yes this use of AI is absurd, but so was the meeting itself. Well hey, I guess manglement will always love up to its name.
The person said this is a webinar, which probably means attendance is optional…
It makes sense to me. Different people might need to get different things out of the meeting.
Sometimes at work I’ll need one piece of information, but it’s contained in a thirty minute presentation. Or I might not know how much information I need, so I’ll start with a summary. If that’s not enough, I’ll watch a recording of the presentation.
I mean, one person or a few replaced by bots could be a lack of professionalism on the attendees’ part. All of them? You suck and nobody has time for your bullshit.
jesus christ alexandre why don’t you grow a fucking sack and boot anyone who “shows up” like this.
Because their entire job likely is selling these kinds of “solutions” to people
There probably arent even any “participants” behind those bots. The AI companies have exhausted all the written content on the internet, so now they are scraping video and audio data. I wouldnt be surprised if that is exactly what those bots are doing. Either thats their primary job, or their secondary job that the actual participants dont even know about.
If this isn’t true, I hope they don’t read this and take this idea because goddamn.
Edit: Actually, I just thought about it again and I do not care.
In case you do end up caring, have some technological horrors for your entertainment: https://youtu.be/NuIMZBseAOM?t=1972
Sorta just sounds like you can probably fire a few employees who don’t give a fuck.
From experience, a lot of companies tend to be propped up by like 10% of their developers doing 90% of the work, maybe 50% of developers doing the last 10%, and then like 40% of developers either doing fuck all or actively harming the codebases and making more work for the other 60%.
And more often than not, these people are the ones sending stuff like “AI Note Takers” merely to give the illusion of existing.
In reality you have like three devs who actually care and do most of the work having a discussion and like 10 to 30 AFK participants with their cameras off who probably arent even listening or care.
And the thing is, it shows later. The same devs have zero clue wtf is going on, they have zero clue how to do their job, and they constantly get their code sent back or they plague up some codebase that doesnt have reviewers to catch them.
The AI note takers are just the new version of people showing up to meetings with their camera off and never speaking a word.
Except now they burn orders of magitude more power to do it, which is awful.
In my experience, those three groups are really just the three stages of burnout
agree on everything except I hate turning my camera on, fuck that
From experience, a lot of companies tend to be propped up by like 10% of their developers doing 90% of the work, maybe 50% of developers doing the last 10%, and then like 40% of developers either doing fuck all or actively harming the codebases and making more work for the other 60%.
Hello, how do I join the 40%?
I want to coast for a whileI’m with you on a lot of even most developers at a company making things worse rather than better.
However if for some reason a webinar is only going to be “live” with no recording to be provided, and further it may be a pointless session you don’t need but work mandates, then I would be firing off whatever recording/transcription/summarization they allow me. Like my employer has manated every employee regardless of job attending 60 hours of AI webinars in the year, to give the illusion of being in tune with AI without bothering to actually have a plan. Mostly it’s been people rambling without any actionable stuff trying to sound smart, absolutely every bit of it has been superficial, the speakers at best have toyed with prompts and read articles saying Nvidia gpus are useful. Not one of them have so much as even run a local model. There’s nothing in these 60 mandated hours that will do anything but waste time.
Even for mandatory “all hands” where we can’t all questions but at least I want to know what they are thinking, I’ll get a recording and watch it at 2x speed.
If they are mandated, that’s just as bad I agree.
At my company we have tonnes of in house Lunch and Learns (on paid time, non mandatory) that are effectively “I found this super useful thing and want others to know about it”
And I’ll join these things, and see (person), who is on my team, in it too. Later I’ll hat with them about it, or at least try, and they’ll have zero clue wtf I’m talking about.
And it becomes obvious they just joined the meeting to give the illusion of caring, they prolly were afk the whole time. And I suspect this cuz they often do the same for our “in team” mandatory important meetings discussing critical stuff on the project.
Yeah but think of the potential money the Ai company de jure made while guzzling more water than Ai fanboys guzzle corporates sloppy seconds.
I don’t even know why we talk with other people in companies anymore. We can’t send emails because people don’t read them. So we are drowning in calls where we include the whole team where we talk about our weekends for 5 minutes at the start and spend half talking about what could have been a email. So on top we have bots that do these summaries so people can be sitting on calls only paying half attention to then not read the summaries anyway.
Lmao I would have read emails if I wasn’t drowning in irrelevant emails and they forced us to switch to outlook which not only got rid of all the automated filtering and sorting I had setup but also lacked the features to recreate them. I used to be on top of email and slack channels but they just added so much mandatory shit that I just couldn’t wade through anymore. So, “We can’t send emails because people don’t read them” in my experience has been a management problem, not an employee problem. This was Oracle though, and they’re particularly bad at treating employees as human beings
The only real solution is to actually care enough about the work to read the email. The trouble is that so many companies these days do meaningless middleman shit that people couldn’t give a fuck about. We’re headed straight for an economy substantially consisting of work that doesn’t matter, largely being done by bots that can’t think properly.
… Which would be fine I guess, as long as the ruling class would be so good as to offer a substantial sinecure to the populace. But instead they will likely insist that we quietly die someplace they don’t have to watch.
We’re headed straight for an economy substantially consisting of work that doesn’t matter,
This part was achieved in the 1980s.
Can I have like, the one scrap of false hope, just as a treat?
I tangibly feel the agony in this comment. What if I told you this false hope is an opiate that allows the situation to continue, but the pain of lancing that boil opens an opportunity to (yes, painfully) to sever and extract the root of the putrid infection that will keep recurring, if undone?
Say the same thing, but without using a single metaphor
Really?
Yes you can have it, but choosing the less painful option for yourself right now is allowing corruption and fascism to win, possibly for generations, inflicting greater
ain’tpain not only on yourself, but fellow citizens as well.Eta: a pox on autocorrect
See, this is how I knew you were just being a shit. You accuse me of complacency but you have no suggestions. Fucking turd behaviour.
Really. Lance what boil? Do what, exactly? What box are you imagining I haven’t ticked?
Half of the participants don’t contribute anything, but need to look busy so they have to lengthen the call with inane banter.
Most of my emails have nothing to do with me, but everyone is CCing me on stuff, just in case I might be relevant somehow. Particularly and they made a convenient distribution list that includes 300 people and people send to it all the time. Someone I’ve never heard of on the other side of the world was going to be unavailable because they were sick and I get an email. The automated test for some project I have nothing to do with failed again last night and I get an email. Every morning I am greeted with about 100 emails that happened overnight. Even the handful of threads where I have some relevance, it goes off topic and I have no idea if I’m relevant to the new message or not until I read it.
Corporate communication is just screwed.
I will spend part or my Monday setting up 2 meetings to follow up people who didn’t answer the message I sent them last week. I need a simple data from one, and a 2 minute task from the other.
This is a company I joined 3 years ago, and was baffled in the first weeks how nobody answers their emails, not even IT. So I started sending MS Teams messages like others, and that worked well so far, but now they also seem to have lost efficiency.
Work would be easier if everybody just respected others enough to answer their messages. We don’t need to be best friends, just pls everybody do your job…
Edit: even better, if I didn’t have to chase people for simple data and giving acces rights to a bunch of non-confidential shit that is gatekeeped like trade secrets
Back to School - Marge Takes Notes scene.
Never saw this movie but I live this actress from the Elvira movie. Is it worth watching?
This actress is only in like 1-2 scenes. It’s mostly a Rodney Dangerfield vehicle. A pretty good one imho. It’s got a young Robert Downey jr as a supporting character and a great scene with Sam Kinison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9DO26O6dIg
OK thanks for saving me from it.
