In the new Washington Post profile, Malcolm implies that he “engineered the scene” because “he knew smacking his kid would draw attention, help the article go viral and get their message out.”

How does beating your kid for clicks make anything better!? You still beat your two year old kid!

Good question!

The guesses and rumours that you have got as replies makes me lean towards "apparently no one knows".

And because it's slop machines (also referred to as "AI", there is always a high probability of some sort of scam.

Biblically accurate gymnastics.

But they make up for it in volume!

In the famous locomotive competition where Rocket beat Novelty (or was it the other way around?), other locomotives also participated. Some broke down and one was disqualified for containing a horse instead of a steam engine. Feels like there are lots of hidden horses today, and they are rewarded instead of disqualified.

So they named the product sucking the data after the Facehugger? At least they know that they are in the abomination business. Will they be releasing an AI named Bursting Chest?

I have so far seen two working AI applications that actually makes sense, both in a hospital setting:

1. Assisting oncologists in reading cancer images. Still the oncologists that makes the call, but it seems to be of use to them.
2. Creating a first draft when transcribing dictated notes. Listening and correcting is apparently faster for most people than listening and writing from scratch.

These two are nifty, but it doesn't make a multi billion dollar industry.

In other words the bubble is bursting and the value / waste ratio looks extremely low.

Say what you want about the Tulip bubble, but at least tulips are pretty.

Gerard -> Assange -> creates Wikileaks -> Wikileaks receives and publishes hacked or leaked DNC emails -> DNC emails shows Clinton cheating Sanders in the primary -> depresses turnout among potential democratic voters in the general election -> Trump wins.

On can question each step on how influential it's for the next, but if one doesn't Trump was all his fault.

I have noted two AI companies going belly up with earnings in a year matching costs per month. So I assumed that was around the worse case scenario, and for not yet bankrupt AI companies earnings were probably a bit better, perhaps just losing ten times their earnings.

I now see the flaw of my reasoning. Capital isn't allocated on profits, it's allocated on hype. Having profits draws the company down because it's no longer pure hype, and thus doesn't contribute to the hype bubble the same way.

So existing, not yet bankrupt, AI companies probably has significantly worse cost to income ratio than twelve.

"National socialism" is the term the Nazis invented to describe themselves. "Nazi" is the abbreviation of the term "national socialism". Could be good to know.

Reading this extract I was surprised, figuring the desperate search for investment money must mean that Kickstarter wasn't turning a profit despite a seemingly sound business model.

Reading the article I found out it was even stupider. Kickstarter wasn't lacking a path to profit, it was lacking a path to growth. And being a profitable company with a clear market nisch isn't cool enough. Everything has to grow, grow, grow. So Kickstarter created a bunch of problems for itself, destroying much of its brand. It's that stupid.

Knowing just a smidgeon about how the statistical parrots work, I wonder were they will get the dataset for the animal languages.

This reminds me, I read an article in Nature about teaching dogs to read. Now, this was a 19th century article in a 19th century Nature, so it described how the author had written "food" on a note and placed it on the food bowl and placed a blank note on an empty bowl and eventually gotten his dog to fetch the note that had "food" written on it. Alas, due to unforeseen circumstances, it was hard to expand into more advanced literature.

So where to get the dataset? Nevermind, Magical AI to the rescue!