Palentir's Advice for Corps. Re- AI Probably Applies to Individuals, Too

[snot]

1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future. Sovereignty is the precondition for choice. Relinquishing sovereignty transfers the future choices of your institution to others, who are likely to exploit it for their gain and your loss.

2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones.

3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence. The pursuit of high token usage incentivizes disposable scripts over robust software — with the addictive feeling of false progress. There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.

4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs.

5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha.

6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants. Techno-politicization is the wellspring of false sovereignty. Techno-politicization drives decisions that seem to reduce dependency, but ultimately limit agency — especially on the battlefield in the West.

7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right. Listen to those closest to the problems, not those speaking most compellingly about them.

8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered. Institutions facing existential threats do not have the luxury of making technical decisions based on political preferences.

9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right. A track record of correctness is the best and only signal for future correctness. Judging something as right or wrong based on who you like is exceedingly misguided.

ALSO NOTE, error rates among AI responses are currently estimated to range from 7% to 88% and up, with the highest rates in the fields of healthcare, the law, scientific/academic, and financial analysis (see https://axis-intelligence.com/ai-hallucination-statistics/ ; plus there are findings of substantial losses in originality and creativity).

The 9 points listed above are from

Link to tweet

[DBoon]

1. "Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude "

I've seen lots of management-speak in my working career, but this one breaks the BS meter.

[snot]

6. I had to look it up. If I understand correctly,

many AI providers encourage corporations to track their employees' usage of AI via "tokens," as a supposed indicator of employee productivity, on the premise that the more the employee uses AI, the more productive they'll be.

The problem is that this system works better as a way to sell more AI than it does to enhance real productivity, since among other reasons, it's easily gamed – employees can "tokenmax" by submitting the same query multiple times or write simple programs to submit multiiple queries that may or may not be relevant to real productivity.

[TommyT139]

2. Point 9: "Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right."

So...not AI, then.

Thanks, Oligarch Obvious.

(Although the points were probably written by AI.)

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Listen to progressives. Block out Regressives. Couldn't agree more.

A shame these people never realize the implications of what they're saying.

[snot]

8. Actually,

I think I prefer the original wording: listen to those who were right, not those who were wrong. Because although I've voted Dems for nearly 50 years, I've seen Dems say or do some things that were incorrect or wrong, and I've seen some Republicans say or do some things that I agreed with.

[The Madcap]

3. When did businesses stop using English as their primary language?

Much of this list is indecipherable, full of jargon, and a horrible reminder of what it was like to work for a large company.

Now I understand why CEOs and their immediate underlings make so much money. They are the only ones who understand this gibberish.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. This is almost certainly their CEO's language. Thiel is a bit of a psycho and a whirly-eyed fundie. nt

[snot]

7. I found it worthwhile because

it's coming from someone who understands what's going on and is warning corps., which presumably have more sophistication than the average individual user -- but it seems to me that the same warnings are relevant for individuals; and the warnings appear reasonable to me.

And one might say, "duh!"; but I am seeing an awful lot of people as well as corps. still trying to rely on AI, despite the shocking error rates referred to in the OP and the many other dangers.

So my point is, beware!

That said, eventually we will have AI that's actually intelligent; but I believe that's a long way off.

PS: Fwiw, the current CEO of Palentir is Alex Karp, not Thiel; I don't know anything about Karp.