• Snowclone@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 months ago

    They put new AI controls on our traffic lights. Cost the city a fuck ton more money than fixing our dilapidated public pool. Now no one tries to turn left at a light. They don’t activate. We threw out a perfectly good timer no one was complaining about.

    But no one from silicone valley is lobbing cities to buy pool equipment, I guess.

    • lazynooblet@lazysoci.alEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Whilst it’s a shame this implementation sucks, I wish we would get intelligent traffic light controls that worked. Sitting at a light for 90 seconds in the dead of night without a car in sight is frustrating.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        That was a solved problem 20 years ago lol. We made working systems for this in our lab at Uni, it was one of our course group projects. It used combinations of sensors and microcontrollers.

        It’s not really the kind of problem that requires AI. You can do it with AI and image recognition or live traffic data but that’s more fitting for complex tasks like adjusting the entire grid live based on traffic conditions. It’s massively overkill for dead time switches.

        Even for grid optimization you shouldn’t jump into AI head first. It’s much better long term to analyze the underlying causes of grid congestion and come up with holistic solutions that address those problems, which often translate into low-tech or zero-tech solutions. I’ve seen intersections massively improved by a couple of signs, some markings and a handful of plastic poles.

        Throwing AI at problems is sort of a “spray and pray” approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.

        • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
          2·
          3 months ago

          (I know I’m two months late)

          To back up what you’re saying, I work with ML, and the guy next to me does ML for traffic signal controllers. He basically established the benchmark for traffic signal simulators for reinforcement learning.

          Nothing works. All of the cutting edge reinforment algorithms, all the existing publications, some of which train for months, all perform worse than “fixed policy” controllers. The issue isn’t the brains of the system, its the fact that stoplights are fricken blind to what is happing.

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 months ago

    I think tech CEOs can empathise with chatgpt on how uninformed its opinions are and how well it can it bullshit

  • uis@lemm.ee
    1·
    5 months ago

    CEOs(dumbasses who are constantly wrong): rush replacing everyone with AI before everyone replaces them with AI

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    5 months ago

    LLMs aren’t virtual dumbasses who are constantly wrong, they are bullshit generators. They are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but don’t really care either way and will say wrong things just as confidently as right things.

  • StaySquared@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    Lots of companies jumping the gun… laying off so many people only to realize they’re going to need those people back. AI is still in its infancy, using it to replace an actual human is a dumb dumb move.

    • abracaDavid@lemmy.today
      01·
      5 months ago

      Oh come on. It’s called AI, as in artificial intelligence. None of these companies have ever called it a text generator, even though that’s what it is.

    • Match!!@pawb.socialEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Generative AI is amazing for some niche tasks that are not what it’s being used for

        • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          01·
          5 months ago

          Creating drafts for white papers my boss asks for every week about stupid shit on his mind. Used to take a couple days now it’s done in one day at most and I spend my Friday doing chores and checking on my email and chat every once in a while until I send him the completed version before logging out for the weekend.