* Posts by Schultz

1769 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Oct 2007

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

Schultz

... quantum computing hardware and software

Last time I checked, quantum computing was still a fundamental science project. Yes there are companies collecting investor money and selling access to whatever-bit quantum computers but so far nobody has run a useful computation on these. It's a bit like fusion energy: we know it works in principle but we don't know if we can assemble a device that scales sufficiently to be useful.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Schultz

The fault lies with lazy humans

Humans love magic. Imagine you can skip the hard work because you can just wave some wand or enter some data into a black box. Wouldn't that be nice? Well, some people just a little smarter than you have invented just that. For a little fee, you can use that box and you can Be Rich without any hard work.

For the person understanding the workings of said black box, the limitations may be obvious, but fortunately more than 99% of humans have no clue. So there is a big market. If you don't want to be the customer, maybe you can be the reseller. And because nobody understands the limitations, the possibilities and the market are truly limitless (no liability!).

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Schultz
Stop

"HP have confirmed they hate theiir customers"

No, no, no, HP loves their customers! They love their customers like the invasive cat on some remote island loves the flightless, ground-dwelling bird chick. Tasy!

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

Schultz
Angel

3 strikes and you're out ...

... so I switched away from Chrome.

See, Google and I had this unwritten contract. I got to use their free services and browser while keeping annoying advertisements at a minimum (ublock, etc.). In return, Google could use all their tools to monetize the shit out of my internet activities.

If Google doesn't keep up their end of the deal, why should I? Let's move on.

IBM-led advertising X-odus gains steam as more flee Musk's platform

Schultz

Nazis versus Leftists is the wrong paradigm

Look up Stasser and the left wing of the nazi party. The party called itself national socialists for a reason.

Maybe we should be more selective with the labels we apply to people. And stop using these labels as a convenient way to discredit those we disagree with. OTOH, your use of language does help me recognize your personal set of biases, so carry on.

Nvidia boss tells Israeli staff Mellanox founder's daughter was killed in festival massacre

Schultz
Go

The way to defeat terrorism

All we have to do is look at Ireland / Northern Ireland or Austria / Northern Italy (South Tyrolia). The way to defuse terrorism is by granting meaningful autonomy. One side's terrorists are the other side's freedom fighters and once a reasonable degree of freedom is achieved, the terrorists melt away.

Schultz
WTF?

Xenophobia is running strong in this one ...

CowHorseFrog: "By having so many babies they are creating a hell hole that is Gaza. Its utter madness to have 8+ kids when theres no future in the shithole tht is Gaza."

Here are the actual numbers from Wikipedia (go to the Wiki page for reputable references):

"Out of 224 listed countries and territories, the West Bank ranked 48th with a total fertility rate (TFR) of 3.2, and the Gaza Strip ranked 31st with a TFR of 3.97 according to The World Factbook in 2018.[13] In 2018, the West Bank had an estimated population growth rate of 1.81% (country comparison to the world: 56th) and the Gaza Strip had a population growth rate of 2.25% (35th)."

So we have a nice example of xenophobia coupled with an inability to look up the numbers. Full points.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Schultz

Just learned to break open our family phones ...

and found that replacing batteries and screens is quite feasible, if you have the weird screwdrivers, a guitar pick, and some patience. I guess that newly acquired skill will become quite useless in the near future.

Concerning the limited lifetime of phones, I guess it's time to figure out how to prolong that lifetime. For most of us, it's not a hardware issue anymore -- the email app, messenger and browser worked just fine on my old phone. But the software obsolescence made me get a new phone this year.

CERN spots Higgs boson decay breaking the rules

Schultz
Boffin

"Too many alternatives to the Standard Model"

The fact that there are so many untested (and some times untestable) theories out there indicates that we throw too much money at theoreticians and too little at experimentalists. This results in a lot of pointless theories and then a lot of PhDs ("Quants") messing up our financial system.

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Schultz
Facepalm

Re: A phrase to remember

Just repaired an old HP-42s, so my kid could have a calculator for school. Turned out to be a real PITA, but free42 somehow violates the school's no-phone policy :(.

Here's how the data we feed AI determines the results

Schultz
Boffin

Re: It's useful

Turn that logic around: If the AI can do it, it's not new and most probably useless.

And don't be all impressed that the AI might pass an exam: The exam itself is only useful as indicator that the examinee might have the smarts to do do useful stuff in his future career.

US, NATO military plans leak: Actual war strategy or pro-Kremlin shenanigans?

Schultz

Simple explanation for low Russian death count on Mediazona

According to the Mediazona website:

"These numbers do not represent the actual death toll since we can only review publicly available reports including social media posts by relatives, reports in local media, and statements by the local authorities.

The real death toll is much higher. Besides, the number of soldiers missing in action or captured is not known."

So they don't count soldiers who were not officially killed in Ukraine. And the Russian Army seems to have a lot of I centives to keep the official numbers low: Financially they are on the hook for widow pensions, etc., if they acknowledge a war death. And I won't have to spell out how hight casualty numbers might affect their PR efforts.

So, pointing to the Mediazona numbers to question other counts is a bit nonsensical. RtFM!

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

Schultz
Boffin

The article's arguments against AI ...

are based on the fact that people might figure out how to do bad things with the knowledge provided by it? Well, you could buy physics and engineering books to figure out how to build a bomb ... no AI required. I guess that's how the North Koreans did it.

From my playing around with ChatGPT, it seems that this AI provides an interface to make searchable information more accessible (i.e., summarizes your search results in coherent sentences). It doesn't fundamentally change the available informtion or change the fact that technology can be used for good or bad purposes. Of course, there is the saying that sufficiently advances science always looks like magic. I guess for the uneducated masses, the current AI is the magic engine that will allow you to build a nuclear bomb or perform other sufficiently complicated 'magic' tasks.

OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT plugins, granting iffy language model access to your apps

Schultz
Boffin

Next Step ...

...will be Microsoft opting you into sharing all your data within your Windows / MS cloud ecosystem. Win11 already requires enough comupting power that they should be able to train on you data locally before uploading relevant (marketing) information. Suitably anonymized, of course. Except if you reside in the EU, where they'll require proper consent and anonymization, somewhere in the 2030s.

But apart from my cynical view of the MS/ChatGPT cooperation, do you guys think the new AI engines represent a new user interface to information (+(natural language), +(compilation of multiple sources), -(reliability / reproducibility)) or does it acutally 'generate' knowledge? It seem like everybody assumes the second, but I am somewhat sceptical.

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

Schultz
Facepalm

...past their mid-30s most people struggle to pick up new skills...

I find that pasr 30 I became more selective with the skills I want to pick up. All those wasted hours learning totally useless skills, or skills that age faster than you hamster... Those hours are just not coming back.

Those young kids always think that the latest fad will completely revolutionize their world. Then they spend a large amount of time debugging the latest fad, reproducing and fixing all those old errors, and feeling very smart about it :).

UK prepares to go it alone on post-Brexit science plan

Schultz

...what the EU wants in a completely separate area

Separate area? Such as signing and abiding by a Brexit agreement.

There is no separate area, the EU agreement is a package deal and you can't pick the parts you like and renegotiate the rest. The EU tried to make this clear from the very beginning, but British politicians were a bit preoccupied with internal politicking and never seemed to get the message.

Intel wants another €3.2b from German gov for Magdeburg mega fab

Schultz
FAIL

Free money ...

... so you have given us billions to build this thing. It would be a pity if all that money would go to waste! How about you give us a bit more and we'll consider actually building it. It would be a pity if you'd loose an election because you wasted all that taxpayer money!

It was a mistake to start offering money, but then they did it before and it also crashed and burned back then. But those politicians love this type of thing: they get to spend other people's money, they get a bunch of excited press releases and photo-shoots, and it works magic if they suddenly are out of a job and try to find a place within some friendly industry.

Time for the government to remember its core functions: pay your teachers, maintain a reasonable social net to keep your society stable, fund the army.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Schultz

My favorite story ...

The American in the ski rental was offered the 1-meter-80 skis, would those be the right size for him? He was unsure and asked whether the clerk could tell him the length in cm.

Microsoft patent eyes ads in streaming online games

Schultz
Devil

Not just for games...

They should bring out their ad-supported version of MS glasses and they can start replacing billboards in real life! Imagine the possibilities, those hours of driving enlivened by interactive ads. It'll be good for the economy and good for the user too. (Honest, judge, that cyclist jumped out from behind the Budweiser ad.) Also imagine Clippy offering you a helping hand in those mundane daily tasks. What could possibly go wrong?

Why did Microsoft just buy fiber optic cable company Lumenisity?

Schultz
Stop

Re: Latency is everything

Latency is only important for high-frequency trading, i.e., some broker trying to interject himself between a buyer and a seller by buying faster and then selling with a mark-up. There is no benefit of high-frequency trading to the wider economy -- it has a negative effect as it drives up the cost of trading. So this shouldn't be a good long term business to invest in, as the business model will vanish once the regulators get their act together and agree on shutting it down.

But there is a benefit of low latency data transmission for almost all aspects of computing. The only question is whether hollow-core fibers are the tool for the job. Trading signal attenuation versus speed means that the benefits of hollow core fibers come with a significant cost. So it's a matter of finding the right niche where this trade-off is worth the cost.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Schultz
Boffin

The definition of temperature, latent energy, etc.

Temperature describes the average energy in matter. To talk about temperature only makes sense when all molecular degrees of freedom are reasonably equilibrated, including kinetic, vibrational, and rotational degrees of freedom. Molecular collisions very rapidly equilibrate these degrees of freedom and the equilibration between rotation and velocity is actually faster than that between vibration and kinetic energy. It therefore makes no sense to separate out rotation or to claim that rotation is a form of latent energy. While the earth is warmer than space (at a cool 2.7 K, or -270.5 C), all that heat will eventually be re-emitted into space, but fortunately the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere (predominantly water vapor, but unfortunately also CO2) retain the heat from solar absorption long enough to keep us at comfortable temperatures.

Latent energy is energy consumed in a phase transition. E.g., a cooling earth might spend a lot of time at -2 C while all the oceans freeze, emitting a lot of latent heat. Latent heat does not play any role in the understanding of global warming.

In my field of research, we use supersonic molecular beams, expanding a molecular gas into vacuum. Within mm distances from the molecular beam nozzle (microseconds of flight into vacuum), molecules cool from room temperature to few Kelvin. So rotation is not special and equilibrates almost completely within microseconds (faster near room temperature!).

I'll be happy to recommend some textbooks if you want to learn more. I know this stuff pretty well, considering that I develop and perform molecular spectroscopy experiments for a living and teach all aspects of physical chemistry.

Schultz
Boffin

Climate pseudo-science versus science

As a scientist, let me inform you that rising atmospheric CO2 does lead to increased temperatures on the earth surface. It's as simple as filling a bottle with a transparent liquid and another with a dark liquid, placing both into the sunlight and observing how one warms up with respect to the other. Only we fill the earth atmosphere with a 'darker', more absorbing gas.

If you want a deeper understanding of the earth thermal equilibrium, you'll have to look up the blackbody radiation spectrum for sun and earth and account for the place where sunlight is absorbed (mostly on the earth surface) and how heat is re-emitted into space (as IR/THz radiation through the atmosphere, with CO2 absorbing some of that, trapping the heat). This has been understood for some 100 years. We now have very good observations that CO2 concentrations and climate were coupled in past millenia and we have good observations showing the correlation of man-made CO2 and climate. The controversy is no more among scientists (crackpots excepted), but among the uneducated and populists.

Schultz
Stop

Re: Didn't someone previously propose 'stretchy' seconds

Great, there goes our standardized system of units. Where is Napoleon when you need him?

Schultz
Boffin

TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

The whole idea of this change to UTC is to remove leap seconds and the announcements stated that this will remove any requirement to play with time until the end of this century. So we'll leave it to the next generations to decide if they want to fiddle with the clocks or accept a few second's shift in time versus the day/night cycle. Stop worrying and trust your grandchildren to make a competent and informed decision about UTC versus UTC1, it's not your business anymore.

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

Schultz
Facepalm

Stupid Management?

So the company incurs the full cost of developing and producing powerful hardware and software and then sells an inferior product instead. Doesn't sound like a great business decision to me. I'd rather buy from the competition who sells a fully functional product.

To sell a deliberately inferior product sounds like a bad idea to me. It might work if you are the only supplier in town, but it is not a way to build and gain market share in a competitive environment. I believe these managers should go sell razor blades, printer ink, or coffee pods instead.

Germany says nein to Qatari World Cup spyware, err, apps

Schultz
Devil

I wonder if there were any brown envelopes [...] involved

You wonder, really?

The German press talked extensively about the gifts that the various German soccer executives tried to smuggle back home from Katar. E.g., luxury watches in the case of former German Soccer Association president Theo Zwanziger or European Club Association chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. The smarter members of the German delegation were not caught with $100'000 luxury watches, interpret that as you want. I'd expect that less flashy gifts have been transferred more discretely.

Imagine how blatant it must have been if even the Germans were caught with their bribes.

Australian exchange pauses project to move stocks to blockchain

Schultz
Stop

The problem of Blockchain in finance...

The argument for blockchain technologies in finance (including exchanges, cryptocurrency, and the bunch) is that it pretends to solve the problem of trust -- but this problem cannot really be solved.

Do you trust your bank, the stock exchange, your central bank to keep your money safe from fraud, theft, and inflation? They have a good track record, that's why they exist in their current form. If you replace these institutions with blockchain software, then you have to trust the programmers and bookkeepers of the newly created systems. Any blockchain needs to be maintained and stored and your 'safe' transactions still need to be properly recorded. So, really, you now just trust another set of people (unless you are inside the system, be it a bank or a crypto outfit, and roll your own). Be careful whom you entrust with your money <cough>FTX</cough>.

Google wins lawsuit against alleged Russian botnet herders

Schultz
FAIL

"DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country."

The short-term gains from lying are usually paid back with interest, as the world catches on to said lies. Same is true for every human interaction in this world: being trustworthy is better for business than being a lying scumbag and cheater.

Case in point is the current cost of Russian foreign policy. They thought that lying about their strategies and goals in Ukraine might pay off internationally and internally. Now they need to enforce a draft and Orwellian speech policies to keep up their extension of diplomacy with other means.

Microsoft tests 'upsells' of its products in Windows 11 sign-out menu

Schultz
Angel

Is it still an Ad ...

... if you call it a suggestion? Clearly somebody should update the dictionary. My friend Orwell will be happy to help.

Bumble open sources AI code to automatically blur NSFW photos

Schultz
WTF?

Alternative ways to "make the internet a safer and kinder place"...

is to get everybody (including kids) used to the naked human body.

Seriously, I never quite understood the stigma associated with human nakedness. In the West, showing too much leg is considered risqué, whereas in Asia you have to cover up your shoulders. And if we cast the net a bit wider, we can find that showing female hair or eyes is way to revealing, or that exposed breasts and even full nakedness is quite normal.

Back in the days of my PhD, it took the US students exactly two trips to the sunbathing beach (Zürihorn) to realize that the female form is quite ordinary. (Don't look it up, nobody is excited to encounter your misplaced curiosity.) Made me realize how prudish our US cousins are; the locals had stopped staring a long time ago.

The rules about decency are quite arbitrary. Let's change the rules.

Quantum startup demos spin qubits fabbed with existing tech

Schultz
Thumb Up

Re: Refreshing and unusual realism!

Usually followed by rapid disinvestment and the money being reallocated into the Next Big Thing. The latter, of course, has its 5-10 years in the sun before realism sets in. ... Cue, the next migration to amazing unexplored pastures filled with ill-defined concepts and grandiose language.

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

Schultz
Go

The circle of life ... as related to business

Innovation in context of the circle of life is called evolution and should teach us a little something about the futility of grand corporate visions or great weed fields that may or may not sprout the next big thing.

Biological evolution is fundamentally random but is progressing through constant evolutionary pressure and is constantly adapting to new environmental conditions. The right mutation meets the right conditions and you have a great success story. Capitalist business works very much the same way (unless you include rent-seeking and cronyism into the equation), but we tend to re-interpret every success story - with hindsight - as great visionary success from brilliant people.

Let's just face it, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates (just to name a few) are not singularly smart engineers, managers, or investors but were the right people in the right place at the right time. An Albert Einstein, surely, they are not. The best a company can hope for is that its smart and creative employees find the right product that meets its moment in the marketplace. These employees will need enough time and space to succeed. The worst those companies can do is to micromanage every aspect of their company and grind all creativity into finely-powdered productivity that can be sifted and quantified in this year's report card.

Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend

Schultz
WTF?

Just for context, Elon Musk tweeted:

“there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story” behind the attack on Paul Pelosi in San Francisco, linking to an opinion article in the Santa Monica Observer, a site described by fact-checkers as a low-credibility source favoring the extreme right. The article claimed without evidence that Pelosi was drunk at the time of the assault and “in a dispute with a male prostitute.” (cited from the Washington Post; the NYT article reported the same facts.)

Looks like Elon turned off the bullshit filter in his own mind as a warm-up for his actions at twitter.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

Schultz

"Christmas is called Christmas"...

... Unless we call it Xmas (as one commenter did above), which then makes me raise him an XXmas, and you can see where it goes from there.

I just hope that you have a good time. And if you don't, then maybe add some more Xses, because that can fix anything.

20 years on, physicists are still figuring out anomaly in proton experiment

Schultz
Boffin

"Studying atomic details is like doing a crossword puzzle"

But only if your crossword puzzle extends into 4 dimensions and has new questions popping up when you take a closer look.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Schultz

And drop the "Great", past a joke.

Somebody should campaign with the slogan: "Make Britain Great Again".

Schultz
Facepalm

BJ is front runner to replace her

I guess he is jealous because she broke a national record and he didn't.

Schultz
Stop

1 Merkel equal to approximately 140 Trusses

But what is that in lettuces? I hope they didn't stop the experiment simply because one of the contestants dropped out!

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Schultz
Go

Manual is optional,

but that box should have a big label "Press to Start" (or similar) with an arrow pointing to the button.

We've all been there, that's why we bought the labeling machine!

Founder of zero-emissions truck venture Nikola found guilty of $1b fraud

Schultz
Stop

energy storage ... pulling a train of concrete blocks ...

sounds like a great energy storage solution until you realize that hydroelectric pumping stores much more power with much less infrastructure. Just picture the infrastructure of track, loading dock, and trains and compare that to the small water tube and pump/turbine building that will transport the same mass flow. Also imagine throwing all those concrete blocks into your water storage lake -- their weight and volume will hardly make a difference on the scale of a decent lake.

Bitcoin energy consumption a feature, not a bug, says crypto-miner

Schultz
Unhappy

...soak up all that excess green energy...

Unfortunately, that green electricity in Georgia seems to be predominantly produced from fossil fuels (see: link to US energy information administration): some 50% natural gas and 15% coal. Bitcoin proponents sound more and more like tobacco admen in the late 90s: they know their game is up, but they are committed to squeeze that lemon dry while there remains a gullible audience.

Bitcoin worse for the climate than beef, say economists

Schultz
Thumb Down

Re: Lying with numbers

So an Anonymous Coward pulls some arguments out of his sleeve and thinks that this makes a convincing case against a serious and well-documented study published in Nature? How about you invest a few years into higher education, become so brilliant that your PhD topic makes into the Nature journal, and then you explain to us, with proper fact-based arguments, why said study is mistaken. Calling others liars is a bit over the top. Doing so without any meaningful arguments is just despicable.

China spins up giant battery built with US-patented tech

Schultz
Trollface

Once something is patented it is secret ...

Upvoted for hidden sarcasm -- our favorite kind.

US warns cryptominers must cut power use to avoid busting US carbon goals

Schultz
Stop

"our problem isn't energy scarcity...because [energy] isn't scarce"

There is a reason why chemists distinguish energy from free energy: Just because energy exists doesn't mean that it can be usefully employed.

So while your statement that "energy isn't scarce" is true, it is also totally meaningless. Usable, clean energy is very scarce. So scarce, that we continue to burn fossil fuels for the majority of our energy needs. So scarce, that we cut down forests for wood pellets. So scarce, that the gasoline price may decide the election outcome in our largest democracies.

The scarcity of clean energy may come to define this century. Already, we saw energy-intense and dirty industry migrate to poorer and less-democratic places -- fundamentally reshaping the development of our world. These forces won't diminish and will define the conflicts of this century. Oil and gas in the black sea may well have tipped the scales for the Ukraine war.

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C8H10N4O2

Schultz
Stop

...forbidding any liquids ...

So you can punish every innocent coffee drinker in the company or you can punish the select few who were in the room where it happened.

Brain-inspired chips promise ultra-efficient AI, so why aren’t they everywhere?

Schultz
WTF?

But what is it good for?

After reading the article, I was left wondering: But what is it good for?

In my mind, the efforts to simulate the brain in silico is based on old-fashioned transistors clicking away while simulating neurons. But apparently, the idea of neuromorphic chips is to leave those transistors unpowered until a stimulus comes along (see: Nature article on the topic), hence the immense power savings. Clearly, this is only useful when you assume that your computer is going to sit idle most of the time and that you fail to power down while idling. The other touted advantage is highly parallel computing.

The big question then becomes: is it helpful to try to model a brain in order to gain advantages from parallel computing and power-down upon idle, or might one just optimize parallel computing and dynamic power use? The former is clearly advantageous when trying to obtain research funding (addressing fundamental questions), while the latter sounds more promising if you want to develop and sell actual silicon. So my prediction would be that brain-inspired chips will remain an active research area for the foreseeable future, without ever moving beyond the stage of a investors' fad. But I am sure that every neuromorphic brain in this world would like to contradict me on that.

Dutch authorities arrest 29-year-old dev with suspected ties to Tornado Cash

Schultz
Stop

...There are no investors in crypto....

I mildly disagree with that statement. According to the dictionary, investment is: "the action or process of investing money for profit or material result."

You can invest in collectible plastic figurines. You can invest in tulip bulbs. You can invest in crypto. Let's leave it to those with too much money in their pockets to decide whether crypto is a worthwhile investment. We can then have a good laugh in 10 to 20 years' time.

Scientists unveil a physics-defying curved space robot

Schultz
Boffin

Ever used a Skateboard?

Looks like they copied the kickturn (Youtube link).

No momentum transfer? I call bullshit, because that would break the standard model and, to-date, the standard model has been quite robust. It'll take more than a few students playing with robot parts to overturn that ;).

If you think you invented mechanical magic, check for momentum transfer via friction.

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Schultz
Facepalm

What an achievement ... in hyperbole

The researchers manage to be quite honest in describing their achievement, but at the same time they do an amazing job hyping their research.

Did you catch that they use an area of about 50 nanoWales (2 Tennis courts, or ~1080 square meter) to make a few drops of jet fuel per hour? And they never mention how much energy went into the pumps, valves and motors required to run the whole set-up, so it is not clear that the set-up creates more energy than it consumes.

This is the current reality of our energy transition -- a lot of hyped achievements that are only realistic when you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain (who is burning that cheap hydrocarbon energy to fuel you pipe dreams).

AI-friendly patent law needed 'as a matter of national security', ex-USPTO boss says

Schultz

It'll be a big clusterfuck

Your statements nicely illustrate the problem with 'AI patents': So your novel, patentable method would be to use Tensorflow to recognize cat pictures? (Feel free to substitute the cats with whatever you consider useful.) Or do you really, in your heart, want to patent the idea of using AI for recognizing said cat pictures? Or do you want to only patent the use of your particular training data in combination with Tensorflow? Or maybe the use of any equivalent AI system that could give somewhat similar input-to-output results?

Whatever you try to do, either you get a monopoly for an idea as opposed to a method -- and that would break the very innovation the patent system is supposed to foster -- or you try to patent data or software.

AI is so interesting to so many, because it's a black box that promises to solve all problems of this world. Because it's a black box, it's really hard to prove that it cannot, potentially, solve a particular problem. You could spend decades of your life trying to understand and solve a hard problem. Or you could just use this magic box.

I predict that AI will go out of fashion, gradually, over the next 10 years. All those great AI projects will be extremely successful. (You wouldn't tell your boss otherwise, would you? After all, it's research and it's OK to move the goalposts a bit, innit.) But after a few rounds of funding, the weeding-out will begin.