Showing 1 - 9 of 9
Microsoft put on the naughty step by Aussie regulator
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/11/2025
» Microsoft has been at it again. The Competition & Consumer Commission in Australia has started a legal process against the Redmond giant for apparently misleading users of the policies for its Microsoft 365 bundle. Microsoft advised users with a Personal and Family plan that "to maintain their subscription they must accept the integration of Copilot and pay higher prices for their plan, or, alternatively, cancel their subscription".
The hidden dangers of AI
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/09/2025
» There's going to be a lot on artificial intelligence topics this week so let's get started. For the time being, the most common way to leverage an AI product is using a prompt of some kind. To that end, you will see lots of posts on platforms declaring that they have the best god-level prompts for large language models (LLMs). A prompt is something like, "What are the top ten songs from Depeche Mode?", or "Draw me a picture of a frog on a toadstool in the style of Alice In Wonderland with vivid colours". The more detailed and nuanced the prompt, the better the desired outcome tends to be. As with everything in the computer world, there are bad actors looking to take advantage of this.
OpenAI's search for profit is a risk
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/02/2025
» Is Sam Altman potentially the most dangerous person on the planet? An interesting question. Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company that made the AI that everyone knows as ChatGPT. The original aim of OpenAI back in the day, when Elon Musk was involved, was a fully open-source product that would be scrutinised and controlled by the wider population. In contrast, the focus of Altman appears to be money. OpenAI is currently looking for an injection of funds to make it a fully commercial enterprise. When that is the focus, safety is a secondary consideration and you can end up with Skynet. The current estimate for GAI or AGI (artificial general intelligence) is as soon as next year, but perhaps two to three. Readers will know my opinion on these estimates. So OpenAI may just as well now be called ClosedAI because it's all about the potential income and is really one of the potentially dangerous AI platforms available today.
AI is the new marketing buzzword
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/11/2023
» Some readers will remember back a decade or three when the big term was "turbo". Everything was turbo something. Turbo speed, turbo clearing, turbo graphics and so on. Today, the equivalent term is AI. I saw an advertisement recently for glasses described as AI technology that adapts to your sight. It was a regular lens with some design elements, perhaps from an AI, perhaps not, with claims of predictive focus. Rubbish. There was no inherent active or dynamic AI technology in the lenses to back up this claim and I don't think such a technology at that level is even available at any price in the current time. The same goes for many other claims preceded or appended by the AI moniker. Like turbo, it is the current marketing buzzword and since many don't understand it and what the current engineering and technological limitations are in 2023, it has become part of the mindscape.
The new normal of AI fakes
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/10/2023
» Following on from my last article, consider the following scenario. You've grabbed enough clear speech of someone to make a good AI model of them. You write up some text, pass it through the model and verify that the result sounds exactly the same as that individual. This is a little different from the previous example because it's a text to speech model, but essentially the same as using one voice to change to another. You now take a speech or interview from that person, change one word that will essentially change the context, and process this.
WFH causes a rethink of sales
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/06/2020
» - I love a good marketing vs predictive analysis battle. Lenovo is guessing the current work-from-home trend will be good for PC makers. This is on top of the orders for laptops that went through the roof as offices closed and staff were asked to work remotely. Sales in Western Europe for example jumped 55%. My organisation just had me take my PC home as they didn't have enough notebooks to go around. Lenovo are betting that if people are working from home on a more permanent basis that will mean more PC sales, predicting 25% to 30% growth in the next two to three years.
Universal sounds, universal sights, universal rights
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/04/2019
» Those reading my columns for long enough will know that I play the guitar. I'll never be Eric Clapton but I'm OK. Among the sources I use to improve my technique or break down a difficult lick are the helpful people that post guitar tutorials on YouTube. That could be about to change.
AI-aided hope on the horizon
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/02/2019
» Despite some of my criticisms in the past there are some excellent examples of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I've mentioned some of these from the medical world in earlier articles but a new one caught my eye this week, figuring out in which hotel a picture was taken. No, not to help people remember where holiday snaps were taken but to track down human trafficking where pics of women are taken to sell them for sex. The three groups behind this identification technology are from George Washington University, Temple University and Adobe, all in the US. Like many AI systems a large amount of source data is used and to help with this more than a million images have been collected from 50,000 hotels worldwide. Using all the room elements in backgrounds a neural network is being trained to identify a hotel chain and then a location.
Huawei still some way behind rivals
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/11/2018
» I've had some feedback expressing surprise that I invested in a smartwatch. Yes, I didn't think I'd see the day either, but it does function very well as a watch with changeable faces and at a price point that's far below some of the faces it can duplicate. The always-on test was a success in that I only turned the watch off when I wasn't using it on some evenings. It also does sleep tracking, which perhaps provides a sterner test, but it still provided a week's worth of use making it usable for many. On a longer trip you would need to take the charger along. Note that for both tests, I kept Bluetooth on the whole time.