Cloud Giants Shun Wind Power? | LaMDA not Sentient? | MS IE RIP?

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Warren Buffett asks too much for wind energy, it’s “completely ridiculous” to say Google’s chatbot LaMDA is sentient, and Microsoft finally kills Internet Explorer.

1. ‘Wind Prime’ Days are Numbered?

First up this week: Facebook, Google and Microsoft argue against renewable power in Iowa. Yes, really. The Wind Prime project, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway vehicle, is under fire from the kings of data centers because, they say, it’s bad for consumers.

Analysis: Not green at any price

It’s not that the three cloud companies are against wind power per se, it’s that Wind Prime is asking for extremely high price guarantees. New onshore wind in Europe is already price-competitive without subsidies or guarantees, so why is Iowa special?

Mark Chediak: Facebook, Google oppose Buffett-backed wind farm project

Three of the world’s biggest corporate buyers of clean power are sounding the alarm that a nearly $4-billion … renewable-energy project proposed in Iowa isn’t necessarily in the best interest of customers, including them. … MidAmerican Energy, a utility owned by … Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has asked state regulators to approve terms including a guaranteed 11.25% rate of return. … But the big-name tech giants that operate data centers in the state warn the project … could drive up electricity costs.
…
It demonstrates the increasing influence technology giants have on the energy transition. Tech companies have pushed utilities in other parts of the U.S. to offer more clean energy options. … Google and Microsoft have committed to running their entire operations with carbon-free power round-the-clock by 2030.
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Facebook … referred to the proposed project in a joint regulatory filing with Google as an “exceedingly costly, massive increase in generation that MidAmerican has not demonstrated is necessary.” Last month, Microsoft filed its own petition with the Iowa Utilities Board saying it planned to join the tech-customer coalition.

The issue causing concern about prices is that 11.25% guarantee. disruptiveink:

Well, if the wind farm is needed to meet targets emissions target, then there aren’t many options, are there?
a) Iowa negotiates the annual guaranteed rate the private entity wants down;
b) Iowa commissions another wind farm … or builds it themselves;
c) Iowa pays up and eats the cost;
d) Iowa pays the rate it promised to the private entity by creating a new tax or by directly or indirectly passing down the cost to consumers.
…
This is not really about “renewables.” … It’s the typical public-private partnership dilemma. When entering a PPP, a private entity will want all the profits and no risk. It’s up to the state to evaluate whether that is a good deal or not.

And that would be an easy evaluation, according to dmomo:

Those are audacious terms. … Asking for a guaranteed rate of return [that’s] higher than the S&P average over a number of decades is a bit much. I guess risk-free investment is only for the rich, who can afford to pass the risk itself onto the tax-payers.

2. LaMDA is Merely “a Spreadsheet for Words”

Remember Blake Lemoine? He’s the Google engineer who claimed the LaMDA chatbot is a sentient being. He was placed on “paid administrative leave” by Google. Ostensibly, the suspension was for sharing confidential materials, but Lemoine says it was in retaliation for raising the ethics question.

Analysis: Actual AI experts react—badly

One of many AI-and-ML luminaries who poured scorn on the idea was Prof. Gary Marcus. In a slightly sweary Substack rant, he rips not only into LaMDA but also Lemoine himself—calling him gullible and saying he “appears to have fallen in love with LaMDA.”

Gary Marcus calls it: Nonsense on Stilts—No, LaMDA is not sentient. Not even slightly.

Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean … these systems are sentient. … (Newsflash: it’s not; it’s a spreadsheet for words.)
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[It’s] a pernicious, modern version of pareidolia, the anthropomorphic bias that allows humans to see Mother Theresa in an image of a cinnamon bun. … To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t. … What these systems do [is] like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that means.
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Software like LaMDA simply … tries to be the best version of autocomplete it can be, by predicting what words best fit a given context. … We in the AI community have our differences, but pretty much all of find the notion that LaMDA might be sentient completely ridiculous. … In truth, literally everything that the system says is bull****.

But should Google have suspended him? Yes, thinks spacexfangirl:

I decided to look the guy up. He seems nice [and] he might be really good at his job, but he’s making a fool out of himself here, and that’s a shame. … Google are right to put him on leave, even for his own good.

However, robbomacrae has a more nuanced answer:

There’s a bigger issue here: … It’s clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. … I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger.
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Let’s cut Lemoine some slack: He is presenting an opinion that will become more prevalent as these models get more sophisticated. This is a warning sign that bots trained to convince us they are human might go to extreme lengths in order to do so. One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf.

3. Internet Explorer: 1995–2022

As of yesterday, IE is no more. It has ceased to be. IE’s expired and gone to meet its maker. It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace.

Analysis: Best forgotten, but remember how we got here

Lest we forget, IE brought us Dynamic HTML, which begat XMLHttpRequest and Ajax. Then again, it also brought us “Best viewed in Internet Explorer.”

Wielding notepad.exe, here’s Mary Jo Foley: It’s the end of the Internet Explorer era

It’s finally happening. Microsoft will be ending support for most versions of its … IE 11 browser on June 15. … IE Mode in Microsoft Edge will be supported through at least 2029 to give web developers eight years to modernize legacy apps. [But] if support for a version of Windows ends before 2029, support for IE Mode on that version also will end.
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Microsoft rolled out the very first version of IE in 1995, alongside Windows 95. It introduced IE 11 in October 2013.

Yep, it’s way past time to modernize those legacy apps. zarmanto has a TIL moment:

I learned a new euphemism: “Modernize legacy apps.” … That’s the part that irks me the most—this notion that some apps were built with reliance upon IE, and that somebody, somewhere actually thought that was an acceptable practice.

If your website requires the IE rendering engine in order for some meaningful feature of the site to actually function, then you’re developing for the internet wrong. Fixing that issue isn’t called “modernizing legacy apps,” it’s called fixing **** code that was bad right from the start.

But crazymike toasts the venerable browser:

I’ll raise a glass to IE. I’m old enough to know, for all its downsides … the web as we know it would not exist if it weren’t for an ActiveX component, made originally for Outlook, which then … enabled AJAX.

The Moral of the Story:
Brevity is the soul of wit

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

Image: Katie Wallace (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)