Column: This AI chatbot was ‘trained’ using my books, but don’t blame me for its incredible stupidity Meta’s LLaMA chatbot was trained on a database of 200,000 books, including mine, without pay. How should authors like me think about that? Oct. 5, 2023 It’s true that some of the contemplated risks seem unlikely in the foreseeable future; its sponsor, state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), says it has been drafted to cover more than distant eventualities. Advertisement “The focus of this bill is how these models are going to be used in the near future,” Wiener told me. “The opposition routinely tries to disparage the bill by saying it’s all about science-fiction and ‘Terminator’ risks. But we’re focused on very real-world risks that most people can envision and that are not futuristic.” That brings us to doubts not about AI risks, but about its real-world utility for business. These have been spreading in industry as more businesses try to use it, and find that it has been oversold. A survey by Boston Consulting Group found last year, for instance, that “for business problem solving,” using the most advanced version of OpenAI’s GPT chatbot “resulted in performance that was 23% lower than that of the control group.” As the consultants noted, “it isn’t obvious when the new technology is (or is not) a good fit, and the persuasive abilities of the tool make it hard to spot a mismatch. ... Even participants who were warned about the possibility of wrong answers from the tool did not challenge its output.” Some investment analysts say that so much has been invested in AI that the big developers such as Microsoft, Meta and Google may not see returns for years, if ever. In coming years, Goldman Sachs analysts reported in June, “tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $1 trillion on AI ... with so far little to show for it. So, will this large spend ever pay off?” Nvidia’s dominance of the market for AI hardware raises questions about the effect on the financial markets if the firm stumbles financially or technologically. JP Morgan’s Cembalest titled his analysis of the market’s future “A severe case of COVIDIA.” AI is “driving the [venture capital] ecosystem,” he noted, producing more than 40% of new “unicorns” (startups worth $1 billion or more) in the first half of this year and more than 60% of the increases in valuations of venture-backed startups. Advertisement The instability this imposes on investment markets was visible Tuesday, when Nvidia’s downdraft helped to bring the Nasdaq composite index down by more than 577 points, or 3.26%.