WAYNE KUBLALSINGH
ARE YOU familiar with people who suffer from hallucinations? Like paranoid people, or those on LSD and other narcotics? Who hear imaginary voices, or see imaginary people? Or those news anchors on global mainstream media, CNN, the BBC, Fox, who gaze into the camera (you) with the deepest of earnestness, directness, the utmost pathos in their voices, but continually generate, repeat and reinforce fake news?
What about AI (artificial intelligence) hallucinations? AI programs which generate and repeat information, with the greatest of aplomb, confidence and poise, from the most “established,” “secure," “reliable” and “trusted” data banks, but information which is biased, ambiguous, or plainly inaccurate and wrong?
For years we have been subject to a grand hallucination from Big Tech AI gurus. That to develop credible, resourceful AI programs you need astounding volumes of energy. Such as would be produced by large power plants, nuclear power. That you need astounding sums of money, hundreds of billions (US).
That you need astounding levels of compute, computer processing power to train models, large GPUs working in tandem. That you need cutting-edge, high-end chips solely produced by elite companies. That the cost of generating AI was so high, licensing fees and subscriptions had to be paid for its use.
Big Tech AI savoured and swanked on these myths. On Wednesday last week, Donald Trump called a press conference to promote Stargate, a US$500 billion AI joint-venture infrastructure project, backed by ChatGPT backers OpenAI and Oracle, as well as Japanese Softbank.
The very same CEOs of Big Tech, Google, Facebook/Meta, Yahoo, the former Twitter, who had flagellated and vilified Trump, were, at his inauguration ceremony, lined up on the front row, like those turncoat barons and dukes of the Ancien Régime. These narratives of Big Tech AI naturally lead one to suppose that AI is deserving of astronomical investments from banks and substantial returns from the market.
We have been also fed the narrative that the US is the "natural" home of AI and worthy of global AI "dominance," while China is a thief, a spy, a threat to the privacy and freedoms of the citizens and US state.
In 2019, following the placing of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications creator, on an export blacklist, cutting China off from key technologies, the US instigated the house arrest (in Canada) of Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company’s founder Ren Zhengfei.
It also imposed strict controls on exporting high-end chips, chip-making equipment, and advanced semi-conductors to China, even from Taiwan. It banned TikTok in the US, which has since been temporarily reversed by Trump.
The narrative was that China was a national security risk; that its technologies have "back doors" to steal sensitive information of US citizens and the US government, and that China steals US technologies for its own innovation and advancement.
More predictable than ironic, Edward Snowden is in exile in Russia today, called a "traitor
