Everything is guessing, only death is certain. I’ve worked with AI/ML for over 15 years long before folks got all hot and bothered by it. Your examples you give are great because if you walked up to a person and just said 5 you might get as random of answers and you gave.

Assuming by AI you mean LLMs, because that is what is hot on social media today, they use statistical probability models to be able to rate their input to output consistency. It is measurable but could never be 100%. No compute or person is 100%, but an LLM is orders of magnitude less consistent than traditional compute.

I use AI on a daily basis. I trust it less than people, but I also am able to feed it dumb questions which is nice.

No

AI is any compute model performing complex enough reasoning that the output does not always resemble the input. They are by definition non deterministic and the same ask can provide different outputs without being influenced by other inputs.

It is hardware. The embargo is on the connectivity silicon used in China because it is full of Chinese backdoors. Unlike the chips made elsewhere that have US backdoors

Making everything run ontop of an LLM was not non deterministic enough. Now with the power of cosmic rays we can guarantee the most non deterministic system possible. With such an unknown state we may finally achieve garbage in sometimes not garbage out compute. Invest in typewriters and monkeys today and you could be a partial owner of the entire works of Shakespeare soon™.

The fact that consumers have LLM garbage shoved in their face doesn’t mean that the exponential increase in other ML use cases isn’t driving life saving technology. The COVID vaccine only deployed as fast as it did because of AI ML. 20% of surgeries right now are robot assisted and all of those use AI ML.

On a personal level I’ve been able to move my family to FOSS because of LLMs. LLMs are very good at understanding how open source software works and translating the workflows to human language. I personally can read man pages but others in my family honestly don’t want to have to in order to just watch a show on AppleTV. I can do this with a small local LLM running on a low wattage micro server.

We are seeing LLMs enabling us easily to overwrite the proprietary software in our home devices and take back hardware and improve repairability so we can stop producing so much E Waste. And the more that companies use LLM code to slop up their embedded devices the easier it becomes.

You can run AI without causing environmental problems just like you can drive cars without burning fossil fuels and you can have industrial production without creating pollutants.

All of that just cuts into the profits though.