Christopher Fulton

Like so much in our society, the Nobel Prize can be influenced by manias. It was true with some of economics awards in the 80s and 90s — for innovations that eventually enabled Wall Street to blow up the global economy in 2008 — and it may be true with the awards today in AI.

@revit_template Love to but don’t seem to be able to actually send you a DM!

Any of y'all wanna do a virtual coffee meetup? I'm interested in talking to more AEC/BIM peeps. DM me.

@aectechy Also linked to a previous post about people not following rules they don’t understand, is there room in the market for a CDE that has a UI that works for real-world users, not just BIM mngrs? Or (holy grail) design so good (Apple-ish) that formal user training isn’t even needed!

Why are CDEs in #aec so expensive? Serious question.

@aectechy Basically it’s a SaaS model so I also bet a lot of costs get passed on down from the cloud provider, and no-one wants less than 100% uptime and data integrity and in-region storage so they can satisfy legal requirements.

@aectechy Can’t be on-prem because it’s got to be collaborative across disciplines, hence cloud and cloud costs. Big files, lots of Azure/AWS credits? Might be interesting to develop an Azure VM image which firms already using cloud can spin up, but probs tricky to make a profit on that.

@aectechy Also, big part of it is trust. I guess you have to trust whoever is providing the CDE will host your data safely, with critical uptime provision, strong SLAs. Enterprise tech is expensive partly to signal this kind of trustworthiness, whether it actually costs that much or not.

@aectechy My guess: although on the face of it they’re a simple document management system, they have a lot of domain-specific requirements which make development complex.

@aectechy Wanna build (and maintain) an open-source one?!

BIM standards.

Let’s all take a moment and read this again please ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fu…

Idea: Alternate Harry Potter universe where parents worry about messing up their kids’ dopamine response systems and causing ADHD and anxiety by letting them play with world-changing magic, in the same way that we worry about screen time.

And punk, whilst being by definition pretty anti a classical “mastery” framework, was also something actually *novel*, whereas LLMs are really really bad at doing anything outside regurgitating a blend of their training data.

“[Sam] Altman’s entire job is to keep us all fixated on an imagined AI future so we don’t get too caught up in the underwhelming details of the present,” David Karpf writes. theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

So, even if your PDF says one thing, if there are some Reddit posts in the training data of the LLM that say different, or out of date info, then sorry bucko but that’s what you’re getting served.

I’ve experimented with this approach in the construction/architecture sector, searching for a way to provide reliable info on regulatory issues. It still makes up the most crazy BS, despite the correct answer being there in the input documentation.

So: AFAIA, none of the LLM architectures work like this. RAG vectorises the PDF text, finds a phrase or para that most closely matches the user query and *adds this* to the LLM prompt. So what you get back is not really PDF content, but downstream of hallucinations of the LLM.

millennials had years of computer classes where it was drilled into us “THE INTERNET IS FOREVER” and “DON’T OPEN SPAM EMAILS” and “CITE YOUR SOURCES” and then boomers were given internet access like tossing keys to a drunk and telling them to have fun.

This is these guys in a nutshell. It's a shot-for-shot remake of the original trailer... except it's not even a good copy. It's not just that there is not a single original idea in there, they aren't even aware that they have taken out all the substance. (A li'l thread.)

No no no no no. AI is a mirror of the recent past, encouraging repetition of all our extractive mistakes we’ve digitised. The solution to driving off a cliff is not to automate away the steering wheel and let the machine put its foot on the accelerator in the name of efficiency.

I started learning the violin when I was 7. I distinctly remember the first time I made a sound that I thought was objectively good - I was 16. Instead of settling for slop from a stochastic parrot, let’s enable more people to find the joy of mastery - it is far more rewarding.