This Is No Country for AI

Once again, I was playing around with the Polish language model Bielik, created by enthusiasts from the SpeakLeash organization (aka the granary). An interesting initiative, but instead of proper funding to educate specialists, they are scraping by on crowdfunding collections on Patronite. The future of Polish AI looks like this:

https://patronite.pl/speakleash

So far, they have collected a little more than the monthly salary of a cashier at Biedronka. Well, this nation has never given up. In Poland, there have been many actions like “you have a bullet for 5 people” or “land in the fog”. Maybe this time a solution will be found?

Update: I added a photo of the team working on Bielik to show the young and ambitious practitioners…

This country is swelling with brilliant assessments and people. Bielik uses patronite.pl, and meanwhile, the Ministry of Digitalization has just put 4.5 billion on the table for development and innovation. Sounds beautiful, right? It’s a shame that at the same time, the Americans have turned off our tap for AI chips, throwing us into the bag of third-world countries - as a supposedly good partner of the USA, we might get 50,000 of them over the next two years. It seems like a lot, but ChatGPT 3 itself consumed 30,000 processors, so I wouldn’t count on a great revolution. Unless we are going to build some ZUS chatbot. And the cherry on top is that even if these processors fell from the sky, we have nothing to feed them with. Such toys require gigawatts of cheap energy, preferably from nuclear power. But why worry about such mundane things when you can create more strategies and appoint expert teams?

Let’s go back to the Polish deliberations on new technologies. They are a bit like the elektroda forum - an uncle who spends half an hour cutting a container for screws out of a bottle, another half an hour organizing his workstation, then chooses the RIGHT tools for 10 minutes, only to perform a simple task after an hour. Of course, the uncle will later describe this in a long post of 50,000 characters and will discuss it for the next six months. In a normal country, it would take a minute and no one would mention it, because the problem is solved.

It’s amazing that in a country with such an organizational culture - just look at the post office or public transport - we are talking about artificial intelligence and digital transformation. Ambitious strategies are being drawn up and more expert teams for AI are being appointed, and I timidly draw attention to a prosaic problem: all these new technologies simply require a lot of electricity. With the most expensive energy in Europe and zero chance of it getting cheaper in the next 5 years, all we can do is watch others develop their AI centers.

One more thing. Do you see it? This potential for optimization using AI? In a country with a chronic problem of organization and work efficiency? Imagine this AI entering the healthcare system and showing that 90% of tests are unnecessary or done incorrectly and only to squeeze money from the budget. An algorithm setting new work schedules for doctors? So what, you can’t treat as you want anymore? Meaning, in a private office? What a potential for repair and savings! STOP! This is impossible. It will cause the system to implode, a catastrophic collapse, caving in like a black hole and sucking in everything around it. After all, we know very well that in a normal country where efficiency counts, and not siphoning off funds, such a scenario would make sense. In our country, it will cause an implosion, a general catastrophe, and destruction.

That is why I am completely calm that the AI revolution will pass us by. We will remain a country with a specificity that was best explained by Fronczewski in the role of Jacek Ben Silberstein, the consul general of Austria. When he was caught and it turned out that he was just an ordinary Czesław Wiśniak, he explained in court why he did not flee the country: this is the only country where one can live like this…

I wanted to provoke you to critical reflection…