(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
At AMD’s Computex 2024 keynote Dr. Lisa Su was keen to point out how well its Radeon Instinct MI300X graphics cards do when paired with OpenAI’s latest tools. Unfortunately, all it did was once more prove that you really ought not to trust everything you’re told by an AI.
Dr. Su was demoing the Wanderlust, a travel assistant built on GPT-4 and, because we’re in Taipei right now, that was what the demo was centred around. Unfortunately it got the location of the Computex show, the event at which AMD was hosting the opening keynote, completely and utterly wrong.
It was, at least, in Taipei. Unfortunately it was on almost the completely opposite end of town. And there’s no excuse that it was using the old location of Computex, around the Taiwan World Trade Center, because it was seemingly pointing at the Changan Junior High School instead.
If I’m being generous, very generous, I could maybe suggest that what Wanderlust was doing was just highlighting that the entire of Taipei itself was the venue. Though you can see the point shifting to set down on a specific point as the person recording the demo zoomed into the map. And honestly, if something’s pointing at a map and saying ‘this is the venue’ I’d expect it to be a little more accurate than that.
Demos can, and often do, go awry. But this was no live demo, this wasn’t an AI in the moment doing something weird on-stage and presenting falsehood as fact. This was a pre-canned demo where someone had just taken what the Wanderlust AI had spat out as the truth—because it was being presented to them as such—and putting it into a presentation that was given to thousands of people in an auditorium and tens of thousands of people watching online.
And it’s a perfect example of where we’re at with AI in 2024. You can’t trust it. It can superficially look like it’s doing a good job, but you will have to independently verify everything it’s telling you because it could quite easily be making it up. And sending you to hang out at the Changan Junior High School instead.
And if you’re having to check every detail of what your AI travel assistant is telling you, why not just go and do the research yourself anyway? Or ask someone else. I’ve been coming to Computex on and off since 2007, so I reckon it would take me less time than Wanderlust to tell Dr.Su where the Nangang Exhibition Center actually is.
On the plus side, at least Dr. Su’s keynote wasn’t just about AI, and did give us some actual gaming product to get excited about, with the unveiling of its Ryzen 9000-series CPUs and the Ryzen AI mobile chips. That’s in stark contrast to Jen-Hsun Huang’s more rambling Nvidia keynote, where gaming was notable by its absence despite the company actually making some really interesting Computex announcements away from the keynote. It just seems like open-sourcing RTX Remix and demoing Project G-Assist weren’t interesting enough to make the cut.
