Interesting to note that the introduction of AI within the public service (and as anticipated it's social services chosen for the risk and suffering) has not been a huge success so far https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/27/ai-prototypes-uk-welfare-system-dropped
 

"does the reality of AI match the rhetoric?”

Not even close.

Anybiody worried about the chances of AI becoming self aware can relax a little in the knowledge that the developers of OpenAI at least have a predictable lack of insight and self awareness. Reports today suggest they are accusing the Chinese developers of DeepSeek of plagiarism. Without a trace of (understanding of) irony, they claim there is evidence that DeepSeek used OpenAI as a source for training.

It's an opening gambit to get DeepSeek banned in the U.S. of A., or at least tie it up in the courts.

Fully justified of course. Those pesky foreigners should have written it like OpenAI where the developers obviously wrote, drew, painted, filmed, sang, spoke every one of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of pieces of work used to train it, without even a hint of plagiarism.

I keep meaning to try and embrace ChatGPT (and other language models) more to try and figure out and reduce some work or tasks I'm doing.

At work we are very lacking in systems and processes. It's a nightmare. Someone new is trying to introduce a new system/solution which supposedly has some amount of AI.

I'm part of the small initial team on the project and currently the tasks they are looking to wrap in some form of "AI" are pretty simple interactions between systems that absolutely don't require AI. Just calculations based on predefined parameters to save time manually doing them, then feed the result to another system. (an MRP system with automated order sending).

Frustrates me when this phase of the project is claiming some sort of AI use case when it's not really true. Further phases could, but I'd still be very cautious of letting it loose. Probably mainly because a lot of the data being fed in from other parts of the business is generally shite - shit in, shit out.

Your situation sounds familiar. So few businesses of any kind pay any serious attention to the early stages in customer interaction (the online or other computer kind). Just thinking a bit about what somebody needs to to enter in a simple initial screen, which may be little more than a menu, and how that screen responds, is like some kind of magic to many people. And yet those tools have been there for years. I used to teach ISPF which is probably the most common way that developers interact with IBM mainframes, and although IBM provided a hugely rich variety of ways of prompting, validating and responding to every field on a menu, it was incredibly hard to get people to make use of them. A few careful decisions and it was easy to build a menu that had much of the functionality that today we would call AI. And probably more secure and fault tolerant.