Rob Pelinka Discussion: BBall Ops Pres + GM (AKA: Lucky Rob)

This is exactly my thoughts on the whole AI thing.
I work in IT and it's sad how companies are jumping to stuff with no foundation whatsoever.

A friend of mine mentioned this is the new bubble and basically many companies will go all in into AI, fire a bunch people, it will start failing in multiple directions and costing money to the company where they then return to some sort of middle ground and start hiring people again and it stabilizes there.

 

This is exactly my thoughts on the whole AI thing.
I work in IT and it's sad how companies are jumping to stuff with no foundation whatsoever.

A friend of mine mentioned this is the new bubble and basically many companies will go all in into AI, fire a bunch people, it will start failing in multiple directions and costing money to the company where they then return to some sort of middle ground and start hiring people again and it stabilizes there.

 

not to fully derail, but it's most certainly a bubble, and like other bubbles, it's propping up a bunch of stuff and that's why it hasn't already failed. privately, most places that have imported it haven't reaped the promised benefits. everything started as giving it away for free so people become dependent upon it. step 2 is making you pay for it. problem is not enough dependence has been created.

the real long con here is an attempt to recapture "the internet" and sell it back to us. i think that's going to fail, and we'll all pay for a few people gaming the system and getting rich. again. yay.

anyway, i did derail. whatever tools the front office can employ effectively, go for it. i'm just not sure that being the nba team who has most integrated deep learning or whatever will necessarily deliver results on the court. i'm guessing there's more to the new person/position than any of that, and the journalists reporting on it just know AI is a buzzword right now.

 

While I am absolutely on board with hating on the AI craze.... LLMs are particularly useful in this type of application -- analyzing a collection of data sets and finding the patterns. Now... won't be without hallucinations, but you can do a lot to minimize that... cross-checking with an isolated-context agent, human-in-the-loop of course and so on.

It's just... the front end stuff of that process, something we used to call BI analyst, is a thing of the past, and has been for some time now.

 

It is a bubble, but in the sense that the investments are somewhat circular. Tech stuff is solid, even if not without hiccups/challenges/limitations. The "show you the internet" part is such a small fraction of what is actually possible.

I've been in software/infra/architecture for 20+ years (as some of you may know), so... I am hardly naive when it comes to new stuff that is going to change the world (looking at you blockchain), but this one is very close.

I stopped writing code. My programming language is now English, with a looooooot of guardrails and control. But I haven't written a line of code by hand in some time.

 

AI has become very big in my company as of late. I will just say I don’t hate it as much as I initially thought I would.

Like many things, I find it to generally only be as good as the person using it. Some folks are generating bad videos of Jordan dunking on LeBron. Real data scientists are using it to identify patterns and track down very complex and intricate human trafficking rings (literally).

Fron that perspective, I like having true nerds at wheel. Is it going to revolutionize the way everything is done in the NBA? Doubtful. Can it be very helpful in the right hands? Absolutely

 

Agreed