AMD's broken Computex AI demo again proves you can't trust everything an AI tells you

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