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I think Google just had an "oh shit" moment as it dawned onto everyone that we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work,

I think Google just had an "oh shit" moment as it dawned onto everyone that we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work, and this could be the new tech that disrupts Google's business. But now that the dust is settling, people are realizing that this technology is not flawless. We haven't fully 100% mastered it, there are unsolved problems, and maybe it's not quite ready for a broad deployment just yet. That's normal. It's just the way the hype cycle works. People (and the media) quickly get really excited and build unrealistic expectations, then they become aware of the flaws and limitations. That doesn't mean these kinds of systems can't be better and even more useful in 1-2 years. There's a lot of really smart people working on them with many possible paths to address the current limitations.

dmitriid 4y ago
> we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work That parenthetical "almost" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.
throwaway5752 4y ago
Alphabet probably has more IP on ML than any group on the planet. There's the Deepmind and AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and AlphaFold but much more practically I can type a sentence into Chrome and get a page for of useful and general correct lines that provide what I want. It would be trivial for Google to summarize the results in some sort of written form instead of a list of links to other places. They could have done that a decade ago.
- l33tman 4y ago
  The current state of the first 10 results on a google search is quite sorry. It's 5 irrelevant ads and 5 SEO-autogenerated sites (probably using GPT3 in the first place). Try it with any kind of IT-problem or IT-product review question. No amount of AI is going to summarize that load of crap into anything better. This is googles problem. The underlying abstraction of knowledge is going to change - knowledge has to be built and served while severely filtering away "noise" up to 90%. Maybe their traditional algos can do this, maybe it requires GPT+++, but it is broken as it is now and has been for more than a year.
  - bfeynman 4y ago
    I think you're confusing wanting someone to do something for you for free and for billions of people with something that can give you good enough 80% of the time and also make money while doing it.
roncesvalles 4y ago
>That doesn't mean these kinds of systems can't be better and even more useful in 1-2 years. It's also faulty to assume that improvements will happen linearly. We had a self-driving car mania in 2013-2017 with billions poured into it and people just forgot about it. Also consider that if easy linear improvements were possible, they would've delayed launching it. AI (software in general?) seems to be the kind of thing where once R&D hits the exponential difficulty wall, they make it generally available.
- sva_ 4y ago
  > The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. - Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
- kenjackson 4y ago
  Self driving cars have a failure downside that is very high for basically all use cases. On improvements— one of the things that has impressed is how much Chat GPT has improved since it was released. I don’t think it’s going to be a perfect AI in two years. But it already is working better for some use cases for me.
- Hyption 4y ago
  It feels slow to us but from past performance we still progress on this topic and have achieved already impressive results. And more and more puzzle peaces are falling in place. We can see were it is going. And when you follow Nvidia with their digital twin topic, we are converging.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Not so much. Making it available allows OpenAI to evaluate and iterate on the chatbot layer, which has had much less data and engineering invested. You equate lack of ubiquitous self driving cars with lack of progress in self-driving technology, but even if we've had super-linear progress in terms of self-driving "driving skill," if that skill is below the threshold where the sales from pushing the software are less than the potential legal liability, companies aren't gonna push it.
joeltt 4y ago
Just like driving cars were "just around the corner", I highly doubt 1-2 years will fix the issues, that "last x%" is exponentially more difficult.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  I think there is a greater tolerance for error here though. Cars haven't made it yet because the assumption about allowable errors was wrong. Turns out it isn't "good enough" for self-driving cars to be safer than humans.
- snek_case 4y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily as hard as you think. Can't do math? Teach the model to use an external mathematical expression evaluator to do math. Makes up inaccurate information? Teach it to query an external knowledge base. How hard to implement do you think that is? They're already working on it.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    > How hard to implement do you think that is? Very, very, very, very hard.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      It's not that hard: https://github.com/williamcotton/empirical-philosophy/blob/main/articles/from-prompt-alchemy-to-prompt-engineering-an-introduction-to-analytic-agumentation.md https://github.com/williamcotton/empirical-philosophy/blob/m...
      - mijail 4y ago
        @williamcotton - saw this the other day in the prompt engineering post - I enjoyed it. Sent you a message on your site but something looks broken. If you use linkedin I requested to connect.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
>we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work Siri doesn't need AI to be useful - it really just needs this $2t company to invest in some basic usability around a set of prompts that people could actually use. Yesterday's ridiculous Siri failure: "hey siri, set alert volume to 25%" Siri: "media volume set to 25%" That is not bad AI, that is a total failure of UX and it makes it clear that Apple has simply failed to invest resources into making Siri useful.
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
  The one that really boggled me recently: >hey siri, play Chet Baker Sings on the Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV >Siri, play the album “chet baker sings” on Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV Those are not the same album…and only one of them is saved in my library, the one I asked for. It failed repeatedly, too. The only response Siri would produce was to insert two new words to my request and then serve that.
  - LazyMans 4y ago
    Years later and my Alexa in my bathroom still only successfully starts NPR when I ask it to maybe 80% of the time. Alexa isn't getting any better at recognizing my voice? At 8am everyday, it hasn't learned I'm likely asking for NPR, not something else? It's not consistent at all. Controlling Hue lights with it is atrocious too. Alexa is purely a dumb voice assistant and there is either a complete lack of investment in it, or that money is invested elsewhere like making Alexa more likely to order too much product off Amazon so someone can point to a chart that shows a bug increased sales.
  - dmd 4y ago
    My experience: > hey siri, play the art of fugue by bach on downstairs > now playing Love The Way You Lie featuring Rihanna, by Eminem, on downstairs And like have apple’s ML people just never even heard of Bayes or what? if i have, in the last few days, asked siri to play debussy, ravel, liszt, and chopin, and today I say “play debussy on downstairs” - and i have never, not once, played any kind of rap or hiphop - why would it... “now playing Ain’t No fun - by Snoop Dogg - on downstairs”?
djyaz1200 4y ago
"But now that the dust is settling, people are realizing that this technology is not flawless." Of course it's not flawless, Google isn't and people aren't... and those are the two targets for this tech. People lie, make mistakes and mislead and Google directs to plenty of problematic content. The thing to watch isn't the position of GPT or any disruptive technology today, but its trajectory. The trajectory of GPT is explosive growth, and that growth will be disruptive to imperfect human jobs and imperfect search engines. GPT does not have to be perfect to be disruptive. This is especially threatening to Google because they have an organization that has never had to compete, like pandas they just consume. They don't hunt. Look at their vast graveyard of platforms they couldn't sustain even with their monopolistic power and endless money. Consumers and ad purchasers want competition in search because like Uber and Lyft demonstrate, when you have two technology products competing head to head the margins get compressed toward zero. Edit: spelling
lamontcg 4y ago
> I think Google just had an "oh shit" moment as it dawned onto everyone that we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work, and this could be the new tech that disrupts Google's business. The bigger problem for Google is that we've got AI which can produce millions of times more shitty blog articles to flood the internet with, that their SEO algorithms can't keep up with in order to surface anything actually relevant to humans. Also the problem for all social media and reddit as it becomes easier to write bots that you can't casually distinguish from humans (given how many humans on reddit read like bots that are desperate for attention).
slowmovintarget 4y ago
You're making the mistake of assuming that the primary purpose of these systems is to help you accomplish something you want. These systems are to capture a commodity to resell; you, and all the other users that engage with the system. It could be great, but until an assistant of this sort runs on your hardware, and works only for you (really hard to show), it won't be your assistant. It will be some corporation's Carnival Crier.

dmitriid 4y ago

> we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work That parenthetical "almost" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

throwaway5752 4y ago

Alphabet probably has more IP on ML than any group on the planet. There's the Deepmind and AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and AlphaFold but much more practically I can type a sentence into Chrome and get a page for of useful and general correct lines that provide what I want. It would be trivial for Google to summarize the results in some sort of written form instead of a list of links to other places. They could have done that a decade ago.

l33tman 4y ago
The current state of the first 10 results on a google search is quite sorry. It's 5 irrelevant ads and 5 SEO-autogenerated sites (probably using GPT3 in the first place). Try it with any kind of IT-problem or IT-product review question. No amount of AI is going to summarize that load of crap into anything better. This is googles problem. The underlying abstraction of knowledge is going to change - knowledge has to be built and served while severely filtering away "noise" up to 90%. Maybe their traditional algos can do this, maybe it requires GPT+++, but it is broken as it is now and has been for more than a year.
- bfeynman 4y ago
  I think you're confusing wanting someone to do something for you for free and for billions of people with something that can give you good enough 80% of the time and also make money while doing it.

roncesvalles 4y ago

>That doesn't mean these kinds of systems can't be better and even more useful in 1-2 years. It's also faulty to assume that improvements will happen linearly. We had a self-driving car mania in 2013-2017 with billions poured into it and people just forgot about it. Also consider that if easy linear improvements were possible, they would've delayed launching it. AI (software in general?) seems to be the kind of thing where once R&D hits the exponential difficulty wall, they make it generally available.

sva_ 4y ago
> The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. - Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
kenjackson 4y ago
Self driving cars have a failure downside that is very high for basically all use cases. On improvements— one of the things that has impressed is how much Chat GPT has improved since it was released. I don’t think it’s going to be a perfect AI in two years. But it already is working better for some use cases for me.
Hyption 4y ago
It feels slow to us but from past performance we still progress on this topic and have achieved already impressive results. And more and more puzzle peaces are falling in place. We can see were it is going. And when you follow Nvidia with their digital twin topic, we are converging.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Not so much. Making it available allows OpenAI to evaluate and iterate on the chatbot layer, which has had much less data and engineering invested. You equate lack of ubiquitous self driving cars with lack of progress in self-driving technology, but even if we've had super-linear progress in terms of self-driving "driving skill," if that skill is below the threshold where the sales from pushing the software are less than the potential legal liability, companies aren't gonna push it.

joeltt 4y ago

Just like driving cars were "just around the corner", I highly doubt 1-2 years will fix the issues, that "last x%" is exponentially more difficult.

BobbyJo 4y ago
I think there is a greater tolerance for error here though. Cars haven't made it yet because the assumption about allowable errors was wrong. Turns out it isn't "good enough" for self-driving cars to be safer than humans.
snek_case 4y ago
I don't think it's necessarily as hard as you think. Can't do math? Teach the model to use an external mathematical expression evaluator to do math. Makes up inaccurate information? Teach it to query an external knowledge base. How hard to implement do you think that is? They're already working on it.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  > How hard to implement do you think that is? Very, very, very, very hard.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    It's not that hard: https://github.com/williamcotton/empirical-philosophy/blob/main/articles/from-prompt-alchemy-to-prompt-engineering-an-introduction-to-analytic-agumentation.md https://github.com/williamcotton/empirical-philosophy/blob/m...
    - mijail 4y ago
      @williamcotton - saw this the other day in the prompt engineering post - I enjoyed it. Sent you a message on your site but something looks broken. If you use linkedin I requested to connect.

wintermutestwin 4y ago

>we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work Siri doesn't need AI to be useful - it really just needs this $2t company to invest in some basic usability around a set of prompts that people could actually use. Yesterday's ridiculous Siri failure: "hey siri, set alert volume to 25%" Siri: "media volume set to 25%" That is not bad AI, that is a total failure of UX and it makes it clear that Apple has simply failed to invest resources into making Siri useful.

mustacheemperor 4y ago
The one that really boggled me recently: >hey siri, play Chet Baker Sings on the Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV >Siri, play the album “chet baker sings” on Apple TV >playing the best of chet baker sings on Apple TV Those are not the same album…and only one of them is saved in my library, the one I asked for. It failed repeatedly, too. The only response Siri would produce was to insert two new words to my request and then serve that.
- LazyMans 4y ago
  Years later and my Alexa in my bathroom still only successfully starts NPR when I ask it to maybe 80% of the time. Alexa isn't getting any better at recognizing my voice? At 8am everyday, it hasn't learned I'm likely asking for NPR, not something else? It's not consistent at all. Controlling Hue lights with it is atrocious too. Alexa is purely a dumb voice assistant and there is either a complete lack of investment in it, or that money is invested elsewhere like making Alexa more likely to order too much product off Amazon so someone can point to a chart that shows a bug increased sales.
- dmd 4y ago
  My experience: > hey siri, play the art of fugue by bach on downstairs > now playing Love The Way You Lie featuring Rihanna, by Eminem, on downstairs And like have apple’s ML people just never even heard of Bayes or what? if i have, in the last few days, asked siri to play debussy, ravel, liszt, and chopin, and today I say “play debussy on downstairs” - and i have never, not once, played any kind of rap or hiphop - why would it... “now playing Ain’t No fun - by Snoop Dogg - on downstairs”?

djyaz1200 4y ago

"But now that the dust is settling, people are realizing that this technology is not flawless." Of course it's not flawless, Google isn't and people aren't... and those are the two targets for this tech. People lie, make mistakes and mislead and Google directs to plenty of problematic content. The thing to watch isn't the position of GPT or any disruptive technology today, but its trajectory. The trajectory of GPT is explosive growth, and that growth will be disruptive to imperfect human jobs and imperfect search engines. GPT does not have to be perfect to be disruptive. This is especially threatening to Google because they have an organization that has never had to compete, like pandas they just consume. They don't hunt. Look at their vast graveyard of platforms they couldn't sustain even with their monopolistic power and endless money. Consumers and ad purchasers want competition in search because like Uber and Lyft demonstrate, when you have two technology products competing head to head the margins get compressed toward zero. Edit: spelling

lamontcg 4y ago

> I think Google just had an "oh shit" moment as it dawned onto everyone that we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work, and this could be the new tech that disrupts Google's business. The bigger problem for Google is that we've got AI which can produce millions of times more shitty blog articles to flood the internet with, that their SEO algorithms can't keep up with in order to surface anything actually relevant to humans. Also the problem for all social media and reddit as it becomes easier to write bots that you can't casually distinguish from humans (given how many humans on reddit read like bots that are desperate for attention).

slowmovintarget 4y ago

You're making the mistake of assuming that the primary purpose of these systems is to help you accomplish something you want. These systems are to capture a commodity to resell; you, and all the other users that engage with the system. It could be great, but until an assistant of this sort runs on your hardware, and works only for you (really hard to show), it won't be your assistant. It will be some corporation's Carnival Crier.