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This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it compl

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population. Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.

andsoitis 3y ago
> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Intuitive to use? Or has intuition?
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters anyway: if the assistant says what's most likely to come next according to a LLM, or if a person says what they think should come next based on intuition, the listener would probably find each to be about equally intuitive to converse with due in large part to each of those qualities.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters “Intuitive to use” roughly means that it is easy for a human to interact with. “Intuition” is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
- janoc 3y ago
  And that actually anyone wants? Google and Amazon have tried to sell theirs for a long time. And none were actually selling much. Amazon admitted to be selling theirs at a loss. Facebook has tried their own - and quickly cancelled them. Google's is in every Android device - and yet pretty much nobody uses them. Even Apple's Siri is more annoyance than help. That something can be built doesn't mean it will sell or that people will actually want to use it. If you create a solution looking for an imaginary problem that your marketing thinks is what people want instead of a solution that solves a real existing problem, you do get a solution looking for a problem ... Also, answering questions and communicating in natural language is the easy part of such assistant. For the thing to be useful it must be able to actually do something too. Which is incredibly difficult beyond the (closed) ecosystem of its vendor. Thirdparty integrations are usually driven by who pays the manufacturer for the SDK and partner contract (seen as a marketing opportunity), not by what the users actually want it to integrate with. Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here.
  - pksebben 3y ago
    > Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here. OpenAI is already on it. The latest gen of GPT-3 and -4 are finetuned to respond to "do this thing" commands with JSON structured to: - provide the name of a given function call - provide arguments to that function call it's "early stage", which in this case probably means "good enough to be useful within a month or two", given the rate at which these things have been developing. Anecdotally, I've been playing with giving the models instructions like: "When asked to perform a task that you need a tool to accomplish, you will call the tool according to its documentation by this format: TOOL_NAME(*args) Below you will find the documentation for your tools." ...and I've gotten it working pretty damn well (not even with the JSON-finetuned models, mind you). All you really need is python-style docstrings and a minimal parser and you're off to the races. I recommend anyone interested play with it a bit.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Early stage might mean good enough to use in a month or two or it might mean “full self driving this year”. There isn’t any way to tell until it happens.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Intuitive to use? Or has intuition? I don't really see either of those things as a real possibility. Within my lifetime, anyway.
MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
This is a perfect example of an AI-hype comment. You’re treating it as a fact that LLM are going to replace existing products, at some unknown future date. “In 5 years, all code will be written by AI” “In 5 years, LLM will replace Siri and Alexa” “In 5 years, AI will replace [sector of jobs]” The thing that frustrates me about these statements is that you don’t know what AI technology is going to look like in 5 years, so stop treating it like a fact. It’s possible LLM are useful in all of these places, but we don’t know that yet.
- rvz 3y ago
  Exactly. The AI bros here are doing the same thing as the crypto bros and almost all of them don't even know it. Pontificating their nonsense around the hype about LLMs to the point where they don't even trust it. The same thing they did with ConvNets and they still don't trust that either since they both hallucinate, frequently. I can guarantee you that people will not trust an AI to fly a plane without any human pilots on board end-to-end (auto-pilot does not count) and it is simply due to the fundamental black-box nature of these so-called 'AI' models being untrustworthy in high risk situations.
  - aenis 3y ago
    I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on. I like to think of capable LLMs as pf gifted interns. I can expect decent results if I explain well enough, but I need processes around them to make sure they are doing what they are told. In my industry thats enough to produce a noticeable productivity gain, and likely some reduction of employment as its a low margin cut throat business relying on low grade knowledge workers. I see the hype and honestly cant stand it, but its measureably impacting my industry and the world around me.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - rvz 3y ago
afavour 3y ago
> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close Year of the voice assistant is getting close to year of Linux on desktop. What you’re promising has been promised time and time again, received endless hype cycles then collapsed once people realised the limits of the technology. Yes, this time the tech is much more capable than what came before but I’m inclined to believe we’ll yet again find a limit that means we’re using it for some things but our lives still aren’t drastically changed.
- adriand 3y ago
  What you’re missing is that with LLMs the chief obstacle with voice assistants changed overnight from “how do we develop a system that can easily interact in natural language” (at the time, a very hard and possibly unsolvable problem) to “how do we expose our systems to API-driven input/output” (a solvable problem that just takes time). Case in point, I asked Siri to change my work address. She stated that I needed to use the Contacts app to do that. This is not very helpful. The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input. Siri is also probably not very good at extracting structured address information from me via natural language, but the new LLMs can do this easily.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input …which is something an LLM won’t help with. “Just design an open ended API capable of doing absolutely anything someone might ask ChatGPT to do” is not the simple task you’re making it out to be! There's a reason why people describe ChatGPT as a "research tool": you often need to do a bunch of iterations to get it to do the correct thing. And that's fine because it's non-destructive. But it's very far from a world where you can let it loose on a production, writable database and trust that it's going to do the correct thing.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I'm sure I've seen a headlock that someone connected their screen reader to GPT and it totally could do that kind of thing… No idea how well, so I assume "badly"; but the API is already there.
rvz 3y ago
> Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium. Seems like it has proven very useful for Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], TicketMaster [2], etc. Unlike AI which continues to consume tons of resources to burn the entire world down to the ground without any viable efficient methods of training, inference or fine-tuning their AI models in the past decade with its chatbot hype and gimmickry [3], crypto does not need to consume tons of CO2 to operate, thanks to alternative and greener consensus algorithms available in production today. [4] Being 'useful' is not an excuse to destroy the planet around untrustworthy AI models getting themselves confused over a single pixel or hallucinating in the middle of the road. [0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto [1] https://stellar.org/moneygram https://stellar.org/moneygram [2] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok... [3] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [4] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...

andsoitis 3y ago

> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Intuitive to use? Or has intuition?

hunter2_ 3y ago
There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters anyway: if the assistant says what's most likely to come next according to a LLM, or if a person says what they think should come next based on intuition, the listener would probably find each to be about equally intuitive to converse with due in large part to each of those qualities.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters “Intuitive to use” roughly means that it is easy for a human to interact with. “Intuition” is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
janoc 3y ago
And that actually anyone wants? Google and Amazon have tried to sell theirs for a long time. And none were actually selling much. Amazon admitted to be selling theirs at a loss. Facebook has tried their own - and quickly cancelled them. Google's is in every Android device - and yet pretty much nobody uses them. Even Apple's Siri is more annoyance than help. That something can be built doesn't mean it will sell or that people will actually want to use it. If you create a solution looking for an imaginary problem that your marketing thinks is what people want instead of a solution that solves a real existing problem, you do get a solution looking for a problem ... Also, answering questions and communicating in natural language is the easy part of such assistant. For the thing to be useful it must be able to actually do something too. Which is incredibly difficult beyond the (closed) ecosystem of its vendor. Thirdparty integrations are usually driven by who pays the manufacturer for the SDK and partner contract (seen as a marketing opportunity), not by what the users actually want it to integrate with. Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here.
- pksebben 3y ago
  > Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here. OpenAI is already on it. The latest gen of GPT-3 and -4 are finetuned to respond to "do this thing" commands with JSON structured to: - provide the name of a given function call - provide arguments to that function call it's "early stage", which in this case probably means "good enough to be useful within a month or two", given the rate at which these things have been developing. Anecdotally, I've been playing with giving the models instructions like: "When asked to perform a task that you need a tool to accomplish, you will call the tool according to its documentation by this format: TOOL_NAME(*args) Below you will find the documentation for your tools." ...and I've gotten it working pretty damn well (not even with the JSON-finetuned models, mind you). All you really need is python-style docstrings and a minimal parser and you're off to the races. I recommend anyone interested play with it a bit.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Early stage might mean good enough to use in a month or two or it might mean “full self driving this year”. There isn’t any way to tell until it happens.
JohnFen 3y ago
> Intuitive to use? Or has intuition? I don't really see either of those things as a real possibility. Within my lifetime, anyway.

MatthiasPortzel 3y ago

This is a perfect example of an AI-hype comment. You’re treating it as a fact that LLM are going to replace existing products, at some unknown future date. “In 5 years, all code will be written by AI” “In 5 years, LLM will replace Siri and Alexa” “In 5 years, AI will replace [sector of jobs]” The thing that frustrates me about these statements is that you don’t know what AI technology is going to look like in 5 years, so stop treating it like a fact. It’s possible LLM are useful in all of these places, but we don’t know that yet.

rvz 3y ago
Exactly. The AI bros here are doing the same thing as the crypto bros and almost all of them don't even know it. Pontificating their nonsense around the hype about LLMs to the point where they don't even trust it. The same thing they did with ConvNets and they still don't trust that either since they both hallucinate, frequently. I can guarantee you that people will not trust an AI to fly a plane without any human pilots on board end-to-end (auto-pilot does not count) and it is simply due to the fundamental black-box nature of these so-called 'AI' models being untrustworthy in high risk situations.
- aenis 3y ago
  I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on. I like to think of capable LLMs as pf gifted interns. I can expect decent results if I explain well enough, but I need processes around them to make sure they are doing what they are told. In my industry thats enough to produce a noticeable productivity gain, and likely some reduction of employment as its a low margin cut throat business relying on low grade knowledge workers. I see the hype and honestly cant stand it, but its measureably impacting my industry and the world around me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rvz 3y ago

afavour 3y ago

> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close Year of the voice assistant is getting close to year of Linux on desktop. What you’re promising has been promised time and time again, received endless hype cycles then collapsed once people realised the limits of the technology. Yes, this time the tech is much more capable than what came before but I’m inclined to believe we’ll yet again find a limit that means we’re using it for some things but our lives still aren’t drastically changed.

adriand 3y ago
What you’re missing is that with LLMs the chief obstacle with voice assistants changed overnight from “how do we develop a system that can easily interact in natural language” (at the time, a very hard and possibly unsolvable problem) to “how do we expose our systems to API-driven input/output” (a solvable problem that just takes time). Case in point, I asked Siri to change my work address. She stated that I needed to use the Contacts app to do that. This is not very helpful. The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input. Siri is also probably not very good at extracting structured address information from me via natural language, but the new LLMs can do this easily.
- afavour 3y ago
  > The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input …which is something an LLM won’t help with. “Just design an open ended API capable of doing absolutely anything someone might ask ChatGPT to do” is not the simple task you’re making it out to be! There's a reason why people describe ChatGPT as a "research tool": you often need to do a bunch of iterations to get it to do the correct thing. And that's fine because it's non-destructive. But it's very far from a world where you can let it loose on a production, writable database and trust that it's going to do the correct thing.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I'm sure I've seen a headlock that someone connected their screen reader to GPT and it totally could do that kind of thing… No idea how well, so I assume "badly"; but the API is already there.

rvz 3y ago

> Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium. Seems like it has proven very useful for Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], TicketMaster [2], etc. Unlike AI which continues to consume tons of resources to burn the entire world down to the ground without any viable efficient methods of training, inference or fine-tuning their AI models in the past decade with its chatbot hype and gimmickry [3], crypto does not need to consume tons of CO2 to operate, thanks to alternative and greener consensus algorithms available in production today. [4] Being 'useful' is not an excuse to destroy the planet around untrustworthy AI models getting themselves confused over a single pixel or hallucinating in the middle of the road. [0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto [1] https://stellar.org/moneygram https://stellar.org/moneygram [2] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok... [3] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training... [4] https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain-eliminates-99-99-of-its-carbon-footprint-overnight-after-a-successful-merge-according-to-new-report/ https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/ethereum-blockchain...