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I'm gonna say something that probably some people won't like. I'm impressed by how much money the industry is moving by this so called "AI" movement and literal

I'm gonna say something that probably some people won't like. I'm impressed by how much money the industry is moving by this so called "AI" movement and literally having zero concrete improvement on one's every day life (and by this I mean common people, not developers/techies). I haven't seen, nor witnessed anything that you can benefit from all this AI hype. All that has done is opening the door for polluting the web with crap. And we keep on and on with the madness of training, wasting money (and resources) on gpus, generating tb of data. For what? To generate text, images? If someone can actually point out a real example on the real world how all this madness helps to a better world, much appreciated, because honestly I don't see it.

Erazal 3y ago
ok I'm biased because I work in exactly this sector: automated meeting minutes make life easier and are powered by LLMs. US employees spend 18 hours / week in meetings so that is a noticeable improvement IMHO.
- eurekin 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure everyone made a version of that. Makes me think, if it would be useful to open source that hodgepodge of scripts
  - Erazal 3y ago
    yes I've definitely thought quite a few times about open-sourcing our company code (AI note-taker for remote meetings). But then the hard thing is Kubernetes on top... And as always not sure our "closed-source", "employee only" code would be useful to anyone not working with us :/
    - ponderings 3y ago
      Is that real time? Does it have to be?
  - yellow_postit 3y ago
    Google, Microsoft and Zoom will all have it integrated soon enough and many companies will pay extra for it because of “security and privacy” guarantees the tech companies will make.
    - eurekin 3y ago
      Slack already has, but it's not stellar to be honest
- atmosx 3y ago
  Yes sure. But that’s not anywhere near ground breaking. Also the math here is akin to those who believe that if they didn’t smoke they’d be driving a Ferrari. In reality owning a Ferrari is way more expensive than your monthly cigarettes and comes with belles and whistles (luxury taxes, maintenance, etc).
  - DennisP 3y ago
    AI could change our lives completely over the course of a decade but if each change is just a little improvement that builds on the last one, the whole time people could grumble that "that's not anywhere near ground breaking."
plasticchris 3y ago
A couple of examples: Using RAG on a set of docs for a project it's possible to get good answers to specific questions (and ask follow ups, etc) - really speeds up understanding, like having someone who knows their stuff answering questions for you all the time. Making meeting notes, summarizing discussions - frees the note taker and produces a nice record of what happened.
- not2b 3y ago
  And even that application is leading to this abuse which kills the benefit: Person A: ChatGPT, expand these bullet points into a ten page presentation. (sends to person B) Person B: ChatGPT, scan this ten page presentation and give me the main points.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    Yeah but someday, the ChatGPT service will fail, people will send the bullet points directly because that's what they're accustomed to writing now, recipients will be pleasantly surprised to see the summarizer working automatically, and countless hours of wasted human effort will be saved with no further computation required.
  - vimax 3y ago
    To me, that is like printing out an document and scanning it later to send to someone. It happened a lot in the early days of email.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I don't know about anyone else, but for me the value in taking notes is the actual process of taking the notes, not the end product of the notes themselves. Having AI (or, indeed, a human colleague) do it for me is a bit pointless, as it eliminates 90% of the value.
kraftman 3y ago
I don't think making the world better is their goal, so I'm not surprised you aren't seeing those results. Their goal is to either make more money, cut costs, or both.
atmosx 3y ago
I believe there is more to it than just problematic or “almost correct” code examples after 7 retries with ELI5 explanations. But part of me believes this is another “self-driving car” thing where in 10 years we’ll still be in exact same place. Today I saw an interview from a Greek YT economist who was asked about BTC. His answer was “it’s been 10+ years that has bene around. We know by now that is not new or groundbreaking in any substantial way” and I agree. There are many tech that “if this and that” but we never seem to reach “that” point.
- aydyn 3y ago
  But self driving has improved. Maybe not as fast as people would like but its clearly better than it was 5 years ago.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    You can't tell people you're "24 month from full self driving in every driving condition" every 12 months for a decade an expect people to continue drinking the koolaid It's the same for "AI", it's happening in cycle since the 60s, nobody learns a damn thing, it's borderline a pump and dump scheme at that point
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      You're making a terrible mistake.
      - lm28469 3y ago
        I can come back to this discussion in 10 years and we still won't have self driving cars. I wouldn't even be surprised if personal cars are banned entirely before we reach self driving cars
        CamperBob2 3y ago
        We're not talking about self-driving cars. That's not a technical problem, it's a human problem.
MeImCounting 3y ago
ChatGPT is far and away the best tutor I have ever had. It starts to fail once you get past mid level concepts but its ability to provide links to other sources, explain things, not get offended when you call it out as wrong about something (which human teachers certainly do) and many other aspects make it very helpful. Specifically its useful in expanding your breadth of knowledge on a subject. Less so depth. Regardless I have learnt things and taken on projects I never would have attempted without it.
- blibble 3y ago
  > ChatGPT is far and away the best tutor I have ever had. > Regardless I have learnt things who cares what we learn is true as long as we learnt something?
  - iwontberude 3y ago
    They alluded in their past comment that human teachers make errors too which students can identify. So perhaps if students don't implicitly trust human tutors, then so too can they corroborate ChatGPT against reality and solidify their understanding.
    - blibble 3y ago
      I don't know about where you're from but in my country to teach requires several years of qualifications, assessment and continuing observation by an independent regulator and there are consequences if you're caught teaching rubbish not to say they are perfect, but there is some level of quality control meanwhile ChatGPT just bullshits endlessly with no possible way to punish OpenAI for it
      - MeImCounting 3y ago
        I think perhaps you had a bad experience with GPT at some point or didnt ask it to provide sources that you then read through. Either way it is far more reliable than you seem to believe.
qwertox 3y ago
Not sure if this is related to a better world, but I know that some of my family members use it to write nice, "thoughtful" words to family and friends. Like for birthdays and stuff. There's something in me which strongly goes against this kind of use, but there's your example. They also use it to learn about people and places, a bit like using Wikipedia, which they never used. Regarding non-dev uses, I use it to simplify and "neutralize" a text I'm writing to others, like getting a second opinion on the text. For example for the homeowners association. For example now I passed `What does this mean? "Regarding non-dev uses, I use it to simplify and "neutralize" a text I'm writing to others, like getting a second opinion on the text. For example for the homeowners association."` and read the answer to see if it coveys my message properly. The answer was helpful: "[...] This could be particularly useful in ensuring that the message is clear, diplomatic, and devoid of unintended connotations, which is important in formal or communal communications like those in a homeowners association context."
- aslilac 3y ago
  > like for birthdays and stuff I would never look them in the eyes again if I found out someone did this to me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I know that some of my family members use it to write nice, "thoughtful" words to family and friends. Which makes those expressions have about as much value as the ones in greeting cards: almost none.
throwup238 3y ago
> If someone can actually point out a real example on the real world how all this madness helps to a better world, much appreciated, because honestly I don't see it. US government killbots will bring peace in our time! It's just taking a little longer than we had hoped to perfect the "friend or foe" module
happytiger 3y ago
There are lots of groundbreaking applications. But I’ll give you one that by itself justifies the technology. Early research shows that AI is able to detect cancer 4 years earlier than a doctor traditionally would.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  First, I love how “AI” is just a meaningless term here. The topic was generative text and images, and now you’ve brought up image classification, a different problem. But hey, computers! So let’s bring it back to generative systems. IBM Watson was a complete failure, generating nonsensical diagnoses and treatments. https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failure-artificial-intelligence.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failu...
  - happytiger 3y ago
    > I'm gonna say something that probably some people won't like. I'm impressed by how much money the industry is moving by this so called "AI" movement and literally having zero concrete improvement on one's every day life (and by this I mean common people, not developers/techies). > I haven't seen, nor witnessed anything that you can benefit from all this AI hype. All that has done is opening the door for polluting the web with crap. And we keep on and on with the madness of training, wasting money (and resources) on gpus, generating tb of data. For what? To generate text, images? > If someone can actually point out a real example on the real world how all this madness helps to a better world, much appreciated, because honestly I don't see it. The comment I was replying to did not say LLM or Generative AI. It didn’t specify LLM and simply asked for examples where AI is making good. Instead of saying, “is there a source?”, or taking 2 seconds to Google “4 year cancer detection with AI” people are lighting up the comments about failed AI from IBM from ten years ago. Here is the source: https://www.unilad.com/technology/ai-detected-breast-cancer-years-before-developed-737052-20230325 https://www.unilad.com/technology/ai-detected-breast-cancer-... Also re Watson. Top Google article for the search terms “Watson medical ai” leads to this article, which contains the best response to your criticism: > I don’t think that the failure of Watson means that artificial intelligence isn’t ready to make significant improvements and changes in health care. I think it means the way that they approached it is a cautionary tale that lays out how not to do it. https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failure-artificial-intelligence.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failu... Whether LLMs deserve all this hype is debatable, but whether there is merit in AI technologies being used today is not. There are some pretty good use cases in medical, pharma and biotech, agricultural, etc. Few of them are based on LLMs but that wasn’t what the commented was actually asking. They were asking if “the AI hype” had any real applications, and it does. LLMs are just the manifestation of the Gartner hype cycle anyways. And we haven’t gotten anywhere near the terminus for them either, with almost every vendor and open source project planning to at least double model size in the next year as hardware and GPU capabilities expand. I think we have yet to see what LLMs can really do and will be much more pleased with them in 2-3 years as they mature.
rideontime 3y ago
You might want to specify that you're talking about generative AI specifically, as opposed to LLMs in general. I abhor stuff like what's in the OP, but don't really have a problem with using it as, for instance, a research tool, with human experts actually confirming its output: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2411374-ai-comes-up-with-battery-design-that-uses-70-per-cent-less-lithium/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2411374-ai-comes-up-wit...
raincole 3y ago
The foundamental question is: is making people more productive "making world better"? For example, ChatGPT has already brought huge benefits to all the non-native speakers who work for/with companies in English speaking countries. Does it count as "making world better"? Or it makes lives of white-collar workers in these countries worse, since it brought more competition in?
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  You are on the right track. The truth is whether its making the world better or not is unknowable. To know it you have to know the future. Which is why people who strive to make value judgement always do so by predicting the future. But even if you get it right, the future has future still. Whats immediately bad might be good for the big picture, vice versa. This is doubly true for complex things like AI. All I'm saying is that with thing like AI its entirely dishonest to say its making the world better with a straight face. It is what it is. Don't fool yourself by thinking you're doing it for 'the greater good'.
carlosjobim 3y ago
> I haven't seen, nor witnessed anything that you can benefit from all this AI hype. AI translators are opening up the whole world to communication. I can talk to and do business with people even if we speak no common language. I can parse information from any language now. Incredible that you hackers are down voting this, I answered his question exactly. AI translators are very useful tools for international business and communication. Some languages were impossible for machine translating up until a few years ago. This has a real impact on the world for non-tech people. It's not a toy.
hackerlight 3y ago
Small increase in economic productivity. Like the invention of the word processor or spreadsheet. It's hard to quantify but it trickles into the economy in the form of lower prices for the same goods (or prices that aren't as high as they otherwise would have been).
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  >it trickles into the economy Are we absolutely sure about that?
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    I didn't say trickles down. My claim is that it leads to GDP growth. How it gets allocated is another question.
Andrex 3y ago
I'm not impressed that much either (yet) but this is a little unfair, ChatGPT is barely a year old and while there is a lot of hype and talk it's also having concrete effects on the real world -- it was a key sticking point for the Writer's Guild and SAG-AFTRA during their strikes last year, and why they lasted so long.
Bjorkbat 3y ago
Kind of reminds me of this screenshot someone took of the fastest growing subreddits back in 2023, and all of them were AI-related, but here's the kicker, I think 8 out of 10 of them had to do with AI waifus and porn.
- 10xDev 3y ago
  To be fair that's just human nature, which AI can't really change. Even if we achieve AGI, a lot of the most asked questions will probably be money/sex related.
reaperducer 3y ago
I'm impressed by how much money the industry is moving by this so called "AI" movement and literally having zero concrete improvement on one's every day life One small thing: Amazon.com appears to be using an LLM to provide a summary of all of a product's reviews. But aside from that, I haven't seen anything useful out of "AI" yet.
ben_w 3y ago
> If someone can actually point out a real example on the real world how all this madness helps to a better world, much appreciated, because honestly I don't see it. Anecdote time. My sister, who doesn't care much about computers, found ChatGPT useful in her job, as it gave her a template to build from that included things she'd not thought of initially. I've just listened to the latest Numberphile podcast, and was surprised to hear Donald Knuth saying similar about a handful of the responses it gave him when he was playing with it. I play around with the GPT models regularly, even before ChatGPT came out, and it broadens my abilities by producing code in languages I don't have much professional experience with, but which I can verify. I sometimes use it for translations, and have occasionally tried using it as a foreign language conversation partner (it's OK at that, one limitation is that it keeps going back to English, though this is also a problem I face in real life with actual humans).
ponderings 3y ago
The way I imagine it (sometimes spot on, sometimes hilariously wrong) large companies could eventually have really good company representatives that answer phone/email/chat immediately and are deeply familiar with the company and the customer. Many complaints can be converted into polished product/feature proposals and bug reports. Eventually they should be able to have smaller constraints, draw up plans, fill agendas and make decisions within their budget. A bit like algorithms are trusted to trade stocks. Seems funny, have a bot from acme inc, give it a list of job descriptions, assign a budget. acme then figures out how to extract as much money as possible. In the end, humanoid robots running the company, doing meetings and interviews all over the world simultaneously. Walking around the factory, hey Jim, how is the wife? Oh, things are slow today, I'm going to give you the rest of the day off. Not real empathy but simply the most profitable manipulation.
xjay 3y ago
Sobering read in an age of alcohol intoxication ("AI"). There is a project that tracks/curates "AI" in the context of bad use or real world (mis-)application [1]. [1] https://incidentdatabase.ai/ https://incidentdatabase.ai/
flandish 3y ago
What you’re noticing is a sort of active “commodity fetish” with this AI stuff. Just like NFTs only bigger. Just like 80’s era diet pills. Or 90’s era whatevers. It’s a facet of capitalism to drive consumption and move to profit as quickly as possible. I think we are still in the “gauge and gamble” phase, but eventually in a season or to we will see it hit and bilk the general public. We all know “AI” has been a “thing” since ML or Soundex or PID loops, or small models, etc. It’s just “finally” hit a downhill allowing some momentum to build.

Erazal 3y ago

ok I'm biased because I work in exactly this sector: automated meeting minutes make life easier and are powered by LLMs. US employees spend 18 hours / week in meetings so that is a noticeable improvement IMHO.

eurekin 3y ago
I'm pretty sure everyone made a version of that. Makes me think, if it would be useful to open source that hodgepodge of scripts
- Erazal 3y ago
  yes I've definitely thought quite a few times about open-sourcing our company code (AI note-taker for remote meetings). But then the hard thing is Kubernetes on top... And as always not sure our "closed-source", "employee only" code would be useful to anyone not working with us :/
  - ponderings 3y ago
    Is that real time? Does it have to be?
- yellow_postit 3y ago
  Google, Microsoft and Zoom will all have it integrated soon enough and many companies will pay extra for it because of “security and privacy” guarantees the tech companies will make.
  - eurekin 3y ago
    Slack already has, but it's not stellar to be honest
atmosx 3y ago
Yes sure. But that’s not anywhere near ground breaking. Also the math here is akin to those who believe that if they didn’t smoke they’d be driving a Ferrari. In reality owning a Ferrari is way more expensive than your monthly cigarettes and comes with belles and whistles (luxury taxes, maintenance, etc).
- DennisP 3y ago
  AI could change our lives completely over the course of a decade but if each change is just a little improvement that builds on the last one, the whole time people could grumble that "that's not anywhere near ground breaking."

plasticchris 3y ago

A couple of examples: Using RAG on a set of docs for a project it's possible to get good answers to specific questions (and ask follow ups, etc) - really speeds up understanding, like having someone who knows their stuff answering questions for you all the time. Making meeting notes, summarizing discussions - frees the note taker and produces a nice record of what happened.

not2b 3y ago
And even that application is leading to this abuse which kills the benefit: Person A: ChatGPT, expand these bullet points into a ten page presentation. (sends to person B) Person B: ChatGPT, scan this ten page presentation and give me the main points.
- DennisP 3y ago
  Yeah but someday, the ChatGPT service will fail, people will send the bullet points directly because that's what they're accustomed to writing now, recipients will be pleasantly surprised to see the summarizer working automatically, and countless hours of wasted human effort will be saved with no further computation required.
- vimax 3y ago
  To me, that is like printing out an document and scanning it later to send to someone. It happened a lot in the early days of email.
JohnFen 3y ago
I don't know about anyone else, but for me the value in taking notes is the actual process of taking the notes, not the end product of the notes themselves. Having AI (or, indeed, a human colleague) do it for me is a bit pointless, as it eliminates 90% of the value.

kraftman 3y ago

I don't think making the world better is their goal, so I'm not surprised you aren't seeing those results. Their goal is to either make more money, cut costs, or both.

atmosx 3y ago

I believe there is more to it than just problematic or “almost correct” code examples after 7 retries with ELI5 explanations. But part of me believes this is another “self-driving car” thing where in 10 years we’ll still be in exact same place. Today I saw an interview from a Greek YT economist who was asked about BTC. His answer was “it’s been 10+ years that has bene around. We know by now that is not new or groundbreaking in any substantial way” and I agree. There are many tech that “if this and that” but we never seem to reach “that” point.

aydyn 3y ago
But self driving has improved. Maybe not as fast as people would like but its clearly better than it was 5 years ago.
- lm28469 3y ago
  You can't tell people you're "24 month from full self driving in every driving condition" every 12 months for a decade an expect people to continue drinking the koolaid It's the same for "AI", it's happening in cycle since the 60s, nobody learns a damn thing, it's borderline a pump and dump scheme at that point
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    You're making a terrible mistake.
    - lm28469 3y ago
      I can come back to this discussion in 10 years and we still won't have self driving cars. I wouldn't even be surprised if personal cars are banned entirely before we reach self driving cars
      - CamperBob2 3y ago
        We're not talking about self-driving cars. That's not a technical problem, it's a human problem.

MeImCounting 3y ago

ChatGPT is far and away the best tutor I have ever had. It starts to fail once you get past mid level concepts but its ability to provide links to other sources, explain things, not get offended when you call it out as wrong about something (which human teachers certainly do) and many other aspects make it very helpful. Specifically its useful in expanding your breadth of knowledge on a subject. Less so depth. Regardless I have learnt things and taken on projects I never would have attempted without it.

blibble 3y ago
> ChatGPT is far and away the best tutor I have ever had. > Regardless I have learnt things who cares what we learn is true as long as we learnt something?
- iwontberude 3y ago
  They alluded in their past comment that human teachers make errors too which students can identify. So perhaps if students don't implicitly trust human tutors, then so too can they corroborate ChatGPT against reality and solidify their understanding.
  - blibble 3y ago
    I don't know about where you're from but in my country to teach requires several years of qualifications, assessment and continuing observation by an independent regulator and there are consequences if you're caught teaching rubbish not to say they are perfect, but there is some level of quality control meanwhile ChatGPT just bullshits endlessly with no possible way to punish OpenAI for it
    - MeImCounting 3y ago
      I think perhaps you had a bad experience with GPT at some point or didnt ask it to provide sources that you then read through. Either way it is far more reliable than you seem to believe.

qwertox 3y ago

Not sure if this is related to a better world, but I know that some of my family members use it to write nice, "thoughtful" words to family and friends. Like for birthdays and stuff. There's something in me which strongly goes against this kind of use, but there's your example. They also use it to learn about people and places, a bit like using Wikipedia, which they never used. Regarding non-dev uses, I use it to simplify and "neutralize" a text I'm writing to others, like getting a second opinion on the text. For example for the homeowners association. For example now I passed `What does this mean? "Regarding non-dev uses, I use it to simplify and "neutralize" a text I'm writing to others, like getting a second opinion on the text. For example for the homeowners association."` and read the answer to see if it coveys my message properly. The answer was helpful: "[...] This could be particularly useful in ensuring that the message is clear, diplomatic, and devoid of unintended connotations, which is important in formal or communal communications like those in a homeowners association context."

aslilac 3y ago
> like for birthdays and stuff I would never look them in the eyes again if I found out someone did this to me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
JohnFen 3y ago
> I know that some of my family members use it to write nice, "thoughtful" words to family and friends. Which makes those expressions have about as much value as the ones in greeting cards: almost none.

throwup238 3y ago

> If someone can actually point out a real example on the real world how all this madness helps to a better world, much appreciated, because honestly I don't see it. US government killbots will bring peace in our time! It's just taking a little longer than we had hoped to perfect the "friend or foe" module

happytiger 3y ago

There are lots of groundbreaking applications. But I’ll give you one that by itself justifies the technology. Early research shows that AI is able to detect cancer 4 years earlier than a doctor traditionally would.

jonathankoren 3y ago
First, I love how “AI” is just a meaningless term here. The topic was generative text and images, and now you’ve brought up image classification, a different problem. But hey, computers! So let’s bring it back to generative systems. IBM Watson was a complete failure, generating nonsensical diagnoses and treatments. https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failure-artificial-intelligence.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failu...
- happytiger 3y ago
  > I'm gonna say something that probably some people won't like. I'm impressed by how much money the industry is moving by this so called "AI" movement and literally having zero concrete improvement on one's every day life (and by this I mean common people, not developers/techies). > I haven't seen, nor witnessed anything that you can benefit from all this AI hype. All that has done is opening the door for polluting the web with crap. And we keep on and on with the madness of training, wasting money (and resources) on gpus, generating tb of data. For what? To generate text, images? > If someone can actually point out a real example on the real world how all this madness helps to a better world, much appreciated, because honestly I don't see it. The comment I was replying to did not say LLM or Generative AI. It didn’t specify LLM and simply asked for examples where AI is making good. Instead of saying, “is there a source?”, or taking 2 seconds to Google “4 year cancer detection with AI” people are lighting up the comments about failed AI from IBM from ten years ago. Here is the source: https://www.unilad.com/technology/ai-detected-breast-cancer-years-before-developed-737052-20230325 https://www.unilad.com/technology/ai-detected-breast-cancer-... Also re Watson. Top Google article for the search terms “Watson medical ai” leads to this article, which contains the best response to your criticism: > I don’t think that the failure of Watson means that artificial intelligence isn’t ready to make significant improvements and changes in health care. I think it means the way that they approached it is a cautionary tale that lays out how not to do it. https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failure-artificial-intelligence.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failu... Whether LLMs deserve all this hype is debatable, but whether there is merit in AI technologies being used today is not. There are some pretty good use cases in medical, pharma and biotech, agricultural, etc. Few of them are based on LLMs but that wasn’t what the commented was actually asking. They were asking if “the AI hype” had any real applications, and it does. LLMs are just the manifestation of the Gartner hype cycle anyways. And we haven’t gotten anywhere near the terminus for them either, with almost every vendor and open source project planning to at least double model size in the next year as hardware and GPU capabilities expand. I think we have yet to see what LLMs can really do and will be much more pleased with them in 2-3 years as they mature.

rideontime 3y ago

You might want to specify that you're talking about generative AI specifically, as opposed to LLMs in general. I abhor stuff like what's in the OP, but don't really have a problem with using it as, for instance, a research tool, with human experts actually confirming its output: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2411374-ai-comes-up-with-battery-design-that-uses-70-per-cent-less-lithium/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2411374-ai-comes-up-wit...

raincole 3y ago

The foundamental question is: is making people more productive "making world better"? For example, ChatGPT has already brought huge benefits to all the non-native speakers who work for/with companies in English speaking countries. Does it count as "making world better"? Or it makes lives of white-collar workers in these countries worse, since it brought more competition in?

justanotherjoe 3y ago
You are on the right track. The truth is whether its making the world better or not is unknowable. To know it you have to know the future. Which is why people who strive to make value judgement always do so by predicting the future. But even if you get it right, the future has future still. Whats immediately bad might be good for the big picture, vice versa. This is doubly true for complex things like AI. All I'm saying is that with thing like AI its entirely dishonest to say its making the world better with a straight face. It is what it is. Don't fool yourself by thinking you're doing it for 'the greater good'.

carlosjobim 3y ago

> I haven't seen, nor witnessed anything that you can benefit from all this AI hype. AI translators are opening up the whole world to communication. I can talk to and do business with people even if we speak no common language. I can parse information from any language now. Incredible that you hackers are down voting this, I answered his question exactly. AI translators are very useful tools for international business and communication. Some languages were impossible for machine translating up until a few years ago. This has a real impact on the world for non-tech people. It's not a toy.

hackerlight 3y ago

Small increase in economic productivity. Like the invention of the word processor or spreadsheet. It's hard to quantify but it trickles into the economy in the form of lower prices for the same goods (or prices that aren't as high as they otherwise would have been).

BobaFloutist 3y ago
>it trickles into the economy Are we absolutely sure about that?
- hackerlight 3y ago
  I didn't say trickles down. My claim is that it leads to GDP growth. How it gets allocated is another question.

Andrex 3y ago

I'm not impressed that much either (yet) but this is a little unfair, ChatGPT is barely a year old and while there is a lot of hype and talk it's also having concrete effects on the real world -- it was a key sticking point for the Writer's Guild and SAG-AFTRA during their strikes last year, and why they lasted so long.

Bjorkbat 3y ago

Kind of reminds me of this screenshot someone took of the fastest growing subreddits back in 2023, and all of them were AI-related, but here's the kicker, I think 8 out of 10 of them had to do with AI waifus and porn.

10xDev 3y ago
To be fair that's just human nature, which AI can't really change. Even if we achieve AGI, a lot of the most asked questions will probably be money/sex related.

reaperducer 3y ago

I'm impressed by how much money the industry is moving by this so called "AI" movement and literally having zero concrete improvement on one's every day life One small thing: Amazon.com appears to be using an LLM to provide a summary of all of a product's reviews. But aside from that, I haven't seen anything useful out of "AI" yet.

ben_w 3y ago

> If someone can actually point out a real example on the real world how all this madness helps to a better world, much appreciated, because honestly I don't see it. Anecdote time. My sister, who doesn't care much about computers, found ChatGPT useful in her job, as it gave her a template to build from that included things she'd not thought of initially. I've just listened to the latest Numberphile podcast, and was surprised to hear Donald Knuth saying similar about a handful of the responses it gave him when he was playing with it. I play around with the GPT models regularly, even before ChatGPT came out, and it broadens my abilities by producing code in languages I don't have much professional experience with, but which I can verify. I sometimes use it for translations, and have occasionally tried using it as a foreign language conversation partner (it's OK at that, one limitation is that it keeps going back to English, though this is also a problem I face in real life with actual humans).

ponderings 3y ago

The way I imagine it (sometimes spot on, sometimes hilariously wrong) large companies could eventually have really good company representatives that answer phone/email/chat immediately and are deeply familiar with the company and the customer. Many complaints can be converted into polished product/feature proposals and bug reports. Eventually they should be able to have smaller constraints, draw up plans, fill agendas and make decisions within their budget. A bit like algorithms are trusted to trade stocks. Seems funny, have a bot from acme inc, give it a list of job descriptions, assign a budget. acme then figures out how to extract as much money as possible. In the end, humanoid robots running the company, doing meetings and interviews all over the world simultaneously. Walking around the factory, hey Jim, how is the wife? Oh, things are slow today, I'm going to give you the rest of the day off. Not real empathy but simply the most profitable manipulation.

xjay 3y ago

Sobering read in an age of alcohol intoxication ("AI"). There is a project that tracks/curates "AI" in the context of bad use or real world (mis-)application [1]. [1] https://incidentdatabase.ai/ https://incidentdatabase.ai/

flandish 3y ago

What you’re noticing is a sort of active “commodity fetish” with this AI stuff. Just like NFTs only bigger. Just like 80’s era diet pills. Or 90’s era whatevers. It’s a facet of capitalism to drive consumption and move to profit as quickly as possible. I think we are still in the “gauge and gamble” phase, but eventually in a season or to we will see it hit and bilk the general public. We all know “AI” has been a “thing” since ML or Soundex or PID loops, or small models, etc. It’s just “finally” hit a downhill allowing some momentum to build.