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But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-de

But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and discovers "AGI".. then what? Is that worth money, somehow?

gs17 3y ago
At very least, they could make Siri useful.
exe34 3y ago
Have you missed all the people complaining that it'll put them out of business?
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  No, but having tried it I can't figure out what they're talking about. Seems like more NFT-esque nonsense.
  - cududa 3y ago
    That's a really myopic observation. They're very very different. ChatGPT Pro helps me learn new concepts in new languages much much faster than I did in the past.
    - jcgrillo 3y ago
      Who would that put out of business? Does that replace anyone's job function? It sounds like you're describing something like "really good search for Wikipedia" which to be clear I think is great, but who's gonna be replaced by that in their workplace? EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.
      - exe34 3y ago
        Do you understand the concept of individual productivity? If you have 5 people working for you, and a new technology makes each 25% more productive, you can fire one of them. The idea here is that it won't stop at 25%. Even if you were to accept this premise, maybe you're just thinking about chat gpt 3.5 or 4. But it really doesn't take a lot more imagination to think about what version 7 or 30 might do. The same goes for the image/video generation models. Smaller production studios might forgo several artist hires and just generate the stuff they need. Large ones will have an enormous pool of unemployed creatives and won't have to pay them much at all.
        jcgrillo 3y ago
        Has anyone been made measurably more productive with this stuff? Is even 25% achievable? I'm a software engineer, and I spend less than 25% of my time typing out code. So even if copilot could write every single line of code for me it could not improve my productivity by 25%. In order to make me 25% more productive it would also have to somehow speed up everything else I do at work as well. Has this been demonstrated? Auto-completing function bodies with stack overflow content is cool! I'm not trying to say this technology isn't doing anything. It's clearly doing something "cool". But that doesn't necessarily actually make anyone more productive. That seems like an extraordinary claim (at least based on my own small experience working with it), so I'd expect to see some extraordinary evidence.
        exe34 3y ago
        Yes, I wrote a small app in kotlin to scratch an itch. Chat gpt 3.5 gave me code that in the past would have taken me weeks to figure out from the mountain of verbiage in Google docs for the ever changing APIs. Normally googling for this stuff just leads to loads of things that don't work and I have to figure out why. With chat gpt I just pasted whatever error and it gave me the right answer the second or third time. I now have my (private) app that does what I need. Without gpt it would have taken me several weeks (real time, it's a hobby). I've seen new colleagues use co-pilot at work and it definitely increases the amount of stuff they can now figure out for themselves within a given time.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    This comment is really odd to see on HN. It’s like if a group of computer enthusiasts (in person) had a guy saying “I don’t understand what the big deal is with this so-called internet.”
    - jcgrillo 3y ago
      The Internet was (is) a totally transformative technology which has changed how people work, play, shop, and interact worldwide. Your claim is that generative AI will do this? How? I recall a few months ago the Web 3.0 people saying a similar thing. Is it different this time?
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? Better keyboard text prediction and power management. A competent Siri.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Even if all it did was improve Siri’s capability to understand requests and add the ability to ask clarifying questions with no other functional improvements, it’d make Siri vastly more useful.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Apple already has transformer based text prediction and a model for power management. How does "generative AI" help ?
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    That's it. So they're not behind, they're already there.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dash2 3y ago
  "A competent Siri." This, but it is really exciting because for the first time, you can just tell your computer what to do. Not just a given set of tasks, but e.g. "go to my gym and book a slot with my personal trainer"; "contact Shauna and set up a meeting to talk about X, then book me tickets to get there". Think about how much monkey-work we all do with our smartphones. We might look back in 10 years and laugh at the idea that we had to press buttons all the time.
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work
ezfe 3y ago
Generative AI won't lead to AGI any time soon but it does make our computers at lot better at understanding us. Simple example: Adding something to a reminder list, but the name of your lists don't exactly match the list you said to add to. Prompt: "Add milk to my shopping list" Siri: "I didn't find a shopping list, do you want to create one?" ChatGPT (when asked to pick from my actual lists), properly identifies the "groceries" list as the intended list.
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  Does a computer understanding me make it better? I find that attempts the computer makes to understand me, "delight" me, etc. just end up pissing me off. It's a tool. All I ever want a tool to do is be completely invisible and become an extension of my body, which enables me to get a task done. Computer software which does anything other than exactly what I tell it to fails at this, because it instantly breaks my connection to the task I'm trying to do and refocuses my attention on the software itself. I wouldn't dream of trying to use a Siri, it sounds absolutely maddening. All I expect is that when I press a key on the keyboard the character I commanded with my key press shows up on the screen before I can blink, and does so exactly once.
  - k8svet 3y ago
    I love watching my friends and family use Siri. Maybe 20% of the time it does what they want first try. 40% of the time they end up unlocking the phone and tapping the screen. Sounds infuriating to me. (To be clear, I don't have any always-(maybe)-on mics in my life, I doubt Hey Google or Bard or whatever is much better.)
    - ezfe 3y ago
      But none of those things are Generative AI, which is a big part of WHY they're infuriating to use. I use Siri to add stuff to my grocery list and set timers. That's it. It's useful when I'm in the kitchen to just say what needs to go on this list instead of remembering to write it down later. The day when Siri or Google or whatever can make the corrections I mentioned in my higher post will improve it vastly.
ryandrake 3y ago
> But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether their use of AI is going to actually drive earnings. They just care that they are using it. If a company says "We're doing AI blah blah blah" that's enough: investors are happy and stock price goes up.
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  I think you're right, it'll be interesting to see whether the next AI winter brings a market crash with it. It would be one thing if it seemed like there was some commercial application beyond "neat nerd toy" but so far there just isn't that I'm aware of? That smells a lot like tulip bulbs.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    There’s no crash, just vine swinging to the next. A couple years ago it was blockchain. Expect a new stupid rain dance in a few years.
staticman2 3y ago
If AGI is defined as a AI that can replace most humans at most tasks, it would be worth money if it's cheaper than paying humans. So instead of a Marvel film costing 100 million to make, if an AGI can do it for 30 million it's worth tens of millions of dollars. Of course society might eventually collapse from mass unemployment, but corporate owners would live like kings until that finally happens.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  If AI replaces most humans at most tasks how are the humans going to pay for the products?
  - Auracle 3y ago
    There are two possibilities- one is what the PC largely did. Nobody really lost their jobs even though one accountant can do the work of 40 that just had calculators. We can just do “more” now. On the other hand there’s what the washing machine, mechanized farm equipment, etc. did. A slow shift in how many people are required to do a job. There were no absolute jobs lost, just a shift in the economy. Chances are it’ll be somewhere in between.

gs17 3y ago

At very least, they could make Siri useful.

exe34 3y ago

Have you missed all the people complaining that it'll put them out of business?

jcgrillo 3y ago
No, but having tried it I can't figure out what they're talking about. Seems like more NFT-esque nonsense.
- cududa 3y ago
  That's a really myopic observation. They're very very different. ChatGPT Pro helps me learn new concepts in new languages much much faster than I did in the past.
  - jcgrillo 3y ago
    Who would that put out of business? Does that replace anyone's job function? It sounds like you're describing something like "really good search for Wikipedia" which to be clear I think is great, but who's gonna be replaced by that in their workplace? EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.
    - exe34 3y ago
      Do you understand the concept of individual productivity? If you have 5 people working for you, and a new technology makes each 25% more productive, you can fire one of them. The idea here is that it won't stop at 25%. Even if you were to accept this premise, maybe you're just thinking about chat gpt 3.5 or 4. But it really doesn't take a lot more imagination to think about what version 7 or 30 might do. The same goes for the image/video generation models. Smaller production studios might forgo several artist hires and just generate the stuff they need. Large ones will have an enormous pool of unemployed creatives and won't have to pay them much at all.
      - jcgrillo 3y ago
        Has anyone been made measurably more productive with this stuff? Is even 25% achievable? I'm a software engineer, and I spend less than 25% of my time typing out code. So even if copilot could write every single line of code for me it could not improve my productivity by 25%. In order to make me 25% more productive it would also have to somehow speed up everything else I do at work as well. Has this been demonstrated? Auto-completing function bodies with stack overflow content is cool! I'm not trying to say this technology isn't doing anything. It's clearly doing something "cool". But that doesn't necessarily actually make anyone more productive. That seems like an extraordinary claim (at least based on my own small experience working with it), so I'd expect to see some extraordinary evidence.
        exe34 3y ago
        Yes, I wrote a small app in kotlin to scratch an itch. Chat gpt 3.5 gave me code that in the past would have taken me weeks to figure out from the mountain of verbiage in Google docs for the ever changing APIs. Normally googling for this stuff just leads to loads of things that don't work and I have to figure out why. With chat gpt I just pasted whatever error and it gave me the right answer the second or third time. I now have my (private) app that does what I need. Without gpt it would have taken me several weeks (real time, it's a hobby). I've seen new colleagues use co-pilot at work and it definitely increases the amount of stuff they can now figure out for themselves within a given time.
- Auracle 3y ago
  This comment is really odd to see on HN. It’s like if a group of computer enthusiasts (in person) had a guy saying “I don’t understand what the big deal is with this so-called internet.”
  - jcgrillo 3y ago
    The Internet was (is) a totally transformative technology which has changed how people work, play, shop, and interact worldwide. Your claim is that generative AI will do this? How? I recall a few months ago the Web 3.0 people saying a similar thing. Is it different this time?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? Better keyboard text prediction and power management. A competent Siri.

jwells89 3y ago
Even if all it did was improve Siri’s capability to understand requests and add the ability to ask clarifying questions with no other functional improvements, it’d make Siri vastly more useful.
threeseed 3y ago
Apple already has transformer based text prediction and a model for power management. How does "generative AI" help ?
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  That's it. So they're not behind, they're already there.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dash2 3y ago
"A competent Siri." This, but it is really exciting because for the first time, you can just tell your computer what to do. Not just a given set of tasks, but e.g. "go to my gym and book a slot with my personal trainer"; "contact Shauna and set up a meeting to talk about X, then book me tickets to get there". Think about how much monkey-work we all do with our smartphones. We might look back in 10 years and laugh at the idea that we had to press buttons all the time.
jcgrillo 3y ago
I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work

ezfe 3y ago

Generative AI won't lead to AGI any time soon but it does make our computers at lot better at understanding us. Simple example: Adding something to a reminder list, but the name of your lists don't exactly match the list you said to add to. Prompt: "Add milk to my shopping list" Siri: "I didn't find a shopping list, do you want to create one?" ChatGPT (when asked to pick from my actual lists), properly identifies the "groceries" list as the intended list.

jcgrillo 3y ago
Does a computer understanding me make it better? I find that attempts the computer makes to understand me, "delight" me, etc. just end up pissing me off. It's a tool. All I ever want a tool to do is be completely invisible and become an extension of my body, which enables me to get a task done. Computer software which does anything other than exactly what I tell it to fails at this, because it instantly breaks my connection to the task I'm trying to do and refocuses my attention on the software itself. I wouldn't dream of trying to use a Siri, it sounds absolutely maddening. All I expect is that when I press a key on the keyboard the character I commanded with my key press shows up on the screen before I can blink, and does so exactly once.
- k8svet 3y ago
  I love watching my friends and family use Siri. Maybe 20% of the time it does what they want first try. 40% of the time they end up unlocking the phone and tapping the screen. Sounds infuriating to me. (To be clear, I don't have any always-(maybe)-on mics in my life, I doubt Hey Google or Bard or whatever is much better.)
  - ezfe 3y ago
    But none of those things are Generative AI, which is a big part of WHY they're infuriating to use. I use Siri to add stuff to my grocery list and set timers. That's it. It's useful when I'm in the kitchen to just say what needs to go on this list instead of remembering to write it down later. The day when Siri or Google or whatever can make the corrections I mentioned in my higher post will improve it vastly.

ryandrake 3y ago

> But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether their use of AI is going to actually drive earnings. They just care that they are using it. If a company says "We're doing AI blah blah blah" that's enough: investors are happy and stock price goes up.

jcgrillo 3y ago
I think you're right, it'll be interesting to see whether the next AI winter brings a market crash with it. It would be one thing if it seemed like there was some commercial application beyond "neat nerd toy" but so far there just isn't that I'm aware of? That smells a lot like tulip bulbs.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  There’s no crash, just vine swinging to the next. A couple years ago it was blockchain. Expect a new stupid rain dance in a few years.

staticman2 3y ago

If AGI is defined as a AI that can replace most humans at most tasks, it would be worth money if it's cheaper than paying humans. So instead of a Marvel film costing 100 million to make, if an AGI can do it for 30 million it's worth tens of millions of dollars. Of course society might eventually collapse from mass unemployment, but corporate owners would live like kings until that finally happens.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
If AI replaces most humans at most tasks how are the humans going to pay for the products?
- Auracle 3y ago
  There are two possibilities- one is what the PC largely did. Nobody really lost their jobs even though one accountant can do the work of 40 that just had calculators. We can just do “more” now. On the other hand there’s what the washing machine, mechanized farm equipment, etc. did. A slow shift in how many people are required to do a job. There were no absolute jobs lost, just a shift in the economy. Chances are it’ll be somewhere in between.