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People said pretty much exactly the same thing about 3d printing. "Rather than ship a product, companies can ship blueprints and everyone can just print stuff

People said pretty much exactly the same thing about 3d printing. "Rather than ship a product, companies can ship blueprints and everyone can just print stuff at their own home! Everything will be 3d printed! It's so magical!" Just because a tech is magical today, doesn't mean that it will be meaningful tomorrow. Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's just a hobbiest toy. GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful. That's mostly the thinking here. A lot of the "killer" AI tech has really boiled down to "Look, this can replace your customer support chat bot!". Everyone is rushing to try and figure out what we can use LLMs (Just like they did when ML was supposed to take over the world) and so far it's been niche locations to make shareholders happy.

idopmstuff 3y ago
Remember when Chegg's stock price tanked? That's because GPT is extremely valuable as a homework helper. It can make mistakes, but that's very infrequent on well-understood topics like English, math and science through the high school level (and certainly if you hire a tutor, you'd pay a whole lot more for something that can also make mistakes). Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?
- j2kun 3y ago
  If you follow much of the education world, it's inundated with teachers frantically trying to deal with the volume and slop their students produce with AI tools. I'm sure it can be useful in an educational context, but "replacing a poor-quality cheating tool with a more efficient poor-quality cheating tool" isn't exactly what I'd call "meaningful." The most interesting uses of AI tools in a classroom I've seen is teachers showing students AI-generated work and asking students to critique it and fact check it, at which point the students see it for what it is.
- delusional 3y ago
  > Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do? No? Solving homework was never meaningful. Being meaningful was never the point of homework. The point was for you to solve it yourself. To Learn with your human brain, such that your human brain could use those teaching to make new meaningful knowledge. John having 5 apples after Judy stole 3 is not interesting.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
The huge difference between this and your analogy is that 3d printing failed to take off because it never reached mass adoption, and stayed in the "fiddly and expensive" stage. GPT models have already seen adoption in nearly every product your average consumer uses, in some cases heedless of whether it even makes sense in that context. Windows has it built in. Nearly everyone I know (under the age of 40) has used at least one product downstream of OpenAI, and more often than not a handful of them. That said, yeah it's mostly niche locations like customer support chatbots, because the killer app is "app-to-user interface that's undisguisable from normal human interaction". But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app (like a POS). "Magical" is exactly the requirement to replace people like that.
- j2kun 3y ago
  "Adoption" of tech companies pushing it on you is very different from "adoption" in terms of the average person using it in a meaningful way and liking it.
- cogman10 3y ago
  > But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app That's the sleight of hand LLM advocates are playing right now. "Imagine how many people are just putting data into computers! We could replace them all!" Yet LLMs aren't "just putting data into a computer" They aren't even really user/app interfaces. They are a magic box you can give directives to and get (generally correct, but not always) answers from. Go ahead, ask your LLM "Create an excel document with the last 30 days of the high temperatures for blank". What happens? Did it create that excel document? Why not? LLMs don't bridge the user/app gap. They bridge the user/knowledge gap, sometimes sort of.
helicalmix 3y ago
> GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful. sure, but my experience is that if you are able to optimize better on some previous limitation, it legitimately does open up a whole different world of usefulness. for example, real-time processing makes me feel like universal translators are now all the more viable
helicalmix 3y ago
> Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's just a hobbiest toy. how sure are you about that? https://amfg.ai/industrial-applications-of-3d-printing-the-ultimate-guide/ https://amfg.ai/industrial-applications-of-3d-printing-the-u... how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes? > Just like they did when ML was supposed to take over the world how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself?
- cogman10 3y ago
  This honestly made me lol. I'm sure 10 years from now, assuming LLMs don't prove me wrong, I'll make a similar comment about LLMs and a new hype that I just made about 3d printing, and I'll get EXACTLY this reply. "Oh yeah, well here's a niche application of LLMs that you didn't account for!". > how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes? See where I said "in consumer products". I'm certainly not claiming that 3d printing is never used and is not useful. However, what I am saying is that it was hyped WAY beyond industrial applications. In fact, here I am, 11 years ago, saying basically exactly what I'm saying about LLMs that I said about 3d printing. [1]. Along with people basically responding to me the exact same way you just did. > how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself? Did I say it wasn't behind the scenes? ML absolutely has an applicable location, it's not nearly as vast as the hype train would say. I know, I spent a LONG time trying to integrate ML into our company and found it simply wasn't as good as hard and fast programmed rules in almost all situations. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iju9/3d_printing_bigger_than_internet_ftcom/c7mtgle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iju9/3d_print...
  - helicalmix 3y ago

idopmstuff 3y ago

Remember when Chegg's stock price tanked? That's because GPT is extremely valuable as a homework helper. It can make mistakes, but that's very infrequent on well-understood topics like English, math and science through the high school level (and certainly if you hire a tutor, you'd pay a whole lot more for something that can also make mistakes). Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?

j2kun 3y ago
If you follow much of the education world, it's inundated with teachers frantically trying to deal with the volume and slop their students produce with AI tools. I'm sure it can be useful in an educational context, but "replacing a poor-quality cheating tool with a more efficient poor-quality cheating tool" isn't exactly what I'd call "meaningful." The most interesting uses of AI tools in a classroom I've seen is teachers showing students AI-generated work and asking students to critique it and fact check it, at which point the students see it for what it is.
delusional 3y ago
> Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do? No? Solving homework was never meaningful. Being meaningful was never the point of homework. The point was for you to solve it yourself. To Learn with your human brain, such that your human brain could use those teaching to make new meaningful knowledge. John having 5 apples after Judy stole 3 is not interesting.

LordDragonfang 3y ago

The huge difference between this and your analogy is that 3d printing failed to take off because it never reached mass adoption, and stayed in the "fiddly and expensive" stage. GPT models have already seen adoption in nearly every product your average consumer uses, in some cases heedless of whether it even makes sense in that context. Windows has it built in. Nearly everyone I know (under the age of 40) has used at least one product downstream of OpenAI, and more often than not a handful of them. That said, yeah it's mostly niche locations like customer support chatbots, because the killer app is "app-to-user interface that's undisguisable from normal human interaction". But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app (like a POS). "Magical" is exactly the requirement to replace people like that.

j2kun 3y ago
"Adoption" of tech companies pushing it on you is very different from "adoption" in terms of the average person using it in a meaningful way and liking it.
cogman10 3y ago
> But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app That's the sleight of hand LLM advocates are playing right now. "Imagine how many people are just putting data into computers! We could replace them all!" Yet LLMs aren't "just putting data into a computer" They aren't even really user/app interfaces. They are a magic box you can give directives to and get (generally correct, but not always) answers from. Go ahead, ask your LLM "Create an excel document with the last 30 days of the high temperatures for blank". What happens? Did it create that excel document? Why not? LLMs don't bridge the user/app gap. They bridge the user/knowledge gap, sometimes sort of.

helicalmix 3y ago

> GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful. sure, but my experience is that if you are able to optimize better on some previous limitation, it legitimately does open up a whole different world of usefulness. for example, real-time processing makes me feel like universal translators are now all the more viable

helicalmix 3y ago

> Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's just a hobbiest toy. how sure are you about that? https://amfg.ai/industrial-applications-of-3d-printing-the-ultimate-guide/ https://amfg.ai/industrial-applications-of-3d-printing-the-u... how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes? > Just like they did when ML was supposed to take over the world how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself?

cogman10 3y ago
This honestly made me lol. I'm sure 10 years from now, assuming LLMs don't prove me wrong, I'll make a similar comment about LLMs and a new hype that I just made about 3d printing, and I'll get EXACTLY this reply. "Oh yeah, well here's a niche application of LLMs that you didn't account for!". > how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes? See where I said "in consumer products". I'm certainly not claiming that 3d printing is never used and is not useful. However, what I am saying is that it was hyped WAY beyond industrial applications. In fact, here I am, 11 years ago, saying basically exactly what I'm saying about LLMs that I said about 3d printing. [1]. Along with people basically responding to me the exact same way you just did. > how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself? Did I say it wasn't behind the scenes? ML absolutely has an applicable location, it's not nearly as vast as the hype train would say. I know, I spent a LONG time trying to integrate ML into our company and found it simply wasn't as good as hard and fast programmed rules in almost all situations. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iju9/3d_printing_bigger_than_internet_ftcom/c7mtgle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15iju9/3d_print...
- helicalmix 3y ago