5 ms·

Still patiently waiting for the true magic moment where I don't have to chat with the computer, I just tell it what to do and it does it without even an 'OK'.

• lannisterstark 3y ago
  We'll get there. For me, this is seriously impressive, and I already use LLMs everyday - but a serious "Now we're talkin" moment would be when I'd be able to stand outside of Lowes, and talk to my glasses/earbuds "Hey, I'm in front of lowes, where do I get my air filters from?" and it tells me if it's in stock, aisle and bay number. (If you can't tell, I am tired from fiddling with apps lol)
  • yakz 3y ago
    Lowes wants you to look at the ads in the app. I would guess that most companies will not want to provide APIs that an agent could use to make that kind of query. So, the agent is going to have to use the app just like you would, which looks like it will definitely become possible, but again, Lowes wants the human to see the ads. So they're going to try to break the automation. It's going to take customers demanding (w/$) this kind of functionality and it will probably still take a long time as the companies will probably do whatever they can to maintain (or extend) control.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      Do they want a better ad than what the GP was describing? There isn't one they can buy. (But yeah, I guess they will want it, and break any reasonable utility from their stores on the process. That's what everybody does today, I'm not holding my breath for management to grow some competence out of nowhere in the future.)
    • prossercj 3y ago
      More likely future LLMs will mix ads into their responses. ("Your air filters are in stock in aisle A6. Have you heard about the new membership plan from Lowes...?")
      • outofpaper 3y ago
        Ah the corporate dream of a salesperson inside the ear of every consumer.
        • varelse 3y ago
          [dead]
      • ryandrake 3y ago
        If it was a real Personal Assistant I would just have to say: "I want to pick up my home air filter at Lowes today." and it would 1. know what brand/model air filter I needed, 2. know which Lowes is my local one, 3. place the order for me, and 4. let me know when it will be available to pick up.
    • hluska 3y ago
      I’m on Lowes website right now. Can you point out an ad? Because I don’t see any. And why do you think that companies can’t inject advertising into their LLMs? It’s easy to do and with a long enough customer relationship, it gets very powerful. It’s like a sales clerk who remembers everything you have ever bought and appears like it understands your timing. As for data, I can name several major retailers who expose the stock/aisle number via a public api. That information is highly available and involved in big dollar tasks like inventory management.
      • yakz 3y ago
        When I go to the Lowe's website, the homepage itself is covered in ads. "Spring Into Deals", "Lowe's and Messi are assisting you with 100 points! Join Our Loyalty Program". "Get up to 35% off select major appliances"... the more I scroll, the more ads come up. Companies can inject ads into their own LLMs, sure. But ChatGPT is somebody else's LLM. Your point about retailers exposing stock/aisle number via a public API surprises me. What do you mean by public? What's the EULA look like? Exposing stock/aisle number via API for the purpose of inventory management is not a use case that would require making API access public.
    • alwa 3y ago
      At some level, isn’t “connecting you effortlessly with the product you explicitly told me you were here to find” the best kind of ad? To the extent that Lowe’s hires armies of friendly floor staff specifically to answer that kind of question face to face, help my dumb self figure out what the right filter size and type is, learn the kind of particulars about my house that the LLM will just know, and build my confidence that my intentions are correct in my case? Google has always made it hard to avoid clicking the “ad” immediately above the organic result for a highly specific named entity, but where it’s really struck me is as Amazon has started extracting “sponsorship” payments from its merchants. The “sponsored” product matching my search is immediately above the unpaid organic result, identical in appearance. That kind of convergence suggests to me that the Lowe’s of the world don’t need to “show the ad” in the conventional sense, they just need to reduce the friction of the sale—and they stand to gain more from my trust and loyalty over time than from a one-off upsell. I’m reminded of Autozone figuring out, on their dusty old text consoles, how to just ask me my make/model/year, and how much value and patronage that added relative to my local mom-n-pop parts store since I just knew all the parts were going to be right.
      • yakz 3y ago
        That's kinda what I meant with customers demanding it with their money. But, avoiding upselling is not really what I see stores doing. I don't want the cashier (or payment terminal) to push me to open new credit accounts or buy warranties. I don't want them to arrange their stores so I have to walk past more ads and products that I'm not interested in today. They still do it, and they work hard at doing it.
    • Teever 3y ago
      Or we could overcome this with a distributed system where the devices of individuals who have been to the store recently record data about the current location of products and upload it somewhere for the rest of the users to query if needed.
    • throwthrowuknow 3y ago
      If they want to sell more products to more people they will need to provide those APIs. If an AI assistant can make home maintenance more accessible then that will translate to more people shopping at Lowes more often but only if their inventory and its location are accessible by the assistant helping the customer decide which store to go to for the right part. If your store blocks the assistant then it’s going to suggest the competitor who provides access. It would be even better if the assistant can place an order for curbside pickup.
• mycall 3y ago
  I want it to instruct me exactly how to achieve things. While agents doing stuff for me is nice, my agency is more important and investing into myself is best. Step by step, how to make bank -- what to say, what to do.
  • IanKerr 3y ago
    Pretty interesting to me that we're starting to go from humans programming computers to computers programming humans.
    • djeastm 3y ago
      Yep, the more we take AI "advice" the more we're becoming the agents of AI rather than the AI being an agent of us
  • blagie 3y ago
    It's a process: - People want agency. - Once people have comfort and trust that it does things right enough of the time, people no longer want agency. That threshold varies task-by-task and person-by-person.
    • Lalabadie 3y ago
      The tradeoff is more complicated: Automation tech frees up time but takes away agency and opportunity in exchange. Empowerment tech creates opportunity and increases agency, but it needs you to have time and resources, and these costs can easily increase existing gaps between social classes.
    • waffletower 3y ago
      This was exemplified to me by the recent Tesla Full Self Driving trial that was installed on my car. When using it, my want of agency was constant -- it was excruciating to co-pilot the car with my hands on the wheel necessarily ready to take over at any moment. It was not "right enough of the time" for me.
  • narrator 3y ago
• nurettin 3y ago
  If you are not specific enough, it should at least ask for parameters. "Computer, buy some stock" *** buys 100 lots of tesla without a prompt
  • nanomonkey 3y ago
    Hmmm...maybe I should name my next company Vegetable or Chicken so that folks accidentally buy my stock. Sort of like naming your band "Blank Tape" back in the 90's.
    • entropicdrifter 3y ago
      Interesting. Maybe I'll name my company Clean Water
    • ChainOfFools 3y ago
      > "Blank Tape" back in the 90s a punk inversion of this would have been naming one's band "various artists" in the early years of MP3 players. In fact I'm fairly certain I've heard of a group actually doing this, but somehow I can't place the name.
• kemiller 3y ago
  Re: The Expanse. I must have missed that. Maybe that’s the point. People no longer think of a computer as some separate thing that needs to be interacted with.
  • jdmn73 3y ago
    The best example is the scene where Alex has to plot a course to the surface of Ganymede without being detected by the Martian and Earth navies. He goes over multiple iterations of possible courses with the computer adjusting for gravity assists and avoiding patrols etc... by voice pretty seamlessly.
• krainboltgreene 3y ago
  > I don't want to chat with computers to do basic things. I only want to chat with computers when the goal is to iterate on something. If the computer is too dumb to understand the request and needs to initiate iteration, I want no part. This is called an "employee" and all you need to do is pay them. If you don't want to do that, then I have to wonder: Is what you want slavery?
  • baq 3y ago
    Actually yes, I want a blob of quantized floats to be my slave. I definitely don’t want it to be my policeman or philosopher!
    • krainboltgreene 3y ago
      Funny, because policeman and analyst are the first two uses of any AI in the last two decades. Either way I hope you get what you want, it rarely ends well for the slave master regardless of how reductive they get to justify their actions.