6 ms·

The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found

by cjk2 2y ago

The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this. Personally I haven't found a single use for any of the current AI tools out there which materially improves my life other than the de-noise in Adobe Lightroom. I suspect Apple are the most likely organisation to be able to change this as they have a track record of taking existing technology and making it useful and demonstrating it effectively. If they can't do this or it's a disaster I expect it will by proxy reflect badly across the entire industry. This will be an interesting year.

123yawaworht456 2y ago
>The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this. you could've said the same thing about computers, back when they were room-sized machines full of vacuum tubes, capable of rudimentary calculations and not much else. would you imagine that less than a century later, we would have devices with more computing power than a million of those in our pockets? when AI industry stops obsessing over lobotomizing their models into being useless for anything except basic bitch customer support, content moderation and mediocre stack overflow substitute, there will be tons and tons of applications for generative AI. my own industry - gamedev - is within less than a decade from dialogue and audio being generated on the fly, with human writers doing maybe 10% of the work and voice actors just providing a few samples. of course, that will not happen until LLMs are allowed to produce anything but soulless garbage that strictly adheres to FAGMAN sensibilities.
- cjk2 2y ago
  Not really. Your point is hyperbole. Personal computing was a paradigm shift. This is a relatively minor change in a small subset of it.
  - 123yawaworht456 2y ago
    it was a paradigm shift, yes, but you would never guess that if you were looking at ENIAC in the 40's.
    - cjk2 2y ago
      I'm wearing Dick Tracy's watch so the ideas were already out there... The point is that idea was actually useful!
    - flohofwoe 2y ago
      It's not like "AI" is anything new though, it's been around since the 1950's and we've been through several AI winters since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter There's no reason to believe that this time it'll be different.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > you could've said the same thing about computers, back when they were room-sized machines full of vacuum tubes, capable of rudimentary calculations and not much else Electronic computers were seen as useful right from the start; they clearly fulfilled an existing need. No-one was handing out VC money to make computers of possible speculative future interest in the 1940s.
  - aurareturn 2y ago
    I must be the only one on HN who finds GPT4/GPT4o extremely useful and use it multiple times/day for different things. I'm aware of its limitations and work around its limitations. For example, I'm not going to blindly push the code it gives me without checking it carefully and testing it. I'm not going to completely trust the legal document that it generates for me but I will use it for the first draft and ask it questions. ChatGPT is excellent for tasks that are on the low end of the risk spectrum but are tedeous.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I simply don't understand this take. Yes, I think AI is incredibly over-hyped at the moment, and I've come to totally agree with Yann LeCun's assessment that LLMs have nothing to do with AGI, but I still think it's an incredibly useful tool if one is aware of its limitations. Things like: 1. ChatGPT is great at translations (at least for English-French), and I've found it too be a great language learning assistant. 2. It's incredibly useful for me when it comes to writing a first draft of complicated SQL queries. 3. It's great at essentially a faster document search and summarization tool if I don't know the keyword of what I'm looking for, e.g. when I want to ask "I want to code X, which libraries can help me do that?" 4. I use cursor.sh as my IDE and I find it incredibly useful, especially for finding answers about a large codebase when I'm a newbie to the repository. 5. I've found ChatGPT to be great for trip ideas and planning. In short, I think generative AI is a powerful if flawed tool, and I think the disillusionment comes when people think it's more than that.
- cjk2 2y ago
  I think the disillusion here is when you find out that these things are mostly smoke and mirrors that tend to generate very suboptimal solutions. For example I am forever having to shoot down ChatGPT generated code before it hits production which is naively and lazily generated and the engineer is not aware of this at all. Yes it can write SQL but does it understand the index strategy on the destination table or the consequences of running thousands of those queries a minute in a production database? No. Does it have a deep understanding of context rather than just syntax (ask a French language translator what they think of it). No. And with trip planning and ideas, which is a speciality of mine, it is always better to find someone local and ask them about it because a huge portion of the information out there isn't something a model can infer about because it isn't written down anywhere. Case in point, I'm off to the Azores islands shortly - it can't generate anything useful for me. I had someone suggest that already. On top of that it is compelled to over explain sometimes to the point of incorrectness, which it likes to do on travel advice. This becomes dangerous. I found someone local to talk to instead. So personally I think the LLM and question based uses are limited and quite ridiculous from an objectivity perspective. They barely scratch the surface of the problem and the hit rate is less than I'd get doing the legwork myself, which I do not find useful. And the information is hard to verify and judge if it's safe without deeper contextual knowledge. This is a complete mire. The other use cases, like classification and search are where I see it winning but those aren't sexy and don't play on our human emotions as well enough to part with cash. They will be left after the hype of course. Really I think people are buying into a romantic fantasy at the moment.
nailer 2y ago
> Personally I haven't found a single use for any of the current AI tools out there which materially improves my life other than the de-noise in Adobe Lightroom. Huh odd. I use the copilot mobile app continuously to find things that would be laborious or annoying with search.
pquki4 2y ago
Well, anecdotally, a Uber driver who is also a real estate agent told me that he used ChatGPT daily, and it was very helpful. Just to put it out there.
dzhiurgis 2y ago
Kinda opposite in my circles - techies are just meh while creatives use to do tons of writing or summarising stuff. Of course tons of friends never even heard of it.

by cjk2 2y ago

123yawaworht456 2y ago

>The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this. you could've said the same thing about computers, back when they were room-sized machines full of vacuum tubes, capable of rudimentary calculations and not much else. would you imagine that less than a century later, we would have devices with more computing power than a million of those in our pockets? when AI industry stops obsessing over lobotomizing their models into being useless for anything except basic bitch customer support, content moderation and mediocre stack overflow substitute, there will be tons and tons of applications for generative AI. my own industry - gamedev - is within less than a decade from dialogue and audio being generated on the fly, with human writers doing maybe 10% of the work and voice actors just providing a few samples. of course, that will not happen until LLMs are allowed to produce anything but soulless garbage that strictly adheres to FAGMAN sensibilities.

cjk2 2y ago
Not really. Your point is hyperbole. Personal computing was a paradigm shift. This is a relatively minor change in a small subset of it.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
  it was a paradigm shift, yes, but you would never guess that if you were looking at ENIAC in the 40's.
  - cjk2 2y ago
    I'm wearing Dick Tracy's watch so the ideas were already out there... The point is that idea was actually useful!
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    It's not like "AI" is anything new though, it's been around since the 1950's and we've been through several AI winters since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter There's no reason to believe that this time it'll be different.
rsynnott 2y ago
> you could've said the same thing about computers, back when they were room-sized machines full of vacuum tubes, capable of rudimentary calculations and not much else Electronic computers were seen as useful right from the start; they clearly fulfilled an existing need. No-one was handing out VC money to make computers of possible speculative future interest in the 1940s.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  I must be the only one on HN who finds GPT4/GPT4o extremely useful and use it multiple times/day for different things. I'm aware of its limitations and work around its limitations. For example, I'm not going to blindly push the code it gives me without checking it carefully and testing it. I'm not going to completely trust the legal document that it generates for me but I will use it for the first draft and ask it questions. ChatGPT is excellent for tasks that are on the low end of the risk spectrum but are tedeous.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I simply don't understand this take. Yes, I think AI is incredibly over-hyped at the moment, and I've come to totally agree with Yann LeCun's assessment that LLMs have nothing to do with AGI, but I still think it's an incredibly useful tool if one is aware of its limitations. Things like: 1. ChatGPT is great at translations (at least for English-French), and I've found it too be a great language learning assistant. 2. It's incredibly useful for me when it comes to writing a first draft of complicated SQL queries. 3. It's great at essentially a faster document search and summarization tool if I don't know the keyword of what I'm looking for, e.g. when I want to ask "I want to code X, which libraries can help me do that?" 4. I use cursor.sh as my IDE and I find it incredibly useful, especially for finding answers about a large codebase when I'm a newbie to the repository. 5. I've found ChatGPT to be great for trip ideas and planning. In short, I think generative AI is a powerful if flawed tool, and I think the disillusionment comes when people think it's more than that.

cjk2 2y ago
I think the disillusion here is when you find out that these things are mostly smoke and mirrors that tend to generate very suboptimal solutions. For example I am forever having to shoot down ChatGPT generated code before it hits production which is naively and lazily generated and the engineer is not aware of this at all. Yes it can write SQL but does it understand the index strategy on the destination table or the consequences of running thousands of those queries a minute in a production database? No. Does it have a deep understanding of context rather than just syntax (ask a French language translator what they think of it). No. And with trip planning and ideas, which is a speciality of mine, it is always better to find someone local and ask them about it because a huge portion of the information out there isn't something a model can infer about because it isn't written down anywhere. Case in point, I'm off to the Azores islands shortly - it can't generate anything useful for me. I had someone suggest that already. On top of that it is compelled to over explain sometimes to the point of incorrectness, which it likes to do on travel advice. This becomes dangerous. I found someone local to talk to instead. So personally I think the LLM and question based uses are limited and quite ridiculous from an objectivity perspective. They barely scratch the surface of the problem and the hit rate is less than I'd get doing the legwork myself, which I do not find useful. And the information is hard to verify and judge if it's safe without deeper contextual knowledge. This is a complete mire. The other use cases, like classification and search are where I see it winning but those aren't sexy and don't play on our human emotions as well enough to part with cash. They will be left after the hype of course. Really I think people are buying into a romantic fantasy at the moment.

nailer 2y ago

> Personally I haven't found a single use for any of the current AI tools out there which materially improves my life other than the de-noise in Adobe Lightroom. Huh odd. I use the copilot mobile app continuously to find things that would be laborious or annoying with search.

pquki4 2y ago

Well, anecdotally, a Uber driver who is also a real estate agent told me that he used ChatGPT daily, and it was very helpful. Just to put it out there.

dzhiurgis 2y ago

Kinda opposite in my circles - techies are just meh while creatives use to do tons of writing or summarising stuff. Of course tons of friends never even heard of it.