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If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market c

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a trillion or gazillion dollar market? What am I missing? (I am discounting GH Copilot/Cody and the like as they are an extension of intellisense/ dev oriented workflows which really is a fantastic use case)

mvanbaak 2y ago
hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it happen. It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  But bitcoin and ethereum are near all time highs, while Alexa is laying everyone off and AI has no paying customers…
- LordKeren 2y ago
  This is by design— the rhetoric around crypto was specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to the market and prop up the next rug pull. Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto. I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did.
  - matrix87 2y ago
    > I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did. If you include black market economic activity, then crypto has done way more and over a much longer period
    - LordKeren 2y ago
      > If you include black market economic activity I don’t
  - tempodox 2y ago
    > more real use cases than crypto ever did. Indeed, with crypto the suckers needed to do the hallucinating themselves. LLMs automate that and do it for you.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  The question is the cost to value ratio. There is some value in LLM's, the question is if people are willing to foot the cost.
pjc50 2y ago
> how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". As well as about 90% of the education system. It's not replacing them with something better, but it is cheaper.
- loire280 2y ago
  Except according to Graeber those jobs exist because leaders, companies, and society like having lots of employees doing this work for various reasons and we all more or less tacitly agree that the output of those jobs is useless and only exists because the last 50 years of productivity gains mean there isn't enough real work to keep everyone busy for 40+ hours 50 weeks a year.
- matrix87 2y ago
  > It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". Those jobs were already replaceable to begin with? Isn't that already implied by their name? Also, is it possible that the recent investment in LLMs have actually produced more bullshit jobs instead of decreasing them? > As well as about 90% of the education system. :/ there's a lot more to the education system than just the content
  - QuiDortDine 2y ago
    Even just the content needs a deciding mind to prioritize. If lesson plans were enough, education would happen through VHS tapes.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  > As well as about 90% of the education system. There are multiple stories from actual teachers about kids and teens doing this today. They don't use search engines or books, they ask an LLM. Then 20 students get 20 different answers of varying quality and do ZERO validation that the answer they got is real, they trust the LLM implicitly.
- maximus-decimus 2y ago
  90% of our education system is really just watching over the kids/teenagers so they don't cause trouble while parents are at work. I don't see AI doing that.
conradfr 2y ago
They are useful for customer service.
- joshmarinacci 2y ago
  When? I’ve used various customer service chat bots and they just point me to the knowledge base. They can’t take any actions. You have to talk to a human for that, and if I just wanted info I wouldn’t have contacted support in the first place.
  - conradfr 2y ago
    The vast majority of CS contacts don't require action, and are not through a chat bot. You don't even need to automate all the steps, an IA is perfectly capable of fetching the customer data, delivery info etc and write a decent reply, then a human agent can discard it, improve it or send it as written.
- rty32 2y ago
  Here is the thing. Most of the time I call customer service because the app/website does not provide the information or the ability to do certain things, and I need to talk to a human to get things explained or get something done. And more than a few times customer service agents don't know what they are doing or are just talking nonsense, and I need to escalate to a manager. You think you can trust an LLM to make decisions for something like resetting password or closing an account?
nox101 2y ago
> how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? I'm paying for chatGPT and use it quite often. I find it very useful. I don't pay for chat because there have been free options since the 80s. I don't pay for voice(chat) because there have free options for ~10yrs?
- textlapse 2y ago
  Interesting. How much would one have to pay you to stop using it? Wondering what the use cases are (replace Google? Stack Overflow? etc).
  - ChadNauseam 2y ago
    I'd have to be paid probably at least $200/mo to stop using LLMs, they are a massive productivity boost for new projects and can replace google for simple things. As an example of replacing google (since I was writing C++ today and I haven't used it in ages): me: is there an issue with passing "hello" to std::string claude: Passing "hello" to a function expecting std::string is actually not an issue. C++ allows implicit conversion from string literals (like "hello") to std::string objects. This conversion is possible because std::string has a constructor that accepts a const char*, which is the type of string literals in C++. If I type this question into google, I get this: > some_function(std::string{"hello, world"}); is completely safe, as long as the function doesn't preserve the string_view for later use. The temporary std::string is destroyed at the end of this full-expression (roughly speaking, at this ; ), so it's destroyed after the function returns. which doesn't really answer my question As an example of simple project: I wanted to make an app with swiftUI, and I was able to just describe it to claude and have it give me the basic outlines of the app, and then improve it by iteratively asking claude for changes. Since I try to understand the output, this lead to me learning Swift and SwiftUI very quickly while also having a functional app within a few minutes.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      String literals are not const char *, but const char[] in C++. They decay to a pointer when you pass them to the std::string constructor that takes one.
rtpg 2y ago
It's silly but having the Apple robot or Google robot put stuff into your Apple shopping list or Google shopping list is a pretty good ecosystem play, right? Like how people get kinda locked in with photo sharing and airplay and friends. Like if both environments feel equivalent but one has a better speaker setup (or inversely if one environment feels better and both have equivalent-feeling speakers) now you're locked in? It's good marketing I guess? Very hand-wave-y
DaoVeles 2y ago
That is a fair point. The only thing I use Co-pilot to do is to make stupid stuff like pictures of Wizards bowling.
WatchDog 2y ago
If OpenAI ends up releasing the GPT-4o voice model they demoed, I feel like I would use it a lot, especially while driving.
- maronato 2y ago
  Isn’t it out already? I can definitely use something very similar right now on their app.
  - WatchDog 2y ago
    The app can do speech-to-text, and text-to-speech using their whisper model, and it's integrated with chatgpt. On May 13th, they demoed GPT-4o's multi-modal voice capabilities, and it's much better than a text/speech model. Converting speech to text, and vice versa, is quite lossy, all the tone and emotion of the speech is lost in translation, the model they demoed in May was capable of much more than whisper is.
tempodox 2y ago
Investors hallucinating large windfalls and users who want to believe in miracles and/or are just ignorant. How many people know that LLMs are just text completion engines and cannot do reasoning or math or have a concept of truth?

mvanbaak 2y ago

hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it happen. It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing

monero-xmr 2y ago
But bitcoin and ethereum are near all time highs, while Alexa is laying everyone off and AI has no paying customers…
LordKeren 2y ago
This is by design— the rhetoric around crypto was specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to the market and prop up the next rug pull. Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto. I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did.
- matrix87 2y ago
  > I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did. If you include black market economic activity, then crypto has done way more and over a much longer period
  - LordKeren 2y ago
    > If you include black market economic activity I don’t
- tempodox 2y ago
  > more real use cases than crypto ever did. Indeed, with crypto the suckers needed to do the hallucinating themselves. LLMs automate that and do it for you.
DaoVeles 2y ago
The question is the cost to value ratio. There is some value in LLM's, the question is if people are willing to foot the cost.

pjc50 2y ago

> how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". As well as about 90% of the education system. It's not replacing them with something better, but it is cheaper.

loire280 2y ago
Except according to Graeber those jobs exist because leaders, companies, and society like having lots of employees doing this work for various reasons and we all more or less tacitly agree that the output of those jobs is useless and only exists because the last 50 years of productivity gains mean there isn't enough real work to keep everyone busy for 40+ hours 50 weeks a year.
matrix87 2y ago
> It replaces all the David Graeber "bullshit jobs". Those jobs were already replaceable to begin with? Isn't that already implied by their name? Also, is it possible that the recent investment in LLMs have actually produced more bullshit jobs instead of decreasing them? > As well as about 90% of the education system. :/ there's a lot more to the education system than just the content
- QuiDortDine 2y ago
  Even just the content needs a deciding mind to prioritize. If lesson plans were enough, education would happen through VHS tapes.
theshrike79 2y ago
> As well as about 90% of the education system. There are multiple stories from actual teachers about kids and teens doing this today. They don't use search engines or books, they ask an LLM. Then 20 students get 20 different answers of varying quality and do ZERO validation that the answer they got is real, they trust the LLM implicitly.
maximus-decimus 2y ago
90% of our education system is really just watching over the kids/teenagers so they don't cause trouble while parents are at work. I don't see AI doing that.

conradfr 2y ago

They are useful for customer service.

joshmarinacci 2y ago
When? I’ve used various customer service chat bots and they just point me to the knowledge base. They can’t take any actions. You have to talk to a human for that, and if I just wanted info I wouldn’t have contacted support in the first place.
- conradfr 2y ago
  The vast majority of CS contacts don't require action, and are not through a chat bot. You don't even need to automate all the steps, an IA is perfectly capable of fetching the customer data, delivery info etc and write a decent reply, then a human agent can discard it, improve it or send it as written.
rty32 2y ago
Here is the thing. Most of the time I call customer service because the app/website does not provide the information or the ability to do certain things, and I need to talk to a human to get things explained or get something done. And more than a few times customer service agents don't know what they are doing or are just talking nonsense, and I need to escalate to a manager. You think you can trust an LLM to make decisions for something like resetting password or closing an account?

nox101 2y ago

> how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? I'm paying for chatGPT and use it quite often. I find it very useful. I don't pay for chat because there have been free options since the 80s. I don't pay for voice(chat) because there have free options for ~10yrs?

textlapse 2y ago
Interesting. How much would one have to pay you to stop using it? Wondering what the use cases are (replace Google? Stack Overflow? etc).
- ChadNauseam 2y ago
  I'd have to be paid probably at least $200/mo to stop using LLMs, they are a massive productivity boost for new projects and can replace google for simple things. As an example of replacing google (since I was writing C++ today and I haven't used it in ages): me: is there an issue with passing "hello" to std::string claude: Passing "hello" to a function expecting std::string is actually not an issue. C++ allows implicit conversion from string literals (like "hello") to std::string objects. This conversion is possible because std::string has a constructor that accepts a const char*, which is the type of string literals in C++. If I type this question into google, I get this: > some_function(std::string{"hello, world"}); is completely safe, as long as the function doesn't preserve the string_view for later use. The temporary std::string is destroyed at the end of this full-expression (roughly speaking, at this ; ), so it's destroyed after the function returns. which doesn't really answer my question As an example of simple project: I wanted to make an app with swiftUI, and I was able to just describe it to claude and have it give me the basic outlines of the app, and then improve it by iteratively asking claude for changes. Since I try to understand the output, this lead to me learning Swift and SwiftUI very quickly while also having a functional app within a few minutes.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    String literals are not const char *, but const char[] in C++. They decay to a pointer when you pass them to the std::string constructor that takes one.

rtpg 2y ago

It's silly but having the Apple robot or Google robot put stuff into your Apple shopping list or Google shopping list is a pretty good ecosystem play, right? Like how people get kinda locked in with photo sharing and airplay and friends. Like if both environments feel equivalent but one has a better speaker setup (or inversely if one environment feels better and both have equivalent-feeling speakers) now you're locked in? It's good marketing I guess? Very hand-wave-y

DaoVeles 2y ago

That is a fair point. The only thing I use Co-pilot to do is to make stupid stuff like pictures of Wizards bowling.

WatchDog 2y ago

If OpenAI ends up releasing the GPT-4o voice model they demoed, I feel like I would use it a lot, especially while driving.

maronato 2y ago
Isn’t it out already? I can definitely use something very similar right now on their app.
- WatchDog 2y ago
  The app can do speech-to-text, and text-to-speech using their whisper model, and it's integrated with chatgpt. On May 13th, they demoed GPT-4o's multi-modal voice capabilities, and it's much better than a text/speech model. Converting speech to text, and vice versa, is quite lossy, all the tone and emotion of the speech is lost in translation, the model they demoed in May was capable of much more than whisper is.

tempodox 2y ago

Investors hallucinating large windfalls and users who want to believe in miracles and/or are just ignorant. How many people know that LLMs are just text completion engines and cannot do reasoning or math or have a concept of truth?