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"the actual software we use daily doesn’t seem like it’s getting noticeably better" Honestly, this seems like a straw man. The kind of distributed productivity

"the actual software we use daily doesn’t seem like it’s getting noticeably better" Honestly, this seems like a straw man. The kind of distributed productivity tools like Miro, Figma, Stackblitz, etc. that we all use day-to-day are both impressive in terms of what they do, but even more impressive in terms of how they work. Having been a remote worker 15 years ago, the difference in what is available today is light-years ahead of what was available back then.

cma 2y ago
Still less impressive in a lot of ways than Englebart's mother of all demos.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I expect Englebert would have been astounded by real time text generation, faster than he could read, of a first pass draft of a Supreme Court brief involving a James Bond incident uncovering a pharmaceutical plot to undermine the biosphere via a constitutional loophole written in Dr. Seuss prose, with the humor of Monty Python. Or that he could get successive improvements in the form of real time collaboration with the model. It is true that a tool that isn’t as reliable as an expert won’t impress an expert. Even if it’s better/faster on 99% of varied tasks for any given human, for fast response output. “It still isn’t great”, by an experts standards. But as humans, each of our task/field span of expertise or informed amateur fluency is terrifyingly limited compared to the broad awareness of fields and subjects that these models incorporate. And they are crazy impressive in terms of how much better they have become, qualitatively and quantitatively, inexpensive (to deploy/use) and available, in a few years.
  - cma 2y ago
    I was talking about the collaborative productivity tools, not language models.
jansan 2y ago
IIRC all those mentioned products have been around before the AI craze started. Can you explain how bringing up these products is not a straw man by itself?

cma 2y ago

Still less impressive in a lot of ways than Englebart's mother of all demos.

Nevermark 2y ago
I expect Englebert would have been astounded by real time text generation, faster than he could read, of a first pass draft of a Supreme Court brief involving a James Bond incident uncovering a pharmaceutical plot to undermine the biosphere via a constitutional loophole written in Dr. Seuss prose, with the humor of Monty Python. Or that he could get successive improvements in the form of real time collaboration with the model. It is true that a tool that isn’t as reliable as an expert won’t impress an expert. Even if it’s better/faster on 99% of varied tasks for any given human, for fast response output. “It still isn’t great”, by an experts standards. But as humans, each of our task/field span of expertise or informed amateur fluency is terrifyingly limited compared to the broad awareness of fields and subjects that these models incorporate. And they are crazy impressive in terms of how much better they have become, qualitatively and quantitatively, inexpensive (to deploy/use) and available, in a few years.
- cma 2y ago
  I was talking about the collaborative productivity tools, not language models.

jansan 2y ago

IIRC all those mentioned products have been around before the AI craze started. Can you explain how bringing up these products is not a straw man by itself?