5 ms·

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies

• jayd16 1y ago
  It may be true but Bezos' comment is also classic smoke blowing. "Oh well you can't see us using <newest hype machine> or quantify it's success but it's certainly in everything we do!"
  • anon7000 1y ago
    But it’s completely true — Amazon undoubtedly has a pretty advanced logistics set up and certainly uses AI all over the place. Even if they’re not a big AI researcher. There are a lot of great use cases for ML outside of chatbots
    • janalsncm 1y ago
      > There are a lot of great use cases for ML outside of chatbots To be slightly provocative, most of the ML applications that are profitable are not chatbots. To stay on Amazon, their product recommendations, ads ranking, and search likely make Amazon way more than their little AI summaries or Rufus chatbot.
      • hattmall 1y ago
        But also, like, how much of that is really "AI" in the general sense as it applies to things like ChatGPT today? Do you really need a massive resource intensive system for products recommendations and things related to Amazon's marketing.
    • airstrike 1y ago
      It's not "generative AI" which is what most people mean when they say "AI" today, outside of "old school" AI/ML folks. So at best technically correct on his part but still semantically incorrect
• NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  > The best AI applications are beneath the surface to empower users Not this time, tho. ChatGPT is the iphone moment for "AI" for the masses. And it was surprising and unexpected both for the experts / practitioners and said masses. Working with LLMs pre gpt3.5 was a mess, hackish and "in the background" but way way worse experience overall. Chatgpt made it happen just like the proverbial "you had me at scroll and pinch-to-zoom" moment in the iphone presentation. The fact that we went from that 3.5 to whatever claude code thing you can use today is mental as well. And one of the main reasons we got here so fast is also "chatgpt-like bots and buttons with sparkles". The open-source community is ~6mo behind big lab SotA, and that's simply insane. I would not have predicted that 2 years ago, and I was deploying open-source LLMs (GPT-J was the first one I used live in a project) before chatgpt launched. It is insane! You'll probably laugh at this, but a lot of fine-tuning experimentation and gains in the open source world (hell, maybe even at the big labs, but we'll never know) is from the "horny people" using local llms for erotica and stuff. I wouldn't dismiss anything that happens in this space. Having discovered the Internet in the 90s, and been there for every hype cycle in this space, this one is different, no matter how much anti-hype tokens get spent on this subject.
  • djhn 1y ago
    I’ll spend an anti-hype token :) ChatGPT wasn’t the iphone moment, because the iphone wasn’t quickly forgotten. Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts. They can’t use chatbots for work (maybe data is sensitive, or their ‘knowledge work’ isn’t the kind that produces text output). Our native language is too poorly supported for life admin (no Gemini summaries or ‘help writing an email’). They just don’t have any obvious use case for LLMs in their life.
    • janalsncm 1y ago
      It’s tough because every CEO and VC is hyperventilating about LLMs as a paradigm shift for humanity when in reality they are useful but also so are gene editing and solid state batteries and mrna vaccines. It’s just that software innovations are much more attractive to certain groups with money.
• jvanderbot 1y ago
  I can strain the analogy just enough to get something useful from it. If we laboriously create software shops in the classical way, and suddenly a new shop appears that is buggy, noisy, etc but eventually outperforms all other shops, then the progenitors of those new shops are going to succeed while the progenitors of these old shops are not going to make it. It's a strain. The problem is AI is a new tech that replaces an entire process, not a product. Only when the process is the product (eg the process of moving people) does the analogy even come close to working. I'd like to see analysis of what happened to the employees, blacksmiths, machinists, etc. Surely there are transferrable skills and many went on to work on automobiles? This SE q implies there was some transition rather than chaos. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46866/did-any-carriage-manufacturers-make-the-transition-to-automobile-building https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46866/did-any-ca... Stretching just a bit further, there might be a grain of truth to the "craftsman to assembly line worker" when AI becomes a much more mechanical way to produce, vs employing opinionated experts.
  • scrubs 1y ago
    I agree as I point out in other comments here - you said it with more detail. AGI + robot is way beyond a mere change in product conception or implementation. It's beyond craftsmen v. modern forms of manufacturing we sometimes read about with guns. It is a strain indeed to get from cars v.buggies to AGI. I dare say that without AGI as part and parcel to AI the internalization of AI must be necessarily quite different.
• ryanrasti 1y ago
  > With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Agreed. The analogy breaks down because the car disrupted a single vertical but AI is a horizontal, general-purpose technology. I think this also explains why we're seeing "forced" adoption everywhere (e.g., the ubiquitous chatbot) -- as a result of: 1. Massive dose of FOMO from leadership terrified of falling behind 2. A fundamental lack of core competency. Many of these companies companies (I'm talking more than just tech) can't quickly and meaningfully integrate AI, so they just bolt on a product
  • jelder 1y ago
    3. Layoffs in all but name, mainly in response to a changing tax environment. See also: RTO.
• baxtr 1y ago
  Just today I used the AI service on the amazon product page to get more information about a specific product, basically RAG on the reviews. So maybe your analysis is outdated?
  • justinrubek 1y ago
    The amazon store chatbot is mongst the worst implementations I've seen. The old UI which displayed the customer questions and allowed searching them was infinitely better.
    • geoka9 1y ago
      FWIW, the old UI (which I agree is better) is still available. Once the "AI search" is done, there's a dropdown you can click and it will show all the reviews that include the word you searched.
    • janalsncm 1y ago
      I think you two are talking about different things: the product review summary and the chatbot.
  • BenFranklin100 1y ago
    Are you seriously suggesting the crappy AI bot on Amazon product pages is evidence of an ‘AI’ revolution? The thing sucks. If I’m ready to spend money on a product, it’s worth my time to do a traditional keyword search and quickly scroll through the search returns to get the contextualized information, rather then hoping an LLM will get it right.
  • benhurmarcel 1y ago
    An Amazon AI chatbot is also the only way to request a refund after you haven't received your packet.
• standardUser 1y ago
  Mobility is not an analogy for AI, it's an analogy to whichever industry you work in. If you publish a magazine, you may think you're in the 'publishing' business and that AI as a weak competitor, maybe capable of squashing crappy blogs but not prestigious media like yours. But maybe what you're really in is the 'content' business, and you need to recognize that sooner or later, AI is going to beat you at the content game even if it couldn't beat you at the publishing game. The kicker being that there no longer exists a publishing game, because AI.
  • DrewADesign 1y ago
    Or more likely, you are in the publishing business but the tech world unilaterally deemed everything creative to be a fungible commodity and undertook a multi-billion dollar campaign to ingest actual creative content and compete with everyone that creates it in the same market with cheap knockoffs. Our society predictably considers this progress because nothing that could potentially make that much money could possibly be problematic. We continue in the trend of thinking small amounts of good things are not as good as giant piles of crap if the crap can be made more cheaply.
    • standardUser 1y ago
      Tell it to the carriage-makers I guess.
      • DrewADesign 1y ago
        More like the American manufacturing sector that was sold out because executives liked money more than the people that built their company. They were wrong then, are wrong now, and now the US manufacturing sector is irreparably harmed because of it. Following investor profit at the expense of everyone and everything else isn't the inevitable, natural path of progress-- every day we walk down this path mindlessly chasing profit at the expense of commercial artists is a deliberate choice. Beyond that, cars, trucks, and busses were FAR more of an improvement over animal-powered transportation, while the current LLM and image-generating NN stuff is choking the internet with complete garbage made by hucksters trying to make a cheap buck by fooling people into thinking there's something valuable on the other side of a link. ::slow clap:: Then there's the scammers, extortionists, political disinformation peddlers, etc. Now that's what I call progress! The American creative sector is going to atrophy exactly as the American manufacturing sector did. The whole idea that "well everybody's still gonna do art" isn't going to save the best cohort of commercial artists in the world any more than hobby home machinists saved America's collective knowledge of tool and die making.
• hedgehog 1y ago
  Viewed from a different angle I think he's probably close. A service provider changing the back end while leaving the front end UI similar is not dissimilar to early cars being built like carriages. But when the product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates" that's a pretty radical difference in what the customer sees.
  • majormajor 1y ago
    > But when the product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates" that's a pretty radical difference in what the customer sees. For a bunch of stuff - banks, online shopping, booking a taxi, etc - this shift already happened with non-LLM-based "send me notifications of unusual account activity" or even the dead-simple "send me an email about every transaction on my bank account." Phone notifications moved it from email to built-into-the-OS even. The "LLM hype cycle" tweak becomes something like "have an LLM summarize the email instead of just listing the three transactions" which is of dubious use to the average user.
    • hedgehog 1y ago
      No the shift hasn't happened yet at all. Let's take those examples one by one. Banks: Normal retail customers are responsible for managing their account balances, importing transaction data into whatever book keeping system, downloading their tax forms for filing, adjusting their services and strategy based on whatever they're planning to do in their life etc. Private banking is a reasonable model for the service that everyone should get, but can't because it's too expensive. Online shopping: Most people have to figure out what they're looking for, research the options, figure out where to order from, keep track of warranties, repairs, returns, recalls, maintenance, consumables, etc. Personal assistants can absorb most of that, but that's expensive. Booking a taxi: On the same theme, for all the scheduled travel that should be booked and ready to go based on your calendar. Personal assistants can do this too, but again it's expensive. The core ideas of giving the service provider context, guidance, and autonomy to work without regular intervention are not unique to automation but only recently is there a conceivable path to building software that can actually deliver.
• mcswell 1y ago
  "With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence." I'm missing something here. First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did. So if "most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence", that could mean that they ought to be. However, I draw a somewhat different conclusion: the business that companies ranging from Newsweek to accountants to universities to companies' HR departments should see themselves in is intelligence, regardless of whether that's artificial or otherwise. The question then becomes which supplies that intelligence better: humans or LLM-type AI (or some combination thereof)? I'm not at all sure that the answer at present is LLM-AI, but it is a different question, and the answer may well be different in the near future. There are of course other kinds of AI, as you (jampa) mention. In other words, AI is not (for now) one thing; LLMs are just one kind of AI.
  • kamaal 1y ago
    This is a different way of saying, people must learn how to use a new technology. I think like cars, radio, internet or smart phones. It took a while for people to understand somethings are so disruptive, eventually it will find a way into your life in all forms. Im guessing for someone in laundry or restaurant business it might be hard to understand how AI could change their lives. And that is true, at least at this stage in the adoption and development of AI. But eventually it will find a way into their business in some form or the other. There are stages to this. Pretty sure the first jobs to go will be the most easiest. This is the case with Software development too. When people say writing code has gotten easier, they really are talking about projects that were already easy to build getting even more easier. Harder parts of software development are still hard. Making changes to larger code bases with a huge user base comes with problems where writing code is kind of irrelevant. There are bigger issue to address like regression, testing, stability, quality, user adoption etc etc. Second stage is of course once the easy stuff gets too easy to build. There is little incentive to build it. With modern building techniques we aren't building infinite huts, are we? We pivoted to building sky scrapers. I do believe most of AI's automation gains will be soaked up in the first wave and there will little incentive to build easy stuff and harder stuff will have more productivity demands from people than ever before.
• benreesman 1y ago
  Right. The point is that in frothy market conditions and a general low-integrity regime in business and politics there is a ton of incentive to exploit FOMO far beyond it's already "that's a stiff sip there" potency and this leads to otherwise sane and honest people getting caught up into doing concrete things today based on total speculation about technology that isn't even proposed yet. A good way to really understand this intuitively is to take the present-day intellectual and emotional charge out of it without loss of generality: we can go back and look at Moore's Law for example, and the history of how the sausage got made on reconciling a prediction of exponential growth with the realities of technological advance. It's a fascinating history, there's at least one great book [1] and the Asionometry YouTube documentary series on it is great as always [2]. There is no point in doing business and politics and money motivated stuff based on the hypothetical that technology will become self-improving, if that happens we're through the looking glass, not in Kansas anymore, "Roads? Where we're going, we won't need roads." It won't matter or at least it won't be what you think it'll be some crazy thing. Much, much, much, much more likely is that this is like all the other times we made some real progress, people got too excited, some shady people made some money, and we all sobered up and started working on the next milestone. This is by so far both A) The only scenario you can do anything about and B) The only scenario honest experts take seriously, so it's a double "plan for this one". The quiet ways that Jetson Orin devices and shit will keep getting smarter and more trustworthy to not break shit and stuff, that's the bigger story, it will make a much bigger difference than snazzy Google that talks back, but it's taking time and appearing in the military first and comes in fits and starts and has all the other properties of ya know, reality. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolutionary/dp/0465055648 https://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolution... [2] https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry
• scrubs 1y ago
  There's a qualitative difference between ok transport and better transport vs AI. If we're going to talk cars, I think what the Japanese did to the big three in the 1980s would have been far more on point. AI is encumbered by AGI which is further encumbered by the delta between what is claimed possible (around the corner) and what is. That's a whole different ball game with wildly different risk/reward tradeoffs. Learning about history post buggies didn't do much for me.