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My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of

by 827a 1y ago

My deepest concern at this time isn't that AI eventually gets written down to nothing; because I don't think it will. Its that these companies are so scared of being out-competed by an AI-first competitor that they're willing to make deep sacrifices to their core businesses just to effectively virtue signal that they're AI first and unable to be out-competed. It is deeply concerning because all things point to reality shaking out with irony. None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Apple has nothing, Microsoft wants to put spyware on every Windows computer and builds the worst coding agent on the market despite having privileged access to every line of source code ever written, Meta put a chatbot in Whatsapp then decided paying researchers ten mil would solve their problems, Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive. Their fear is going to lose them everything. Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Everyone learned that lesson and decided "we'll never be unwilling to innovate ever again"; but now their core product stable undergoes constant churn that is pissing off customers and driving competition to eat their lunch. There is long-term, durable beauty in investing majority effort into making Github the single best place to host and organize code. That need is never going away. There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, no one doubts that, but its a matter of proportion and humility. Microsoft/Github will never build AI products that lead the market. Its not a technology problem; its an organizational and political one. But that's ok, because they could dominate the market with the world's best code hosting platform, an average AI strategy, and a library of integrations with the rest of the frontier world.

bongodongobob 1y ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah." Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices. Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed. I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
- moi2388 1y ago
  The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM. Yeah, don’t ask..
  - smcin 1y ago
    Why doesn't your company get the use case for Elasticsearch? Is it because you're trying to pitch it with CTO arguments on capabilities, not COO/CFO arguments like "will permanently replace N humans"?
    - moi2388 1y ago
      No, they do get it. They just don’t want to invest time in it, so only through a third party. But AI is sexy, so LLMs doing document search? Yes please, let’s have some teams dedicate their time and effort to develop it ourselves. It’s because AGI is going to come, you know, so if we invest now they can replace everybody with AI Are you laughing as hard as I was when they told me this?
      - bongodongobob 1y ago
        We just recently implemented a doc search "agent". It's no better than just using the built in search in Teams/M365. Complete waste of time. One of our dev teams spent an entire quarter on it and no one is going to use it because it is slower and outside of everyone's normal workflow.
        moi2388 1y ago
        Yep. We do the same. We also do copilot agents. Just don’t tell anybody that behind the scenes it’s the same 10 year old power automate flows running..
      - smcin 1y ago
        If your mgmt is so technically illiterate, why not just pitch them you're investigating using LLMs, then do the ElasticSearch work and sprinkle on some magic LLM pixie dust so it looks good on their mgmt slides? Should keep you all happy. That's generally what I've seen happen under such types.
somenameforme 1y ago
What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would. If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
- 827a 1y ago
  I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money. I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
  - michaelt 1y ago
    > I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. Depends if you agree with somenameforme's theory that tech companies start off amazing, get big, then become awful. You may have noticed, in recent decades, we haven't bothered with enforcing anti-trust law. If Facebook wants to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, they can. If Microsoft wants to buy Github and Activision they can. If Google wants to buy Youtube, Doubleclick and Nest they can. If we accept the premise that FAANG is where innovation goes to die, going 25 years without any antitrust enforcement might not have been the smartest move.
coliveira 1y ago
Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are turning away their most important asset: super qualified people capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on their own extinction.
mzajc 1y ago
intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel". Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI" 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of "CPU". I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.
- siva7 1y ago
  They realized they can't compete on processors, so they're moving on to greener pastures. Like kodak back then.
  - gtirloni 1y ago
    Intel has traditionally been behind in software quality and discrete GPUs, I wonder if they are making this move out of desperation because nobody thinks "yay, Intel!" when both topics are mentioned.
theptip 1y ago
> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive. NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product. YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product. Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example. I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually. Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).
- alecco 1y ago
  The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck). Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core-workers-moves-jobs-to-india-mexico.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
  - mindwok 1y ago
    It was the best model according to almost every benchmark until recently. It’s definitely SOTA.
  - jemmyw 1y ago
    There are problems with every model, none of them are perfect. I've found Gemini to be very good but occasionally gets stuck in loops: it does, however, seem to detect the loop and stop. It's more cost effective than the Claude models, and Gemini has regular preview releases. I would rate it between sonnet and opus except it's cheaper and faster than both. For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.
zemo 1y ago
> Apple has nothing I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri. It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest. I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen. The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction. I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between: - an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training. - and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party. And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
  - nik_lvk 1y ago
    [dead]
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction. My hunch tells me this is a temporary stopgap until Apple figures out their "private cloud compute" or whatever where they can run their own model, after that it'll be seamless. Try to do as much on device as possible, and if that fails/is not possible, offload to the model running on Apple's servers rather than a 3rd party service. Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind), but I appreciate their approach to try and do as much on device as possible. They are the only ones around that aren't just defaulting to "harvest as much data as possible and ship it to our servers." I can be patient - Siri works fine for what I want it for anyway - it can set reminders, timers, alarms, dictate messages, and create notes. That's about all I use it for and would use it for. Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.
- 827a 1y ago
  I explicitly said "big tech companies"; that's FAANG, which does not include OpenAI, Anthropic, Anysphere, or their kin.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    with a $500B valuation, I'd say that OpenAI is now "BigTech"
    - 827a 1y ago
      Not by any traditionally-recognized definition, but I'll certainly admit them into the club once they go public.
wvenable 1y ago
> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc. I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.
armchairhacker 1y ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is Github Copilot. It is true these companies haven’t recouped anywhere near the $trillion they’ve invested in AI.
- 827a 1y ago
  Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having every advantage a company could have, the resources of a megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce a mediocre and uninteresting product. But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.
hbn 1y ago
Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here? I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish. That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling. It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.
- camel_Snake 1y ago
  going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me. Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one. Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
  - smcin 1y ago
    > going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me. Duolingo was always aiming at the casual app user (not serious language learners, think getting casual 14-30yo users to switch 10 min a day from playing casual games instead or consuming SM), and openly admitted they crafted the product and their metrics around gamification and socially acquiring new (paying, non-freemium) users. So judge their behavior by that. Also, you can turn off some but not all of the default gamification + social features.
heresie-dabord 1y ago
> There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, I find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.
wolvesechoes 1y ago
Yes yes, big corpos bad, startups good, I hecking love my Cursor agent.
ciconia 1y ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Exactly, but this is just the nature of this technology. It can sort of fake human intelligence but not really. You can't count on it to do human work without supervising it so what's the point?

by 827a 1y ago

bongodongobob 1y ago

> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it. Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah." Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices. Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed. I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.

moi2388 1y ago
The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM. Yeah, don’t ask..
- smcin 1y ago
  Why doesn't your company get the use case for Elasticsearch? Is it because you're trying to pitch it with CTO arguments on capabilities, not COO/CFO arguments like "will permanently replace N humans"?
  - moi2388 1y ago
    No, they do get it. They just don’t want to invest time in it, so only through a third party. But AI is sexy, so LLMs doing document search? Yes please, let’s have some teams dedicate their time and effort to develop it ourselves. It’s because AGI is going to come, you know, so if we invest now they can replace everybody with AI Are you laughing as hard as I was when they told me this?
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
      We just recently implemented a doc search "agent". It's no better than just using the built in search in Teams/M365. Complete waste of time. One of our dev teams spent an entire quarter on it and no one is going to use it because it is slower and outside of everyone's normal workflow.
      - moi2388 1y ago
        Yep. We do the same. We also do copilot agents. Just don’t tell anybody that behind the scenes it’s the same 10 year old power automate flows running..
    - smcin 1y ago
      If your mgmt is so technically illiterate, why not just pitch them you're investigating using LLMs, then do the ElasticSearch work and sprinkle on some magic LLM pixie dust so it looks good on their mgmt slides? Should keep you all happy. That's generally what I've seen happen under such types.

somenameforme 1y ago

What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would. If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!

827a 1y ago
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money. I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
- michaelt 1y ago
  > I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. Depends if you agree with somenameforme's theory that tech companies start off amazing, get big, then become awful. You may have noticed, in recent decades, we haven't bothered with enforcing anti-trust law. If Facebook wants to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, they can. If Microsoft wants to buy Github and Activision they can. If Google wants to buy Youtube, Doubleclick and Nest they can. If we accept the premise that FAANG is where innovation goes to die, going 25 years without any antitrust enforcement might not have been the smartest move.

coliveira 1y ago

Yes, I find it greatly satisfying that these mega companies are turning away their most important asset: super qualified people capable of creating new products. They're basically betting on their own extinction.

mzajc 1y ago

intel.com's <title> says "Simplify Your AI Journey - Intel". Their description meta tag says "Deliver AI at scale across cloud, data center, edge, and client with comprehensive hardware and software solutions." Their frontpage mentions "AI" 9 times, but has only 3 mentions of "processor" and zero of "CPU". I know they make processors, but they sure don't make it seem that way.

siva7 1y ago
They realized they can't compete on processors, so they're moving on to greener pastures. Like kodak back then.
- gtirloni 1y ago
  Intel has traditionally been behind in software quality and discrete GPUs, I wonder if they are making this move out of desperation because nobody thinks "yay, Intel!" when both topics are mentioned.

theptip 1y ago

> Google has world-class research teams that have produced unbelievable models, without any plan at all on how those make it into their products beyond forcing a chat window into Google Drive. NotebookLM is a genuinely novel AI-first product. YouTube gaining an “ask a question about this video” button, this is a perfect example of how to sprinkle AI on an existing product. Extremely slow, but the obvious incremental addition of Gemini to Docs is another example. I think folks sleep on Google around here. They are slow but they have so many compelling iterative AI usecases that even a BigTech org can manage it eventually. Apple and Microsoft are rightly getting panned, Apple in particular is inexcusable (but I think they will have a unique offering when they finally execute on the blindingly obvious strategic play that they are naturally positioned for).

alecco 1y ago
The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck). Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core-workers-moves-jobs-to-india-mexico.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
- mindwok 1y ago
  It was the best model according to almost every benchmark until recently. It’s definitely SOTA.
- jemmyw 1y ago
  There are problems with every model, none of them are perfect. I've found Gemini to be very good but occasionally gets stuck in loops: it does, however, seem to detect the loop and stop. It's more cost effective than the Claude models, and Gemini has regular preview releases. I would rate it between sonnet and opus except it's cheaper and faster than both. For whatever reason there are tasks that work better on one model compared to another, which can be quite perplexing.

zemo 1y ago

> Apple has nothing I always hear this but people use Siri all the time, and I think outside of talking to programmers, a lot of consumers probably consider that the level of AI they care about using. "is Siri really AI" seems like a real "is a hotdog a sandwich" question. Who cares? People eat hot dogs and talk to Siri. It seems what Apple has less of is LLM products that cost enormous sums of money to make that people don't like using. Sure, they have a little of it, they fell flat on their faces with their news summaries thing last year and AppleVision was a nothingburger, but when it comes to "sinking huge amounts of money into deeply unpopular ventures", it seems to me that Apple's reluctance to deploy its largess here might be prudent. It seems like they're less exposed on the hype.

hnlmorg 1y ago
I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest. I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen. The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction. I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between: - an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training. - and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party. And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
- nik_lvk 1y ago
  [dead]
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction. My hunch tells me this is a temporary stopgap until Apple figures out their "private cloud compute" or whatever where they can run their own model, after that it'll be seamless. Try to do as much on device as possible, and if that fails/is not possible, offload to the model running on Apple's servers rather than a 3rd party service. Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind), but I appreciate their approach to try and do as much on device as possible. They are the only ones around that aren't just defaulting to "harvest as much data as possible and ship it to our servers." I can be patient - Siri works fine for what I want it for anyway - it can set reminders, timers, alarms, dictate messages, and create notes. That's about all I use it for and would use it for. Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective The coding agents, CC, Cursor, etc. are quite good and useful.

827a 1y ago
I explicitly said "big tech companies"; that's FAANG, which does not include OpenAI, Anthropic, Anysphere, or their kin.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  with a $500B valuation, I'd say that OpenAI is now "BigTech"
  - 827a 1y ago
    Not by any traditionally-recognized definition, but I'll certainly admit them into the club once they go public.

wvenable 1y ago

> Its a fascinating inversion of the early internet problem, where companies who were unwilling to innovate got out-competed. Is it though? There's a reason why Microsoft's JVM competitor is called ".NET". They were planning Windows .NET Server 2003, Office.NET, etc. I don't think an inversion of the hype cycle, it's just another hype cycle exactly. I think, in fact, it's extremely comparable. I remember people joking about Pets.com -- just imagine buying your pet food online?!? Crazy stuff. AI is the same. It's hyped up massively, there will eventually be some kind of correction, and then it'll become the new normal.

armchairhacker 1y ago

> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Not true. Ironically, the first exception I can think of is Github Copilot. It is true these companies haven’t recouped anywhere near the $trillion they’ve invested in AI.

827a 1y ago
Only a sentence later do I explicitly reference Github Copilot; yet they belong on the list because despite having every advantage a company could have, the resources of a megacorporation, all the source code in the world, the semi-independence of a smaller team; they still managed to produce a mediocre and uninteresting product. But, again: I think that state for Copilot is totally fine for Github. That product state of "its there, its builtin, and its fine" is a fantastic and extremely efficient market to service.

hbn 1y ago

Do I have any fellow Duolingo users here? I know they've gotten shit for years, it's not gonna make you fluent, etc etc But I've defended them because it's at the very least a good starting point and something to keep you consistent every day. As long as you're trying to be mindful about learning, I've found it to be a great tool to assist in improving my Spanish. That is until a month or 2 ago where they completely overhauled their curriculum with AI slop. The stories are bland at best and confusing at first, the questions are brain-dead simple, it'll have sentences and questions that I've confirmed with native speakers are confusing/incorrect, it's riddled with mistakes, and somehow they even broke the TTS so it'll pronounce things wrong. One of the character voices consistently can't say a couple of letters, like it pronounces all the 'd's with 'v's or something. I can't believe they actually shipped it in this state, they completely broke it overnight. At this rate if it's not fixed by the time my annual subscription is up to renew, I will be cancelling. It's absolutely the worst AI slopification of any product I use, and the CEO and everyone who pushed to ship it needs to be fired.

camel_Snake 1y ago
going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me. Clozemaster is much more rudimentary but I do like how they use AI - there's a single button that gives you an AI grammatical summary of the translation and calls out any idioms or grammatical conventions in the target language compared to your native one. Bought the lifetime license but it's free to use, you just get a limited amount of flash cards a day. If you wait until christmas there's generally a big discount on the lifetime license.
- smcin 1y ago
  > going to shout-out ClozeMaster here since I first found out about it on hacker news. Always hated duolingo - it's the gamification triggered to many alarm bells to me. Duolingo was always aiming at the casual app user (not serious language learners, think getting casual 14-30yo users to switch 10 min a day from playing casual games instead or consuming SM), and openly admitted they crafted the product and their metrics around gamification and socially acquiring new (paying, non-freemium) users. So judge their behavior by that. Also, you can turn off some but not all of the default gamification + social features.

heresie-dabord 1y ago

> There is also necessity in ensuring it has an AI strategy in a post-AI world, I find it necessary to ask AI what that sentence even means.

wolvesechoes 1y ago

Yes yes, big corpos bad, startups good, I hecking love my Cursor agent.

ciconia 1y ago

> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Exactly, but this is just the nature of this technology. It can sort of fake human intelligence but not really. You can't count on it to do human work without supervising it so what's the point?