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Candidly, the accusation of short-sightedness doesn't really make sense when it comes to enthusiasm in a technology which often in practice falls short today bu
by AbrahamParangi 10mo ago
Candidly, the accusation of short-sightedness doesn't really make sense when it comes to enthusiasm in a technology which often in practice falls short today but which in certain cases and in more cases tomorrow than today is worth tremendous business value.
If anything, you should accuse them of foolhardy recklessness. They are not the sticks in the mud.
- swiftcoder 10mo ago> and in more cases tomorrow than today is worth tremendous business value That's a nice crystal ball you have there. From where I'm standing, model performance improvements have been slowing down for a while now, and without some sort of fundamental breakthrough, I don't see where the business value is going to come from
- AbrahamParangi 10mo agoThe prerequisite for me to be wrong is that the technology needs to stop getting better entirely *right now* AND we need to discover ZERO new uses for what exists today. That's a fairly tall order.
- jpkw 10mo agoSo if the plateau is unanimously declared to have been reached tomorrow OR just one more tiny use case exists tomorrow and all others dwindle away to nothing, than you consider yourself to be correct? What a wild assertion!
- AbrahamParangi 10mo agoIf the plateau is reached at some higher level of capability, I will remain correct, yes. If use cases are discovered that do not exist today, I will also be correct. You said it in a silly way but you're directionally correct.
- jpkw 10mo agoNo. You state that this is all that it would take to be considered as tremendous business value. You are moving your goal posts on your point. My point is that you are taking an absolute position that there is tremendous business value in its current form(as a miniscule improvement and one insignificant new use case does does not equate to tremendous business value in itself) and so that remains to be seen.
- AbrahamParangi 10mo agoYou either misread or are misrepresenting my statement and either way I am not interested in continuing this.
- bigstrat2003 10mo agoWe don't even have good uses today. That doesn't mean there won't be good uses tomorrow, but neither does it inspire confidence.
- ForHackernews 10mo agoRushing to get on board something that looks like it might be the next big thing is often short-sighted. Some recent examples include Windows XP: Tablet Edition and Google Glass.
- AbrahamParangi 10mo agoThat's like saying that gambling is shortsighted. It depends entirely on the odds as to whether or not it's wise, but "shortsighted" implies that making the bet precludes some future course of action.
- ForHackernews 10mo agoMaybe if you have near-infinite wealth like Google or Microsoft you aren't precluding future choices. For most economic actors, making some bets means not making others. Companies that are hastily shoehorning AI into their customer support systems could instead devote resources to improving the core product to reduce the need for support.
- marcyb5st 10mo agoCan a company like openAI be worth an estimated 1/5th of Alphabet, which offers a similar product but also has an operative system, a browser, the biggest video platform, the most used mail client, its own silicon to running that product, the 3rd most popular Cloud platform, ... ? I think that is the recklessness in question. Throw in that there is no profit for OpenAI & co and that everything is fueled by debt and the picture is grim (IMHO)