I saw people complaining the companies are yet to find the next big thing with AI, but I am already seeing countless offer good solutions for almost every field imaginable. What is this thing the tech industry is waiting for and what are all these current products if not what they had in mind?
I am not great with understanding the business point of view of this situation and I have been out from the news for a long time, so I would really appreciate if someone could ELI5.
AI seems to be for coders what the PC was for Designers.
We used to have a guy for type, a guy for colours, a copywriter, an art director, and a graphic designer. Now it’s all one guy whose responsible for everything start to finish.
Nobody’s mentioning this but the reason is that when they say ‘next big thing’ what they mean is ‘being able to monetize it and make it profitable’.
They care about usefulness only insofar as its a way to monetize it. It doesn’t need to be useful at all. It’s maybe a nice buzzword for on the PowerPoint slide when they’re trying to convince investors.
But investors aren’t idiots and they are usually pretty fucking tuned in to whatever they put money on. And ai is very oversold and overpromised. It’s not that great, very difficult to get to do what you want, and very costly to operate, with mostly questionable/untrustworthy results that still require a lot of knowledge to be able to work with. Plus it’s begging for a lot of new legislation to protect copyrights and privacy law. So, we need a bunch of idiots with money to make this work and those are usually in the large tech companies (think the bezos and musks of this world). They have the infrastructure and resources to put into it, and then they try to incorporate it into their ecosystem. They’ll probably fuck everything up forever and probably make it so llm’s and other models are going to have to be destroyed to be able to comply to legislation.
Anyone with a brain stays away from investing in this and maybe hedge it a bit. See what happens… I don’t think that there’s going to be other companies popping up in this space. But just the continuing progress of big tech streamlining their current systems until enough people are exposed to enough bullshit to change legislation. Depending on that, maybe some companies will be able to give us something useful like: An ai personal assistant that figured out in the middle of a conversation to put the appointment you made in the agenda, ordered a seat in the restaurant and reroutes you to a gasstation because you’re low on fuel and messages your spouse you’re 5 minutes late because of it. While your privacy is protected and your data secure.
In the meantime we can make pictures of cats in space wearing a clown costume.
A buddy told me he used AI to mostly author a PowerShell script for something or other automation at his work the other day. Sounded like it was reasonably complex and all he had to do was sanity-check the code and touch it up to make sure it worked correctly. I’ve barely dabbled in that area, but I was reasonably impressed with the small tasks I threw at it.
Are you writing a term paper or business plan and looking for ideas? Lol cuz that’s how you get ideas. Data mining for business ideas – an AI function, actually…
AI is seeing a lot of uses. At my job were using it for Change Control and Requirements Analysis. Legal Discovery was already a thing for LLM models but this threatens to make contracts simpler to digest. My graduate advisor mentioned how she’s using it to grade papers.
These aren’t the same use cases as the average person, and may not be using the same products, platforms, or models.
You’re falling into a no true Scotsman fallacy. There are plenty of uses for recent AI developments, I use them quite frequently myself. Why are those uses not “true” uses?
Because by design, once an AI implementation finds a use, it changes names. It has to, it’s just how marketing this stuff works. We don’t use writer AI, we have predictive text; we don’t have vision AI, we have enhanced imaging cancer diagnosis; we don’t have meeting’s AI, we have automatic transcription; we don’t have voice AI, we have software dictation. And this is not exclusive to AI, all fields of technology research follow the same pattern. Because selling AI is a grift. No matter how much you want to fold it, it’s the same thing as selling NFT or Blockchain or any of the previous tech grifts, solutions without problems. No one actually have a use for a fancy chatbot. And when they do and get a nice chatbot going, they won’t call it AI, because AI is associated with grifts and no one wants that perception problem. But when you actually make a product that solves a problem, you sell that product, you stop selling AI. Also AI is way larger than the current stream of LLMs.
