I think AI has mostly been about luring investors into pumping up share prices rather than offering something of genuine value to consumers.
Some people are gonna lose a lot of other people’s money over it.
Definitely. Many companies have implemented AI without thinking with 3 brain cells.
Great and useful implementation of AI exists, but it’s like 1/100 right now in products.
If my employer is anything to go by, much of it is just unimaginative businesspeople who are afraid of missing out on what everyone else is selling.
At work we were instructed to shove ChatGPT into our systems about a month after it became a thing. It makes no sense in our system and many of us advised management it was irresponsible since it’s giving people advice of very sensitive matters without any guarantee that advice is any good. But no matter, we had to shove it in there, with small print to cover our asses. I bet no one even uses it, but sales can tell customers the product is “AI-driven”.
My old company before they laid me off laid off our entire HR and Comms teams in exchange for ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We can just have an AI chatbot for HR and pay inquiries and ask Dall-e to create icons and other content”.
A friend who still works there told me they’re hiring a bunch of “prompt engineers” to improve the quality of the AI outputs haha
That’s an even worse ‘use case’ than I could imagine.
HR should be one of the most protected fields against AI, because you actually need a human resource.
And “prompt engineer” is so stupid. The “job” is only necessary because the AI doesn’t understand what you want to do well enough. The only productive guy you could hire would be a programmer or something, that could actually tinker with the AI.
I’m sorry. Hope you find a better job, on the inevitable downswing of the hype, when someone realizes that a prompt can’t replace a person in customer service. Customers will invest more time, i.e., even wait in a purposely engineered holding music hell, to have a real person listen to them.
Yes, I’m getting some serious dot-com bubble vibes from the whole AI thing. But the dot-com boom produced Amazon, and every company is basically going all-in in the hope they are the new Amazon while in the end most will end up like pets.com but it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
“You might lose all your money, but that is a risk I’m willing to take”
- visionairy AI techbro talking to investors
Investors pump money in a bunch of companies so the chances of at least one of them making it big and paying them back for all the failed investments is almost guaranteed. That’s what taking risks is all about.
A lot of it is follow the leader type bullshit. For companies in areas where AI is actually beneficial they have already been implementing it for years, quietly because it isn’t something new or exceptional. It is just the tool you use for solving certain problems.
Investors going to bubble though.
Yeah, can make some products better but most of the products these days that use AI, it doesn’t actually need them. It’s annoying to use products that actively shovel AI when it doesn’t even need it.
Ya know what pfoduct MIGHT be better with AI?
Toasters. They have ONE JOB, and everybody agrees their toaster is crap. But you’re not going to buy another toaster, because that too will be crap.
How about a toaster, that accurately, and evenly toasts your bread, and then DOESN’T give you a heart attack at 5am when you’re still half asleep???
IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK???
Sweet, I’m the one who gets to link the obligatory Technology Connections toaster video!
Nah. We already have AI toasters, and they’re ambitious, but rubbish.
Adding AI is just serious overkill for a toaster, especially when it wouldn’t add anything meaningful, not compared to just designing the toaster better.
I tried to find the advert but I see this on YouTube a lot - an Adobe AI ad which depicts, without shame, AI writing out a newsletter/promo for a business owner’s new product (cookies or ice cream or something), showing the owner putting no effort into their personal product and a customer happily consuming because they were attracted by the thoughtless promo.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
I’m not. My particular beef is with is with plastics and toxic materials and chemicals being ubiquitous in everything I buy. Systemic problem that I can do almost nothing about apart from make things myself out of raw materials.
As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic:
Slapping the words “artificial intelligence” onto your product makes you look like those shady used cars salesmen: in the best hypothesis it’s misleading, in the worst it’s actually true but poorly done.
LLMs: using statistics to generate reasonable-sounding wrong answers from bad data.
Often the answers are pretty good. But you never know if you got a good answer or a bad answer.
And the system doesn’t know either.
For me this is the major issue. A human is capable of saying “I don’t know”. LLMs don’t seem able to.
Accurate.
No matter what question you ask them, they have an answer. Even when you point out their answer was wrong, they just have a different answer. There’s no concept of not knowing the answer, because they don’t know anything in the first place.
They really aren’t. Go ask about something in your area of expertise. At first glance, everything will look correct and in order, but the more you read the more it turns out to be complete bullshit. It’s good at getting broad strokes but the details are very often wrong.
Now imagine someone that doesn’t have your expertise reading that answer. They won’t recognize those details are wrong until it’s too late.
With proper framework, decent assertions are possible.
- It must cite the source and provide the quote, not just a summary.
- An adversarial review must be conducted
If that is done, the work on the human is very low.
That said, it’s STILL imperfect, but this is leagues better than one shot question and answer
Except LLMs don’t store sources.
They don’t even store sentences.
It’s all a stack of massive N-dimensional probability spaces roughly encoding the probabilities of certain tokens (which are mostly but not always words) appearing after groups of tokens in a certain order.
And all of that to just figure out “what’s the most likely next token”, an output which is then added to the input and fed into it again to get the next word and so on, producing sentences one word at a time.
Now, if you feed it as input a long, very precise sentence taken from a unique piece, maybe you’re luck and it will output the correct next word, but if you already have all that you don’t really need an LLM to give you the rest.
Maybe the “framework” you seek - which is quite akin to a indexer with a natural language interface - can be made with AI, but it’s not something you can do with LLMs because their structure is entirely unsuited for it.
Market shows that investors are actively turned on by products that use AI
Customers worry about what they can do with it, while investors and spectators and vendors worry about buzzwords. Customers determine demand.
Sadly what some of those customers want to do is to somehow improve their own business without thinking, and then they too care about buzzwords, that’s how the hype comes.
There are different types of people in the market. The informed ones hate AI, and the uninformed love it. The informed ones tend to be the cornerstones of businesses, and the uninformed ones tend to be in charge.
So we have… All this. All this nonsense. All because of stupid managers.
No shit, because we all see that AI is just technospeak for “harvest all your info”.
I refuse to use Facebook anymore, but my wife and others do. Apparently the search box is now a Meta AI box, and it pisses them every time. They want the original search back.
That’s another thing companies don’t seem to understand. A lot of them aren’t creating new products and services that use ai, but are removing the existing ones, that people use daily and enjoy, and forcing some ai alternative. Of course people are going to be pissed off!
