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Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

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Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#13
It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping.

Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am.

But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to the economy? AGI?

It certainly doesn’t seem that way. Yes incremental (in this case a large increment!) improvements in the way we interact with machines.

But humans stay winning.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#14
Hmm. That would be like asking them to explain why you need fast code—you could easily argue you don't, but it _can_ make your experience a lot better. There's a weird rush to market right now where there are a lot of examples of these LLMs being wrong which do not help, but don't forget, AI has been around for a long time (ever googled something?).

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#15
I know Apple is relevant because they have a lot of money. But when was the last time their products were relevant? 2008 w/ the iPhone? 2010 with the iPad? 2002 w/ the iPod? MacBooks in 1998?

Most of my family uses iPhones and it's painful to watch them struggle with basic tasks. My mom tries to find out how to access gmail instead of me.com. My brother downloads yet another app to add metadata to pictures. No one at work seems to know how to upload pictures as JPEGs (I think they default to AVIFs now. Not a problem, but it was a super-secret change to the defaults, and easy to support on the server, but we didn't hear about it until our users started complaining.

I know there are people who positively love their iPhone and the status it apparently confers in their friends group. But I've never understood why a device from a secretive developer-hostile company is supposed to be some amazing tool.

It's a miniature computer with built-in wireless network and a poorly integrated phone app. It's innovation seemed to me to be how well they were able to convince Verizon to finance the phone so users wouldn't have sticker-shock.

So "apple intelligence" is just repackaging other people's stuff in a way that their users can digest? That's not a surprise. I'm just waiting for my family to start yammering on about how Steve Jobs just added AI to their phones and no one else has such features even though Steve Jobs is dead and LLMs have been a thing for YEARS.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#19

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to…

If it is a pop how can Big Tech walk it back? Am I overreacting here or have companies like Google and Microsoft pimped out their reputations in an irreversible fashion?
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