Do AI companies work?

I've always been more interested in the non-verbal aspects of human intelligence. I believe that "true AGI", whatever that is, is likely to be able to mimic sentient but non-verbal species. I'd like to see an AGI do what a dog or cat does.

LLMs are quite astonishing at mimicking something humans specifically do, the most "rational" parts of our brain. But they seem to jump past the basic, non-rational parts of the brain. And I don't think we'll see it as "true AGI" until it does that -- whatever that is.

I'm reminded of the early AI researchers who taught AI to play chess because it's what smart people do, but it couldn't do any of the things dumb people do. I think the biggest question right now is whether our present techniques are a misleading local maximum, or if we're on the right slope and just need to keep climbing.

Putting aside that I fundamentally don't think AGI is in the tech tree of LLM, if you will, that there's no route from the latter to the former: even if there is, even if it takes, I dunno, ten years: I just don't think ChatGPT is a compelling enough product to fund about $70 billion in research costs. And sure, they aren't having to yet thanks to generous input from various commercial and private interests but like... if this is going to be a stable product at some point, analogous to something like AWS, doesn't it have to... actually make some money?

Like sure, I use ChatGPT now. I use the free version on their website and I have some fun with AI dungeon and occasionally use generative fill in Photoshop. I paid for AI dungeon (for awhile, until I realized their free models actually work better for how I like to play) but am now on the free version. I don't pay for ChatGPT's advanced models, because nothing I've seen in the trial makes it more compelling an offering than the free version. Adobe Firefly came to me free as an addon to my creative cloud subscription, but like, if Adobe increased the price, I'm not going to pay for it. I use it because they effectively gave it to me for free with my existing purchase. And I've played with Copilot a bit too, but honestly found it more annoying than useful and I'm certainly not paying for that either.

And I realize I am not everyone and obviously there are people out there paying for it (I know a few in fact!) but is there enough of those people ready to swipe cards for... fancy autocomplete? Text generation? Like... this stuff is neat. And that's about where I put it for myself: "it's neat." OpenAI supposedly has 3.9 million subscribers right now, and if those people had to foot that 7 billion annual spend to continue development, that's about $150 a month. This product has to get a LOT, LOT better before I personally am ready to drop a tenth of that, let alone that much.

And I realize this is all back-of-napkin math here but still: the expenses of these AI companies seem so completely out of step with anything approaching an actual paying user base, so hilariously outstripping even the investment they're getting from other established tech companies, that it makes me wonder how this is ever, ever going to make so much as a dime for all these investors.

In contrast, I never had a similar question about cars, or AWS. The pitch of AWS makes perfect sense: you get a server to use on the internet for whatever purpose, and you don't have to build the thing, you don't need to handle HVAC or space, you don't need a last-mile internet connection to maintain, and if you need more compute or storage or whatever, you move a slider instead of having to pop a case open and install a new hard drive. That's absolutely a win and people will pay for it. Who's paying for AI and why?

Getting a taxi was awful before ride-sharing apps. You'd have to walk to a taxi stop, or wait on the side of the road and hope you could hail one. Once the ride-sharing apps came in, suddenly getting a ride became a lot simpler. Our taxi companies are still alive, though they have their own apps now -- something that wouldn't have happened without competition -- and they also work together with the ride-hailing companies as a provider. You could still hail taxis or get them from stops too, though that isn't recommended given that they might try to run the meter by taking a longer route.

For food delivery, before the apps, most places didn't deliver food. Nowadays, more places deliver. Even if a place already had their own delivery drivers, they didn't get rid of them. We get a choice, to use the app or to use the restaurant's own delivery. Usually the app is better for smaller meals since it has a lower minimum order amount, but the restaurant provides faster delivery for bigger orders.

I think the big game changer in the PC space was graphics cards, but since their introduction, it has all been incremental improvement -- at first, pretty fast, then... slower. Much like CPU improvements, although those started earlier.

I can't think of a point where the next generation of PCs was astoundingly different from the prior one... just better. It used to be that they were reliably faster or more capable almost every year, now the rate of improvements is almost negligible. (Yes, graphics are getting better, but not very fast if you aren't near the high end.)

Politics, history, religion and other topics of conversation that are matters of opinion, taste and state sponsored propaganda need to be off limits.

Its mission ought to be to provide a PhD level education in all technical fields, not engage in shortening historical events and/or opinions/preferences/beliefs down to a few pages and disputing which pages need to be left in or out. Let fools engage in that task on their own time.