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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#371

Post by PodgieTar »

tqi wrote: post #255

Personally, I think the more interesting question is: if not AI then what? I doubt we will go back to Metaverse (lol) or Crypto, B2B SaaS seems safe but stagnant (and competing over a largely fixed pie of IT spend). It feels like it doesn't matter if the companies work-- until there is something shinier to invest in it will be the defacto choice for LPs chasing returns (and VCs chasing carry).

How about moving away from the unicorn model into creating small, sustainable and focused companies that don't explode, but provide sustainable income.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#372

Post by insane_dreamer »

Apple might emerge as one of the winners here, despite being one of the last to come out with an LLM, because it already has the infrastructure, or delivery system, for hundreds of millions of users to interact with an LLM. Google has a similar foothold worldwide, but its major weakness that it's cannibilizing its Search cash cow (how do you make $ from ads with LLMs?), whereas in Apple's case it enhances its product (finally a smart Siri). OpenAI doesn't have that except through Microsoft.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#373

Post by shafyy »

bsenftner wrote: post #357
shafyy wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone using a chatbot already has felt the frustration of "it doesn't get what I want". And also "I have to explain so much that I might as well just do it myself Ehm yes. That's because it actually doesn't work as well as the hype suggests, not because it's too "high bandwidth".

I'd contribute that we, the engineering class, are as a whole terrible communicators that confuse and cannot explain their own work. LLMs require clear communications, while the majority of LLM users attempt to use them with a large host of implied context that anyone would have a hard time following, not to mention a non-human software construct. The key is clear communications, which is a phrase that many in STEM d…

No, this is absolutely not the reason. The reason is that many people benefit financially as long as the hype train keeps going choo choo. So they lie to our faces and sleep like babies at night.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#374

Post by teractiveodular »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #372

Apple might emerge as one of the winners here, despite being one of the last to come out with an LLM, because it already has the infrastructure, or delivery system, for hundreds of millions of users to interact with an LLM. Google has a similar foothold worldwide, but its major weakness that it's cannibilizing its Search cash cow (how do you make $ from ads with LLMs?), whereas in Apple's case it enhances its product…

LLMs only cannibalize search if people use it as a replacement. I'm not seeing this happening at scale, instead they can be used to complement it by providing summaries, doing translations etc.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#375

Post by madeofpalk »

LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

> Anyone using a chatbot already has felt the frustration of "it doesn't get what I want". And also "I have to explain so much that I might as well just do it myself"

I find this funny because for what I use ChatGPT for - asking programming questions that would otherwise go to Google/StackOverflow - I have a much better time writing queries for ChatGPT than Google, and getting useful results back.

Google will so often return StackOverflow results that are for subtly very different questions, or ill have to squint hard to figure out how to apply that answer to my problem. When using ChatGPT, i rarely have to think about how other people asked the question.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#376

Post by roenxi »

threeseed wrote: post #366
roenxi wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a strong argument that super-intelligence is already in the rear-view mirror. My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge, numerical processing, etc. There is a tiny sliver of things that I've spent a life working on where I can consistently outperform a CPU, but it is not at all clear how that could be defensible given the strides AI has…

> The typical AI seems more capable than the typical human to me Your microwave is more capable than a typical human. If of course your definition of capabilities is narrowly defined to computations and ignores the huge array of things humans can do that computers are no where close to.

> the huge array of things humans can do that computers are no where close to.

For example?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#377

Post by Atmael »

LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

why do you believe that humanity is the habitat for ai and not the other way around?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#378

Post by madeofpalk »

yibg wrote: post #216
LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

* We're seeing much less of "it's making mistakes" these days.* Perhaps less than before, but still making very fundamental errors. Anything involving number I'm automatically suspicious. Pretty frequently I'd get different answers for the same question (to a human). e.g. ChatGPT will give an effective tax rate of n for some income amount. Then when asked to break down the calculation will come up with an effective t…

> Perhaps less than before, but still making very fundamental errors. Anything involving number I'm automatically suspicious

Totally. They are large language models, not math models.

I think the problem is that 'some people' overhype them as universal tools to solve any problem, and to answer any question. But really, LLMs excel in generating pretty regular text.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#379

Post by insane_dreamer »

The biggest problem that I have with AI is how people extrapolate out of thin air, going from "LLMs can craft responses that sound exactly like a human" to "LLMs can solve climate change and world hunger". Those are two orthogonal skills and nothing we've seen so far indicates that LLMs would be able to make that jump, any more than I expect someone with a PhD in linguistics to solve problems faced by someone with a PhD in applied physics working on solving nuclear fusion.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#380

Post by insane_dreamer »

teractiveodular wrote: post #374
insane_dreamer wrote: post #372

Apple might emerge as one of the winners here, despite being one of the last to come out with an LLM, because it already has the infrastructure, or delivery system, for hundreds of millions of users to interact with an LLM. Google has a similar foothold worldwide, but its major weakness that it's cannibilizing its Search cash cow (how do you make $ from ads with LLMs?), whereas in Apple's case it enhances its product…

LLMs only cannibalize search if people use it as a replacement . I'm not seeing this happening at scale, instead they can be used to complement it by providing summaries, doing translations etc.

If people no longer click on sponsored links because they are getting a reply to their query in the summary paragraph at the top, Google no longer makes money from search. That's the cannibalization.
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