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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#391

Post by steveBK123 »

I do wonder if they become another category like voice assistants where people just expect to get them free as part of an existing ecosystem.

Or search/social media where people are happy to pay $0 to use it in exchange for ads.

Sure some people are paying now, but its nowhere near the cost of operating these models, let alone developing them.

Also the economics may not accrue to the parts of the stack people think. What if the model is commodity and the real benefits accrue to the GOOG/AAPL/MSFT of the world that integrate models, or to the orgs that gatekept their proprietary data properly and now can charge for querying it?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#392

Post by achenet »

Hoasi wrote: post #381
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".

It works for some annoyances in life, though. For example, you can get it to write a complaint to an administration. It's good enough unless you'd rather be witty and write it yourself.

often writing the witty complaint yourself can be not only more effective, but more emotionally satisfying.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#393

Post by timomaxgalvin »

llm_trw wrote: post #31

I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...

Voice recognition is still very poor and barely used.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#394

Post by kombookcha »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #379

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…

Yeah, the issue with climate change and world hunger has never been the ability to generate loads and loads of vaguely relevant text in a very short time. It also isn't a problem of being able to recognize patterns in data, as you would with machine learning.

They're issues of socially and politically organizing how humans and resources and economies interact, and there is nothing about the current crop of AI that suggests they can help with that in any particular capacity. If anything the genAI hunger for energy and chips is kinda looking like a net negative in terms of the first problem.

I don't even really get why the hypemen are pushing these huge global issues as motivators - surely that insane standard of Unrealised Value only highlights how limited the abilities of this technology actually are?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#395

Post by kombookcha »

timomaxgalvin wrote: post #393
llm_trw wrote: post #31

I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...

Voice recognition is still very poor and barely used.

Interestingly, a big barrier to voice recognition is the same as with AI assistants - they don't understand context, and so they have a difficult time navigating messy inputs that you need assumed knowledge and contextual understanding for. Which is kinda the baseline for how humans communicate things to eachother with words in the first place.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#396

Post by achenet »

roenxi wrote: post #376
threeseed wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

anything involving an interface with the physical world.

For example, running a lemonade stand.

You'd need thousands, if not millions of dollars to build a robot machine with a computerized brain capable of doing what a 6 year old child can do - produce lemonade from simple ingredients (lemon, sugar, water) and sell it to consumers.

Same with basically all cooking/food-service and hospitality tasks, an physical therapy type tasks (massage, chiropractor, etc)...

heck, even driving on public roads still doesn't seem to be perfect, despite 10+ years on investment and research by leading tech companies, although there is also a regulatory hurdle here.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#397

Post by sandworm101 »

ManlyBread wrote: post #354

I am wondering where exactly are the AI products. I am not talking about boring, nerd stuff but rather about products that are well-known (to the point where non-technical users have heard of them) and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people. Currently only ChatGPT fits this bill despite the fact that the "AI revolution" is nearly two years old at this point.

The point is that you will not see them. They will be used to generate products and services that you think will come from a human. It may be the drive-through window or tech support line that sounds like a real person. It will be the background in the next Marvel movie that was animated by an AI algorithm rather than a graphics designer. It will be the website that generates a bespoke price quote aimed at the maximum price you are willing to pay for a service or product.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#398

Post by mumblemumble »

ManlyBread wrote: post #354

I am wondering where exactly are the AI products. I am not talking about boring, nerd stuff but rather about products that are well-known (to the point where non-technical users have heard of them) and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people. Currently only ChatGPT fits this bill despite the fact that the "AI revolution" is nearly two years old at this point.

The old chestnut about AI just being a term for things we haven't quite figured out yet might apply here. "Products that are well-known... and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people" are almost by definition not AI.

But here are some examples of things that used to fall under the AI umbrella but don't really anymore:

  - Fulltext search with decent semantic hit ranking (Google)
  - Fulltext search with word sense disambiguation (Google)
  - Fulltext search with decent synonym hits (Google)
  - Machine translation
  - Text to speech
  - Speech to text
  - Automated biometric identification (Like for unlocking your phone)
If you're more specifically asking for everyday applications of GPT-style generative large language models, I don't think that's going to happen for cost reasons. These things are still far too expensive for use in everyday consumer products. There's ChatGPT, but it's kind of an open secret that OpenAI is hemorrhaging money on ChatGPT.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#399

Post by _heimdall »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #379

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…

The expectation for LLMs "solving global warming" is effectively believing that if you could just ask enough people that vaguely know of the research out there to guess how to solve it someone would get the answer right, and they'd get it right better than anyone that has dedicated their life to researching it.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#400

Post by mistercow »

> If a competitor puts out a better model than yours, people can switch to theirs by updating a few lines of code.

This may become increasingly the case as models get smarter, but it’s often not the case right now. It’s more likely to be a few lines of code, a bunch of testing, and then a bunch of prompt tweaking iterations. Even within a vendor and model name, it’s a good idea to lock to a specific version so that you don’t wake up to a bunch of surprise breakages when the next version has different quirks.

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