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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#431

Post by tqi »

PodgieTar wrote: post #371
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.

Lol that sounds good to me, but I'm not the one making those decisions. To be clear, my comment was a prediction based on what I see as the primary motivations of the people with the money. I'm definitely not endorsing this model.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#432

Post by tqi »

britzsquad wrote: post #282
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 a good old financial crisis?

The people will demand a new bubble to invest in:

https://theonion.com/recession-plagued-nation-demands-new-bu...

Re: Do AI companies work?

#433

Post by [deleted] »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #426
smolder wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has spent a ton on developing features that lock in users beyond what is fundamentally 'cloud', i.e. the ability to lease computers as a commodity. I have always warned employers about the downside of adopting all that extraneous stuff, with little effect.

and all of that is part of the "moat" that the article author is talking about which is almost impossible to replicate in a short amount of time

[deleted]

Re: Do AI companies work?

#434

Post by Sateeshm »

bradhilton wrote: post #114

Kind of feels like the ride-sharing early days. Lots of capital being plowed into a handful of companies to grab market share. Economics don't really make sense in the short term because the vast majority of cash flows are still far in the future (Zero to One). In the end the best funded company, Uber, is now the most valuable (~$150B). Lyft, the second best funded, is 30x smaller. Are there any other serious ride sh…

Not all businesses have that first mover or network effect advantages.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#435

Post by ninalanyon »

mumblemumble wrote: post #386
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".

Moreover, this is exactly the frustration I've experienced when working with outsourced developers. Which tells me the problem may be fundamental, not a technical one. It's not just a matter of needing "more intelligence". I don't question the intelligence or skill of the people on the outsourced team I was working with. The problem was simple communication. They didn't really know or understand our business and its…

Not just with outsourced developers. Computer science graduates hired in house to assist in writing specialised engineering software can often be a dead weight in the team for quite some time. This is not just because they and the engineers don't speak the same language but also because the CS graduates know nothing about physics and engineering so they cannot properly evaluate requirements documents.

Left to their own devices they often implemented requirements that were full of errors or even completely unnecessary because they did not understand the domain well enough to ask pointed questions.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#436

Post by YetAnotherNick »

adamc wrote: post #404
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You saw "Her" or Iron man? That's how it could replace windows. Basically entire OS working in natural language. Imagine a great human personal assistant who operates computer for you. And searchGPT could replace Google. Also, wasn't the point of genAI is that it is cheaper than the entire stack of search? At least I know for some recommendation GPT-4 is literally cheaper than many companies in house models and I kno…

OK, then I'm pretty sure it won't happen. I don't want to have a personal assistant replace an OS. I don't even want to talk to Alexa. And I'm not alone...

I meant human personal assistant as I was clear in previous post. If you are given human personal assistant for free who could replace your screen usage, would you be open to replace your OS with it?

Also we are just talking on theoretical level if AI is able to imitate human assistant(which I personally give 10% chance of happening, but not out of realm of possibility).

Re: Do AI companies work?

#437

Post by horsawlarway »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51
horsawlarway wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math on this doesn't work.

…go on?

Look at their total revenue numbers, look at their cheapest pricing option.

The math doesn't work for them to have 10m paying customers. It's not even close.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#438

Post by cgearhart »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #425
cgearhart wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common perspective that was introduced to me as “shifting the goalposts” in school. I have always found it a disingenuous argument because it’s applied so narrowly. Humans are intelligent + humans play go => playing go is intelligent Humans are intelligent + humans do algebra => doing algebra is intelligent Meanwhile, humans in general are pretty terrible at exact, instantaneous arithmetic. But we ar…

> breaking free from the single-purpose nature of traditional ML/AI systems it is really breaking free? so far LLMs in action seem to have a fairly limited scope -- there are a variety of purposes to which they can be applied but it's all essentially the same underlying task

It _is_ all the same task (generating text completions) but that pretraining on that task has seemed to be suitably abstract for the model to work decently well on more narrow problems—certainly they work dramatically better at a collection of tasks like “sentiment analysis of movie ratings” and “spam classifier” than if I took purposes built models for either of those tasks and tried using them like I could an LLM.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#439

Post by LtWorf »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #427
LtWorf wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running on a decade old computer and it is just fine. 10 years ago a decade old computer vs a current one would have made a huge difference.

An M3 vs an Intel Macbook from 10 years ago is a shockingly large leap forward (I say this as someone who has both).

An intel macbook from 10 years ago wasn't really the peak of computing 10 years ago.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#440

Post by nineteen999 »

Terr_ wrote: post #272
nineteen999 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I go to ask an LLM to answer to a question and it starts trying to sell me products I don't want or need? I'll need to filter it's output through a locally run adblock LLM which detects/flags/strips out advertising text before delivering the output. Hmmm.

I still have this pipe-dream of an augmented reality system where you can walk through the grocery store and it will superimpose a warning label over any brand connected to a company on the individual user's shit-list. For many decades consumers have been told that the magnanimous "Free Market" (multiple definitions) is empowering them to vote with their wallets, however some of those same groups start acting rather…

I mean it's a nice idea and all, but I'm not walking around the supermarket with a VR headset on or even a pair of Google(TM) glass.

Also once you've shitlisted all of these 11 companies:

  https://capitaloneshopping.com/blog/11-companies-that-own-everything-904b28425120
We're probably gonna find it hard to find something to eat.

Tongue planted slightly in cheek of course.

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