I assume you've been happy with the other slop Microsoft and Google fed you for years.
The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
21–30 of 421 posts
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#22But why are the CEOs insisting so much on AI? Because stock investors prefer to invest on anything with "AI inside". So the "AI business model" would not collapse , because it is what investors want. It is a bubble. It will be bubbly for a while, until it isn't.
Because it can, will and has increase productivity in a lot of fields.
Of course it’s a bubble! Most new tech like this is until it gets to a point where the market is too saturated or has been monopolised.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#23> Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it? Highways.
> Highways. In my European country you have to pay a toll to use a highway. Most people opt to use them, instead of taking the old 2-lane road that existed before the highway and is still free.
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Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#24But why are the CEOs insisting so much on AI? Because stock investors prefer to invest on anything with "AI inside". So the "AI business model" would not collapse , because it is what investors want. It is a bubble. It will be bubbly for a while, until it isn't.
It is not just that. Companies that already have lots of users interacting with their platform (Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple ...) want to capture your AI interactions to generate more training data, get insights in what you want and how you go about it, and A/B test on you. Last thing they want is someone else (Anthropic, Deepseek ...) capturing all that data on their users and improve the competition.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#25>Everybody wanted the Internet.
I don't think this is true. A lot of people had no interest until smartphones arrived. Doing anything on a smartphone is a miserable experience compared to using a desktop computer, but it's more convenient. "Worse but more convenient" is the same sales pitch as for AI, so I can only assume that AI will be accepted by the masses too.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#26The major AI gatekeepers, with their powerful models, are already experiencing capacity and scale issues. This won't change unless the underlying technology (LLMs) undergoes a fundamental shift. As more and more things become AI-enabled, how dependent will we be on these gatekeepers and their computing capacity? And how much will they charge us for prioritised access to these resources? And we haven't really gotten to the wearable devices stage yet.
Also, everyone who requires these sophisticated models now needs to send everything to the gatekeepers. You could argue that we already send a lot of data to public clouds. However, there was no economically viable way for cloud vendors to read, interpret, and reuse my data — my intellectual property and private information. With more and more companies forcing AI capabilities on us, it's often unclear who runs those models and who receives the data and what is really happening to the data.
This aggregation of power and centralisation of data worries me as much as the shortcomings of LLMs. The technology is still not accurate enough. But we want it to be accurate because we are lazy. So I fear that we will end up with many things of diminished quality in favour of cheaper operating costs — time will tell.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#27Why do people who attempt to critique AI lean on the "no one wants this, everyone hates this" instead of just making their point. If your arguments are strong you don't need to wrap them in false statistics.
> no one wants this, everyone hates this Is not false statistics. "Nobody wanted or asked for this" is literally true.
I still remember how the very first Office Copilot video/mockup?/ads had people very excited. When they finally got it, it was meh for most.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#28The issue really is that the AI isn’t good enough that people actually want it and are willing to pay for it. It’s like IPV6, if it really was a huge benefit to the end user, we’d have adopted it already.
> isn’t good enough that people actually want it and are willing to pay for it. Just from current ARR announcements: 3b+ anthropic, 10b+ oai, whatever google makes, whatever ms makes, yeah people are already paying for it.
Given everyone and their mother is putting AI in to their products it makes me wonder how that revenue breaks down between people incidentally paying for it versus deliberately paying for it versus being subsidized by VC. Obviously ultimately all this revenue is being collected at a massive loss but I wonder if that carries on down the value chain.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#29The major AI gatekeepers, with their powerful models, are already experiencing capacity and scale issues. This won't change unless the underlying technology (LLMs) undergoes a fundamental shift. As more and more things become AI-enabled, how dependent will we be on these gatekeepers and their computing capacity? And how much will they charge us for prioritised access to these resources? And we haven't really gotten t…
"how much will they charge us for prioritised access to these resources"
For the consumer side, you'll be the product, not the one paying in money just like before.
For the creator side, it will depend on how competition in the market sustains. Expect major regulatory capture efforts to eliminate all but a very few 'sanctioned' providers in the name of 'safety'. If only 2 or 3 remain, it might get realy expensive.
Re: The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public
#30I looked for the right term but force-feeding is what it is. I yesterday also changed my default search engine from Duckduckgo to Ecosia as they seem the only one left not to provide flaky AI summaries.
In fact I also tried the communication part - outside of Outlook - but people don't like superficial AI polish