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Why is AI so slow to spread?
41–50 of 189 posts
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#42My dentist said he uses it near constantly, and so do I.
Now I'm trying to visualize an agentic (and robotic) dentist
It'll just say there's no cavities, and when corrected it will extract the wrong teeth, which luckily doesn't exist in humans, and then insist that it did a great job and ask to be paid. Which you will avoid by telling it that you already paid.
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#43I don't often use AI in my work because it is not sufficiently useful not sufficiently trustworthy. It is my ongoing experience that AI + My Oversight requires more time than not using AI. Sometimes AI can answer slightly complex things in a helpful way. But for most of the integration troubleshooting I do, AI guidance varies between no help at all and fully wasting my time. Conversely, I support folks who have the c…
I still haven’t found anyone who AI wouldn’t be helpful or that isn’t trustworthy enough. People make the /claim/ it’s not useful or they are better without it. When you sit down with them it often turns out they just don’t know how to use AI effectively.
No, AI is just garbage. I asked AI a clear cut question about battery optimization in zen. It told me it's based on chrome, but it's based on firefox.
Ask it about a torque spec for your car? Yup, wrong. Ask it to provide sources? Less wrong but still wrong. It told me my viscous fan has a different thread than it has. Would I have listened, I would've shredded my thread.
My car is old, well documented and widely distributed.
Doesn't matter if claude or chatgpt. Don't get me started on code. I care about things being correct and right.
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#44I don't often use AI in my work because it is not sufficiently useful not sufficiently trustworthy. It is my ongoing experience that AI + My Oversight requires more time than not using AI. Sometimes AI can answer slightly complex things in a helpful way. But for most of the integration troubleshooting I do, AI guidance varies between no help at all and fully wasting my time. Conversely, I support folks who have the c…
I still haven’t found anyone who AI wouldn’t be helpful or that isn’t trustworthy enough. People make the /claim/ it’s not useful or they are better without it. When you sit down with them it often turns out they just don’t know how to use AI effectively.
Personally, everyone I’ve seen using AI either clearly didn’t understand what they were doing (in a ‘that’s not doing what you think it’s doing’ perspective), often in a way that was producing good sounding garbage, or ended up rewriting almost all of it anyway to get the output they actually wanted.
At this point I literally spend 90% of my time fixing other teams AI ‘issues’ at a fortune 50.
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#45One reason is that humans have a strong tendency to optimize for the short term. I witness it with my developer friends. Most of them try for 5 minutes to get AI to code something that takes them an hour. Then they are annoyed that the result is not good. They might try another 5 minutes, but then they write the code themselves. My thinking is: Even if it takes me 2 hours to get AI to do something that would take me…
My perspective is a bit different. I've been fiddling with image generators a fair bit and got pretty good at getting particular models to generate consistently good images. The problem is a new model comes out every few months and it comes with its own set of rules to get good outputs.
LLMs are no different. One week ChatGPT is the best, next is Gemini. Each new version requires tweaks to get the most out of it. Sure, some of that skill/knowledge will carry forward into the future but I'd rather wait a bit for things to stabilize.
Once someone else demonstrates a net positive return on investment, maybe I'll jump back in. You just said it might take a year to see a return. I'll read your blog post about it when you succeed. You'll have a running head start on me, but will I be perpetually a year behind you? I don't think so.
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#46> With its fantastic capabilities, ai represents hundred-dollar bills lying on the street. Why, then, are firms not picking them up? Economics may provide an answer. Which science is responsible for the answer that if you can't establish the veracity of the premise for the question, economics can't help you find the missing outcome that shouldn't be there?
‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#47A wall-text just to say: "People do not find AI that useful so they are not adopting it even that top executives are extremely excited about it because do not understand nor care about what AI can really do but about hype and share prices."
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really depends on the use-case. I currently work in the video streaming industry, and my team has been building production-quality code for 2 years now. Here are some things that are going really well: * Determine what is happening in a scene/video * Translating subtitles to very specific local slang * Summarizing scripts * Estimating how well a new show will do with a given audience * Filling gaps in the metadata…
Based on what you listed I would seriously consider the broader societal value of your work.
I know this is just a casual comment, but this is a genuine concern I have every day. However, I've been working for 10 years now and working in music/video streaming has been the most "societal value" I've had thus far.
I've worked at Apple, in finance, in consumer goods.. everywhere is just terrible. Music/Video streaming has been the closest thing I could find to actually being valuable, or at least not making the world worse.
I'd love to work at an NGO or something, but I'm honestly not that eager to lose 70% of my salary to do so. And I can't work in pure research because I don't have a PhD.
What industry do you work in, if you don't mind me asking?
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#49reminds me of crypto a bit. most people i know are apathetic or dismissive. when i see normies use it - its to make selfies with celebrities. in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. those who know how to use it and those who can afford the best tools. the biggest danger is dependency on AI. i really see people becoming dumber and dumber as they outsource more basic cognitive functions and deci…
> in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. That is possible, even likely. But AI can also decrease inequality. I'm thinking of how rich people and companies spend millions if not hundreds of millions on legal fees which keep them out of prison. But me, I can't afford a lawyer. Heck I can't even afford a doctor. I can't afford Stanford, Yale nor Harvard. But now I can ask legal advice from AI, w…
The flaw with that idea is that the big lawyer firms will also have access to the AI and they will have better prompts
Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?
#50That's a whole lot of twisting to avoid admitting "it usually doesn't work, and even when it does work, it's usually not cost-effective even at the heavily-subsidized prices." Or maybe it's more about refusing to admit that executives are out of touch with concrete reality and are just blindly chasing trends instead.
Another issue, one that you alluded to, is imagine AI actually was reliable. And a company does lay off e.g. 30% of their employees to replace them with AI systems. How long before they get a letter from AI Inc 'Hi, we're increasing prices 500x in order to enhance our offerings and and improve customer satisfaction. Enjoy.' The entire MO of big tech is trying to create a monopoly by the software equivalent of dumping…
It's quite easy to switch LLM api, so you can just transition to a competitor. Competition between AI providers is quite fierce, I don't see them setting up a cartel anytime soon. And open source models are not that far beyond commercial ones.