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The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

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Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#51

Post by diggan »

SoftTalker wrote: post #48
ecshafer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at McDonalds, a major thing I learned is that when 95% of people say they got an order wrong, the customer ordered it wrong without realizing it. Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.

Rule #1 at McDonald's: Never customize. If you don't want pickles, take them off yourself. Otherwise they'll just get it wrong. Whenever I took my kids there I told them "if you don't want it the way they make it then don't order it."

I almost always (except if there is a big queue) customize something, because then it's guaranteed made at the spot, instead of the heated old stuff. And since I started using the kiosks, the orders are always right, and fresh.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#53

Post by SoftTalker »

diggan wrote: post #51
SoftTalker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule #1 at McDonald's: Never customize. If you don't want pickles, take them off yourself. Otherwise they'll just get it wrong. Whenever I took my kids there I told them "if you don't want it the way they make it then don't order it."

I almost always (except if there is a big queue) customize something, because then it's guaranteed made at the spot, instead of the heated old stuff. And since I started using the kiosks, the orders are always right, and fresh.

A custom order used to be a hack to be sure you got a freshly-made sandwich and not one that had been sitting in a warmer for 15 minutes, but they make everything to order now. And they still fuck them up, often.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#54

Post by scotty79 »

JustExAWS wrote: post #21
bgwalter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted extreme wrongthink]

This isn’t true. Housing prices recovered by 2016

More like 2021 if you adjust for inflation.

https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-vs-inflation/

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#55

Post by metalliqaz »

aabhay wrote: post #13
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

One of the lowest level jobs in the market is taking orders at a fast food drive thru. If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.

Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering, so turns out AI wasn’t needed for software to take away jobs. That said, AI could do that job perfectly well. The reason we still have human to human interaction when you order is that it creates a more interesting environment for employees, who crave at least some kind of human contact. And customers will pay marginally more for the food if they get some human co…

In my humble opinion, this kind of thing is the largest blind spot in the current tech economy.

Massive LLMs had a breakout moment with chat, and now everyone has invested HARD into that technology while in fact there is really no good reason to think that massive models (billions of parameters, requiring billions of dollars to train, and requiring power-gulping servers to run) are needed or even preferred for most AI tasks.

We had algorithmic automation for all kinds of things in the 80s, and that has been steadily improving for everything from chess engines to computer vision to content suggestion ever since. Photo touch-up runs on handheld devices and is nearly instantaneous. Self-checkout is ubiquitous. Digital CNC and 3D printing is no longer to relegated to professionals, the point that amateurs can buy off-the-shelf solutions and start creating products with a few mouse clicks.

Billions is being spent on shovels in the current gold rush but are they really needed?

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#56

Post by SkyPuncher »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

One of the lowest level jobs in the market is taking orders at a fast food drive thru. If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.

As someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this.

Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard.

* Often lots of background noise

* Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic)

* People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right now, I order a "$5 meal deal at McDonals". This is often not listed on the board and it's not called "$5 meal deal" - but literally every cashier knows exactly what I'm talking about. I doubt AI would figure this out.

* People often have custom requests that don't follow the "official menu".

* The actual food ticketing system that gets sent to the grill has significant limitations in resolution. If you're doing anything other than a basic deletion, it's likely just coming through to the grill as "ask me".

* It's extremely hard to handle edge cases like makeup meals, incorrect orders, coupons, etc. These generally require human judgement and a bit of contextual understanding. Generally, these are things you only understand by actually looking at the real world. For example, is there an unaccounted burger now sitting at the end of the grill line - looks like someone grabbed the wrong food.

* Human cashiers are really good at hearing someone shoutout something like "ice cream machine is down" or "hold on fries" or "we're out of chicken" or "no fire sauce" and understanding what the means in terms of orders. It's a pain to get an AI system to be able to understand all of this nuance.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#57

Post by bathtub365 »

baggachipz wrote: post #41
worldsayshi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It started out pretty okay but every time I order on one of those tablets they seem to have added an extra step of trying to sell me something more.

That's really the worst part. The upsells are insulting and get in the way of ordering what I want. Classic enshittification, starting with something which people like and slowly deteriorating it in order to make an extra buck. I'm sure the MBAs love it though.

“Do you want fries with that?” predates the MBA craze

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#58

Post by bryanlarsen »

diggan wrote: post #46
ecshafer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at McDonalds, a major thing I learned is that when 95% of people say they got an order wrong, the customer ordered it wrong without realizing it. Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.

> Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things. Isn't it up to the person who is receiving the order to ask clarifying questions then? Since they know it's potentially unclear/ambiguous, why not try to resolve the ambiguity before making the order?

That'd just annoy the 99% of people that agree with McDonald's on what plain means. People at McDonald's are often in a hurry, and some would get really annoyed at stupid questions. Better to piss off the 1% than the 99%.

If you're clarifying at this level, there are likely many other questions that you'd ask.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#59

Post by scotty79 »

an0malous wrote: post #45
Workaccount2 wrote: post #40

The MIT report that found 90% of workers are regularly using LLMs at work, many of them even multiple times daily [1], somehow has become the spark of the recent explosion of "AI has failed" articles. Which is ironic, because it shows that the people we trust to write with integrity are either only reading the headlines or purposely misleading with their articles. If that's the case, LLMs cannot replace these primary…

I use a notes app multiple times a day for work. Does this make notes apps worth $1T in global investments?

No, because to replace a notes app you need pen and paper. But to replace LLM you need at least a human. There's literally nothing else. And humans don't come cheap.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#60

Post by PessimalDecimal »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #40

The MIT report that found 90% of workers are regularly using LLMs at work, many of them even multiple times daily [1], somehow has become the spark of the recent explosion of "AI has failed" articles. Which is ironic, because it shows that the people we trust to write with integrity are either only reading the headlines or purposely misleading with their articles. If that's the case, LLMs cannot replace these primary…

I'm more impressed that 10% can avoid it given how aggressively AI is being shoehorned into everything.
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