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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

#61

Post by ecshafer »

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?

99% of orders are not made incorrectly, and you're being told to go faster and keep times low. Is this the 1 order of the hour that the person will come back and complain that its wrong? Is this person going to come back regardless and say it was wrong to get free food? Its unambiguous enough to not be worth the time.

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

#62

Post by therealpygon »

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?

If everyone is competing to be THE notes app, and there is an expectation for every person in the entire world to use said Notes apps for nearly all tasks in the future? Yea, it absolutely could deserve a global investment of roughly just 3% U.S. GDP. Moreover, isn’t it up to the people investing to decide that, rather than people who used ChatGPT once and then complained on the internet?

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

#63

Post by sfn42 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #42
blibble wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are quite impressively bad in 2025 how is it so hard to make a user interface that doesn't lag like a bastard on every scroll/click/... it's almost as bad as their terrible, terrible, terrible app

> in 2025 how is it so hard to make a user interface that doesn't lag like a bastard on every scroll/click/... Because everything is done in fucking React or Node or Blazor or whatever the newest flavor of this wRiTe oNcE rUn aNyWheRe bollocks is, because it always, always, always the exact same fucking thing: abstracting UI elements to fucking goddamn JavaScript and running it in a browser. And heaven knows McDonald…

That's not the issue. All these technologies can be nice and snappy. The problem is that developers suck at making software nice and snappy.

I've taken over several react apps over the years and one thing I always end up doing is remove a bunch of spinners because you don't need a spinner when the page loads instantly - as it should. Its very common for pages to take 10-60+ seconds to load, and when I look into it it's always obvious why they're so slow and easy to fix. The devs who made it just sucked.

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

#64

Post by jihadjihad »

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…

The PDF is viewable here [0]; the link above doesn't take you there.

And from that PDF, I'm not seeing anything that is incongruent with what is stated in TFA:

From TFA:

> To be precise, the report states: "The GenAI Divide is starkest in deployment rates, only 5 percent of custom enterprise AI tools reach production." It's not that people aren't using AI tools. They are. There's a whole shadow world of people using AI at work. They're just not using them "for" serious work. Instead, outside of IT's purview, they use ChatGPT and the like "for simple work, 70 percent prefer AI for drafting emails, 65 percent for basic analysis. But for anything complex or long-term, humans dominate by 9-to-1 margins."

From PDF:

> Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot are widely adopted. Over 80 percent of organizations have explored or piloted them, and nearly 40 percent report deployment. But these tools primarily enhance individual productivity, not P&L performance. Meanwhile, enterprise-grade systems, custom or vendor-sold, are being quietly rejected. Sixty percent of organizations evaluated such tools, but only 20 percent reached pilot stage and just 5 percent reached production. Most fail due to brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and misalignment with day-to-day operations.

0: https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

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

#65

Post by SkyPuncher »

ecshafer wrote: post #44
diggan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want. Huh, for me is the polar opposite. Maybe it's because I mumble, is unclear or don't speak the native language as well as the natives where I live, but I always preferred the kiosks. I seem to always get what I order then, and it's a lot easier to cu…

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.

I also worked at McDonalds. You example is interesting because this specific issue came up often. Different people interpreted it to mean different things. The cashiers who'd been around the longest had learned to clarify exactly what the customer wants.

Also, this is absolutely NOT a customer issue. It's a restaurant issue to clarify. Plain means different things at different restaurants, so the solution is to _always_ clarify exactly what the customer means.

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

#66

Post by eigenspace »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #56
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 no…

Yes, this is a surprisingly difficult job that has a lot of complications. In fact, most jobs have surprising complications to them, and that surprising difficulty is why there's skepticism about AI taking over other jobs.

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

#67

Post by justlikereddit »

I've used AI to get meaningful results(working code) out of it.

The service provider got little useful out of it because I'm fine using their free versions for it.

Also. AI is not as good as it's going to get. It going to get much much better than it is but it's going to follow a mostly mundane trajectory getting there.

According to the AI hype merchants we should see titanic super-AGI slug it out in the sky, by year 2023. That clearly did not happen.

What we will get is hype for current model+1 and disappointment when it's released for the coming decades.

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

#68

Post by baggachipz »

bathtub365 wrote: post #57
baggachipz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True, but it's so much worse now. Several "special offers" you have to go through, with dark patterns to prevent skipping it.

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

#69

Post by JohnFen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #15
aabhay wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering As an experience though, they could hardly have implemented it in a worse way. A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.

> the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.

Those kiosks are horrific and greatly reduced the number of visits I made to McDonald's. The insane pricing since then further reduced those visits to zero.

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