The use case for AI is spam
Don't forget porn. Though it's a use case people like Satya will want to avoid for reasons.
"Why d'you think the net was born? Porn, Porn, Porn"
Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
41–50 of 228 posts
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#42For 96% of the population, AI will not boost production. Generally speaking people are too stupid to use AI properly at least for awhile.
GenAI is only useful to bump terrible up to mediocre, so it'd be really stupid to spend time honing one's prompting skills. And as you noticed, so far 96% of the population agrees.
It’s really not going to bump up terribles to mediocres. It’s only going to mask the terribles and make it harder to assess intelligence and talent. Underlying human intelligence is not going to get a boost from AI. Intelligence is mostly innate. I would even argue that AI will make average humans marginally dumber for the most part.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#43LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…
The difference is LLMs let you "run Google" on your own data with copy paste. Which you could not do before.
If you're using ChatGPT like you use Google then I agree with you. But IMO comparing ChatGPT to Google means you haven't had the "aha" moment yet.
As a concrete example, a lot of my work these days involves asking ChatGPT to produce me an obscure micro-app to process my custom data. Which it usually does and renders in one shot. This app could not exist before I asked for it. The productivity gains over coding this myself are immense. And the experience is nothing like using Google.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#44Wasn't Satya saying earlier that AI would replace knowledge workers? Now he's saying we need to find something useful for AI...lol. Quite the reversal.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar to my thoughts. If we are still scrambling to find stuff the average Joe finds useful, the 100s of Billions poured into this gold rush are wasted (IMHO).
People said the same thing 30 years ago about the internet. I’m spending $400/mo on AI subscriptions at this point. Probably the best money I spend.
And the people who bought a lot of shovels during the gold rush thought they were making the smartest money move
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#46When I read HN comments where people say "AI sux, AI is useless, AI is a waste of time", I think I must be living in a different universe. Maybe Hacker News is a dimensional portal between my reality and other people's.
Hi there, friends from another dimension! In my reality, there's a cold front coming from the north. Healthcare is expensive and politics are a mess. But AI? It hallucinates sometimes but it's so much better for searching, ad hoc consultation and as a code assistant than anything I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it saved me SO much time I decided to pay for it. I'm a penny pincher, so I wouldn't be paying for it otherwise.
I think Satya is talking about cost/benefit. AI is incredibly useful but also incredibly expensive. I think we still need to find the right balance (perhaps slower model releases), but there's no way we'll put the genie back in the bottle.
I hope your AI gets better! Talk to you later!
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#47I get it. A stunning indictment of our times… but there is something useful AI could be doing that MS has dropped the ball on: personal finance management. I should be able to have copilot grab all my transactions, build me budgets, show me what if scenarios, raise concerns, and help me meet my goals. It should be able to work in Excel where I can see and steer it. The math should be validated with several checks and…
Have you tried to get LLMs to do math or quantitative analysis? They're remarkably poor at it
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#48LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…
If only search engine AI output didn't constantly haluciate nonexistent APIs, it might be a net productivity gain for me...but it's not. I've been bit enough times by their false "example" output for it to be a significant net time loss vs using traditional search results.
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#49LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…
The difference is LLMs let you "run Google" on your own data with copy paste. Which you could not do before. If you're using ChatGPT like you use Google then I agree with you. But IMO comparing ChatGPT to Google means you haven't had the "aha" moment yet. As a concrete example, a lot of my work these days involves asking ChatGPT to produce me an obscure micro-app to process my custom data. Which it usually does and r…
there have been various solutions that allow you to "run Google" on your own data for quite a while, what is the "aha" moment related to that?
Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"
#50[deleted]